There’s just one long weekend left separating our kids’ dual lives:  The summer, when they live like mini retirees (but with better backs), and the school year, when the demands on their time make them more like junior partners in a law firm (with far more casual wardrobes).

I’m guessing that all parents prefer the season of water aerobics and early-bird-specials (which is not necessarily summer for parents of kids on the LAUSD track system).

Of course I’m not against my kids going to school in principle.  It’s not even that the children’s busy school year demands almost as much of parents as of them.  But when the kids are at school, I miss them.  Not in a “can’t bear to be apart,” kind of way, but in a “they’re such great company,” kind of way.  There’s also the trepidation of handing them over on that first day of school to a relatively unknown group of adults, and trusting and hoping that they will be OK.  Better than OK, really, because school is supposed to accomplish something that we can’t manage to do at home.

Which is why I have never even flirted with the idea of home schooling.  Even if I were a trained teacher, I would never subject my kids to 24 hours a day of me.  They may be great company, but I can get pretty grouchy and impatient when it comes to textbook chapter summaries and verb conjugations.

So I am thankful for the schools for taking care of this crucial bit of raising our kids, and hopeful that their teachers will get to know my children and appreciate them for their unique take on the world.  While I’ll look forward to seeing them at the end of every school day, I can only hope that their teachers will look forward to seeing them every morning.

This entry was posted on September 01st, 2008 and is filed under Mother Tongue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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