Parenting: Time machine to your past

So, I toured the Montessori. Carl didn’t, ’cause Noah had a cough and was tired and so we decided they would stay home and I would check it out.

This particular school seemed to be half-Montessori, half-lycée. Which is a totally odd mix. Concrete up to about grade 3 and then desks in rows after that. There were things I liked a lot about it: The kids seemed happy and engaged, the teachers reasonably ditto; the language instruction blew. my. mind. in both French and English. They also do double math (in the morning in french, with textbooks from France, and in the afternoon in english with Saxon math, so that they learn to think mathematically in both languages. They don’t even worry about whether this is confusing. To quote the directress, “if learning two different maths is confusing, the child has not understood a concept, so as teachers we must re-teach that area in any case. If students read two different books by two different authors in the same day, no one worries.” What? You want them to understand math? Crazy talk, man.)

And I am not easily impressed that way, but the directress let me rifle through random children’s work all the way up to grade 7 and I saw, for example, essays with supporting quotes in grade 5 workbooks, correctly spelled, with varying sentences lengths with different types of clauses.

I guess this is what you can do when your classes, after grade 2, are about 9-12 students large.

But the facilities were very, very ehn. I would suspect the students come out with fantastic basics, including history and geography, but not necessarily a whole lot else. Small rooms in a church hall. There were no computers or labs, and although I kind of think they’re not necessary — and elementary teachers who print material off the Internet with no care as to source drive me up the wall blah blah — I did have to wonder at what it all means when a school is still using the same exact methods as they did in 1978, not uncoincidentally the year I had a teacher from France.

And that was kind of it – the handwriting, the textbooks, the progress chart on the wall, the sheets of dictées floating about, the choice of almost wildly inappropriate reading material (Zola in grade 6? Really?) – all hugely familiar.

I had a lot of feelings come up about that, since grade two was a year of infamy in my mind; I had a teacher who was brilliant and talented and able to move students at their own pace, and so by October of that year I’d finished grade two, and ended up somewhere in the middle of grade 5 by the end of it, and then spent the next several years more or less bored and in trouble and socially ostracized. (The charts on the wall, where my stickers had their own little piece of paper sticking off the right-hand side, did not endear me to my classmates, particularly since there was prize each week for most units completed.)

(Remember SRA reading?)

Which brings me to my navel-gazing point that man, why does parenting have to be such a trip to all the corners of one’s childhood? Why?

Anyways, so that just hit the educational buttons for me without really blowing me away in either direction. I feel sure one’s child would come out well educated; not so sure about happy. Imagine if you did not get along with the 9 kids in your tiny classroom.

Then yesterday I had a meeting with Noah’s current school’s owner/headmistress to get leads on other schools and also Discuss His Future. They of course want to keep him for his final year (which would be senior kindergarten) so she’d both prepared a sheet for me on the french he’s learned and how they could teach him way more. They newly have a teacher whose first language really is french and so that was a pretty generous offer. She also gave me some phone numbers of parents whose kids have gone from her SK to French Immersion directly, which I didn’t know could happen… and which frankly makes me weep a bit for the FI programme. Not that Noah’s teachers are not lovely, but he is in no way fluent.

But she also talked about the whole private school thing and a list of schools to look at and why she chose, with her four kids, to send them to (local) public elementary and save up her pennies for the real, vastly expensive, top-notch private high schools ($27k/yr for anyone wondering) and not bother with the mid-range (mid-range being $15k/year) schools for elementary.

And she talked about how Noah is such a social extroverted wriggly boy and that having a slightly larger class and good school teams and neighbourhood friends would be nice for him to have, and that his skills in learning-to-learn will already basically get him through elementary. Which is slightly overstating the case, I think, but I see what she means which is why actually I started looking at private.

So that was a nice counterpoint, and sort of our original plan. So lots to think about.

It’s not, by the way, that I think Noah is a super special snowflake (although of course, he IS, he’s my son! But only as much as anyone else’s son is. :)) in terms of profoundly gifted or anything like that; it’s more that school is so many hours of the day that I would like them to be good hours.