Shannon Phillips

On my walk home today I was thinking about the nature of politeness in different social contexts.

In a crowded urban environment, ignoring other people is generally the polite thing to do. There’s so little real privacy, but people extend each other the illusion of privacy, and that helps. You travel through crowded sidewalks and trains in your own little imaginary bubble. And generally the only people who try to pierce the bubble are catcallers, panhandlers, pamphleteers and the like: people whose social advances are an unwelcome imposition.

Of course you acknowledge people who you have real business with, and over time you build up a friendly rapport with the folks at the shops and cafés you frequent. Also your neighbors, which in a true urban core means the apartment-dwellers whose units border yours. The term might extend to everyone on your hallway: it almost certainly doesn’t encompass the entire building. But in general, in public spaces, you respect the imaginary bubbles.

This leads to really interesting effects like the phenomenon of familiar strangers: people you see every day but never speak to. I think it’s also something that feeds into the famous reputation of New Yorkers for rudeness. (Those who visit large cities but aren’t familiar with urban social norms could easily find the we’re-all-politely-ignoring-you thing to be offputting, distant, and cold.)

Oakland is not dense enough for this rule to come into effect. Polite sidewalk interaction in my neighborhood requires a “hello” at minimum, with “how ya doin'” greatly preferred. (Note that there’s no question mark at the end, because it’s a statement, not a question. It is perfectly OK to answer with a matching “How ya doin’.”)

I had a little bit of trouble adjusting to this new norm when we first moved here. There’s an older gentleman who’s usually sitting out on his porch when we walk by after school, and I found myself walking on the other side of the street just because the psychic effort of exchanging a few meaningless pleasantries with a stranger every afternoon felt like a burden. It didn’t work, though. He just hollered across the street: “How ya doin’!”

Today on my walk home from picking up Davy, that gentleman was not on his porch. I wondered where he was—on vacation? Running an errand? I hope he’s not ill. I kind of missed him. On the other hand, there were a couple of people standing around a few houses down, folks I hadn’t seen before. “Good afternoon!” I waved across the street. “How ya doin!”

Davy started a new year at Peter Pan today:

That photo looks Instagrammed but it’s actually just blurry because neither Sam nor myself remembered to bring along a proper camera, and so Sam snapped one with his phone.

If you’re not intimately familiar with the franchise, Robin is here cosplaying as “Dark Moon” Luigi, sporting the Poltergust 5000 ghost-hunting equipment (i.e. a backpack and a broom).

Davy is just Mario and very happy to have a role in his older brother’s fantasy play. (Everyone in the family has in fact been cast: I’m Princess Peach, while Sam is Bowser, and Sol is a mushroom man.) The hats were a present from Pops and Mo—they arrived yesterday in the mail and the kids just about flipped their lids!

While Robin is off to his first day of kindergarten, Sol and Davy play together under Thora’s supervision:

Update: Robin was so much happier when I picked him up after school today! He said he had a good day, he likes kindergarten, and he’s looking forward to going back again tomorrow. Such a relief!

So where were we? I think in my last post about UMCS I said that Robin was having a tough time with the transition to a UMCS “lower elementary” classroom. The Montessori lower elementary classes are mixed-age, first through third graders, and Robin was the youngest in the class by quite a bit. His teacher thought that he was prepared for the work academically, but she also said that “Robin doesn’t really have a peer group in this classroom.”

And Robin himself was really, really clear that he wanted to move. “I want to be with the little kids and do little kid things,” he said. “I want to be in a different classroom. I want to go to kindergarten.” He said the same thing over and over in different ways. So I thought, you know, my kid is telling me as clearly as he possibly can what he wants for himself.

And here’s what I think. In Nature’s justice system, Robin has not been guaranteed a jury of his peers, nor has he been vouchsafed an impartial judge. The universe is cruel and it can be very quick to render a verdict. There are no indivisible rights. But in this system Robin has been outfitted with an advocate—one person who will put his needs above literally anything else in the cosmos. And that’s me.

