We are into our third week of back to school in Pittsburgh. Last night was a dreaded Monday night, but unlike the last two, there were no tears or yelling in our household. I did hear at least one child sigh and wish she could return to her school in Australia. Another complained about the increased amount of time he spends sitting in a classroom compared to last year (five hours and fifty minutes per week to be exact), and a third had a long chat with me about how difficult it can be to break into tight friendship groups that have been established since kindergarten. Overall things were much calmer than the past two weeks, however, and I went to bed with a sense of relief.
This morning I popped my head into the bedroom of our youngest to child to wake him up. He rolled over, rubbed his eyes and even before he opened them, he insisted, "I'm not going to school." I left the room knowing that it would be pointless to respond, and a few minutes later I could hear him repeating himself to his father down in the kitchen.
When I handed him his bowl of oatmeal, he made another attempt to persuade me to let him stay home. "Mom, am I stupid?" he asked. "Of course not," I replied.
"Well I feel stupid every day at school."
"Why is that?"
"The problem is ... I don't know American!"
"Hmm." I said. "What exactly do you mean? What don't you know?"
He shrugged his shoulders and took a few minutes to push his oatmeal from side to side in his bowl while he thought about it. Like his mother (and very unlike his father), this child struggles to wake up first thing in the morning. Finally he said, "Just stuff. Like, I don't know how to fill in the worksheets. They are, well, I don't know. They are too American."
I have been scanning the work he brings home every day, and it seems to me he is doing just fine. But it's true that he learned a different type of handwriting, and his teacher has been correcting some of his writing. It is also true that he hasn't always followed the directions. I attribute this more to a family tendency to gaze out the window and daydream, however, than to a problem of "not knowing American."
He has probably hit on something true, however. He realizes that he doesn't quite know the language of his school, the things that his classmates take for granted that he will know. We have thought of some things to teach him ahead of time---the word period, for example. In Australia it's called a full stop. I remember his older brother coming home from his first day of grade five in Melbourne feeling like an idiot because his classmates couldn't believe that he didn't know what a full stop was. J is good with using the (American) word period to refer to the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence instead of full stop, but we haven't been able to think of everything "American" that he won't know.
Yesterday, S told me that she was happy to have finally figured out the meaning of the the word parenthesis.
"It's what Americans say instead of bracket in math class," she explained.
"Why didn't you ask your math teacher what it meant on the first day?" I asked.
"I didn't want to look stupid," she said.
Later in the afternoon, I noticed that they all came home in cheerful moods from school. I asked about their days and received the usual minimalist replies. I decided not to question J too closely and rather to be satisfied with his response of "Good." But when I tucked him into bed, he was ready to give me an update. I braced myself. What he had to say came as a pleasant surprise.
"Mom, I did exactly what you told me to do. I was getting behind on my work, so I prayed and asked God to help me, and He did!"
"I'm so glad," I said.
Wednesday Morning Update: It was a pleasure to send a happy child off to the bus stop this morning, with no more talk of "I hate school" or "I don't know American."
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