Loving the Here and Now

Like many people, I suppose, I strive to “live in the moment” more. It seems I’ve spent my entire adult life looking ahead to the next step of my journey and not savouring where I am at the time.

The most recent shift in my life came 1.5 years ago when we moved from our urban 2-bedroom apartment to a suburban house with a yard. I was so excited about the move; while I loved our old neighbourhood, the apartment faced North and got little daylight. Now light streams in from all sides, all day. We also have a huge wrap-around deck. In the summer months it extends our living area to the outside. There is a huge yard with a play structure and plenty of room for me to grow vegetables.

But it’s not “ours”. We are renters. For many years now I have desperately wanted to own a home. It wasn’t long after moving to this house that I began to sour on it, seeing how much I wanted to change and couldn’t. For the past year or two I have been focussed on The Next Step in our lives, purchasing a home. We’ve saved up, the market is dropping, all was going according to plan, and I could think of almost nothing else.

Then Husband got laid off. He couldn’t find work, so he started his own business working from home. He’s not making the money he used to (not yet, anyways) but wow, is it ever wonderful having both of us at home (now that we’ve got a schedule for ourselves, that is!). I realized a little while ago that I didn’t want to him to work out of the home anymore, that I was willing to forgo a higher income to maintain our wonderful lifestyle.

And with that acceptance, an amazing transformation happened that really surprised me. I began to fall in love with the Now.

Between training for a 10km race and geocaching with Daughter I’ve been discovering many new trails and green spaces in our area lately. We essentially live on the side of a heavily forested mountain. Neighbourhoods are connected by paved walking trails that wind through small sections of forest and cross ravines where fish still spawn.  There are dozens of hiking trails. Nearby is a massive Conservation Reserve where a wide, paved service road runs 11 km through a spectacular alpine valley to a region of Old Growth forest. Here are just a few photos, all taken nearby:

So while I dislike the manicured lawn aesthetic of our suburban residential street, in minutes I can immerse myself in the kind of soul-lifting natural beauty that brings me closest to a spiritual experience. I have heard the great horned owl calling, mornings are filled with birdsong from chickadees and warblers and sparrows. The staccato sound of Pileated Woodpeckers and Northern Flickers is like a musical drumbeat. And the other day while running through a wooded area I passed underneath a Black-Eyed Junco, sitting on a low-hanging branch singing his heart out. How lucky am I?

As for the house, my perspective on being a renter has mysteriously “righted” itself again. Instead of seeing the things I want to change, lately I see a whole lot of money I don’t need to spend, and headaches I don’t need to take on. Life feels simple, and free. And I’m grateful for the Now.

Observing them in their natural state

One of the many wonderful things about unschooling is that it presents one with a unique opportunity to observe how children learn naturally. Since most children are put into school at around age 5 or 6 (at the latest), most people do not have the opportunity to watch what happens when you let kids take charge of their learning and lead the way. It’s a fascinating study because what one observes often flies in the face of conventional wisdom regarding children and learning.

First, there is the firmly entrenched cultural belief that children will not learn unless they are made to (thus, school). When you step outside this assumption and take a good look it, it seems absurd. Raise a child in a family that speaks three languages and that child will have mastered all three of them in about four years without having attended any classes nor having any formal instruction. All parents recall the point at which every valuable, breakable, or potentially dangerous item in the home had to be locked away due to the insatiable curiosity and drive of the newly mobile toddler. Almost as soon as they are able to ask questions, kids drive their parents nuts with them. Nobody seems to doubt the abilities of babies and toddlers to learn.

And yet, somewhere between preschool and school-age our attitude changes. Not coincidentally this is when children are routinely first brought into the school system. By the time kids are around 8 years old, we as a culture are quite certain that they hate learning and would, if left to their own devices, do just about anything to avoid it. We’re certain that a life without school would lead to endless hours of video games, delinquency, and disinterest in anything “useful”. We equate learning with school, and that’s where I think we make our mistake in assessing the motivation of children to learn.

In fact, learning is a biological imperative for young humans. Every unschooling parent has seen with their own eyes that the desire to learn, the insatiable curiosity of the toddler, is maintained even after a child reaches school age and well beyond. As a society, we seem to have forgotten that human culture has existed for millenia without schooling and somehow the kids learned all they needed to know without schedules, curricula, or being removed from daily life in their society.

