One of the internal battles I wage with myself revolves around whether I should be home schooling Georgia, and there’s always another article that makes me feel remorseful for choosing public school. Moving from Georgia’s greenie pre-school to Kindergarten felt like a big deal. Exposing her to new kids with parents who are far less concerned about the environment, commercial exposure, and conscious parenting was scary for me. What if the foundation I had built for her didn’t stick? What if Hannah Montana, Chuck E. Cheese and must-have clothing styles infiltrated our idyllic need-based philosophy? And couldn’t I just as easily, if not better, expose my child to culture and history and science and art?

A few weeks into Kindergarten I was struck by how energetically Georgia was going about learning. She came home and couldn’t stop drawing, and then as reading clicked she did a lot of pretend spelling, and stapled and then hand-bound many books and journals of all sizes and themes. She comprehended patterns and thought in math and told me the difference between lobed and serrated leaves. She was interacting with people we would never have met, all different socio-economic classes and races we never see in diversity-challenged Portland. All that combined with the fact that I really need to work and sleep, and if I home schooled one of those was going to have to give, I felt like we had made the right choice.

And then she started first grade, and I felt the tug again. Am I underestimating Georgia’s potential by not giving her alternative choices to a common elementary education? Should I be doing more to find out who she is and what she might excel at? I hate that Scholastic’s beneficence to our school is tied to offers of commercial video games and toys and books linked to movies, and that I feel pressure to support the school through crappy gift wrap fundraising (though they are also trying out an eco-fundraiser after I nudged last year!). Though her school is green, there isn't a lot of eco-talk. And I don’t like that she doesn’t have much leeway to explore what really interests her outside of the structure of the curriculum.

But now we’re at the three-week mark again. Her reading is exploding, and she asks me to make up homework for her. She loves her teacher and learning and friends and she’s getting fantastic calluses from the monkey bars. She still thinks in math and loves science and nature. And she’s actively learning that people who don’t live like we do are just people too, that some people are mean but most people are nice, and to tolerate people who have completely different values, even if we don’t agree with them. When she’s not in school we go to museums and listen to different genres of music, we do experiments and research bugs and animals and germs. We read much more than we watch TV. We explore the newspaper and talk about how our actions and choices affect the earth. I think she’s getting the best of what a traditional education has to offer, along with our focused attention on anything that attracts her interest.

And maybe the choice is clear after all: her father and I are home schooling her, just not during school hours!