Four Years Later–What Stays With You From High School?
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I sent my children to private school, something I did for reasons that in part were rational–when my oldest went to kindgergarten, the local school was truly terrible and there were no charters at the time–but also in large part irrational: I was driven by the vague conviction that they would get a good education at a private school, though I could not have said exactly what I meant by a “good education,” only that I felt on an instinctual level that whatever it meant, it was what I owed my children, something that literally kept me up at night with worry.
Several years later, as I’ve also mentioned repeatedly, I became a teacher at a charter school in South Los Angeles for similar reasons: to be part of providing a “good education” for children in the community, a drive that again I could not have entirely explained but that also frequently kept me up at night with worry.
But what exactly was I worrying about? I mean, I could name a million tiny details, deadlines, tests, grades, but on some level, I worried for my children and my students that they were not getting what they needed in order to…I couldn’t have said what. Obviously I wanted them to learn stuff and get good grades, but that wouldn’t have kept me up at night. What did they need? What should I have given them?
Now, some years later, with many of them grown, my job as a parent mostly done, my job