At Scripps College, where I went to school, the mantra is to prepare women for lives of  “confidence, courage, and  hope.”  I can’t think of a better time to start teaching these traits than in childhood.  I wasn’t taught these traits.  My parents’ mantra was more like, “Live lives of suspicion, blaming others, and doom.” My mother often would not let me do things because she said, “What if something happens?”  If I got a bad grade on a test, my parents would be livid; then I would say something like, “The teacher didn’t do a good job teaching it,” and the blame would shift.  It could always be someone else’s fault.

This is not how the real world works, as  I learned the hard way when I came to be an adult.   This is a recipe for failure, not success.  I think that mostly my parents wanted me to experience no pain, no consequences for anything, no trouble for them.   This is impossible.    I decided to teach my children the opposite and hopefully make it easier for them to become responsible, happy adults.

My children have had a tough year. There were two school transfers.  On top of that, my husband got laid off in the spring.  We tried not to let the stress get to the kids.

At the beginning of the year,  we had to leave the private school when it got too expensive; originally, with my oldest, we were on scholarship with only 8 students at the brand-new school, and as the school swelled they decided to have fewer scholarships.

I was worried about transferring to a public school. My daughter would go from a class size of 9 to 30 and I didn’t know how she would adjust (my son’s class would only swell from 10-15).  A private school friend had tried to put her kid into a public school, one rated 10 on GreatSchools.net, and pulled him out. “He’s getting threats of getting beat up every day,” she reported.

At private school, true, kids are not always angels. They have character education, but I saw a girl purposely trip another kid.  The second grade was having a “Mean Girls” situation, which the parents of the girls thought was not a problem.  Yet the children are generally, at least, superficially polite.  There are no dark corners of the playground or bathroom where a kid can get beat up.

Would my children, sheltered by the rarefied private school, survive in public?

First, we went to Marvin Elementary, where my 7 year old son was put into a K-1 combo class for 1st grade.A K-1 combo sounds horrible enough on its own, but take into consideration that Marvin was mainstreaming its special ed kids and it was disastrous.  Children with special needs need to be taught self-control and redirection;  at this age, they are unable to.

The class started with a sub for the first two weeks, unable to get the real teacher right away; the kids varied from having no school experience (hello, Kindergartners!) to my son, who can read and write and whom we kept out of school an extra year because he’s a November baby.  At least half of the kids in his class were special ed, requiring aides and varying from mildly autistic to severely developmentally delayed.  Ethan went from being the most rambunctious kid in an accelerated private-school class to the most well-behaved kid.  His speech, hampered by ear infections and already having undergone therapy, began to decline.  I observed him getting touched by children who didn’t know how to control that behavior; not a tap on the shoulder, but an all-over-his-chest hug and touchy touch. I had to pull a girl off of him, and this was with the teacher nearby; he intervened after I pointed it out.

Now, I am not against special ed, but I am FOR gifted education. I want the needs of all children to be met.  I don’t believe you should sacrifice the gifted kids in order to make them “help out” the other kids; what happens is the gifted kids get shafted.  And then who will be our leaders and engineers?  If I play tennis with Venus Williams, I’ll probably get better; but she’ll get worse.  A Venus Williams needs to play against equally skilled players to get better.  But schools want everyone to be the same, to be level.

I asked for a class transfer and was told the other classes were full.  I pulled both kids out.

I put the kids at Foster, our neighborhood school.  Foster had the reputation of being a rough-and-tumble school, “full of bussed-in kids,” parents whispered.  Yet I liked the principal a lot better. He has a flag ceremony every Friday (saying the Pledge, unheard of!) and has small first and second grade class sizes; he’s at the gate in morning and afternoon; and you can usually locate him easily. And the race and financial background of children (regarding the bussed-in kids I was warned about) does not matter as much as whether or not they behave.  The students mostly behave at Foster; parents are friendly and involved.

Ethan, my first grader, fit in comfortably. They immediately put him into speech therapy (which Marvin didn’t notice) and he “graduated” from that program in a few months.

Elyse did not fit in academically.  She was stymied by the snail-pace of her 4th grade class.  GATE is supposed to have differentiation; GATE students are supposed to be given projects and advanced work.  I did not see any of this.  Plus,  she had done all the work the previous year at her old school, which generally works one year ahead of the private schools (another reason it’s hard to transfer back and forth).

I tested her math skills with the district’s homeschooled math placement test; she tested into 8th-grade algebra. I already knew she read at a 12th grade level, so we asked for her to move into 5th grade.

Two transfers, one year. Three for Elyse.

Elyse handled this all with grace.  She is the Enforcer, the Diplomat.  At family dinners, she sits with her older male cousins, ages 17 to 23, and keeps them in line as they try to throw napkins at each other.  At the last one, her grandmother asked how the boys had behaved.  “Zach disrespected Katherine’s salad dressing,” she reported.  Katherine is her cousin’s girlfriend; apparently he said her dressing looked “like barf,” so Elyse took him to task.

Her new 5th grade teacher told me that he placed her at a table full of troublemakers, and now they behave better. One of these kids I’ll call Frankie.  Frankie is really tall– at least 5’8″– and the class clown and sometime bully.  He got suspended for punching a kid, in the library, right in front of the librarian, without provocation.  He says curse words during class.  He tells the other kids that the girls all “want his body” and for the class movie, he wanted to watch Sex and the City.  Elyse told me this, and I told her she could tell him that it’s about a bunch of middle-aged women who like clothes and can’t find a good man. He also, she reported, tried to spit on her camera.  She said, “That’s my mom’s!” and he handed it back and said, “Oh, okay– tell your Mom she’s pretty.”  The kid has problems.

So anyway, this kid sits across from my kid and he makes comments and jokes to her all day long.  Instead of taking umbrage or crying (as I might have done) she tells him off.

“Don’t sass me back,” he told her.

“I’ll sass you back until the day I die,” she shot back.  “You’re my mortal enemy.”

He tells jokes nonstop, so the teacher has him keep a joke journal, in which he is supposed to write down his jokes– harnassing evil for good, I guess.  When he tells a joke, my daughter tells him, “Don’t forget to write that in your joke journal!” And he does.

Do I like that my kid has to endure this? I think she kind of likes the conflict.  I think it’s making her tougher.  In the parenting book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee the author talks about how learning to deal with all kinds of crap basically forms a better character.  It’s true.

Exceptions apply, as for Ethan’s class;  that wasn’t a single kid he had to deal with, that was an untenable situation at an age where he still needed to learn basic skills.

But for Elyse, who already knows the basics, this class is not making her into a worse person.  Last year, a softball parent told us about a hundred times (and everyone else) that Elyse was going to be President.  “Her people skills are unbelievable,” she said.  “The way she can talk to the girls and to the parents…”

For example, yesterday her little sister got a Kidz Bop CD in her Happy Meal.  “Oh, Kaiya, you got number 1! You’re special,” she said.

“I special? Yay!” Kaiya said. Elyse knows how to make people feel good.

And now they must change schools again.  My husband was out of work for about six weeks, not bad in this market, and happened to get a good job in Hawaii.  Everyone bemoans the public schools there.  Frankly, I don’t see how they could be worse than what we have gone through this year.  I am no longer worried.

Mostly, I see my children learning the lessons that I could not.  To have hope in the future. Confidence that things will turn around. Courage when everything else falls apart.  My husband deserves much of the credit, because he possesses these traits naturally.  For someone like me, it’s harder.  But now I know the benefits of positive thinking.  And as G.I. Joe used to say at the end of the PSA on the animated 80s show, “Knowing is half the battle.”