Light and Momentary

Grumble

So! Online learning is not off to a great start. These are the things I hate:

1. The kids are required to use district-issued laptops. Which are terrible: laggy, unpredictable, massively frustrating.
2. The district is using Google Classroom, which seems to be creaking and groaning under its current load: more lags, more frustration.
3. Google Classroom is spewing out enough automated email to overwhelm my sixth-grader, but the teachers are not providing much guidance as they require her to do stuff she's never done before. It's not hard to make a video and embed it in a PowerPoint slide, but it's also not a skill anybody is born with. And at the risk of sounding bitchy and entitled I'm going to say, here at the end of our third very long online learning day, that I don't think it should be my job to walk her through each one of those steps during the workday on a sub-par machine in an overloaded course management system.
4. The teachers are scrambling, and I can't fault them for that. The district did not give them much notice here; they're not to blame for that. But at the same time I'm already weary of the fallout. If you tell an 11-year-old rule-follower that she's required to use a particular app, but the terms of service say it's only available to kids 12 and up, I am going to be the one smoothing down her ruffled conscience. Oh, and can we talk about missing class for a dentist appointment? and the teacher who, when emailed about makeup assignments, said Stella would need to watch the recording of the entire synchronous class session? Would it surprise you to learn that this was not in fact a good use of her time?
5. The kids are lonely, and it is hard to build community over online video. I do not envy the teachers and administrators their tasks. Maybe, though, the kids could talk to each other sometimes? Maybe a little more communication with classmates, a little less reliance on parents?

In this moment I am feeling very grumpy, very flounce-y. It could be so much worse, I know: we have reliable internet service, my job is the most flexible that it will ever be, I have smart kids who are trying hard to be independent, and when they can't be independent I can (mostly) answer their questions about embedding videos and solving pre-calculus problems.

Counting my blessings is not actually helping me feel any better right this minute.

May 26

In the fall of 2006 I put my two oldest kids in school-school for the first time, after four years of homeschooling. Off they went to the neighborhood elementary school, a small brick building a half-mile from our house. For fourteen years now I've had a kid at Neighborhood Elementary. 

This morning Stella and I drove down together to drop off the books she brought home in March and to pick up the items she left in the classroom. As instructed, we made a sign with her name on it to hold up to the driver's side window, so they could retrieve the right bag. After a brief exchange with the person who works at the front desk, we drove away.

I haven't been a very involved school mom. I volunteered in the classroom occasionally, but I never joined the PTO. In the parallel universe where there is no COVID-19 pandemic I would probably have been a little grumpy about the fifth-grade awards night, thinking to myself, "Seriously, people, we don't have to get all Sunrise, Sunset about the end of fifth grade." So I was surprised to find myself a little teary as we pulled out of the parking lot for the last time.

It seemed like such a huge change to send our kids there. And it was, I guess. Nobody was making them memorize The Raven at Neighborhood Elementary (seriously, Past Jamie, you were kind of a nut); there was a heavier emphasis on team sports and finishing all of the math problems on the worksheet. 

I guess any institution that's woven into your daily life for fourteen years is going to leave a space when it goes away. When we first became a Neighborhood Elementary family I was 36 and my oldest was 9. He raised his hand after the first test was returned and asked, "Can you tell me what the mean was?" The teacher told me about about this episode in hushed tones, saying, "Of course I told him we don't talk about that in this classroom." At the time I felt like such an outsider. Was there a social code in play here that I had failed to learn? In hindsight it seems more likely that she was not accustomed to being asked about mean scores.

As the years went by I felt less uncertain. I am thinking about the teachers who got my kids, who presided over classrooms where they could thrive. I am thinking about the occasional teachers for whom thriving seemed to be a lower priority than complying. I am thinking about the teachers with staying power, who have known all five of my kids whether or not they taught them. And I am also thinking about the day that Stella and I saw a surprise heron in the creek that runs past the school. Maybe the heron is a good reminder for today: life is full of unexpected loveliness, and every variety of temporal goodness comes to an end.

