If Introverts Designed Schools

If you are an introvert and you went to school, you know our education system is not designed around you. Indeed, much of the world is not designed for you. The world is for extroverts, and the first time you learn this is your first day of junior high school, when the guidance counselor tells your class there will be “fun” after-school activities throughout the year.

You can’t think of anything less fun.

In fact, if you could design the perfect school, it would look like: 

Cubicles in the lunchroom

The lunchroom would have the usual choose-your-own-adventure — or lunch mates — for extroverts, but it also would have cubicles for people like you. Because, for an introvert, there is nothing worse than that moment when you leave the lunch line, your tray in hand, and realize no one is going to tell you where to sit. You’ll just have to pick the least crazy table and hope the people there will give you some personal space. You also hope no one will think you’re weird for not talking. After a full morning of answering questions in class and working on group projects — the horror — you just need 20 minutes to yourself.

In the introvert’s lunchroom cubicle, you could eat alone, in silence, without curious onlookers hoping someday you’ll come out of your shell. You like your shell, thank you very much, and in order to go back out into the world — or classroom — you need your quiet time there.

Lockers big enough to fit inside

At the introverts’ school, every locker actually would be a portal to your own private den of sorts. Hallways too rowdy and crowded? Step inside your locker and read a few paragraphs of your favorite book until the rush is over. Need to reflect on a comment someone made or a grade you just received? Step inside your locker for some personal reflection.

Also, all the talking and socializing that school necessarily requires is tiring for an introvert. It literally takes everything out of you. Step inside your you-sized locker for a quick nap to recharge your socializing battery.

One-person seats on the bus

Bus rides are a nightmare for most introverts. You’re surrounded by all those extroverts who seem even more energized by their full day of socializing and being at school. You? You need some time to reflect and process, and sitting on a bus is the perfect place to do it — if you could just get some peace and quiet.

Not coincidentally, introverts’ favorite seat on the bus is the random single-person one near the front. If introverts designed school buses, they’d make half the bus with single-person seats, all of them with a window so you can stare at the passing scenery and think about your day.

A posted schedule for answering questions

As an introvert, you live in fear of the next time the teacher will call on you to speak in class. You hardly can learn because of all the brow-wiping you do, wondering if the teacher will call on you next. What if you aren’t ready to talk? What if you’re having a quiet day?

At a school designed by introverts, teachers would have a published schedule for calling on students. No one would be called on without a 24-hour advance notice.

Fewer team sports, more tennis, track and yoga

Physical education introduces many hurdles — pun intended — into an introvert’s life. First, there is the locker room. Need I say more? Then there is the whole picking teams thing. 

Introverts like to participate. They really do. But they don’t need to be vocal about it. You won’t find them jumping up and down after someone picks them for a team. Therefore, they don’t get picked often.

No field trips, or the ability to opt out

Field trips are like the high dive for introverts. At least during a normal school day there is some structure. You go to one class and then another. There is a schedule. The teacher probably — hopefully? — even tells you where to sit in class. And then comes the field trip, which must be an extrovert’s Disneyland.

Not only do field trips usually involve long bus rides (see above), but the extroverts of the world seem to go into hyperdrive over them. It’s like someone fed them too much sugar. They literally are giddy over the idea of an unstructured, semi-spontaneous school day. There is very little personal space — no locker, no desk — and even lunch involves finding a park bench and listening to the overly excited extroverts again.

At an introverts’ school, there would be no field trips or the ability to opt out of them. At the very least, if they’re going to make you go on a field trip, they’re going to have to give you some nap time in your locker afterward.

Learning to Sail and Let Go

We mothers like to hover. Even those of us who preach about not hovering, well, sometimes we still hover. It’s hard to resist at times, despite what we know about letting go.

For me this summer, “letting go” came in the form of watching my older boys learn how to sail. Yes, on the water, in the wind, and with me watching helplessly from the shore. (Oh, I tried to sail with them once, but I immediately tipped the sailboat and was never invited back.)

