Archive for the ‘ High School ’ Category

School Choice

When I was growing up, my family figured there were three choices for schooling: public, private and parochial.  For us, that meant there was only one choice.  By the time my eldest was old enough for school there were a few more.  So whereas virtually every kid I knew in church, Christian clubs or camp went to public school, my children would grow up with a mix of Christian friends in public school, Christian school, charter school, private school and home school.

We bought our first home back in the 80s when the Fed was wringing inflation out of the economy with 8-10% mortgage interest rates.  Areas of the city that had been starting to show signs of age were becoming gentrified as new homeowners were trying to stake out a real estate claim and affordability was capped by the size of the payments required.  The local elementary school was considered better than most so we figured we should be able guide our kids through the system.

Maybe I had a bit of a romantic view of the public elementary school as the great melting pot of humanity.  It is one of the few situations in life in which you would not choose with whom you would associate.  You were seemingly randomly selected for a class and then seated in alphabetical order with a shuffling of the room assignments at the beginning of each year.  Other than breakouts for reading, we were all locked in the same room for nine months of the year, the smart ones and lazy ones, the populars and off-beats, the bullies and the clowns, and the kid that stayed back from the prior year who was still in reading group C.

By the time you hit high school, you could build some space by self selecting for honors courses, sports, clubs, etc. and you would soon be an adult, able to chose your workplace, your church and which neighbors you would greet.

What I hadn’t yet understood was that many of my interactions outside of work would be built around my children.  Planning schedules, play dates, special events and just pickups and drop offs would create shared experiences that would connect me to the parents of my kids’ classmates.  In the same way that I grew to have more in common with those parents and other families who were in the public school cycle, there was a remoteness growing with those who made other choices.

Within our church, the home school parents were sharing curriculum tips and arranging field trips and the Christian school parents were pulling volunteer duty in the classes and as hall monitors.  The public school parents could be split into those who saw the educators as threats to be combated with clandestine prayer groups and those who were looking for ways to be involved to promote the welfare of the students and school.

Although we tried to check ourselves for any hints of superiority or judgmentalism, I expect some seeped through – if I felt it from others, they probably felt it from me.  Among our peers, it was as if each parent felt an obligation to justify their schooling decision as being the best.  Updates on kids would include the obligatory endorsement and exclamation of how they were thriving in their environment in ways that couldn’t be imagined in another setting.  What I wanted to communicate was that our choices and experiences may provide some insight into benefits and pitfalls of the public school experience but were not an assessment that it was the right choice for them and their child.

As school age approached for our first born, we were not keen on homeschooling.  Janet had read some Edith Schaeffer book in which she extoled the model of the home as a sanctuary.  The dual role of parent and instructor as well as the lack of separation between home and school seemed to mix things up a little too much to fit that model.  Plus, a few years later, we heard an interview on a Christian radio program in which the “expert” stated, “If you child obeys on command, they are a good candidate for home schooling.”  That line gave us some assurance that we likely avoided a colossal mistake by not attempting that route- somehow none of our kids picked up that gene (maybe it wasn’t modeled to them).

Both parents and children experienced our share of challenges and rewards.  We were convinced that our son’s kindergarten teacher smoked a few too many funny cigarettes in her younger days.  She was more into socialization and discovery than drilling the alphabet and numbers and was butchering the pronunciation of our last name for the first three months.  His buddies at school were an African American kid down the street from us and another massive boy who came from a poorer home and loved coming over to play with our son and his toys.  We eventually moved to the burbs where the majority of the boys were medicated with Ritalin and no one walked to school- mom drove or you took the bus.

Our middle child seemed to have two years of fifth grade and two of seventh.  She bounced to Florida and had to reread “Roll of Thunder hear my Cry” during her 6ixth grade class and returned to upstate NY to find that they would tackle Johnny “Tremain” which she went through last year in FL.

On our move to California, we put our youngest in a Christian school for one year, not knowing what to expect, and then moved her back into the public system.  One thing consistent between parents and real estate agents- they are all proud of their schools.

The toughest transition for all three was between sophomore and junior year of high school when they started hanging around at home on Friday and Saturday nights.  It seemed that with the mobility came the alcohol so childhood friends became “daytime friends”.