Another thing unschooling parents observe is that the way children learn naturally doesn’t seem to fit very well with the school model of learning. In school the day is broken down into different subjects. An hour here, an hour there. When the bell rings the child must put down what they are doing, regardless of how interested they are in the subject, regardless of how close they are to grasping a fundamental concept and move on to the next, often completely unrelated, subject. Unschooled kids, on the other hand, seem to get obsessed with a certain subject, run it into the ground in a several-weeks-long foray that involves exploration with a variety of media (eg. drawing dinosaurs, watching dinosaur movies, reading dinosaur books, playing dinosaur role-playing games during imaginative play, listening to songs about dinosaurs, etc) only to suddenly drop it and move onto something else. Then later they pick up where they left off, often having mysteriously grasped concepts during the interval.

There is also a cultural belief that kids have to be taught what they need to know. Reading is a perfect example: witness the massive growth in reading-associated learning materials over the last decade or so (Hooked on Phonics, LeapPad, etc). But I’m going to present a crazy, radical idea: kids don’t need to be taught how to read any more than they need to be taught how to speak. Put them in an environment with people who read, materials for them to read, and they will read because they are genetically driven to obtain the skills necessary to function in their society.

In school it is unacceptable to be a 7 year old who is not able to read. Never mind that this child, if left to his own devices, will almost certainly become a competent reader who, at the age of 12, will be indistinguishable in his reading skills from children who learned to read at an earlier age. In addition, I posit that the late-reading child will go from “not reading at an acceptable level” to “reading at peer level or beyond” in less than half the time it took the other kids to make that shift. Because I suspect that the 7 year old probably has nearly all the neurological pieces of the puzzle required to read already gathered in his mind, and merely needs a final burst of motivation to put them all together – motivation that works best when it is intrinsic (driven by the child’s own desire) and not extrinsic (driven by grades and report cards).

What I’m finding is that observing children learn in their natural state reveals several reasons why schools are a sub-optimal environment for learning for most children. We will likely always need schools, since not all parents are able to unschool their children. It would be great if one day the lessons learned from unschooling could be applied to schools so that we as a society could harness the power of natural learning, instead of working against it.

Unschooling’s Secrets

The other evening one of my LLL coleaders came over with some materials for a video project we are working on. She used to be an elementary school teacher and I’ve gotten the feeling over the years that she thinks pretty highly of schooling (there are lots of homelearners in the LLL community here).

As we were sitting together, Daughter wandered in and asked if I would play “division cards” with her. She had bought a few sets of flash cards several months ago, totally of her own accord, and she has made up various games with them. I told her I was busy with my friend and that we’d play later, so she wandered off.

My coleader said “She actually wants to play with math? Wow, that’s wonderful!”. Her attitude seemed to be one of pleasant surprise mingled with disbelief. I had to laugh to myself. I guess she is so used to school culture that it hadn’t occurred to her how things might be different for unschooled kids.

This experience prompted me to make a short list of “secrets” about children and learning that one discovers with unschooling:

1) kids who have never been to school don’t distinguish between “learning” and just living their daily lives; reading a book about history is no different than playing a video game or colouring a picture – all are done because that’s what the child felt like doing at that moment in time

2) kids who have never been to school don’t get exposed to a culture where kids are rated according to scholastic acheivement; thus it never occurs to them to use labels such as “brain” or “jock”, etc. There is no sense of self-consciousness about being “smart” (thus my Daughter’s confusion at the slogan on her Brain Quest cards: “It’s OK to be Smart!”)

3) kids who have never been to school aren’t exposed to the idea that Math is “hard” or only for smart kids; they don’t distinguish between “fun stuff” (e.g. karate class) and “stuff you have to learn” (e.g. social studies or history)

4) kids can find any subject interesting and enjoyable when it is done on their own time, at their own pace, and at their own initiation

5) when you are exposed to unschooled children your whole attitude towards kids changes; our society views children as naturally lazy and unwilling to learn – most don’t believe that kids in a completely self-designed educational program would ever learn all they need to know; once you’ve witnessed unschooling you see children as endlessly curious, willing to work hard to reach self-established goals, and driven to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to participate wholly in society

It’s truly an amazing experience to see what children are capable of when they are allowed to learn naturally, the way they are designed to learn. This is one of the most wonderful aspects to unschooling, the feeling that you are witnessing processes that few people ever get to see.

Fun with Fractions

I haven’t been writing much about unschooling lately. Mostly it’s because I write a report each week for Daughter’s homelearner program. Also because this blog is partly for me; writing out thoughts and experiences helps me to process them. But  I really would like this blog to be a place someone can come to if they are interested in, or curious about, unschooling to see what it looks like In Real Life.

