And my heart broke for little Mr. A too, particularly because the main cause of his troubles (apart from the “craziness” of his parents) is the fact that he is the child of immigrants. Just that tiny slice of his story reminded me of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior which I taught years ago.

It was great to hear chicagomama’s voice again after so many months, and her interchange with Jody. It makes me really glad that I’m not sending my son into a school where he might have to face those problems. Well, now I have to go read the most recent posts!

Since I’m one of the parents praising our “progressive” schools, I’ll step up and respond.

The diversity in our schools isn’t about conforming to a hippy-crunchy-granola “quirkiness” standard — although certainly there are plenty of crunchy-granola parents in our first elementary school. It’s about the fact that there are half a dozen different distinct “communities” that make up our school population, and none of the children from those groups has the power or the desire — in the early grades — to divide themselves by food or clothing.

As I wrote in my comment to my last post: by third grade or middle school at the latest, all bets are off. But when first starting out? None of the kids in kindergarten in our school were paying any attention to food or clothing. To call that disinterest a standard to which people must “conform” seems to strain the definition of the term.

There are TONS of children in this district whose mothers spend countless hours on their own and their children’s appearance, because those mothers are good Southern ladies and wouldn’t send their kids to school without hair ribbons and fancy clothes. There are plenty of good Republicans, too, although I’ll admit it’s maybe only 40% in our immediate vicinity. But regardless of political affiliation, Christians are in the vast majority, and Bible-belt fundamentalism is a powerful presence, and if the atheists (of whom there are also many) are pitying us Christians to their children at home, I’m not hearing about it.

At playdates, at birthday parties, on the playground, there is a level of diversity that is not about conforming to one standard of quirkiness. Not at this age. The neatly dressed brand-name-wearing children of white Evangelical Republicans play with the thrift-store generic-Tshirt dressed children of Latino immigrants and they all eat their different foods while chatting at the lunch table and those are just not the issues on which they police their group boundaries.

Few things scare me more than the possibility that I might be sending my child off to a school where she would feel lonely or incapable of understanding the social rules. I was shocked to discover two years ago, when my kids started kindergarten, that the issues that mattered most to me — mostly having to do with clothing, I was hyper-vigilant about buying the “popular” clothes and making sure they were stain-free — didn’t matter to my kids or their peers.

I think it would be great if it turns out that M attends a school like that.

Today was the first day of school. My kids are attending preschool at a low income school which isn’t in our neighborhood because my partner teaches there. We decided we’d rather have them in a place where we understood the variables.

We get high quality handmedown’s – polo, oskosh, tommy… and we could keep them dressed really well, but they would not fit in at that school.

My 4 yo daughter would not wear the cute dress we’d picked out last night, and her foster sister put her in a long sleeve pajama shirt and Ariel shorts. I kept the shorts, but put her in an oshkosh polo shirt. There are lines we won’t cross, at least in the beginning. Her twin brother was totally and completely in spiderman – from toes to lunchbox. Not what I would have chosen, but it was clean, in good shape and will dress himself in spiderman.