That was fast

Tuesday night Matthew had homework that was the same as the first three nights.  His handwriting is terrible, so I had him do that section, but I drew a line through the rest of it and left a note to the effect that I was satisfied that Matthew understood how to do those with my phone number.

The next day the headmaster of his school called.  I wasn't surprised she called, but I was surprised at how inflexible she was.  She was categorically insistent that every student must do every line of homework, "to demonstrate proficiency."  "Isn't that what testing is for?" I asked.  "Yes, but every student must do homework.  It teaches them responsibility to put it in the bin every day."  "No problem; he'll do that, he just doesn't need to do the parts where he's already demonstrated proficiency repeatedly."  "It will get more challenging quickly."  "Okay; when it is, I won't have to draw lines through it."  

Looking back on the conversation, I think there were two things that freaked her out.  One was my laughter when she threatened me with lowering his grades on homework assignments.  "Sure, no problem.  Low kindergarten grades are like water off a duck's back."  Not caring about grades?  What kind of psycho is this that I'm dealing with?  

(And you know, it's not just kindergarten that I don't care about grades in, although I didn't go into that with her.  Why does society care about grades?  In high school, it's so you can get into a good college; in college, it's so you can get a good job.  There's some truth to the first assertion, but unless you go to an Ivy League school nobody cares where you went to college a year later.  Similarly, once you're in the workforce nobody cares about your college GPA.  Unless it's a 4.0, in which case, it can be a line on your resume, but even then it's not a big deal and after your first job your experience will matter much, much more.  I've seen this from both sides of the hiring process.)

The other factor, I think, was one of the times that she insisted that homework prepared students to be productive in society.  I pointed out that in Real Life, productivity doesn't consist of filling out the same arbitrary predigested problems divorced from all normal incentives that 30 other people are filling out, and there was a pause.  I think that was the point she realized that I was an Apostate and there was no hope for my soul.  The only thing to do with apostates, of course, is to burn them -- Sharia seems to be more flexible; as long as they kill you, Allah is happy -- or at least, expell their kids.  So she decided to expell Matthew entirely rather than just dock his grades.  "I just don't think this is a good fit."  She's right about that, but I would have been happy to continue just drawing lines through the busywork, so it galls me to have him expelled because of some bureaucrat's petty power-tripping.  And, of course, the timing is inconvenient.

Rachel doesn't say so explicitly, but she wishes I would just not make waves and make Matthew do the busywork for a couple months.  I almost wish I could, but this is important to me -- I've read the research, and the evidence is clearly in favor of no homework in elementary school; having him do each type of problem at least once and only striking them out when they were clearly busywork was as much of a compromise as I could make.  Rachel has a visceral reaction of I DON'T HAVE TIME TO HOME SCHOOL RIGHT NOW, I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT, which is understandable, but we are far from out of other options.  And my Ellis stubborness has the bit in its mouth; as I pointed out to Rachel, she knew I was stubborn when she married me.

So, Matthew will get to try public school soon, probably next week.  I want to talk to the public kindergarten teachers, on the theory that (a) with six (?) classes, the odds are good that at least one of them will be sympathetic, and (b) I tried the "don't talk to the teacher ahead of time" policy already, and that didn't turn out very well.  But Rachel is afraid I will just do more damage.  We will see.  Maybe if I call the Montessori school in Riverton and make sure they have an opening as a fallback she will worry less.  They are a lot closer to my views on this; the drawback is that they only offer a full-day schedule for Matthew's age.