Anda

First a funny:

A couple of years ago we were given a pair of stuffed bears. They have magnets in their noses, so when you put them together, they "kiss", and that completes a circuit, causing the "girl" bear's cheeks to glow pink.

I don't know where the girl bear is now, but the boy bear has become a favorite toy, especially when the kids discovered he can slide down the metal pole of our bookshelf, holding on by his nose. "He's a fireman!" they said.

Anyway, they wondered why he had a magnet in his nose, so I explained the girl bear thing, and concluded with, "When the husband bear kisses the wife bear, she blushes."

Anda said, "What is 'blushes'?"
I replied, "It's when her cheeks turn pink."
Anda thought about it for a minute and then said, "I guess she got a really cold kiss!"

Now a serious:

Every pre-kindergartner gets excited to go to school for different reasons. Caleb really wanted to raise his hand in class and answer a question right and get praised for it. My friend's daughter thought riding the bus every day would be the best thing ever.

I finally weaseled out of Anda her reasoning for wanting to go to "a big school"--one of her math lessons was too hard and she didn't get every answer right on the quiz, she "will get to go to the park more often" (I think she thinks the playground is a park) and she thinks all the kids in the school will be her friends and she wants lots of friends.

I'm afraid school will be a bitter disappointment to her. Math won't be easier when a teacher is explaining it. It will be the first year, when she's repeating kindergarten, but after that? It's more intimidating to ask a question in front of the class than in front of Mom, and Anda has the same hangups about making a mistake as I do--the first mistake she made doing school, she cried, deeply devastated, and refused to do school for weeks (which was okay because she was just barely 4 years old). So now I find out that weeks ago she got 3/5 on a math quiz after a lesson (it was a vague lesson that I had to re-teach Caleb, too, and the quiz tests things not taught in the lesson; I tried to explain this to her, but she took the failures to heart as her own instead of as the designers'), and she wants to give up on homeschooling all together.

That's Anda for you. Just like me. I can't count the number of times I failed at something, or perceived I failed, or was mildly criticized, or just got embarrassed (usually needlessly) and had the strong strong desire to quit and never try again, or to move, or to never go back. Some things I did quit--I didn't sing when I thought people could hear me from the time I was 12 until I had kids because a friend teased me. I never have played basketball again since the girls at church laughed when I tried to make a shot at a practice and didn't know what I was doing--and I've avoided other sports, too, just in case. I still remember the one worksheet I got less than an A on in elementary school (Fifth grade, doing math with Time; I still don't get how the teacher was doing it, with adding and carrying and borrowing to figure out what time it will be when she gets there). I also remember that the other kids in the class teased me because it was the first (and only) time I didn't say my score out loud when the teacher was collecting grades (he always gave us the option to pass, and I did, and they openly mocked me for it). Or the time I wanted desperately to move because the Relief Society President rolled her eyes at the condition of my house and refused to come inside, clearly uncomfortable.

The trouble is, the jabs of peers are much more painful than not understanding one assignment, and the damage is far more lasting. I read once that the only long-term negative parts of having Tourette's syndrome actually come from the way the child is mistreated by other children at school, not from the disorder itself.

And I'm not sure sending Anda to school will teach her to "get back on the horse," so to speak. In fact, I'm afraid all the positive attention she gets for being so darn smart will only exacerbate the problem. So then is it a favor to send her to school?

Not only will Anda be bored out of her mind in school, I'm afraid she'll be sorely disappointed in the "having friends" thing, and in the "easier to do math" idea and the "playground is like playing at the park" thing. I suspect she'll have more success at making friends by joining a home school group that meets at the park once a week or so, and going to the "science for homeschoolers" and "art for homeschoolers" classes at the local rec centers. And both of those things would be less work for me, and cost less than school does, and would not require us to be somewhere at 8:00 am every day, which would be so difficult as to be almost impossible for me. (Don't laugh or say I should try harder--the mixed up sleep schedule is something that I suffer from constantly; many tears have been shed, many options tried, and it's still a serious and very real problem for me that is not so easy to solve as you'd think).

There are good things that come from school, and Anda would probably do well. She's social, bright, pretty (the clerk at the store yesterday said she looks like a porcelain doll!), creative, fun. But the negative things that school does to children are so powerful and long-lasting that I hesitate to send my children there, even when they want to go.