Here’s a recent experience: The other night Daughter asked if I would look at a library book with her. It was Fraction Action. She had already read it, and had this idea that we could draw out the examples of fractions given in the book.

I’m sorry this isn’t rotated correctly; I’m having import issues. We started with a circle I drew that Daughter then divided into halves. I wrote “1/2″ on one side and she wrote it on the other. She then drew examples of halves from the story: a sandwich cut in half (middle row, left) and (continuing from left to right) a glass half full of juice, a dish with half vanilla and half chocolate ice cream, then (going down to the third row) a garden plot with half vegetables and half flowers, a muffin cut in half, a piggy bank half full, and a framed image of a cow jumping over half a moon.

We then moved onto thirds, repeating the sequence. You can see a flower with three petals, a chocolate-chip cookie divided into three peices, a court jester’s hat with three “tassles”, a wallet with three folds (and a dollar bill edge along the top), and a beach towel with three stripes.

Finally, we did quarters. She again divided the circle I drew, and wrote the fractions. She drew (from the book) a hot dog cut into four peices, a dollar bill folded into fourths (here she drew 4 lines, an easy mistake; she laughed when I asked her to count the number of sections she made and she found she had five), a cracker broken into four pieces, a four-leafed clover, and a pie cut into four peices.

With each pictured I’d asked her “what is this section called” and she’d answer “a half; a third, a quarter”.

We then reviewed how to write fractions, as she didn’t remember from the last time we’d worked on this stuff and asked me to show her again. I drew a circle with six sections and made one of them shaded. I showed her that the top number of a fraction was the number of shaded bits, and the bottom number was the total number of bits. We then practiced with me drawing sectioned shapes, then moving on to flower petals, and dinosaurs. Of course she enjoyed the dinosaurs. An example question I gave her was “What is the fraction describing the plates on this Stegosaurus’ back?” (which I’d drawn with one dark and three light coloured plates) and she’d say “a fourth” and I’d write 1/4. Then she asked if  SHE could draw some puzzles for me:

First she asked me to write the fraction that represents the number of dinosaurs with babies and eggs. Next she asked me to do the number of fish with stripes or spots. Finally, the number of jellyfish that are alive (we both had a good laugh at that one; note the dead jellyfish on the bottom right!). When I was done she said she hadn’t realized that she’d done all the same fraction!

I’d like to point out that this was ALL HER IDEA. She guided the whole activity. To be honest, it was evening and I was tired and I really didn’t feel like it at first. But I’m glad I did, because it ended up being fun.

The No-Debt Mindset

About 18 months ago Husband and I decided to get rid of our debts once and for all. It took us about a year of serious tight budgeting, and right when we paid off the last one he unexpectedly got laid off. Good timing or what?

We were not only debt-free but had a small cash savings put aside as well. We’ve been wanting to buy a home for a while but we also wanted a trailer. We’re avid campers but, being in our early 40’s, sleeping on the ground was fast losing its appeal. We figured that once we purchased a home we’d have lots of expenses, so we decided to get the trailer first.

Last fall we bought our baby. She’s 30 years old, but the last owner restored her to mint condition.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to use her before camping season ended because we lacked a tow vehicle. We did a ton of research and thinking about it over the winter, and this past week we finally bought one. It’s a 2003 Ford Expedition and let’s just say with the economy and gas price concerns these days it was a good bargain.

I can’t tell you how good it felt to pay cash for these purchases and to own these things without looking at years of monthly payments ahead of us. But now, of course, our cash savings account is looking a little bare. With Husband having just launched a new business our income is still “approaching equilibrium” and our savings rate over the next little while is unknown.

We have sworn not to access the now-insane amount of credit we have at our disposal (why is it when you don’t want/need it suddenly everybody wants to extend it to you?). The only debt we wish to incur is a mortgage. So now I find myself in an interesting mindset, looking at daily life from a different perspective.

Recently I went to the dentist after too long a hiatus and discovered I’m going to need about $2000 worth of dental work. Sure, I could put it all on Visa or the LOC but I refuse to do that. Instead I will save up and have it done a bit at a time. The dentist’s office offered me a payment plan when I said I wanted to spread the treatments out a month at a time, as if I had no other way to pay for it. No, I could pay for it just fine thank you but I refuse to go into debt over this. They probably think I’m some kind of nutcase.