Did we do what was best for our kids?  I know we wanted to- but “best” isn’t just a choice.  It is a commitment to a long haul- of experiencing the ups and downs together, evaluating and reevaluating decisions together, talking and praying through the latest disappointment or challenge together.  I hope our kids understood that no matter what, we were in their corner and we were trusting God to take our choices actions and redeem them.

2011
11/18
CATEGORY
Childhood
High School
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Life Part 3: College

Much like Gooley in Joe Bayly’s “I saw Gooley Fly”, I escaped to Christian college and except for a few letter exchanges with my high school crush who felt sorry for me, thinking that I was off to an all male college, I disappeared from the radar of my high school class until our 10th reunion.

Wheaton was one of those places that I wished was better than it was but I had to admit, it beat the alternatives.  There were some quirky rules but the staff would actually try to explain the rationale to you.  I remember sitting in a cabin up in snowy northern Wisconsin over spring break, listening to the athletic director, who was an institution at the school, explain the prohibition against using Playing Cards.  As he described it, “When you get those old familiar faces in front of you, you will not be able to stop from reaching for your wallet.”  Since my family only played something called “Rook”, the “Christian alternative” to Playing Cards- they weren’t all that familiar to me, and the only game I ever played using Face Cards was War- so I figured this guy had some demons that I couldn’t relate to.  The school dropped the prohibition by my senior year.

One of the great experiences was mingling with students and professors who were from all sorts of denominations.  For the first time, I heard a Biblical basis for infant baptism during a casual debate with a friend.  This was foreign- I mean- we wouldn’t even let those people take communion at my church back home.  So on the Sunday’s that I didn’t sleep in or wasn’t off in Wisconsin with the climbing club, I went to the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church and a few different independent churches, but mostly to the Plymouth Brethren Church where they had a full service just around communion every week.  They had some pretty strict ideas about women in worship (silent).  I guess the women there were pretty patient or were just biting down hard on their tongues.

For me, the environment had a generous mix of challenges to my paradigms as well as support from others who either worked through the conflicts or were in the process.  The reconstruction of my worldview required realizing that within the Body of Christ, there was a lot more diversity of opinion and belief than I may have liked, and I would have to accept that while there may not be agreement, we remained together in the Church.  There were pacifists and ROTC cadets, theistic evolutionists and six-day creationists, Calvinists and Charismatics, socialists and libertarians, all of whom were seeking to pursue a Christian ethic.  This was all fine except that when I felt the freedom to challenge convention outside of the academic environment, I was quickly labeled a troublemaker- if I didn’t buy into flood geology, I was an evolutionist, if I invited discussion of Adam as an archetype, I was tearing at the authority of scripture.  Of course, I was hopeless when it came to church polity.  How could I ever be convinced that there was one “Biblical” model after being exposed to every variety of governance, each claiming to be scriptural?

At one point during each year there was usually a Black emphasis week or African American awareness week- I can’t remember what the pc term was at the time.  We’d get the staff person in charge leading the chapel service and be made aware that as whites we weren’t doing what we should be to be inclusive or understanding or actively changing the campus to help these folks.  There would usually be an inner city gospel choir doing a concert on the weekend- which had some fantastic music enjoyed by a huddle of the black student group in the first few rows and me along with six or seven others spread about the cavernous auditorium.  I invited the leader of the student group to dinner at the dining hall once to try to understand what I was missing regarding my responsibilities.  I was trying to understand what I was neglecting and he was insisting that the overwhelming presence of me and my peers was oppressive- so the conversation wasn’t very helpful.  One of the learnings I keep coming back to is that it is always more comfortable to deal with stereotypes and labels than it is with individuals.   Individuals demonstrate a complexity that we wish others appreciated in us and invoke a degree of empathy and pity that we don’t want to invite in.

Somewhere about half way through my four years, I started appreciating the fact that we had an incredible stream of speakers coming through the school for chapel and various special lectures.  I would need to travel to conferences all over the country to hear these people otherwise.  Some were “out there” (Anne Kiemel), some were booming (EV Hill) some were inspiring (Corrie Ten Boom).   I could blame it on the sermon survival skills I developed as a child, but it remains a shame that I wasn’t more attentive.  Now that I’m writing tuition checks for my third child I keep prodding her to go take in everything available.

