I’m feeling a little sad about summer vacation, and not just because I’m overwhelmed by travel and summer camps and swim team and how hard it is to pack for a day at the pool.
This is a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. As a general matter, I love summer vacation. I love being outdoors and not being cold. I love seeing my kids play all day. Love it when they ask me to buy them math workbooks and are all excited to page through them. I love it most of all when they read for fun instead of because someone told them they had to.
But I was hit by a big old fireball of sadness when the school year came to an end earlier this month. Because, much as I have written about the angst of homework and testing, racial inequities and legislative strangulation of the public school system here in North Carolina, my kids had an amazing, awesome, happy school year.
And for that, I’d like to take a moment of focus and appreciation. So here are a few things I loved about school this year:
1) My kids were happy.
This is pretty much what it’s all about. I just forget sometimes because so much of the political debate about education focuses on goals and longterm results and how many kids will go to college and whether our school will receive all the federal funding it needs to stay afloat.
But all of these issues are oddly disconnected from my kids. Of course they affect them. Of course I’ve dealt—not always gracefully—with tears over homework, tears over testing, tears over how much time they have to spend sitting at desks and how little they get for running around on the playground.
And yet, overall, they have been happy.
They got to head off every weekday morning to a place where they felt safe and loved. Where they had their own worlds, separate and apart from me and their dad. They did things they enjoyed practically every day—free reading, art, special assemblies with dancing and drumming, cultural events like a lion dance for the Chinese New Year and a storytelling festival.
It’s a good reminder of why we should all meditate. (Yes, I’m talking to me.) When our minds chatter away about the things that bother us, we can so easily miss all that is right with the world.
Meditating makes the things that are making me crazy a whole lot smaller, so I’m better able to deal with them. Letting myself focus on how happy my kids are lets me better think about how to approach what is broken in the educational system. It reminds me that what’s broken isn’t going to break my kids. They are much stronger than that.
2) They had amazing teachers.
I know this doesn’t happen every year. Believe me, I know.
But, oh my, how perfect each of my children’s teachers were for that child. Jake needed a guy who’s strict but gentle, funny and encouraging, smart enough to see what no test could, and who remembers what it’s like to be a goofy eight-year-old boy. Lily flourished with a teacher who imbued the classroom and all their lessons with visual art, who had them do Zumba on rainy days, made Sight Word Bingo games and blubber for a science experiment, gave them classroom jobs that made them feel extremely important, and, yes, was always ready to give or receive a hug.
But with great teachers, there’s always the fear that they will burn out. Get tired of being underpaid, dumped upon for all of society’s ills, made to be not only teachers but social workers and nurses and guidance counselors. No longer be able to bear having to be part of a system of testing with which they philosophically disagree yet have no choice but to participate in.
I worry about these teachers I’ve grown to love because of the love they’ve given my kids.
And then I recognize that they are following their hearts.
This is the first lesson I learned from yoga, and the one that made me a lifelong convert. True happiness lies in doing what you love—instead of what makes “sense” because of pay, prestige, ease of lifestyle, whatever. Really. It’s why I never go back to working at a law firm, even when money is tight. If I did, I’d have more money, but I wouldn’t be happy.
Kudos to the teachers who recognize this. I know it’s a balance, and I know there’s a point at which even the happiest teacher may not be able to pay the mortgage. But for as long as they can continue teaching simply because it’s where their hearts lie, they provide the best unspoken lesson ever for my kids, and a powerful reminder for me. If you love it, you will stick with it, and you will succeed wildly.
3) They have an amazing school.
Not long ago, our principal proudly told me she suspected that of all the principals in the school district, she might just care least about test scores. That is my kind of principal.
She has fostered an environment with so much more to offer than test preparation. A curriculum with arts integration. A leadership model of positive citizenship. In her view, she once told me, elementary school is about instilling kids with a love of learning. She cared when my son was crying about going to school. She made sure that changed. And I am forever grateful.
Is the school perfect? Of course not. But, then, the world isn’t, and it’s honest to let my kids experience imperfection. While they seem to believe that “not fair” is the most horrible thing in the world, judging by how many times the words are uttered in this house on a daily basis, it’s ultimately good for them to discover that, in fact, it isn’t fair and they’re just going to have to live with it.
The world, as Buddha and many after him have explained, is full of suffering. Trying to eradicate it in one’s life—thinking you’re really that much in control—leads to more suffering. Only when we learn how to accept suffering can we transcend it.
Which brings me to my final point.
4) The children I see in my kids’ school give me hope.
Writing about suffering when the worst my kids have to deal with are a few standardized tests on which they will do just fine can seem quite petty just two weeks after the murders in Charleston. But if ever there was a reason for me to be even more committed to public school education for my children, horrors like this one provide it.
When I spend time volunteering in my kids’ classrooms, I get to know children who give me hope in all sorts of ways. The ones who are excelling in school despite all that centuries of racism and inequitable treatment have thrown at them. The friendships that form when children are too young to have fully absorbed this hateful history. The love and encouragement of the faculty and staff, who will do, it seems, just about anything in their power to help every student at that school make it.
There’s a reason the haters rarely stoop to blaming kids for their circumstances, and it’s the same reason they can blithely claim that there’s something wrong with government. You look at these elementary school-aged kids and you believe that anything is possible, even though it obviously isn’t, especially if you keep pulling funding and support programs.
Ironically, it’s the determination of the people who support public schools that make it possible for the nay-sayers to claim there’s nothing wrong with failing to properly support them. Those people make it harder, and we work harder, because it’s children, after all, who will suffer if we don’t.
In the meantime, a backlash is building. I often feel like we’re all just hanging on until the time that common sense will prevail and kids will be allowed to be kids again—to play a lot more and sit at desks a lot less, to be allowed to develop at their own pace instead of in step with tests written by people who appear to be wildly out of step with reality, to be given the support and fairness that will allow them to reach their full potential, and to have that potential be defined in much broader terms than the the ones in which economically obsessed powers-that-be currently define it.
It’s all about perspective. Yoga teaches us that much of what we think we see and understand is false. It’s our own limited perspective, filtered through our own individual experience. Once you recognize that yours is not the only way of seeing the world—that, in fact, the world exists independently of you and your conception of it—you begin to see more truly. It’s call empathy, and an awful lot of people in power seem to be stunningly lacking in it.
So until the tide turns, it’s those kids that give me hope. And make me look forward to the new school year, when I’ll see how many smiles and hugs I continue to receive. When I’ll meet the new teachers who have chosen to dedicate themselves to educating children no matter what.
And when my kids will, because of everything I’ve just said about this past year, be happy. Because, it bears repeating, that’s what’s most important.
YogaMamaMe 