My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling

Clifford Levy:

The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice. "Daddy? I want to go home," said my 8-year-old daughter, Arden. Two hours earlier, I dropped Arden and her two siblings off at their new school in a squat building in a forest of Soviet-era apartment blocks on Krasnoarmeyskaya (Red Army) Street in Moscow. They hugged me goodbye, clinging a little too long, and as I rode the metro to my office, I said a kind of silent prayer to myself that they would get through the day without falling apart.

But Arden had just spent the minutes between class periods hiding in the bathroom so no one would see her crying. Finally, she composed herself, found her teacher and pantomimed that she needed to talk to me. "I don't understand . . . anything," she told me. I tried to respond with soothing words, but I had no idea what to do. You can tell your kid to tough it out when she transfers from one school to another in your hometown. This was different.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 18, 2011 1:01 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas