Pulling Bella Out of First Grade for SMA: I Asked Her Teacher

I had the conversation I'd been dreading with Bella's first-grade teacher. Here's what she actually said — and what make-up work in first grade really looks like.

By Christina Hayes·

I had been practicing the conversation in my head for two weeks. Bella's first-grade teacher, Mrs. Reyes, is a person I respect in the way you respect anyone who voluntarily spends six hours a day with twenty-three six-year-olds. I did not want to disappoint her. I also did not want to back down. I wanted to pull Bella out for nine school days at the end of October so we could be in San Miguel for Día de los Muertos, and I had decided that I was going to do it whether Mrs. Reyes endorsed it or not, but I really, really wanted her to endorse it.

I have read the louder posts on this blog — the ones where the message is essentially "pull them out, don't apologize, the teacher works for you." I am not built that way. I'm a former gringa who moved her kid to Mexico and made a thousand cultural mistakes the first year and is still working out how to be a parent who advocates for her kid without being the kind of parent teachers dread. I needed the conversation to go well, and I was going to do it on Mrs. Reyes's terms, not the internet's.

What I prepared

I went into the conference with three things written down. Not a printed document — I was not going to be that mom — but a list in my notes app I could refer to.

  • The reason. Día de los Muertos in SMA is a family ritual that predates Bella's schooling. Our former landlord, who is in his late sixties, has been part of this ritual since Bella was three. We will not skip it.
  • The dates. October 28 to November 5. Nine school days.
  • What I was offering. A daily journal entry, math practice if she had a packet, a read-aloud log, and a willingness to do whatever she wanted us to do.

I sat down. I said the thing. I waited.

What Mrs. Reyes actually said

She smiled. She said, and I am paraphrasing because I was too anxious to take notes, the following:

  1. She had been teaching first grade for eleven years.
  2. She had never had a parent regret a culturally-meaningful trip.
  3. She had occasionally had parents regret pulling kids out for theme park trips, but that wasn't what we were talking about.
  4. The amount of academic ground a first grader "misses" in nine days is, in her professional estimation, recoverable in about three afternoons. The bigger question is the social rhythm of the classroom — was Bella in a stable place socially? (She was. She is.)
  5. What she wanted in exchange was: the journal, twenty minutes of reading per night, and one show-and-tell artifact when Bella came back. That was it.

Then she said something that flattened me a little. She said: "I wish more of my parents would do this for the right reasons. The kids who travel for cultural reasons come back changed. The kids who go to Disney come back tired."

What "make-up work" actually looks like in first grade

I want to be honest about this because I think the fear of "make-up work" is bigger than the make-up work. Here is what we actually do:

  • Read 20 minutes a night. We do this anyway. We did this in SMA before any teacher asked us to. This is not extra work; this is dinner-and-a-book.
  • One journal entry a day. Bella draws a picture and writes one or two sentences underneath. Often in Spanglish. Mrs. Reyes loves this; she said the bilingual entries are the best part of the year.
  • A small math packet. Sight words and addition within twenty. Total time investment across nine days: maybe forty minutes.
  • A show-and-tell artifact. Last year it was a pressed cempasúchil petal. This year Bella has decided in advance that it will be "a story Don Luis tells me."

That is the whole list. That is the entirety of "making up" first grade for nine days.

What Bella learns on the trip that she doesn't learn in school

I want to be careful not to overstate this, because I know how easy it is for the pulling-them-out argument to tip into a kind of homeschool-is-better triumphalism. School is doing things for Bella I cannot do. But for nine days a year, there are also things SMA does for her that school cannot.

  • She uses Spanish in the wild. Not at home, not on a video call, but with a vendor who is genuinely impatient and a six-year-old who needs to make herself understood. This is the version of Spanish that sticks.
  • She participates in a ritual that has the weight of place behind it. Building an altar in our actual old courtyard with Don Luis is not the same as making one at home in Colorado. It cannot be the same. The geography is part of the meaning.
  • She watches Eddie operate in his second life. Eddie ran a B&B in SMA for four years. When we go back, people remember him; he speaks Spanish in the registers he learned running the B&B; he is a different version of himself there, in a way Bella registers without my having to explain.
  • She comes back with stories the other kids do not have. This is, on its own, a small thing, but it gives her a kind of confidence I would not know how to teach her.
I know the louder voices on this blog have been saying "pull them out" for years. I'm coming around to it more every trip. Slowly. In my own voice. With permission, in writing, from Mrs. Reyes.

I left the conference and called Eddie from the car and cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but accurate. Mrs. Reyes had given me something I didn't know I needed, which was the official endorsement of the part of our family life that has felt, since we moved back to Colorado, like a thing we were doing in defiance of the calendar. We aren't. We're doing it in cooperation with a system that is more flexible than I had given it credit for. We're going to SMA next week. The journal is in Bella's backpack. Don Luis is expecting us. The cempasúchil are already up.