“Kindergarten is kind of boring, but you learn a lot.”

This is Jordan’s assessment of public school so far. Things seem to be going very well; he’s enthusiastic at dropoffs, learning the new routines, trying out new friends, and generally seeming very functional. Every morning he and I walk the one block to school together; he carries his own backpack and lunchbox, puts them on a very faded blue star on the asphalt to mark his place in the line for Room 2, and runs off to play on the playground for a few minutes. At 9:15, the whistle blows, and all the children stampede over to line up. Their teacher leads them to their classroom. Jordan waves cheerfully at me and seems into it. When school gets out, Coach Terra from the JCC meets him at the totem pole with three other kids and they walk down the hill for Kidstown. The other Kidstown kids are a nice small group of his closest school buddies from last year. I think it must be quite a relief at the end of the day to have these familiar faces, and to be one of the big Kidstown kids, whom he has always admired.

I have no idea what happens in his classroom all day. It’s his world. We get some entertaining little windows into events and routines, which I’ll try to post about.

The overt signs are all positive, but there are some indirect indicators that Jordan is anxious, like not eating his lunch. That lunchroom is huge and loud and strangely lit and they eat at long tables; it seems pretty overwhelming even to me, and possibly unappetizing, too. When I asked him what lunch is like at his new school he said, “It’s kind of like when you have to go down to the office,” referring to a disciplinary procedure at his old school, “because you have to be completely quiet. There is music playing and when the music is on you don’t use your voice.” I assume this is for the walk down the hall, because the school has staggered lunch periods. Jordan talked me through the routine of finding somewhere to sit, opening up your lunchbox, etc. Then he looked a little intense and said, “It’s a little bit strange for me, because there are a lot of people that I don’t know and only a few people that I do know.” Ah… yes. This is the case. We reminisced about his old school, how at first he had not known anyone there, either, and now those were his good friends. Hopefully that will help him be patient.