Uniforms

Aside from a few undergraduate and graduate classes that I took at a community college and Bowie State University, I attended private schools from Kindergarten through my master's degree, and I earned my doctorate at a public university. From Kindergarten through fifth grade I attended schools where the students had to follow a dress code (girls couldn't wear pants and skirts had to come down to the knee for example). When I went into sixth grade, the school where I had gone since fourth grade implemented a school uniform. I did NOT like it one iota. I thought it was ugly, and I hated having so little variation in what I wore and in what I saw my schoolmates wearing. Boring! Now trust me when I say that at no point in my life have I ever come anywhere close to being a "fashionista." I don't think I've ever been bad enough to warrant a nomination for the show "What not to wear," but I've never been a trend setter or one that wanted to wear the latest fashion (although I do remember really wanting a Benetton t-shirt when I was in high school). I wore uniforms for a grand total of four years, and this was one of the factors in choosing where I went to school for tenth and eleventh grades (I was hoping to avoid wearing uniforms).

The schools where I taught from 1992-1996 had uniforms. I found I wasn't keen on them as a teacher either. I thought it was boring to look out across the classroom and see a sea of navy blue. Also, I am not a visual person, and so I didn't always notice the infractions that I was supposed to notice as a teacher. I remember once an administrator saying something to be about the fact that some of my girls were not wearing the right socks, and I was supposed to say something to them. Really? Socks?!? I couldn't exactly understand why there were rules about what socks they could and couldn't wear, but of course I did my duty and said something to the girls and hoped somehow I would notice in the future although noticing something like socks definitely didn't come naturally to me. The school where I was a principal for seven years did not have uniforms when I came. Some parents wanted me to implement a uniform policy, but it never happened.

Here in our home school, my requirement is that the kids change out of their pajamas either before or after they eat breakfast, and they usually eat breakfast pretty soon after they get up, although a couple of days ago Nadia wanted to finish listening to Ramona the Brave on cd in her room before she came down for breakfast. Given how my kids like to dress up in costumes, it might seem like our school uniform is a costume. Oliver doesn't initiate wearing costumes yet, but sometimes his siblings help him put on a costume at their initiative. As you can see from the photos in this post, they had him wearing a monkey costume earlier this week. To make it more fun, if Nadia is wearing a costume then I don't call her by name while she's doing her schoolwork, but rather I call her "Snow White" or whomever she is dressed up to be at the moment. I'm thrilled given how many costume changes he goes through in one day that Ian became independent with putting costumes on earlier this year.