Can I Go Back to Public School?
Dylan has become a discipline problem at his new school. All of the teachers have emailed me and two of them are incredibly frustrated.
One teacher emailed, “He is consistently coming late to class. Walking in screeching or doing something else of a disruptive manner. Last week, I took the ‘stress’ ball from him because he was throwing it so high that it was banging against the ceiling tile.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard from this teacher. But now Dylan is admitting that he has a problem with self-control in the classroom.
“There’s so much talking that it’s impossible to focus,” he whined. “I have to work so hard just to ignore all the noise that I can’t get anything else done!”
Then he dropped the mega-bomb: “I wish I could go back to my old school.”
Fifteen thousand dollars and three months of private school, and he’s begging to go back to public school.
So … I let him go back to public school. For one hour.
I arranged for Dylan to sit in on a geometry class at the public middle school. On a day that he didn’t have school, he got up early and went with me – and Shane – so that he could sit for an hour in public school, and remember how he’s supposed to behave – and why he didn’t want to be there.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, he came out saying, “It was so fun!”
I thought maybe I’d misheard. After all, this is a boy who cried, in incredible angst, last spring: “Please, just get me OUT of this school!”
So when Dylan said an hour of public school geometry was fun, I inquired further.
“Well first, there were like 40 kids in the class,” he said. “It wasn’t just 26 kids or whatever, it was like 40. And nobody was talking, so I could really pay attention to the teacher. And they only did, like, two worksheets. And everybody did them and we had plenty of time to go over them. In private school they do, like, five worksheets and it just goes way too fast. Please, can I go back to public school?”
“You begged me to go to private school,” I said. “You begged and pleaded and said you hated public school. All you wanted to do was go to private school. You have to be kidding me.”
“Why?” he whimpered. “I can really handle it now and it’s way easier to focus there!”
“We spent $15,000 on private school for you. We spent all of your college savings and Shane’s college savings just to get you into the private school. You begged and pleaded to go to private school. You are NOT going back to public school after three months!”
“But I like it way better,” he said, as if that made a difference.
“If you were in public school,” I assured him, “you would be flunking 8th grade. You would not have teachers who let you turn in your assignments late. You are doing better, but you still had seven zero’s for missing assignments in three different classes!”
“But I wouldn’t do that,” he said. I laughed out loud. I felt queasy, dizzy and a bit faint.
“NO,” I said. “You are going to finish this year at private school. You are going to learn to turn in your assignments on time. You are going to advocate for yourself. And you are going to get through this year.”
After some real screaming, I ended the conversation as I so often do:
“You are going to start doing what YOU need to do for YOU,” I said.