The Great What If

The Great What If

              I’ve always had this secret little dream, ever since my kids first started school, and if you are a parent, let me know if you’ve ever had it, too. I call it the Great What If?  What if I pulled the kids out of school for a year, and we spent it traveling? What if I made the whole world their classroom? What if we flew to Europe, and spent a week or two wandering through the Louvre, and what if we wandered Rome and Greece and talked about the architecture and art, and why so many Greek and Roman antiquities are housed in the British Museum, and what if I let my kids follow their own imaginations through art and music, and what if we went to Ethiopia for a few months, and just lived there, immersing ourselves in culture and learning to cook the food and make the coffee and read the poetry and learn the history and hang out with the neighbors and make some new friends? What if?

               The Great What If is a pretty grand dream, as it turns out, and I forgot to become a billionaire when I grew up, making it impossible to implement, but it’s a big dream that opened the door for more practical What Ifs? What if I bought a second-hand RV and the kids and I spent a year visiting every single National Park in the US and Canada? What if we made nature our classroom, and camped, and fished, and what if we studied naturalist artists like Ansel Adams and the Group of Seven, and what if we let the riotous beauty of wild places guide our choices each day, instead of a complicated series of bells and a succession of 45 minute classes? What if?

               The Great What If has lived in a little space in the back of my head for 7 years, mostly just popping up as a happy little daydream to get me through a dull PTA meeting, or while sitting in a giant queue of cars in the school drop off line. Sometimes, The Great What If crossed my mind when my kids were being assigned homework in the 1st grade, or when they would tell me they didn’t like school very much.  What if school could be less stressful and more fun than this, I’d think to myself? What if?

And then that quiet little voice in the back of my head, the one that was what if-ing,  started getting a little louder, around the same time I got my first look at the daunting statistics of who gets educated in our school district, and who does not. In Language Arts, 83% of white students are making the college readiness benchmarks on MAP testing, but only 33% of Black students are. 78% of white students are reaching the benchmark for Math, but only 21% of Black students do.  And I would ask teachers why this was, and they would always hem and haw a bit, and then tell me how much they loved my children, and I would ask about what role curriculum plays in these statistics, and they would assure me that our district’s curriculum was intentionally anti-racist, and then send my kids home wearing pilgrim hats and ‘Indian’ headdresses after a classroom Thanksgiving party.  And always I was left wondering how a teacher could claim to love my children so much, but deliver a curriculum that erases people like them from the dominant narrative in every subject. What if there was a way to de-colonize their learning space; let them be immersed in a learning environment that celebrated Black achievement? What if?

               Although my kids landed in excellent middle schools, with excellent teachers, the great What If still whispered to me. What if their educational experience could be different? What if there was a better way to keep them from being a part of our district’s dismal statistical landscape? And then came the pandemic, and e-learning, and as I watched my kids struggle, I realized that there would never be an opportunity like this again to rethink their education, to experiment with decolonizing the curriculum, and refocus the lens that so often can only find Black Excellence one month out of the year, and only in the same five names, on posters that only hang in classrooms in the month of February.

               My What If changed, to a new kind of What If? What if I reframed a complicated and stressful pandemic academic situation as an opportunity instead? What if I gave my kids a profoundly different kind of educational experience, one rooted in social justice, and de-centering cisgender white narrative? What if we only read books written by LGBTQIA+ and non-white authors? What if we did an entire year of art history, with no white artists in it? What if we listened to music by Black composers, learned from Black scientists, celebrated Black culture, took a deep dive into the Harlem Renaissance, studied Stonewall and Black Lives Matter and what if we stopped pretending the history they were learning in school was anything more than Eurocentric historiography? What if?

               What if I could give my Black kids an academic year that provided the kind of affirmation and reflection the district curriculum looks like for their white peers? What if I gave my kids the agency to help design that curriculum, and the space to let their academic curiosity develop? What if we didn’t have to spend this year in front of a computer screen, jumping from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting, anxious and stressed out? What if?

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became, that this was the year to jump from What if, to Why Not Now? And so, with the help of a supportive Principal, I am embarking on the Great What If this week. One of my sons will be only be dabbling in What-If-ing, to supplement an excellent in-person curriculum at his private school. And the other is now a very part-time student in our local middle school, and the rest of his education for the foreseeable future will be entirely What If.

               That is what this space is about. A place to share what I learn this year, as I pull together a curriculum from hundreds of different resources, and try to make this dream work. If I am successful, this will end up being a blueprint for other parents seeking out alternative options for their own What Ifs. And if I fail, well, the worst that is going to happen is that we are going to read some great books and look at great art this year; listen to great music and watch a lot of spoken word poetry on YouTube, and that doesn’t feel much like failure at all.