After reading a few of the responses to my bookends post I realized that I didn't talk about all the positives in my kids education ... sometimes when I write I am focused on one goal and in the effort to save my fingers and your sanity and patience, I tell part of the story or throw in a wrap up comment and that's what happened yesterday... I kinda finished up the post with a 'me against the education system' comment and that's not always true... but sometimes, just sometimes the way situations work makes you feel like you are up against the odds... so over the next few days, I am going to share some 'balanced' reflections on my kids education....
As a parent, I figure one of my most sacred responsibilities is to make sure my kids get the best education that I can help them get within the bounds of the systems we live in... and with Robyn that started when we knew that she was going to be living with us... Wayne and I made our third major move in our marriage for a variety of reasons just before Robyn came to live with us, so school district became an important factor in our home search. We settled on a sweet little house near Sheppard Public School in Kitchener, Ontario... the school had great options for us once she got older, a neighbourhood feel and a great reputation... and boy was that a great decision... Robyn sailed through Junior Kindergarten (4K for my american friends) with the right balance of success and challenge and our next major education decision came mid way through her Senior Kindergarten year... French Immersion or regular stream 1st grade... Our school district had a fabulous program opportunity for kids to take a half day in French and a half day in English...but it meant that Robyn would have to take math and science is a relatively unknown to her language... so we signed up and waited to see if there were enough kids signed up to run the program... and were disappointed to find out we were four kids short about a week before the deadline... so my first real fight for Robyn's education began... I wasn't taking on the school board, but the other parents in the kindergarten program... to convince them to try French immersion for their child...
One of the people that I approached was the mom of my daughter's best friend K - she hadn't really considered FI as an option and was dealing with several issues related to K not wanting to go to school... so I appealed to her in the only way I knew... I asked her what doors she opened by not pursuing FI for K and what doors she closed...
First grade is a scary time to be deciding your child's academic career path, so in the end I was able to convince her to give it a try (and we found 3 other families who came on board) by asking her to try it for a year...
Well, it turned out to be a great decision for both of us, although Robyn was only able to complete one year of FI before moving to the US, K found a challenge in the FI program and is now working towards being fluently bilingual and still taking half of all her programs in french in 6th grade....
Our next education decision came when my husband Wayne was ready to move from Kitchener after finishing his PhD at Laurier... there were two offers on the table - a post-doctoral research job in Hong Kong or a tenure-track teaching position in Southwestern Pennsylvania... the post-doc would be 2 years in a foreign country with the educational challenges that came with that... and Southwestern PA would be fraught with inherent challenges - no neighbourhood schools, a very rural environment and a very economically depressed area... check back tomorrow to see how this decision played out!
