Monday, January 15, 2007

"I'M STUPID AND EVERYBODY HATES ME"

I got into the motherhood business at thirty-seven, knowing
nothing about babies or kids. When they handed me this little
thing in the hospital, I was inclined to think, "What am I
supposed to do with this?"

What I did was talk to it a lot, and later read to it. Something
we were reading or doing prompted my sister, a school speech
pathologist, to say, "You know, if you keep that up you're going
to wind up with a kid who can't function in public school." So
much the worse, it seemed to me, for public school. I'd read
John Holt and Summerhill in college and was comfortable
with the position that school as we know it isn't given in
the nature of the universe. But by the time Justin appeared in
the world, I hadn't thought about that issue for years. I took
it for granted that he would go to school like everybody else.

Justin's approach to life has been characterized as "head first
at a hundred miles an hour," although in fact he has always been
more controlled than he seemed to be to slow, old grownups. He
was Dennis the Menace, Calvin, Eloise, Tom Sawyer -- a kid who
may grow up to be Mark Twain or Liza Minelli but whose childhood
is hard on everyone concerned. A book I once read about the
Dakota Indians described the big boys' "dangerous games," things
like galloping their horses across the prairie, bareback of
course, and trying to push each other off. Justin would have
loved it. He'd have been tribe champion. He would have made a
great Dakota Indian. He'd have done well as a Shao-Lin warrior,
or a Spartan, or a Zulu. He did not make a good middle-American
school child.

His problem in school wasn't really his tearing energy and
nonstop activity, although that didn't help. It wasn't even that
he knew it all already, or thought he did, and was bored to
death, although there was some of that. He reminded me of Pigpen
in Peanuts, with the cloud of dust and dirt that follows him around.
Justin's cloud wasn't dust and dirt so much as a black hole of
disorder and a gleeful disinterest in adapting to the system. He left
trails of lost objects behind him. He played with his lunch like
Play-Doh instead of eating it.

Two high points of his career were losing his spelling book for
good and all -- apparently into a space warp in his desk since no
one could figure how it could have gotten out of the classroom --
and trailing grape juice across the floor from one of those
supposedly unspillable boxes that they make for kids' lunches.
He so mastered the art of losing papers that he could get to
school without his homework even when I picked him up from his
classroom after school and delivered him back there the next
morning.

By the end of third grade, he was saying things like, "I'm stupid
and everybody hates me." I understand that a lot of kids say
things like that, and parents and teachers take it with a grain
of salt, assuming they'll outgrow it. I did not so assume. I
don't think people do outgrow that kind of thinking, once it gets
built into their assumptions about themselves. I think they stop
talking about it and figure out how to make their way in the
world in spite of it, but working around something isn't the same
as getting over it. Nobody should know how to think "I'm stupid
and everybody hates me."

Three incidents sum up why I came to think that our struggle to
shoehorn Justin into public school wasn't working. First was a
conference with the principal. We agreed that in some sense
Justin was doing the best he could, and that continuing to rag
him about his ways wasn't likely to help. She also looked at his
life as I described it and commented that he had a lot of outside
activities, which he did. She suggested that he might be doing
too much, that it was confusing to him. I thought this over and
realized that I knew what he was getting out of the activities,
but I wasn't sure what he was getting out of school. Maybe
school was the thing we could do without.

Then there was a phone call from the school nurse: "Do you know
that Justin came to school this morning with his hair not
combed?" Give me a break. In January, a kid pulls off his
knitted cap and his whole head explodes into static electricity
-- particularly Justin's. He was prone to explosions, most of
them figurative. Likely enough he did go to school without
combing his hair. Since when is this a medical emergency? (My
mother was a public school teacher. Mother and I have had our
issues over the years, and still have a few. Being scolded by
school personnel doesn't bring out the best in me.)

The third incident was the last conference of many with the third
grade teacher: "What are we going to do about Justin?" She said
they thought he might have a neurological crossup of some kind,
and they'd like to do a workup on him. The occupational
therapist happened to be there that day and could take a quick,
informal look at him and check out his coordination.

Check out his what? This is Justin the Dakota Indian. He loved
to do three-point headstands on the back seat of a moving car, or
in a tub full of water. I'd once told his day care lady she
could put him in the gym and swim program if she'd promise
not to improve his coordination. The occupational
therapist had him scoot across the room on a skateboard, sitting
down, and that was that.

But on the way out of the building Justin asked me, "When she
said that, why did I feel like a retard?" That did it. Click,
as the feminists say. In his private universe in the back of the
room, he did his third-grade schoolwork creditably enough when he
bothered to do it. His other activities included melting crayons
on the radiator and reading Stephen Hawking's book about time.
I'm not sure a kid like that can be incorporated into an orderly
school system -- but that wasn't my problem. My job was to get
him out of there before they convinced him beyond repair that he
was stupid and obnoxious. I took him out of school, telling him,
"Someday you'll have your own reasons for keeping track of your
life, and then you'll figure out how to do it."

We did a year of home school. We had fun; but a ten-year-old boy
with no siblings needs to do more than hang around with old Mom
all day. The following year I sent him to Sudbury Valley School
in Framingham, Massachusetts (www.sudval.org), which has its
own kind of order and focuses on requiring students to be
responsible for themselves. To this end, the school tries to keep
its tuition to what a teenager can earn in a year. Some of them do
just that; I remember watching ne kid proudly writing the check
on his own checking account. The real hurdle was getting Justin
to Framingham every school day for five years, including at least
three summers; but that's another story.

At fourteen, he decided that it would be easier to get into
college from a conventional high school. We agreed on Cambridge
School of Weston, and after that Brandeis University. Today at
twenty-seven, he works as a programmer (largely on the basis of
what he and his best friend from Sudbury Valley taught themselves
and each other about computers while everyone else was struggling
with middle school). He is a responsible, tax-paying, self-
supporting citizen. I'm not sure what more a conventional
education would have done for him.

On the first day of his sophomore year in high school, I came
across a list in his handwriting of items to bring to school with
him. Across the top was written: "Do not put this paper down
until everything is in the car." He'll go through life devising
systems to protect himself from his own absent-mindedness,
counting on intelligence and resourcefulness to get himself out
of predicaments he wouldn't have gotten into if he'd been paying
attention in the first place. This is all right with me, having
gone through life that way myself.

Our friends and relations wondered what would become of Justin as
a result of missing all those years of formal schooling. My
answer was that if you believe in yourself you can do anything.
If you don't, whatever else you have going for you almost doesn't
matter. Academic deficits can be made up; but it's frighteningly
easy to build negative images into a child's self system, and
once that really takes hold it can be impossible to eradicate it.

When, after a year of home school and half a year of Sudbury
Valley, Justin stopped saying, "I'm stupid and everybody hates
me," and got on with making a life for himself, I figured I'd
done my job.

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