New Backpack, Who Dis?

Back-to-school links and thinks

Welcome back!!!! How was your summer??? Your new haircut is ADORBS. Love the shoes! Did you get the mean teacher or the nice one?? WHAT IS TIME AND WHY DOES SHE MARCH US ONWARD TOWARDS DEATH NO MATTER HOW HARD WE RESIST??!!

It’s back to school, bitches! Well, weirdly, here in Oakland we’ve been back for over a week. I am now among the lucky parents who have two kids in the same free, walkable, lovely school. I did a victory dance all the home after first-day drop-off. Then I went, like, right back there cause we had early releases and no aftercare for two weeks. I hate hate hate ragging on schools but GUYS COME ON.

That aside, there is so much to be thankful for! Really rad, dedicated folks show up every day to teach my children. Other parents at our school, who continue to be a very chill group, and somehow very dad-heavy, have been trading their kids with us after school until the full schedule picks up. The first-time parents are buzzing with anxiety about their little ones being in a big school and it is so sweet and relatable but also feels long gone. I’m a parent of big kids now! I don’t do shit like cry at drop-offs.

Okay maybe a cried a litttttle. I teared up the first morning at home, when I told my Kindergartener, “I just can’t believe you’re so grown up! You used to be my baby!”

“But I’ll always be your baby!” she exclaimed. WATERWORKS.

Then she farted and laughed. Parenting, y’all.

If I read one more smug think-piece from an east coast media outlet about the “failed liberal experiment” of California, I am going to scream. The whole world is a dystopian hellscape, even if the people in your neighborhood all happen to have homes! California has it’s problems, but it’s also one of only seven states to offer free school lunches (and breakfasts!) to all public school students. The added normalizing of school lunch that this does at a school like my kids’ is tremendous.

The result is, I’m not making motherfucking lunches anymore! No bento boxes with cubes of cheese in one square and olives with toothpicks in another. No sandwiches —crusts on or off. No cleaning shit out every night and loading it back up each morning. Come to think of it, I don’t even worry about breakfast much — at their school, they serve it to all kids in their classrooms first thing.

My celebrations aside, back-to-school can mean a lot of things for a lot of folks. If your child hasn’t had the greatest experiences at school, hasn’t always had teachers who get them or peers who include them, it can be downright fraught. The privilege of an easy school transition is not lost on me.

In this time of varying responses to a shared season, I’ve made you a little Choose-Your-Own-Adventure of my back-to-school musings from over the years. Enjoy.

1. If you’re feeling all the feelings, read Why Does It Hurt So Bad??? And other songs written by Babyface that express my feelings about my son starting Kindergarten:

Am I grieving for the baby that my son once was, even though I didn’t always like that baby very much, and in fact prefer this little man with the comically-large backpack who, no matter how much I ask him to stop, likes to put my fingers in his mouth and suck on them? Or is the first day of Kindergarten just a very loud alarm bell, clanging around my sleep-deprived head, reminding me that this current iteration of my child, too, will be gone soon?

Or How To Manage Big Back-To-School Feelings — For You & Your Kids:

The first thing to do is to get your own feelings about the transition straight. Don’t love your kid’s new assigned teacher? Have some anxiety about whether they’ll make friends this year? That’s all cool, but process it before you talk to your kid about the change so that you can do your best to keep your apprehension to yourself. You don’t need to sugarcoat or lie, but if you’re feeling worried, your kid will surely pick up on it.

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2. If you’re struggling with getting back into the morning routine, read Help! I Can’t Get My Kids Out The Door In The Morning Without Losing It:

Applying creativity or compassion to your parenting life is not an isolated event. Even if things go well for a time, you will need more of it at some point, when new systems lose their charm, old habits return, or outside factors impede. I constantly go in and out of cycles of some aspect of parenting being great, then bearable, then insufferable, then OK again. Sometimes it’s bad, but you don’t do anything about it until you have some extra time, or you go on new meds and feel a burst of energy, or it gets so bad that you have no other choice. And then, after a while, you have to run through the cycle all over again.

That’s OK. That’s how it works. You can always reinvent. You can always give yourself a little more room, or just say, “You know what, I’m gonna let this suck until I have the bandwidth to unsuck it.”

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3. If you want to have a good, or better, year for your neurodivergent or disabled child, read The Concerned Parent’s Back-to-School Guide:

Give the new teacher some tips — Chances are if your child has academic, behavioral, or social challenges, his new teacher already knows all about them. What YOU can do is try and sway that narrative towards compassion and action. Think about the key elements that help your child be successful, and write them down in an email. Keep them clear, brief, collaborative, and reasonable. For example “Andrew gets overwhelmed in the first few days of school, so he might ask to go to the bathroom or get drinks more. If that’s okay with you, we find that he uses this as a good break to reset” versus “Andrew should be allowed to leave the classroom when he asks, and if you could make a note of every time it happens and email it to us each day, that would be great.”

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4. If you’ve also got lunch on the brain, read School Lunch:

The civics-minded, city-dwelling liberal in me is delighted in the idea of my child eating the same food as his classmates, two meals a day, no fuss or comparisons. But what a privilege to make that choice, and to be able to send him to school each day with the “back-up sandwich” he requests. And though I would like to tell myself that this eating at school is a 100% egalitarian exercise, I’m sure the differences in the student’s economics flair up. (According to my son, though, at least, everyone drinks the chocolate milk.)

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5. If you want to think about the bigger picture of education in this country, read Going for broke again: School is back and I think it's gonna be ok:

In a teacher-education course I used to teach, ambiguously called “Transformative Education,” I began every semester by having the class read James Baldwin’s 1964 essay “A Talk to Teachers” (I got this from my colleague, Lynna). The essay, which is absolutely essential American reading, is primarily about what it’s like to be a Black American in our society and education system, and the imperative that teachers have to challenge the backwards, racist foundations of our institutions. It is, as many have pointed out in the education world, highly relevant today. “Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time,” Baldwin opens. “Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country. The society in which we live is desperately menaced, not by Khrushchev, but from within. To any citizen of this country who figures himself as responsible – and particularly those of you who deal with the minds and hearts of young people – must be prepared to ‘go for broke.’ ” But it is also about how important the role of educators is, what we can do to harm or heal. How high the stakes.

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Everyone: For a tremendous read from a teacher’s perspective, check out the wise Alicia Simba’s piece in Teen Vogue Teachers Are Quitting In Huge Numbers, But Here’s Why I’m Staying in Education:

“At a time like this, when the work is so hard and the demands only continue to grow, it is not only understandable, but completely reasonable that so many teachers are leaving. The real question, I wonder, is why are so many of us staying?”

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Also, this:

Okay I finally listened to everyone and watched the Bear. You’re right, it’s dope. Ayo Edebiri for president!