Our school district has a program called “School of Choice” where you can rank which schools that you want your child to attend for elementary school (and I think middle school).  It complicates our decision of which school to send Sean to next year for kindergarten.  If we lived in a traditional school district, it would be easy – we’d send him to the closest school to our house.  Our choices haven’t gotten too complicated because of “School of Choice” except that it is a headache that we won’t be guaranteed our first choice (the school within walking distance for us), so we do have to list a few other schools in our ranking.

Then, yesterday, things got more complicated.  My husband went to a meeting for “School of Choice”, and I knew most of the things except when he started talking about the Magnet and gifted programs.  The three magnet programs in our district have three magnet schools have extra funding and are focusing in different areas:  1)  science/math, 2) government and democracy, and 3) international education.  My husband and I weren’t very excited about the government and democracy school, but the science/math and international education peeked our interest.

The science/math peeked our interest because we’re both computer scientist and we’ve excelled in the areas of science/math.  However, just because we’ve excelled in those areas, doesn’t mean Sean will excel, or more importantly enjoy those areas.  My husband also worried that the school would draw typical “engineers” and a child that might not be naturally interested in those areas would feel out of place.  The international education school was interesting only because they teach all the children Mandarin.  I would like all of our kids to go to Chinese school at some point, so it might be nice for our kids to get that in school rather than going an extra day on the weekend.

The question of whether or not we should consider a Magnet school has caused me some stress.  Both my family and my husband’s family have emphasized an importance in education.  My husband and I both think that education is important as well, and we do expect our children to go to college.  Our hope is that we would encourage our children to do the best to their potential and not compare them to their siblings, peers, or our expectations of how they should do.  We want to foster an environment where their education is important, but not the most important thing.  I’m realizing this is a fine line that I know that we’ll be walking.  I have a tendency to think, “Of course I’m going to give my child the best and give him the best opportunities!  Of course we’d want our child to explore possibilities in magnet schools, extracurricular activities, gifted programs, and good school districts!”  However, I know that I will need to suppress some of those tendencies because 1) I don’t want to live vicariously through my children, 2) put pressure on my children, 3) make my children feel that in order for me to be proud of them they have to do well in school, and 4) most importantly realize that my children’s education is NOT the most important thing.  I don’t even know if giving my children all these opportunities will actually help them in the long run or give them an edge when applying or going to college.  Sure, maybe as they get older it might help, but maybe not.  I think back to what both my husband and dad said, “If your child is going to be good at school or anything, they will be able to succeed wherever they are.”  I think there is some truth to that, but there I know that there are benefits to peers that will drive you and an environment where you can feel challenged.

With all this being said, I think I am leaning more towards not putting Sean in a magnet school right now.  I’m not sure I’m convinced that these specialized areas will benefit Sean before he’s in upper elementary except for being exposed to Mandarin.  Also, I don’t really want to pigeon-hole Sean into a certain type of curriculum when I’m not sure what Sean likes or will excel in.  He’s only going to be in kindergarten after all!

I wanted to end with the point I made above my child’s education is not the most important thing.  First of all, I can’t believe that Sean is going to start kindergarten next year!  Where has the time gone?  I feel completely unprepared for the reality of Sean being in school the whole day, though I’ve been looking forward to this time for many years.  Second, I need to remind myself that Sean, Jonas, and Karis’ education is not the most important thing; that their lives are not the most important thing to me.  I need to remind myself that my relationship with God and Jesus Christ is the most important, my relationship with my husband is second, and my relationship with my kids comes third.  I truly believe that if I live my life this way that my children will not feel shortchanged, but in fact benefit from seeing that God and my husband are more important than them.  Knowing myself, I can foresee how easily I can get wrapped up in my kids education and extracurricular life and let that be my focus.  If I let myself become that way, I know that when we finally have an “empty nest”, I’ll be looking at my husband and wondering, “What happened to us?  Who are you?  Who are we together?”  So, I do not want to get wrapped up in my children.  I want to be an advocate for my children; I want to create a loving environment where my children can feel supported (whether they succeed or not); I want to show them that getting a good education is valuable.  I want to do all these things not at the cost of my relationship with God or my husband.  We’ll see how this goes in practice the next 18+ years, but I’m thankful that I have a husband with the same ideas as me.  I know it won’t be perfect, but hopefully, my husband and I will be constantly working at improving our marriage while leading our children.

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