March 25, 2004 - Thursday
For the last few weeks, perhaps a month or more, Harry has been asking with some regularity in the mornings, "is today a school day?" When the answer is yes, that is almost inevitably followed by a somewhat whiny "when will it not be a school day?" I can take that either as a child wanting to stay home with his parents or as a children who is for some reason unhappy with going to school, or perhaps both. Perhaps he's just looking for attention.

Unfortunately, these days I am worrying more about the atmosphere at school. Harry's Pre-K classroom has been a particularly unfocused environment since he moved into it in January (since September, really). It has more boys than girls and many who are older (closer to kindergarten than preschool) and many of those are what one might call "bouncing boys." More to the point, there are a couple of those bouncing boys who are simply not very well behaved and the bad ones ultimately encourage the others. I've spoken with the school, as have other parents no doubt, and corrective measures are being taken, but I'm troubled that Harry might be uncomfortable.

The tricky part of this is wondering how reliable Harry is in his comments about school. He and I have, out of necessity, spoken about one of the worst offenders by name several times. To my knowledge this other boy, Noah, has never done anything directly to Harry, but his actions have had Harry raising many questions. I think that even at four-years-old Harry can understand that I am not particularly enamored with this other boy. So, when I ask Harry why he doesn't like going to school and his answer is that he doesn't like Noah, I'm left wondering whether Harry actually feels threatened by him, whether his poor behavior makes Harry uncomfortable in a more general way, or whether Harry is leveraging my opinion of this other boy to gain alliance, sympathy, or dispensation to stay home from Pre-K.

Yesterday, when I wrote most of the above (only to have Jeremy's bull-headed behavior trump Harry for the day) I would have stopped there, probably thinking that Harry should be staying home. But today, when I picked Harry up from school his teacher told me that he had been playing with Noah very happily. And, I'm honestly not sure whether I am happy about that or not.


Comments, Opinions?