Next month, I will drop my firstborn child off at the door of a kindergarten classroom for the first time. After I wave goodbye and bike home alone, we’ll each begin secret lives: I’ll spend my mornings writing stuff for grown-ups, while she makes friends, solves puzzles and gets in trouble in ways I’ll never know.
This is not how I planned it. I intended to homeschool my kids.
I had a miserable time in school myself. I was bored. I didn’t socialize well with my peers. I was too smart and too weird. Rio is, to put it gently, a lot like me. Homeschooling seemed like her ticket to a happier, wilder childhood.
This idea wasn’t a whim for me. I spent last summer taking training courses in Waldorf home education, and the past year building up a small home-based preschool that meets at my house four days a week. I turned our whole house into a de facto classroom. I read thousands of pages of child development books, educational philosophy and memoirs by successful homeschoolers. I wrote articles for homeschooling blogs and magazines.
So last year, we made our home a preschool, and worked at building community. At first there was a lot of enthusiasm among our friends and acquaintances. It seemed like every mom I talked to on the playground was thinking about homeschooling her four-year-old. Everyone at playgroup was concerned about the local public schools. I held a few potlucks for people interested in starting a homeschooling coop, and twenty families showed up.
"Tell me about kindergarten," Rio said. "Maybe I would like to go."But one by one, they dropped out. They’d quietly admit they’d enrolled their kids in kindergarten. Sometimes at the child’s request, sometimes because both parents needed to work, sometimes because they realized they just didn’t want to do it. Finally, there were only two or three families left.
I pushed ahead. In January, when our school district started registrations, I watched the deadline coast by. Instead, I called the city to let them know we would not be registering for kindergarten. Rio overheard our conversation.
"Tell me about kindergarten,"Rio said when I hung up the phone. "Maybe I would like to go."
I told her that every city has schools that anyone who lives in the city can attend, and that these schools start with kindergarten at age five. She asked if I went to kindergarten and I said I had. She wanted to know what it was like. I told her about walking to the end of our long dirt road and getting on the big scary bus.
She stopped me, looking very intensely into my eyes. "Mama. I do not want to know how you got to kindergarten. I want to know what you did when you were there."
I wracked my brain for specifics. "We learned about what different size coins were worth. We set off model rockets. I had to go to the bathroom by myself with no teacher to help, and it was scary out in the corridor alone. There was recess on a big playground with a colony of prairie dogs living under the swings. Some bigger kids told me I would get in trouble for eating lunch under my favorite tree. I loved that tree, so big and broad and shady."
"So," Rio said, "Learning about coins. This happened when you were, what, six?"
"No, when I was five."
©2009 Sierra Black and Babble Media
About the Author
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Sierra Black is a freelance writer living in the Boston area with her family. She writes about parenting, education and sustainable family life at Childwild.com.
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