"If you send your kid to private school, you are a bad person"

[hunter]

30. My middle and high school experience was "Lord of the Flies."

My head would have been on a post.

I quit high school. Quitting high school was one of the best decisions I've ever made. One of my few friends didn't make it. He killed himself. I was called "queerbait" since middle school and I was constantly harassed by bullies. One of my siblings also quit high school. Oddly it's the two of us who quit high school who graduated from world-class universities. Our high school graduate siblings have two year associate or technical school degrees and ordinary middle class lives. On paper, anyways..

I graduated from university and thought I could change the world by going back to teach Welcome Back Kotter style in an urban public school.

I put my science degree to work as a science teacher. Television is a fantasy. That was the most hellish job I've ever had. I still don't know how people do it. I had after-school conferences with parents, foster parents, and juvenile probation officers that would make any feeling person weep. I had kids who were sexually abused. I had kids who were hungry. I had kids who were in gangs. I had kids who couldn't read or write. I had kids who never did any work, nothing at all, lights on but nobody home, they wouldn't even bother to fill in random bubbles on a scantron test. Ten points just to write your name. And they wouldn't. Yet my principal said I couldn't flunk them. The most satisfying thing in the universe is igniting a spark of interest in a kid like that, but with forty kids in a classroom the most important job is keeping the peace. I learned how to be an authoritarian and I didn't like it. I'd see substitute teachers signing out of our school, holding back tears, never to return again. There were days I felt like that. I'd sweep the floors of my classroom, fuss with the bulletin boards, write out my lesson plans, anything I could do until I stopped shaking and sweating and was calm enough to drive home safely.

My sister-in-law has been teaching thread-bare science and health in public schools for nearly thirty years. She is a saint. They expect her to do labs. Her lab budget is less than two dollars per student per semester and she has no help, no teaching assistants, nothing. With lab equipment that was already old and obsolete when she started teaching. She buys stuff with her own money, not just science stuff, but terrifyingly basic things like tampons and maxi-pads, spare clothes, and grocery store gift cards.

My kids went to our local public schools. They got free lunches because everyone gets free lunches. It would cost more to account for the kids who don't qualify for free lunches and breakfasts than it's worth.

But we didn't send them to public high school. I couldn't sleep with that. My own kids are not the reactive squeaky skinny autistic spectrum kid I was so they probably would have done well anywhere, but I'll confess, we don't live in a place with excellent high schools. We sent our kids to a Catholic high school. Sure, it turned them into heretics like many of the people in our family but they did very well and were accepted to excellent colleges with good scholarships.

Our oldest kid has graduated and is now teaching... My wife and I met as urban public school science teachers so maybe it's in the genes.

But where's the money gene? We don't have it. Altruism doesn't pay in this society.