Early this summer, friends of the family made an offer. They had a Sunfish, a small monohull sailboat, that hadn’t been on the water in a few years, and if our boys were interested, they’d loan it to them for the summer. My boys were definitely interested. The lake we go to has sailboat races every Sunday, and my boys wanted to be part of that. (Spoiler: a Sunfish cannot win against a Hobie Cat.)

The boat had belonged to our friends’ late son who had been a military pilot. He died young while serving in the United States Navy. With that bit of knowledge and history of the boat, my boys committed to racing it, win or lose (it would mostly be “lose”), every Sunday.

There was just one thing: My boys didn’t know how to sail.

So most days with even a hint of a breeze, they were on the water learning how to harness the wind with the Sunfish. I sat on the dock and watched them, all the while thinking about our friends’ son, the owner of the boat, and his mother.

The first time my oldest son raced the Sunfish alone, I trailed behind him in a motorboat. When I say I trailed behind him, I mean that I kept my distance (sort of) but stayed close enough to yell out really unhelpful advice. I just could not stop thinking about everything that could go wrong, and, well, he looked a bit like Truman at the end of the “Truman Show,” and that’s a very powerful ending. When my son eventually tipped the Sunfish, I was glad the motorboat was there to tow him back to shore.

My son felt otherwise: “Why did you trail me? That was the most annoying thing ever! I could have swum to shore!”

The next weekend, someone else from the racing group offered to take one of my sons on his Hobie Cat while the other son sailed the Sunfish with his grandfather. Since my dad had eyes on the Sunfish racer, I was free to hover at the Hobie Cat while the seasoned racer taught my son how to rig the sails. Someday, I know my sons will tell the story of how they learned to sail, and it will always include this generous racer whose voice exudes calm and patience.

But my son gave me a look that day that said, “You can go now,” as I stood awkwardly on the dock and asked whether he’d need a jacket. Finally, I got the picture. My boys are growing up. They don’t need me as much as before.

However, that didn’t stop me from getting on the committee boat, which is the official finish line of the race, and watching everything from there. And that’s when I saw up close how the Sunfish crawls to the finish (think: Spongebob’s “Two … hours … later …”) and the Hobie Cats zip along to the end.

But I also saw something else. My boys, under the instruction of their mentor, were capable and dedicated. They shifted their weight and their sails effortlessly. They tacked and — and, well, they did a bunch of other things that looked really cool but for which I have no eloquent words because I don’t know anything about sailing. And no matter how many hours had passed, if the boys were in the late-pilot’s Sunfish, they were determined to finish the race.

As the summer went on, the boys continued to practice with the Sunfish and they took turns helping race the Hobie Cat. I watched their confidence grow as I let myself relax.

The last sailboat race was this weekend, and there was a party afterward. My sons were some of the youngest participants by many years, and they also had the distinction of losing nearly every race for the entire season. But it never mattered. Those races, that Sunfish, and the older racers who had taken my boys under their, er, sail — it had all been about something more, something bigger. Because of the generosity of others, my boys gained a lifelong skill. But they gained also by learning from those of another generation and honoring the memory of someone who, like them, learned to sail at the lake.

My young sailors are forever better for it, and someday I know they will pay it forward. I’m just glad I finally got out of the way to let it happen.

In Defense of Snow days

When we moved to the Northeast 12 years ago, people’s concern for us was specific: How will they handle the winters? After our first year in Maine, however, my concern for people everywhere else we had lived — California, Florida, Virginia — was equally specific: How do they exist without the promise of snow days?

Sure, it snowed occasionally in Virginia, but in California and Florida, the only time our family had an unexpected day off was in the aftermath of a natural disaster. It’s not a true “family day” if your roof has been blown off and you have no air conditioning in Florida in August. 