I’m also feeling like we should put our house-buying plans on hold for a little while longer. We’ve got the downpayment set aside already. But even if our mortgage payment is similar to the rent we’re paying right now, there are a lot of expenses involved in owning a place. My friend, for example, is looking at replacing her roof within the next five years. Estimated cost around $30,000. Now most people might take out a home-equity loan but my friends are already in debt, struggling to pay it off quickly, and have no desire to ever be back in that situation. So within their debt-payment and savings plans they have to account for the new roof. If we bought a place I know there would be a long list of things we’d like to do, and I’d want to have the cash ready for that.

Walking around in this buy-now-pay-later world, seeing it through new eyes, is a rather strange experience. The notion of saving up to buy something is so foreign in our society. And yet my feeling is you either wait for what you want, or pay for it afterwards: either way you are looking at long-term. But the latter way also comes with financing costs (and a noose around your neck). Renting may not have the status of being a homeowner (and believe me, I have struggled with that), but we can move any time if we have to (regardless of what our house may be worth) and when something breaks or needs repairs it doesn’t come out of our hard-earned savings.

Meanwhile, we’ll give our businesses a chance to grow and we’ll enjoy a fabulous season of camping this year. Hopefully we’ll even rebuild our cash savings. But I have come to find a deep sense of patience in this regard, which has been sorely lacking in me over the years. And I’m quite sure that the experience of paying cash and refusing to use credit has brought me to this place. Things are good for us right now, even though we don’t really know what our income is going to be this year. And for once in my life I’m feeling happy with what I have right now, rather than spending all my mental energy focussing on what I Want.

She’s growing up

This past week my daughter spent 8 hours with her maternal grandmother on one of their weekly “dates”. Mum picks her up around the time Son goes to preschool, and they spend the afternoon together. Often, like last time, Daughter wants to stay for dinner. They go for walks, stroll through the seaside market, and generally hang out and have fun together.

Yesterday she opted to spend 4 hours with her paternal grandmother. They went to the playground, twice, and out for a hot chocolate and donut. When I picked her up she was playing happily. My mother-in-law commented, almost in surprise, “she was no trouble at all”.

I love that she gets this special time with her Grandmothers. I also love to think about how far she has come. I remember when my Mother would wonder if she would ever get time alone with her granddaughter. She worried that attachment parenting would create dependence, instead of fostering independence. I remember my mother-in-law sighing that, if Daughter was not ready to spend the night with her at age 4, “she never will”.

Thankfully, I had already come to understand early on that Independence cannot be taught or forced. It is innate to all children, and must be allowed to grow and blossom on its own time. Watching the process unfolding in my daughter is a wonderful experience.

This time we have with our young children is so brief, so fleeting. I wish more mothers could just Trust in their innate ability to Mother, and in children’s innate ability to mature and grow on their own inner schedule. I wonder how many parents worry their way through the years, only to wake up one day and realize their kids have grown up. Thanks to my daughter I am learning to slow down and enjoy the journey, to let go of worries and doubts, and to just enjoy my children for who they are.

A personal challenge

Today I did it: I registered for a big 10K run held in our city each year.

I started running last July and have managed to keep it up, although over the worst parts of winter I slid a bit in my endurance due to too many missed runs. I have started up again in earnest in preparation for this 10K run, which is to take place on April 19.

It’s perhaps an interesting observation that I am less concerned about doing the run than I am about getting my sorry butt out of bed early enough to make it downtown by 9 am on a Sunday!

Diagnosis: within the normal range!

I mentioned before that the school brought in a “classroom consultant” to help the teacher figure out how to deal with Son’s hitting issues, not to mention a couple of other children who were also bringing “challenges” to the class. The consultant came on two separate days to observe the class, with an eye in particular on my son’s behaviours. After her observations and further discussion with the teacher, funding for an extra teacher was approved.

This past week the consultant met with Husband and I to discuss her findings and to interview us. We didn’t know what to expect, but my fear was that she was going to suggest that Son had some kind of “diagnosable condition” like ADD or whatever. She spent most of the time asking us questions about Son – his likes and dislikes, which situations work well for him and which don’t, questions about his abilities to perform tasks, play with stuff, etc. She then talked about what recommendations she was going to make in her report to the teacher. The purpose of this report is to make suggestions for activities and/or changes in the environment that will help both Son and other children in the class.