2011
10/01
CATEGORY
High School
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Life Part 2: High School

Part 2 High School

High School was a spiritual battleground – in which faith was tested and young minds were tempted.  For me, one of the biggest daily challenges was finding a restroom that was not a smoker’s hangout and still had some TP available in the stall.  As I tell my kids, I went to an “urban high school”.  We didn’t do homecoming floats- those would have been burned well before any parade.  The school fence was locked after homeroom and “open campus” was only for those kids who would dash out the front door and sprint to the Acme across the street during the switch to first period.

It was the early 70s.  Neil Armstrong was about to step on the moon and Hal Lindsay’s, The Late Great Planet Earth, was screaming that Armageddon was near and we had a good idea which world powers would bring it about.  I was just hoping that the rapture didn’t take place before I had had sex (married sex of course- which meant the world better hold together for at least 10-15 years).  1984 was still a way’s off so George Orwell’s future could be reality.

I was busy being sometimes a jerk, sometimes a Pharisee, sometimes naïve and once in a while getting things right.  Events like “rally round the flag” hadn’t been invented yet so I knew only a few other Christians at my school outside of the kids from my church and the total was maybe 10, definitely less than 20.  So the likelihood that any of them would actually be in a class with me was pretty slim.  Of course there was no such thing as a “born again Catholic” that I had heard of yet.

Union County, New Jersey must have been written off by most of the big high school para-church ministries because they were only rumors were I lived- probably thriving out by the Short Hills mall (our dentist moved out there from Newark- and if the Brady Bunch lived in Jersey, they’d live there).    Anyway, there was this ministry that we hooked up with called Hi-BA – an acronym for “High School Born Againers”.  It was my link to normal Christian kids who actually went to other high schools and churches in my area.  I guess Hillside just made it into the fringe of their coverage area.  The attraction was primarily meeting and mingling with other Christians- and in the meantime I was getting tons of inductive Bible Study and being pushed to do evangelism.  The Bible study was great and seeing as it appears that most sermons and Bible lessons seem to have now latched on to the “Think and Do” model of pedagogy, it is sorely missed (“Think-and–Do” books were these fill in the blank primers which were the standard curriculum in my elementary school days up through at least fourth grade- complementary workbooks for anyone who was devouring the Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot dramas).  The evangelism part was forced and awkward.  My Catholic and Jewish classmates politely tolerated my proselytizing.  I was mostly relieved that I could report that I dutifully performed and still had friends (even if they now were aware that I might turn “Jesus salesman” on them in a one on one situation).  One guy in my grade became a Christian through a Jesus People or other type of charismatic event- not through anything I had done.  He was amazing to observe- he really felt changed and would talk about it with others just like he was talking about sports, cars or girls- that wasn’t me- I had too many interests to balance and risks to weigh.

The other BIG threat in High School was Biology class and evolution. Creationism was just breaking on the scene and not yet debunked as Seventh Day Adventist rationalization (Oh- you didn’t know?), intelligent design was still thirty years off.  I had to make a stand in the classroom and began rattling off challenges (which I had carefully digested and practiced) based the Piltdown man, abnormalities in the progression of the horse and the second law of thermodynamics. With every eye in the class looking at me like I was from another planet (not just the quirky freshman in the sophomore bio class) or just enjoying the diversion, the teacher asked a follow-up on thermodynamics.  I was tapped out- all I knew was that this was supposed to be a perfect foil (after a full semester of thermodynamics in college there is no way I would introduce that to the debate). I beat a hasty retreat by mumbling about irregularities in Carbon 14 dating methods and survived the rest of the unit in stony silence planning a strategy for the upcoming test.  Was my teacher going to fail me if I just wrote down Genesis 1 on my test paper when asked to explain the evolutionary process?  I think I just spat out what he wanted while using the word “Theory” in every other sentence- after all – I needed to stay on the Honor Roll.

2011
09/24
CATEGORY
High School
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