I think he needs to learn that the world won’t always rearrange itself to suit him. But you know what? Sometimes—if he’s clear about his terms and he sticks to his guns—it will.

So I decided to fight this one for him. I scheduled another meeting with his teacher, and then a meeting with the administration, and basically it came down to everybody agreeing: Robin is an edge case. If he “stuck it out” in the lower-el classroom he would probably learn a lot, and the older kids would mentor him…but it would be a rough transition. If he moves to the kindergarten classroom, he probably won’t make a lot of progress academically over the course of the year, but he’ll get a lot more social and emotional support.

And I said: Robin knows what he wants. I don’t think he should get the only vote in this decision, but I think he should get a vote, and in this case probably the deciding vote.

So it’s agreed! Robin moves to kindergarten, starting next week. He’s really happy with the news, especially since one of his friends from preschool is already in that class. I think it’s going to make everything much happier for him. And I’m very pleased with UMCS for being so flexible and for sincerely doing their best to meet Robin’s developmental needs.

I took a picture of Davy tonight for use as his “cubby photo” this year at preschool. I had to catch him right out of the bath to get a clean face!

Robin is having kind of a hard time with the transition to elementary school. He says his days are “bad” and he’s started asking to stay home instead of going to school. This is heartbreaking because he loved preschool so much, and that enthusiasm and delight was something I really wanted him to be able to hold on to.

We talked to his teacher a little bit, specifically floating the idea that maybe he would be better suited to a kindergarten classroom. She says from her perspective he’s doing fine—she thinks he’s going through some normal transition anxiety and that he will settle in within a couple of weeks. She also said that, academically speaking, he is at a first-grade level. (I thought that was true, because I looked up the state standards and did those lessons with him to get him up to grade level, but I was rather pleased to hear her confirm it.)

I told Robin that if he gives it six weeks and still hates school, we’ll make some sort of a change. I hope his teacher is right and that it’s ultimately not necessary.

Me: “So Robin, how was your first day of school?”
Robin: “Long.”
Me: “It is a long day, isn’t it?”
Robin: “The teacher got fustalated.”
Me: “Frustrated? Why?”
Robin: “Because my friends did a bad thing.”
Me: “Really. What did ‘your friends’ do?”
Robin: “Hmm. I’m not going to tell you. You don’t need to know.”

It’s a mixed-age classroom, which I like very much, but when I saw my little guy sitting there flanked by older and bigger boys my tummy knotted up. I wanted to grab each person in that classroom, child and adult, by the shoulders and hiss “That is my heart sitting there on that rug in an orange polo shirt, do you understand? He is my naked, beating heart. Be kind to him.”

But instead I gave him a high five and I walked away.

Robin had an orientation period at his new school this morning—he got to go in, meet his teachers and find his classroom, and stay for about an hour before we all gathered for food and socialization. It went really well. On our way into school we recognized a couple of families from Peter Pan (our co-op preschool), so Robin had a little bit of interaction with friendly, familiar faces to bolster him as he entered this new school environment.

I’m feeling really good about UMCS. There’s a new principal this year but I got a great vibe off both her and the rest of the administration. I didn’t get so much of a sense of Robin’s teachers (his classroom has two) yet, but I’m sure we’ll have lots of time to build rapport. The facilities have a nice “feel,” and there’s a bunch of things about the Montessori model that I really like (multi-age classrooms, team teaching, and an emphasis on cross-disciplinary projects and self-directed learning). So we’re excited about the upcoming year at UMCS.

After our orientation this morning, Robin and I walked over to meet up with Sam and Davy and Sol at Peter Pan, which also had a potluck brunch going on. I ran into another Peter Pan parent on the walk over, and when we got there I was flooded with happiness to see all the folks we’ve been working with over the past couple of years, and to catch up with their kids, who all seem to have sprouted up six inches over the summer vacation. It was just nice.

There are some things about our neighborhood that are not so great. There’s been some awful crime stories lately. But walking from the elementary school to the preschool, greeting our neighbors and friends, I realized that we have made some wonderful connections here.