For example, there is a “rocket ship” structure in the classroom. It’s basically a large wooden box, about 2′ x 3′ and 4′ tall attached to a corner of the room with a single large circular opening as the “entrance”. While some children love to play in there, and can do so quite successfully, for my Son such an environment is courting disaster. The consultant told us that this sort of structure is actually challenging for many children and is not the sort of thing she would recommend having in a preschool class. At the very least, it should have two entrances so children don’t feel “trapped” or a “peephole” through which kids can communicate with those who don’t wish to go inside. These are the types of things that will go into her report.

By the way, a very interesting outcome of our discussion of Son’s behaviour in tight quarters led to the eye-opening suggestion by her that our boy might be claustrophobic. It was one of those lightbulb moments where Husband and I just went “wow….that would explain so much!”.

I also told her Son’s story: how he started out at age 2 “randomly assaulting” children without so much as a glint of expression on his face other than curiosity perhaps. His modus operandi was to grab hold of their checks and squeeze, to scratch slowly, or to pull hair: all sensory experiences. And then I described how, over the course of his fourth year (age 3 to 4)  he began to show clear signs of empathy, recognizing that he was hurting kids and feeling bad about it. The aggression then changed into a response to clear frustration or anger (which was sort of a relief for me; I’d worried that Son was a sociopath!) with hitting now being the most common occurrence. But the key piece of my worrying was my suspicion that he still, every now and then, appeared to lash out at a child for “no apparent reason”.

Well, the consultant explained to me that there was “always a reason” (I’m sure she meant in the absence of any pathology). It may be that the “victim” had done something earlier that wasn’t noticed by anyone (like a verbal exchange). Or it may be that the “victim” was in the wrong place at the wrong time as the child finally let loose in response to something that may have happened earlier with a different child or group of children. She explained how kids process emotions and how it is not at all unusual for their frustration to come out at times that appear disconnected (to us) from the event.

She also pointed out that keeping that anger/frustration under control takes a whole lot of energy (ask any parent, ha ha) and kids are already expending huge amounts of mental energy as they engage in various play activities around the classroom. Taking turns, sharing, working together, figuring out puzzles, exploring building toys, creating art…all these activities take mental energy and some kids can be particularly challenged by them. For example, one day my Son apparently engaged in a friendly 20 minute game of “Bingo” with 3 other children at a table without any incident: that alone required turn-taking, patience, dealing with the frustration of not marking their card, not winning, etc). The consultant said that some kind of physical outlet after such an activity would be good for our son and kids like him, as this had obviously taken a good deal of focus on his part.

At the end of our talk I was so relieved. She saw nothing abnormal about his language, motor skills, play, etc…his “personal challenges” are limited to the social/behavioural aspect of dealing with anger and frustration in socially appropriate ways. I told her that I had been worried she would tell us he has some sort of “disorder” and she said that if she had noticed signs that were consistent with a known condition (autism, etc) she would be ethically bound to share that with us: she saw no such signs. What a relief!

So here’s the bottom line: she agreed that our boy has many behaviours that are what would be called “sensory seeking” and “sensory avoidance” but not to the point of having SID or something similar. She agreed that his “aggression” at age 2 was probably just sensory-seeking. She suggested that he no longer engages in “unprovoked” attacks, but rather has difficulty regulating himself when angry or frustrated. She pointed out the many ways in which he successfully navigated challenging situations during her observation, and I myself have noticed these more regularly now. It’s to be expected that when he has reached his limit he will “fail” and we shouldn’t let those obscure all the successes that came before that final incident.

The extra teacher will continue to work with him as I have done since the very beginning: giving him the tools he needs to replace the hitting with more socially appropriate expressions of emotion. He is doing SO WELL with this and now that he has someone to stand by him through the whole preschool day, I am feeling really confident that he will make huge progress.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have my gut feeling about him validated. It has also helped me to get a clear mental picture of where he was and where we are going. The worst part of all this journey was not understanding why he was doing the things he was doing! Now I feel I understand and it gives me a much clearer picture of where to go from here. I also see that light at the end of the tunnel and am so grateful!

A Happy Ending

Note: if you are new to this blog, or reading after an absence, you might want to check out the two previous posts to get the background of this story…

We recently had our monthly parents meeting at Son’s preschool. The issue of “inappropriate communications” was raised briefly, and the rules for addressing issues and concerns was restated for all. Then the teacher spoke about inclusion and what that meant to her (that all children have a right to be there). She also introduced the new teacher and reminded people that this person’s job was to assist “one of the children” so that hopefully things would be running more smoothly. By the end of this it wouldn’t have been hard for someone to connect the dots and come to the fairly obvious conclusion that an anonymous (and unpleasant) communication had been received that was directed toward our family and probably questioned his right to be there.

