First Day of School

The first day back went fine for Lin. It was nice to see the confidence in her stride as she walked into the building yesterday.

Her schedule had some errors which have now been fixed. She had two math classes and no ESL (English as a Second Language) -- that won't work! She also had been put in a "regular" 7th grade English class. Fortunately her ESL teacher tracked her down yesterday and told her that her schedule was wrong and that they would fix it. Isn't that nice? I'm not sure Lin would have realized anything was wrong otherwise.

So starting today she has the right classes. We are very fortunate that our public school district not only provides daily ESL classes for Lin (some districts only provide an hour or two a week) but her counselors have also agreed to delay putting her in Social Studies in order to give her a second hour of English learning class every day. Yes, she gets two hours of special English classes every day! Not all schools do this. And this year her two hours of English are back-to-back, so that will be really nice for her.

Of course, Lin is worried about putting off Social Studies; she knows the longer she waits the further behind she'll be. But it's more important that she become proficient at reading first. It's sometimes easy to forget that when we talk about Lin's education, we're not just talking about one class schedule. We're talking about years of special treatment for her, not matter how intelligent she is. She'll likely always learn at a slightly different level than other kids. But it's so great that she is smart, she does like to learn. Last night she was even counting up how many years she'll be in school -- she was working out that she has two more years of middle school, then four years of high school, and then with a huge grin on her face she triumphantly threw her hands up and said "And then college!!"

Hmmm... how long do you think this educational euphoria will last...?