Rob and I have spent the past month attending elementary school open houses and tours, just like every other parent with a preschool age child in San Francisco. I know there are many, many places in this country where you don’t have to go to numerous open houses; submit your top ten PUBLIC school choices, desperately hoping to get one; or subject your children to “visits” (i.e. interviews) at private schools. I grew up in a town where the school you went to was just the closest to home, and that was all there was to the selection criteria.

But we want to live in this city, and so we play the school game. It’s actually going fine, I did my online research, made a list of schools to see, scheduled the appointments, and showed up. Easy. What I didn’t count on was the reaction I would have during our first tour, when the children were actually there, as children generally are when school is in session.

They roamed the halls in little packs, made noise in their music class, studied quietly at low, colorful tables. And then there were the walls covered with their work: drawings of families, poems entitled Where I Come From, and lists of classroom rules they had all devised together. Read More>