It’s my insomnia witching hour and rather than lay in bed and watch my brain race around madly, I thought I might get up instead and blog about my latest school tour.
This time I toured Fancy Language School and wow, I was impressed.
If you don’t recall (and don’t feel inspired to click the link), this is a traditional K-5 elementary school with one exception, the fact that it’s also an bilingual immersion school that requires students to spend half the day studying in either Japanese or Spanish. It’s a relatively new program (six years old I believe) in a gorgeous new building. They’ve won tons of awards for their program and it’s currently one of the most sought after elementary schools in our school district.
From the moment I stepped in the door I could tell this was a different kind of school than the others I’ve visited. Before I stepped in the door really, because of all the schools I’ve visited, theirs is the only school with a really nice, really informative website. Most schools’ websites are honestly just about one step above embarrassing and look like they were designed by some parent who was working through a Geocities tutorial and was excited to include some gaudy background and maybe even a song that plays loudly during your entire visit to the site.
The presentation and tour at the school was incredible organized, their materials were very professional. It’s clear that they are drawing on much vaster resources than other schools and indeed, the principal talked about the enormous support they enjoy from the business community (and further indeed, the school was created after polling 150 leaders from international businesses sited in our city about what an international education should look like).
The school prides themselves on providing an “international” education and there was no question that they, at the very least, strove to provide exposure to a wide range of cultures. They focus on one continent a year and shape learning around the cultures on that continent, so that by the end of elementary school, the student has been exposed to the whole world, and they incorporate information from those cultures into every area of study.
But of course, the huge draw to the school is the fact that kids graduate fifth grade bilingual, and let me tell you, it was pretty fucking amazing to walk into a kindergarten classroom where no English was spoken and watch kids, who, until a few months prior, had never been exposed to the language, responding to the teacher’s questions and getting the answers right.
In the early grades they teach math and science in the second language and literacy and social studies in English because they found that math and science were so hands on that it led to a quicker grasp of the language for the students. The principal talked at length about how this program has challenged the teachers to thoroughly examine and entirely reframe the way they teach and he felt that, without a doubt, the teachers at the school were the hardest working in the district.
The school was so impressive. Everything about it was so polished and so thought out. This is definitely a school that enjoys enormous support and has made the best of that support.
If there was even the remotest chance that we’d get in, I would be struggling about whether to put this school as my first choice on our enrollment application. However, there is no chance of that happening because this school allows students in based on distance from the school. They have 50 spots and usually about 150 applicants (who’ve chosen this as their top school). One parent on the tour with me commented that she was afraid they lived too far away. The parent-leader who was taking us to classrooms reassured her by saying, “Well last year we did have one little boy who lived as far away as 52nd Street get in!” The school is on 42nd. And we live on 113th.
It’s a relief that I don’t have to count this school in the running because it would be an immensely hard decision. This school would provide my son with amazing opportunities and connections that would probably benefit him his whole life. But at the same time, it’s a traditional elementary school. As a rule, they give kids ten minutes of homework per grade level, even if it’s just a busywork math worksheet. They take four to five field trips per year. They teach “empathy” and “tolerance” instead of any kind of real understanding of social justice issues and feel content that their international education provides enough exposure to other cultures that their kids will somehow escape the racism, intolerance to difference and xenophobia that’s built into our culture.
If I had to make this choice, I’d be choosing between the school that is set up to help kids “succeed” by traditional definitions of success (regardless of whether they actually enjoy the experience or get to pursue their own interests or develop a love of learning in an environment where their natural curiosity is allowed to thrive), as opposed to a school where curiosity is valued and learning is incorporated into every aspect of life though non-traditional means, but one that, while being theoretically sound, might not lead to “success” in real life. I’d like to think that the latter school would provide greater overall happiness, but some people might feel that happiness is more closely tied to traditional definitions of success than I do. And I don’t know, they might be right. The path I want to take is the one less chosen, the one that’s more experimental, and as a result, certainly the one with more potential risk.
If nothing else, I now have a lot of questions to which I want answers with regards to my top choice school, the alternative hippy school about which I last posted. I need some concrete answers about classroom pedagogy, about how kids are challenged, about how communications lines are maintained with parents who work and are likely to be unable to either drop off or pick up their kids from school, about how learning opportunities are made available to students, especially younger ones. And I want to talk to some parents. I want my sons to have the opportunity to direct their own learning and I want them to never question that learning does not belong in little boxes, that learning is a natural part of living, but I also want them to be challenged to excel and to have their educational needs attended to in a proactive manner.