Ingo Prefers Not To

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The high-school guidance counselor was diligently rounding up the usual suspects. My ex-husband, my daughter, Ingo, as she's asked to be called here, and I had come in for a meeting. I sat on one sofa, Ingo's dad sat on another, and when Ingo herself joined us, she plopped down beside me and spent a good part of the session leaning on me. Her dad did most of the talking, reviewing familiar ground, telling how Ingo was disorganized, how she needed to get better at doing her homework, how hard we were willing to work with her to do that. Eventually the counselor asked for input from Ingo, which was polite but minimal, then sent her back to class. Once she left, he presented us with his hypothesis. He had observed that Dad had done most of the talking and Ingo had sat with Mom. Based on this dynamic, he suggested that perhaps Dad really wanted her to do well in school and I was conspiring with her against him. After all, there was tension in every divorce. He suggested counseling. We declined.

Back on the street, walking together toward the subway, Ingo's dad and I shrugged over the counselor's diagnosis and talked about what we thought we could do to get our daughter through high school. We hadn't found the session with the counselor particularly helpful, but we understood why we, or rather I, stood accused. There had to be a simple explanation as to why a girl as smart as Ingo did so badly in school.

When her school career began, Ingo was a curly-headed little girl who had begun writing as soon as she could hold a crayon and was reading on her own shortly after she turned five. Both her parents were English teachers who spent time reading and writing; those things came naturally to her. We valued education of course, having chosen to spend our lives in it, and we sent her off to school with the cheerful expectation that Ingo would enjoy it and benefit from it as we had. Instead, she bucked the system from the very beginning.

School never held any mystique for Ingo. Early in first grade, she flounced home one afternoon and declared, "Ms. Giampiccolo thinks she's so great because she's a teacher."

Her annoying, flawed parents were both teachers, after all; why would anyone think that was so great?

Ms. Giampiccolo turned out to be the kind who tore up homework that displeased her in front of the first grader who had done it, a terrible teacher sandwiched between Ingo's fabulous kindergarten and second-grade teachers. We thought it was the luck of the draw and that things would improve, but it turned out that Ingo's six-year-old comment set the tone for her school career. Generally she tended not to be outspokenly disrespectful or rebellious; she just withdrew from classroom activities that didn't engage her and was less than forthcoming about how much homework she had or what it was. Teachers who treated her like an intelligent human being with interesting ideas of her own, as her kindergarten and second-grade teachers did, got more from her than teachers who tried to pull rank. But even the best teachers, the ones who let us know that they enjoyed Ingo despite her contrary ways, the ones who told us that she reminded them of their own children who had turned out fine, had twenty-five students in a class and curricula to manage.

Reports of the death of public schools in New York City have been exaggerated. There exists an extensive array of excellent alternative public schools, and Ingo's father and I were able to move her from her nicely functioning but somewhat traditional neighborhood school to an alternative school across the river in Manhattan after her third-grade year. By the time she was nine, she felt, in true Ingo spirit, perfectly capable of making the commute by subway on her own, and in time we compromised. Her...