So Long Second Grade!

Chloe has always been a precocious child.  She was born holding her head up with her eyes wide open.  She walked at 10 months and used her words to communicate with strangers as soon as she could speak.   When it was time for me to send her to pre-school I decided to send her to Riverside Church Weekday School, where my brother and I went.  I filled out the application and the financial aid forms.  Chloe went on her “interview” (a play-date observed by members of the admissions team) and was accepted.

Looking back on it, part of the decision to send her to private school was my effort to ‘keep up with the Joneses.” I went to private school and I assumed that that is just what bougie people did. The first year was great; the school was racially diverse (although not as diverse in terms of economics status or family structure), and Chloe seemed to thrive in the social environment.  I was paying 10,000 a year for a half-day program (a HUGE sum on a Storefront teacher’s salary) but the sacrifice was worth it.

The next year it was a whole different story.  I noticed that Chloe’s picture often did not appear in the weekly newsletters sent home to parents.  Her teachers did not seem to understand that I was a teacher too. I worked the same hours that they did, and therefore could not come to every performance, lunch potluck, or morning PTA meeting.  When they did see me they treated me with this false- “Oh! It’s so good to see you!”- enthusiasm that made me feel like I had just gotten out of jail.

The breaking point was when Chloe’s teachers told me she had “low self-esteem” during an early Parent-Teacher Conference.  When I asked them to justify their conclusion they pointed out that she didn’t like to clean up after herself.  Huh?  Since I make it a point not to argue with fools, I just smiled and nodded and committed to getting Chloe out of there the next year.  There was no way that I was going to pay someone who thought that it was their job to cure my child of a problem that she did not have. These teachers did not like my child.

As a teacher, up until then, I didn’t think that I had to like my students.  I thought that my responsibility was to respect them and challenge them academically- but I wasn’t trying to be friends with them so why did I have to like them?  It wasn’t until Chloe had teachers who didn’t like her that I realized that I needed to change. For the sake of my students (and their parents) I had to find something to like about each child that I interacted with. No matter how much adults smile with their mouths but not their eyes, or speak in sugary high-pitched voices, children can sense when an adult doesn’t care for them.

For the past three years at The Hamilton Heights School, Chloe has been able to take Mandarin and Spanish classes.  She has learned to swim and travelled to Carnegie Hall on field trips.  She has developed a love of mathematics, and now reads at a 4^th or 5^th grade level.  But more important than any of those things, she has been taught by educators that not only like her, but love her.  Thank you Ms. Tasha and Ms. Lisa!