Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

School yays

My little girl is going to school for the first time next week, but don't expect me to cry about it.
opinion_piquen1

My little girl is going to school for the first time next week, but don't expect me to cry about it. I'll be the parent doing doughnuts in the parking lot on my bike, pumping my fist like the Leafs won the Stanley Cup, while other parents dab their eyes and reflect on how big their kids have gotten, how time has flown, and yadda yadda.

That's kind of the whole point of it: kids are supposed to get bigger. This day was always going to come, and it's too awesome not to celebrate.

If it feels like time has flown by, then you must have been having fun. I envy you. Kids are awesome and really can be incredibly fun at times, but in my experience a lot of this parenting gig feels like work — cleaning work, laundry work, short order chef work, crisis management and conflict resolution work, with some part-time clowning thrown in. I've helped keep a kid happy, entertained, fed and active for over five years while my house fell apart around me, my hobbies languished, my friendships ebbed, my skills on a bike and snowboard dissolved, my muscles atrophied, my belly grew and my wallet shrank.

Not that any of that really changes now my daughter is in school: a kindergartner is no more able to cook up a meal of bland, sauce-less food with cheese on top than a preschooler. But it is the beginning of something amazing, something I've been looking forward to since day one.

Before my daughter, I'd never been around kids. I have no younger brothers, no younger cousins, and all of the kids in my neighbourhood seemed to be about the same age growing up. I'd never done any babysitting or worked as a camp councillor, and had no idea how to relate. All I knew was that kids occasionally throw tantrums in malls and supermarkets.

Like a lot of Whistler dads the obvious solution to the whole toddler issue was to do whatever I could to help my daughter grow up quickly. Two? Sure, you're ready for How to Train Your Dragon! And lots of two-year-olds ski! If you can reach the pedals then you can ride it! I don't care what the box says, you're old enough for little Lego — just don't stick the pieces in your ear! Hey, let's read this Dr. Seuss book for the 150th time because it will teach you to read faster!

That approach has only sort of worked and she doesn't hate me too much for trying. But at last she's in school, and based on her years of gymnastics, swimming, Kishindo, preschool, art class, etc., I know she'll be a lot more likely to listen to her teachers than to me.

I have to say I'm really looking forward to being part of this next stage because it's one the first major events in my daughter's life that I can truly relate to. We can talk about school at the end of the day and all of the things she learned. I can help make her awesome lunches and if she gets any projects to take home then I'll be there with glue and glitter. I'll do science experiments and math problems on the side, teach her how to use a computer as she grows, help her learn to read and comprehend, and do whatever I can to make dry subjects like history exciting. Compared to trying to figure out how to play with Barbies (somehow Zombie Ken always made an appearance) this will be easy.

However, what I'm not looking forward to are the expectations of other parents. I've already overheard numerous discussions over teaching methods, perks/drawbacks of split classes, critiques of how much play time kids get, how much homework kids get (or don't get), the way kids are disciplined, and so on. It turns out that people have a lot of diverse ideas about what school is supposed to be and what and how kids are supposed to learn, and it's just not possible for one teacher to meet those varying expectations. In my case I almost always defer to the experts, which in this case are the highly educated individuals with teaching degrees.

That may sound dismissive of parents, but trust me when I say that I really do get it. I understand why parents are more involved than they were in the past and how important school can be. The world is a hard place already, and thanks to the reverse miracle of globalization it's only getting harder. It's bad enough that our kids will one day have to compete with thousands of other applicants to get into a university program, one day they'll also be competing against millions of other applicants from around the world for jobs.

The people who will thrive in that environment need to be strong-willed, hard-working, brilliant in a focused field of study, plus both independent and entrepreneurial enough to carve out a piece of the world for themselves.

All that is important but does it really have to start in Kindergarten? Truthfully, I'll just be happy if my daughter learns one new thing a day and doesn't interrupt the teacher every five minutes to tell a story about the dog. If she makes it through a week without getting her feelings hurt or her hair caught in a zipper I'll be ecstatic. And if she gets to the end of the year and loves school and the process of learning, then my expectations will have been exceeded. In fact she'd be way ahead of me when I finished Kindergarten.