This is His Lot in Life.
It is the last week of school.
If memory serves, the following two or three months will be glorious. Dylan and Shane will do things together. As a family, we will go places. We will spend quality time just being.
And there will be substantially fewer arguments, less yelling, and more peace – because there will be no school.
There will be no arguments about when to get homework done. There will be no screaming matches about how teachers have said that Dylan’s work isn’t done, while Dylan insists that it is.
There will be no online grades to check, so there will be no E’s for me to mention – only to hear about how Dylan already knows about that, and then blames his teacher for not changing the grade fast enough. There will be no more E’s.
No one will be grading Dylan on his work, except at his summer job – where he is spectacular.
I can remember saying to Dylan once – long, long ago – that Albert Einstein had an awful time in school. “Some people just don’t learn the way the schools teach,” I said.
This is still true, and if we had had the money to put Dylan into a Montessori school, maybe his entire life would have been different. He could have done everything with a hands-on approach, learned at his pace – FAST – and succeeded in school beyond his wildest dreams.
Or maybe we didn’t need the money. When I got my teaching certificate, I told my college counselor, “I want to get a Montessori teaching certificate!”
And she said, “Sorry, we don’t offer that here.” I was crushed, because it was the only kind of degree that made sense to me – even then. If my college had offered it, maybe I would have gotten a Montessori degree and been able to homeschool Dylan instead.
But we didn’t have the money, and I didn’t get that degree, and this is his lot in life.
So we count the days. For 260 days a year, we count the days until it’s over.
There are 524 days left before his high school diploma – or slightly less, because seniors get a break at the end of the year.
All I can think is: I did this to him. It’s my fault. I forced him to go to school.
And for the 957,000th time, I consider homeschooling him.