(Altered Back to School notebook- Cosmo Cricket’s “Jack’s World” collection.)

Yesterday was the first day of school. We decided to send Jonas back for a variety of reasons, one of the most important being that I’m too sick to keep up with him, let alone wrangle him into some education. Others include the fact that since I’m so sick, Jonas has decided to pretend that I don’t actually talk, and so when I do tell him to do something I may as well be talking to a brick wall.

School scares me. As much as I love the break, last year was a very, very bad experience. We had so many notes, phone calls and runs ins with the administration that it was less work to have him at home. Jonas’ little psyche got damaged and much of what he actually learned and retained, he did because of my teaching him at home. At the end of the year I removed him from school and home schooled for the last six weeks. It went alright, some days better than others, and we both had a pretty good time. I learned to let him lead, and also that he now associated learning with the abject misery and humiliation of school. Because of this, I backed off considerably on everything except snuggly reading time, and only did math a few times a week when he asked to play flash cards.

Now, Jonas does need to learn some good citizenship skills in the classroom. Handling himself in a group is a life skill that he needs, and not one that I can provide very well at home. However, he needs to learn this without the accompanying message of “I’m a total loser”. I honestly don’t care if he needs to repeat the first grade academically, but I want him to know that he can handle himself in a school situation and enjoy the process. I plan to continue to work with him at home on the homework, but also on reading and finding opportunities for learning that aren’t so cookie cutter. I want him to learn, but keep his spark about it as well.

After much consideration, I enrolled him in school again, but I enrolled him in a different school. I’m already much happier with it. I wrote the teacher a two page letter explaining how Jonas works and how much he wants to succeed. I was very impressed with her at orientation, and love her positive rewards plan for dealing with not just my challenged child- but with every child in the class. Jonas came home from this and very excitedly told his grandmother about the blue reward tickets and prizes, then he said, “that’s going to be really hard for me.” Just about broke my heart.

I don’t ever remember consciously worrying about my behavior as a child. I remember other stresses, like wondering if I would ever figure out reading or hoping my teacher liked me, but never did I walk into a situation looking at myself, knowing that I was going to have to work twice as hard to succeed as everyone else. Little kids should think they can do anything they try; that’s part of the innocence of childhood. Everybody can sing, dance, paint and be a friend at six. Losing that is the saddest step toward adulthood.

The good news is that Jonas has made it through two days of school with no incidents, and he got a blue ticket and a good citizenship paper today! For him, that is huge. It feels good to get off to a good start.

The first day he came home happy, and then promptly fell apart and slept from about 4pm to the next morning, getting up only to use the bathroom and switch beds. I did remarkably well getting up at 6:30 in the morning, and getting us all out the door and through the first day paperwork. Then I felt so jazzed I called a friend and went to lunch. I picked Jonas up after school and then developed a lovely migraine.

This morning it took everything I had to get out of bed, brush my teeth and get him to the school. I then came home and slept for several hours listening to Maggie watch television. I have accomplished almost nothing today. Very clearly, I overdid it. The good thing is, come next week I can just drop him off at the school curb, so it won’t be such an effort, and I’ll try to be smarter about not running around just because I’m having a good day. Right now, I just have to go back to bed.