My grandchild starts kindergarten next week. Just before school started, the school informed his parents that he would be getting a long-term sub until November, because his official teacher is out on medical leave. The sub is a parent in the school, who has emergency teaching certification. I chuckled, because as retired teacher, I could only imagine the calls and emails the office is getting.
He will be fine. We don’t care.
As my kid said, the grandchild “mostly needs a little more basic numeracy and some socialization.”
See, my family is privileged. We don’t have money, but we have (a) property (b) privilege and (c) cynicism.
Property: People think money is key. It can be, but it isn’t necessary. Property is a form of wealth that endures when there’s no money. My grandkid lives in a run-down house in a neighborhood that was tough and half-abandoned when my husband and I bought it for our kid, but it is now highly desirable. The house is in the school’s territory (“catchment”), and so the grandchild was guaranteed a spot in the highly desirable school.
Privilege: We are White. Weird, I know, and White people hate to believe it, but Whiteness is like a magic eraser for all kinds of things. But my grandson also has another kind of privilege: In his free preschool, he was the only White kid. He has Black neighbors, and he gets around town with his parents on buses where they are often the only White people. One of the biggest weaknesses of the well-to-do children I used to teach was that they thought Whiteness was the norm, so they were afraid of Black people. Afraid of the city. Afraid of anyone who didn’t look just like them. Racism isn’t privilege. It’s fear, and it’s a fatal flaw. So he has the privilege of being White, and the privilege of not being a fragile racist flower.
Finally, cynicism: We all happen to know “education” is something much bigger than school. The grandkid has known how to read since he was four; my adult kid taught him. His father reads to him every day. His house is full of books and Legos, and TV and tablets are things he uses only occasionally. He has been to every museum in town and every park, and he travels on foot and on the bus everywhere in the city with one or the other of his parents. He has an amusing fantasy life, and can entertain himself without a television or a tablet for hours, so he can deal with boredom. He is largely school-proof. And he will know, as my adult kid learned before him, that schooling is not the most important thing in life but you have to put up with it and even apply yourself. That attitude also comes from privilege, mind you.
But school, even with a long-term sub, even in a tumbledown building in an underfunded district, even when life isn’t perfect, does provide something very important. As I said to my kid, he needs “to be one among many and not to take himself or others too seriously.”