Troublemaker

I wasn't worried about entering the public school system, once the shock of being the mother of a five-year-old wore off, back in April. We live in a pretty good school district - not one of those scary high-acheiving ones, but one that's okay, fine, definitely among the top for the county we live in (not the richest, let's just say). I was confident that the school was nice and Monkey would settle in pretty well to his new class. It's only elementary school, for goodness sake.

I'm not one of those parents who makes a fuss. I don't expect special treatment. While Monkey is a wonderful, smart, amazing child, I'm under no illusions that he's anything other than pretty much standard in the classroom, at least in the ways they notice at this age.

But now I am one of those parents, because we met his new teacher, and I was not impressed. I had assumed kindergarden teachers were more or less the same all over: mostly nice middle-aged ladies; if you were lucky, an enthusiastic young teacher fresh from college. His school has four kindergarten classrooms: three with perfectly normal teachers, and one, the one they hadn't been able to budget for - even though this happens every year - with a teacher who looks like they rolled her out of the ark and dusted her down. Frankly, she's scary. Monkey thinks so, and I had a hard time mustering the courage to look as if I didn't.

We were not late enrollees. Monkey has been registered for school since May. (I know this sounds late to my Irish readers, who had to put their children's names down for school while still in embryonic form, but here you can't enroll them till the spring before.) None of his nursery-school friends are in this class, even though they're allegedly divided up according to ability, and he's neither streets beyond nor behind the others who were in his class. It just looks like we drew the short straw and got chucked in with the rejects, and Miss Havisham.

And I'm sorry: I know someone has to be in her class, and maybe for some it would be preferable to having 30 in a class, but frankly I'd prefer Monkey to be with a young, vigorous, exciting teacher in a huge class than with the teacher we've been assigned. So would Monkey, who was doing just fine until she appeared, and then regressed to mute-limpet-hiding-behind-my-legs state, and now claims he's not going to kindergarten on Monday.

I hate confrontation, and I couldn't do anything straight away, though in hindsight perhaps I should have, but I had both Monkey and Mabel (who had woken up with a streaming cold; oh joy) hanging out of me and whining about hunger and despite the vitally helpful presence of B, I was pretty much stuck with leaving straight away. Also, I didn't want Monkey to know that I was trying to request a change, in case it didn't pan out.

We came home, I dithered and stressed for an hour and a half, and got some good advice from friends online, and finally put Mabel down for her nap. Then I bribed Monkey with ice cream to let me make a phone call in peace outside on the deck. After three calls, all of Mabel's nap, and no luck speaking to the principal, I was told to write her a letter. Well, I thought: probably not going to change things before Monday; on the other hand, I'm good at writing things.

So I wrote a letter with still-shaking fingers, used spellcheck to discover I've been spelling kindergarten wrong all this time, and delivered it in person to the school office. I don't know what will happen now, but apparently school isn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. Just in case, we'll be talking a lot this weekend about appearances being deceptive and giving things a second chance.