Sometimes it feels like the only time I really relax is late on a Friday night like this one, when the teens are home safely with me, and the four of us are under one roof. Rarely is that the case. One or two of them might be here with me but usually not all three.
Tonight they all were out until late, my daughter at a dance and my sons with friends.
Last night my daughter and I went to a "root beer social" at a charter school, which is one of her options as she enters high school next fall. It is located in the Western Addition, not far from Fillmore Street, which was the area I first got to know when I migrated to San Francisco late in 1971.
The neighborhood, though always somewhat sketchy, still resonates with me as one of my "homes" these many years later.
It's west of the civic center and east of the Haight, where I lived with my older three children when they were young.
The school was impressive, especially because it features small classes (low student to teacher ratios), attentive counseling and tutoring, and an academic curriculum above that required to get into the U-C land grant universities that are the pride of this state.
It says that 95% of its students go to college, twice the state average, although I suspect that is actually 95% of all seniors, since most schools do not count anyone who drops out somewhere along the way to their senior year. (A math trick schools have perfected around here.)
But it also features a staff skilled in recognizing the different learning styles of kids. As the parent of a son diagnosed way too late to be helpful with a severe form of ADHD, I've become sensitive to how poorly our schools handle those with learning styles outside the norm.
Although in this era we call these as "disorders" or "deficits," and treat them with drugs, I suspect a generation from now our educators will simply be better at employing multiple teaching methods to accommodate the radically different way our kids learn.
My son, for example, is brilliant -- he has always managed to do well in school by developing alternative methods of learning than by reading, which tires him enormously and actually forces him in extreme cases to fall asleep.
This is just one example of how primitive our understanding remains of human brain development. Neuroscientists! That's what we need.
P.S. I've got one of those among my kids as well.
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