freshhell's essay on kindergarten this morning touches on a number of issues I've been thinking about lately as well. Like Dusty, AJ starts kindergarten in a month, and we�re all feeling excited and also a little worried about what we'll find there.

Like freshhell, I went to kindergarten more than 30 years ago (I believe we're about a year apart in age). I went to three kindergartens. Like Dusty and AJ, I learned to read well before starting school. I learned to read on my own because I wanted to, not because anyone made me, and I taught myself. When I started kindergarten at the local elementary school in Indianapolis, the teachers chastised my parents for teaching me to read. There are so many things wrong with this, that I don't know where to start. But the end result was that I was shuttled to private school where I remember nature walks and Spanish lessons and naptime on carpet squares and giant tinkertoys and eating hard-boiled eggs for lunch with a tiny salt shaker my mom had packed. If I'm remembering correctly, this kindergarten was slightly longer than half a day. We got to have lunch there, but that was toward the end of the day. When I came home, I took a nap.

Halfway through the school year, we moved to Connecticut where I started public school kindergarten in the morning. After a few weeks, the principal called me and my mom in for a conference. He thought I should try first grade instead. My mom thought I wasn't socially ready for first grade (I wasn't, despite years of preschool). They ended up working out a hybrid program where I'd spend half a day in first grade and half in kindergarten. In that school, first grade went longer than kindergarten but not as long as the rest of the school. In order to accomplish the half and half, I had to switch kindergarten classes again. I went to first grade in the morning and kindergarten in the afternoon. I didn't have any friends in either class. I'm not sure how much I cared about that.

I don't remember much about either of those classes. What I do remember is being so tired when I got home that I didn't want to do anything else. I missed my afternoon nap. After a month or so, I asked to just go to kindergarten. The whole thing had been too much for me. The following year, I returned to first grade and pretended I wasn't bored out of my skull. I sat in the back of the classroom reading my favorite book about dinosaurs. Thus began a long and illustrious career of teaching myself stuff I was interested in while sitting in a classroom that someone else was teaching.

Despite all of this, I ended up really liking school. I loved the ritual search for school supplies and new socks in the fall. Eventually I found some places in school where I wasn't bored. Mostly I was lucky in finding teachers who were willing to help me find interesting stuff to do when I was done with the stuff I was supposed to do.

But my early experiences are making me nervous about AJ's kindergarten. I do think freshhell makes an interesting point about full day kindergarten. I think AJ is probably ready for full day. I'm not sure I am, though. And depending on what the school does with the kids, I'm not sure it's the best thing for him. I want to encourage him to pursue his independent projects a little longer. I want to be able to give him a chance to learn some things they don't teach in school -- if we can swing the finances, we'll be going to Spanish class this fall. In any case, full day is not an option for him without switching to private school.

I agree that full day has more time to do more things -- I particularly wonder how much time recess will take up in the winter when the teacher has to help 22 5-year-olds get in and out of their coats and boots. But they do have recess. And art. And music. And library day. And computer lab. And P.E. They just don't have all those things every day (well, recess is every day; the others are once a week). They also don't serve lunch. But more time doesn't mean better unless the school is really doing a good job. If they're not and AJ is bored and miserable, more is not better. More is worse. More can kill the soul.

All of this is, of course, irrelevant when added to the real world concerns of finding a place for your child while you work where s/he'll be interested and happy. That�s an issue for freshhell with which I am not yet faced.

But here's the real reason I'm not ready for full-time kindergarten -- kids are not playing anymore. Or at least not as much. Today's >New York Times has an alarming article on the disappearance of toys from kindergarten classrooms. One paragraph reads:

The classroom has no blocks, dress-up corners or play kitchens. There is no time for show and tell, naps or recess. There is homework every night. For much of the day, the children are asked to sit quietly with their hands folded as their teachers drill them in phonics, punctuation and arithmetic.

It's not that I'm opposed to phonics, punctuation and arithmetic. It's just that I know how AJ learns. He reads about the solar system He writes about it, and he would be happy to learn how to punctuate it correctly. But he really gets going when he's standing up and demonstrating how Uranus' rotation is different than Earth's by spinning around with his arms out. He'll even show you the gradual evolution of Uranus' rotation, after it was hit first by an asteroid and then by a meteor shower. He draws pictures of the planets and their moons, constellations. This week we've been playing a constellation game where I make a bunch of dots on a page representing stars and he makes pictures by connecting them into constellations. There are a million different ways to learn, but most of the best ones do not keep a kid tied to a desk. Playtime is crucial.

One of the teachers interviewed in the article lamented the removal of toys from the classroom to make way for math and reading stations. "'The dress-up area, I miss it. If a child is timid, playing in the dress-up area helps him make friends.'" With more kids in preschool or daycare, socialization may not be as big a part of kindergarten as it used to be, but it's still an important skill.

If a full day kindergarten would leave time for play that would otherwise be cut from the day, then I am for it. If the schools, however, are just going to add more drills, I think the children's time is better spent elsewhere.

Of course I realize that Dusty and AJ come from a background that prepares them well for school -- they are in homes where learning is encouraged and supported. And there are plenty of kids who are not in that position. Public schools need to accommodate those kids who are less prepared. But is militaristic drilling of skills the way to go? Certainly drills have their place, but what exactly is that teaching our kids when drills are the focus of kindergarten? I don't want AJ to learn how to spend the day at a desk with his hands folded. I hope he never learns how to do that.

But the thing is, really I'm not sure how much I care about that right now. While I certainly want all kids to be able to improve themselves through education, at the moment I'm feeling very selfish. I want MY kid to have a good experience. And I will do whatever it takes to make that happen.

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