Public School to the Rescue

I woke up this morning with a sense of dread about having to homeschool the boys.  The same dread I felt the first week when I couldn’t bear to walk down the stairs to start the day.

The reasons for all of this dread?  I have too much to do at work.   The boys have been rotten this week.  And that article my Amy Chua is bouncing around in my head saying things like, “Why bother!  If you don’t quit your job and start teaching them differential equations you may as well let them play video games all day.”

My dread about the day was not unwarranted.  There was plenty of whining and crying.

And the boys had a bad day too.

Luckily a former student came to spend the morning with us after we got back from the track.  Elizabeth is a freshman in college and is on winter break right now.  When I was threatening Zach for complaining about a writing assignment and he was weeping in response, Elizabeth took him into the next room and said, “Come on, let’s just finish this, and then she’ll give you another chance.”

Her love of him in that moment snapped me out of my ridiculous anger that he was being so annoying.  He wanted to do a good job, and just needed a little hand holding.  She was calm and sweet and encouraging, and he finished the assignment quickly.

And more than that, this college freshman knew about everything I was teaching them today.  She knew a lot about Chinese history.  And she corrected me when I got confused about which was the mortar and which was the pestle. When I looked impressed, she said, “We used them to grind up plants in my biomedical class at Rindge.”

Rindge is the public high school in Cambridge.  And Elizabeth, who is the daughter of a single mother who immigrated from the Dominican Republic, learned a ton there.  It wasn’t perfect — she had to take a no-credit math class last semester because she couldn’t pass the entrance exam — but she is amazing.  She got 2 As and 2 Bs at a prestigious college.  And that couldn’t have happened in a lot of places on this planet, places without public schools that are committed to teaching everyone, regardless of their economic status.  Her mom couldn’t afford to send her children to fancy private schools, nor could she have spent the hours drilling her children in the way that Ms. Chua did.   Instead, Elizabeth got a good, if not great, education.  And she learned how to organize her time, and motivate herself, and work hard.

She told me today that she is going to come over on Tuesday mornings throughout the spring semester.  (She couldn’t afford to live on campus, so she lives at home, a few blocks from me.  Is it wrong to be psyched about that?)  And on those mornings, when I am pretending to be nicer to my kids than I really am because I want to look good in front of her, I will be thinking about how happy I am that not everyone is as driven and scheduled as Ms. Chua seems to indicate should be the norm.  Zach and Ezra definitely need people with a little free space in their lives to come to homeschool and keep Mommy in check.

And I’ll be thinking about how this homeschool momma still loves the entire idea of public education.  And about how happy I am that I get to work with teens like Elizabeth.