Sigh.

I read it more as an account of a different kind of school system. After all, the article didn’t talk about how the kids adjusted *outside of* school at all.

And it might not seem like such a brave choice to immerse his kids in Russian schooling, but *so* many expats (as opposed to immigrants) choose to live completely separately from the host society that I think it is actually a reasonably brave choice. (The same ones often seem to be those who also can’t stop complaining about the culture they are living in, and saying how much better everything was back home).

I understand the parents’ motivation here, but taking chances and experimenting with your kids’ safety so that you can pat yourself on the back for Having Principles makes me really uncomfortable. It’s not that moving to another country for work is irresponsible, not at all. But the adults in this situation required their kids to do something they weren’t doing. To me, that’s another reason why this self-congratulatory attitude is misplaced.

Going to a foreign country with lavish resources and an understanding that it’s temporary is not in any way comparable to leaving everything and everyone you know forever out of desperation and coming to a new country without money, language skills, or connections. Immigration is not an extended vacation.

My parents would never ever go in to meet the teacher on the scheduled day. Then the well meaning teacher would send home a note about working their convenience and all the reasons why they needed to come. They would be shamed into coming by. This would be so embarrassing for me, because now it was just my folks and the teacher, as opposed to a big group of parents.

Truth be told I don’t know the real reason why the wouldn’t come. It may have been their very heavy work load, and it may have been the language barrier.

But sometimes I suspect they were a little insulted by the whole setup at school. One time very early on, the nun who was the principal asked her and my father to speak to me in English so I could learn English faster.

Now my mother is a devout Catholic who would not contradict the RCC lightly. But in this case she said yes to the nun out loud and a big fat FU in her head.

Slightly OT but

I didn’t know it at the time but one of my teachers did something similar for me. I was teased (bullied really) quite badly in elementary school and at one point one of the teachers took three of the worst offenders into a portable classrooms and treated them the way they had been treating me. According to my mom it ended with one of the boys breaking down and crying which is why this made me think of it.