Snow days, it turns out, are the best part of winter. They are the north’s best kept secret, a perk for adults, children — families. They are Christmas morning, Thanksgiving and the first day of summer rolled into one. Even when snow days delay the start of summer by a day or two, nothing compares to going to bed to the sound of snow plows and dreaming of an early-morning call from the school department. And when the call does come, the house is alive at 5 a.m. with the promise of pancakes, board games and sledding with friends. 

Snow days are some of our kids’ best childhood memories. As a mother, they are some of my fondest memories, too. So I was concerned when school departments began announcing plans to eliminate snow daysnow that everyone has figured out remote learning (thanks, COVID). 

But I’m not concerned just for sentimentality’s sake. I’m also concerned about the message we are sending our children. Ever since I got my first email address and, later, a smartphone, my work life has seeped into my home life. Beginning around 2009, I was suddenly available not just during work hours, but also while making dinner or watching a movie before bed. For adults, the phones in our back pockets have allowed constant work intrusion, a disruption to the work-life balance.

And in recent years, mental health experts have begun warning against it. Getting your “life in balance” never had more application than after electronics allowed our work life into our home life.

So why are we starting kids on this path in kindergarten? Why have we decided to tell them that just because the school is closed and the roads are impassable it doesn’t mean you can’t continue to burn the midnight oil? 

Our children have a whole lifetime ahead of them wrestling with work-life balance. They have a lifetime of being pinged at dinner or feeling obligated to check email before bed. Shouldn’t we begin teaching them now that sometimes work — and school — can wait? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And there is nothing wrong with taking a day off for family. 

We’re on the tip of a slippery slope now that remote learning has entered our lives. We adults have lived with the crushing reality of work-from-home life since the early 2000s. Let’s allow our kids to escape it while they can, and maybe, through our example, teach them to lead more balanced lives as adults in the future. 

Instead of telling our children that one missed day of school is a waste, let’s tell them that snow days are an important reminder to slow down, relax, and connect with family. In a pandemic era, we need those reminders — those snow days — more than ever.

When the First One Goes

We dropped Ford, our oldest, at college last month, and, stupidly, I cleaned his room soon after (not recommended). When I came out of Ford’s room crying, his younger brother, Owen (16), said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Ford’s not coming home to play with Legos,” I said.

By the look on Owen’s face, this already seemed obvious to him. Old news, if you will.

But for so many days, in the wake of Ford’s absence, I had buoyed myself with other people’s reminders that he will be back and, “He’s not gone forever.”

This advice appeared to be true. Ford would indeed be back soon for a family friend’s wedding.

But when I cleaned his room that day, I realized for the first time that although he is coming back, he isn’t coming back to play with the Legos. He will never be back to use the matchbox cars lined up on his bookshelf, which I was now dusting.

My son would come home for sure, but something was gone just the same, and that needed to be recognized.

With each toy I picked up in Ford’s room, I heard echoes of times gone by, times that won’t return, even as my adult son surely will.

Lifting a toy Darth Vader to dust underneath brought the sounds of a boyhood Ford promising to make his bed for a week if he could just get “one more action figure.”

Touching the small statue of a football player unleashed the sounds of Ford and his brothers wrestling in the front yard.

A toy Mustang heralded memories of little Ford sitting on his knees and pushing cars around our hallway rug, which served as his racetrack.

A board game shoved under the bed sent echoes of Ford running in the door after school to see if his new game had come in the mail.

And the Legos! The thousands and thousands of bricks each told me a story of the past, a time that is Not. Coming. Back.

And that’s what’s sad.

It’s not Ford being gone or starting his own life. I’m happy for Ford and what awaits him.

It’s echoes of a time that has passed that brings the tears. It’s grief.

And yet, standing at the kitchen counter that day, with a dust rag in my hand, Owen looked at my tear-stained face with utter confusion.

“I don’t play with Legos anymore either, Mom,” he said matter of factly. “And Ford will be back.”

Yes, but my Little Ford is gone. I see that now.

And soon it will be the same with Owen.