We then broke off into groups to discuss various scenarios that occur in the classroom and how duty parents can respond to them (last month some parents had asked for this opportunity). However, given what had just preceded this exercise it was no surprise that many people were focussing on the issue of kids hitting each other and kids getting hurt, etc.

I should tell you that I ended up figuring out the most likely candidate for our mystery letter even before we went to the meeting. At the meeting she stared at her shoes most of the time and didn’t look very happy, while you could see everybody else thinking “wow, what sort of intrigue has gone on that I haven’t heard about?”. I deliberately did not sit in her group when we broke up for discussions. Within just a few minutes of starting I became aware that someone behind me was crying: a discreet glance over my shoulder confirmed that it was my Suspect, sharing something with her group. She was pretty much in tears for the rest of the evening, and before we left I saw her sitting next to the teacher in a “confessional” position, crying. I don’t know if she confessed or if she just finally broke down and expressed all the pent-up feelings that led to her doing that, but I was glad to see it. Not out of any malice, but because I could see quite clearly that she was someone to feel sorry for: confused, upset, and only able to express those feelings in a dysfunctional and destructive way.

When we left, she and her partner were staying behind to speak with the teacher. I don’t think it escaped many other people that she just might be the person who had done this. I felt really good knowing that her identity may in the end be guessed at by the rest of the class through no action on my part. I am proud that we did the Big Thing.

And I’ll share a secret with you…doing the Big Thing had lots of unforeseen benefits. First, I am amazed at how easily I recovered from this incident once I let go of any feelings of anger. I was wondering if it would be very hard for me to be at that meeting (I would normally be filled with anxiety in such a situation), but I felt quite calm and in control of my emotions that night. I am sure that had I not let go of the negative feelings, the evening would have practically given me an ulcer. I am also pleased at how it changed my perspective of the person who did this. When I saw her at the meeting I didn’t feel any animosity or anger, I just felt sorry for her. By the end of the meeting, I was hoping she would get the support she needed.

This whole experience has ended up being a very “Zen” one for me, and I am actually grateful to have had the experience.

Being Big

My first reaction when I received the nasty letter was to send out a mass email to all parents saying “which one of you cowards left this for us?”. I quickly quelled that instinct in favour of calling the teacher and reporting it.

When I later received a suspicious email that could be regarded as harmless were it not for the letter, my first reaction was to reply to this anonymous person with “Who are you and how did you gain access to this confidential email group?”. But I resisted. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew that the best reaction was no reaction.

And when the president of the preschool called me yesterday morning to see how I was doing, I expressed a bit of frustration that the matter was not going to be presented in full detail to the other parents. But I recognized that revealing the full content of the letter might only serve to establish more completely any division among groups that were “for” and “against” the sentiments expressed in the letter. It just may cause more division within the ranks, rather than moving toward healing.

The president said that they felt the best thing to do, the “big” thing to do, would be not to dwell on the letter itself, but to address the underlying issues and move forward. Later that day, enveloped in the warm embrace of an afternoon with our homeschooling group, I felt a peace settle upon me and I immediately sensed that what I wanted to do was the “big” thing.

Whoever sent that letter does not deserve the decency of a reply. Instead, I wish to focus on the issues raised; that of my son’s presence in the school being detrimental to the place. It has been made abundantly clear to me through this process that we are welcome and wanted at the school, so really that issue has been addressed and dealt with. How ironic for the sender of that letter that his/her actions resulted in the exact opposite reaction than what they wanted. Instead of feeling like we should leave, I have felt even more strongly that we are welcome.

The other issue that needs addressing is how we can accommodate my son’s needs without draining the resources of the school or the more personal resources of the teacher. Son’s assessment has resulted in approved funding for an extra teacher, so the school is not having to pay for that. This teacher, who is presumably assigned more or less to my son, should alleviate a great deal of the stress and extra work for the principal teacher. I have decided to focus my energies on ensuring that is happening, and doing what I can to help.

Thus, I now feel a lifting of the anxiety and stress associated with The Incident, and I feel empowered to move this in a positive direction. It’s a good feeling.

It’s not always easy to do the Big thing, to walk away from provocation and rise above the pettiness of the coward and bully. But having made my decision, I am quite certain that this path will lead to far more peace and positive outcomes than any meeting of the accuser on their level could do. I consider this experience to be a good Life Lesson for me, and in that sense I am actually almost grateful it happened.