The girl who did not yet exist when we first sent kids to school is 11 now, and I will turn 50 this summer. It's always true, I suppose, that you don't know what lies ahead when you send kids off to a new place. But I've never felt it quite as keenly as I do this year.

Some boats need rocking

My 12yo is sitting at the dining room table on the very edge of tears. He's been working on math since he got home from Scouts. First Elwood was helping him; now I'm walking him through the last few problems. I just learned that this isn't a homework set: his teacher wanted them to complete all of these practice problems so they would be ready for a standardized test tomorrow. He didn't happen to mention whether they'd be graded or not.

"Please don't email him," said Pete, inching closer to tears. But I'm telling you: this guy deserves an email. Too much homework for any weeknight, too many disparate half-forgotten topics cram-jammed into one assignment, and too little clarity about his expectations, so that kids are left thinking, "If I bail, I might fail."

"Have you ever had trouble because of an email I've written?" I asked him, surprised. (I write very few unhappy emails to teachers; this would be the second for Pete in his eight years of school.)  "No," he said, his voice wobbly. "But please don't."

"Some boats need rocking," I told him, but I also told him that for tonight I would write a crabby blog post instead. Some boats need rocking, I tell you.

A day away

Today I left home at 6:30 to visit Joe at school. They were having an open house, so I spent the morning meeting most of his teachers. Joe joined me at lunchtime for Chipotle and a haircut. We walked around the grounds and talked and caught up and played a ridiculous game of ping-pong. We are both bad at ping-pong but we are an evenly matched kind of bad. He beat me 21-19, entirely because I cannot return his serves from the left side of the table.

You guys, it was so good to see him. I just wanted to feast my eyes on his face. This time I didn't cry when I left but I am definitely a little teary at the memory.

BUT ANYWAY. It is a great place. He is really happy there -- he misses us, but in a manageable way.

Here is a weird thought: in some ways, his entirely secular school seems more Catholic to me than our local Catholic high school. This is partly because of its diversity. It feels strange to me to be in an ethnic minority, but that's the way it is at his school. In the first class I visited there were 14 sets of parents represented. Only 4 of us appeared to be of European descent. It's also because of the value they place on curiosity and on learning as a lifelong unfolding -- not a set of hoops to jump through or boxes to tick off. Another issue is the socioeconomic climate. I am certain that there are plenty of wealthy families sending their kids there, but I asked him about how the vibe compared. At the local high school there's a troubling set of expectations: which subdivision you live in and which car you drive and where you go on vacation carry more weight than I wish they did. "It's nothing like that here," he said. "It's, like, the opposite of Gladlyville Catholic in that way."

The last time I mentioned the local Catholic high school I was grousing vaguely yet again -- that was really just about one teacher. They've given most of the advanced literature classes to a woman who seems to be lukewarm about literature. I wrote about her here. When she took attendance on the first day she said to my 17yo, "I haven't missed you," a pronouncement that sparked my ire last month. Most of the teachers there are trying hard to teach subjects they love. They are certainly not in it for the money. The trouble with a small school, though, is that it's hard to avoid the few bad teachers. And when you couple that with the money thing, and the political climate in which social justice is regarded with suspicion-- I don't really see us sending the younger kids there.

Today's trip was possible because Elwood agreed to cover everything at home: soccer + one-car kid-wrangling + Saturday housekeeping jobs. One of the few areas of friction in our marriage is that he doesn't do housecleaning. Today, though, he covered my jobs and made sure the kids did theirs, so I was free to luxuriate in my time with Joe. I miss that boy.

Make it stop

Tell me, please, about schools that handle communications with families wisely. Because I think there must be a better way.

Our district sends out automated calls to families multiple times per week. In theory, I'm on board with that. If there's a school closing or another kind of emergency, I want to know about it promptly. By all means, call all of the numbers you have on file.

Emergencies are rare, though. (Thankfully.) Unfortunately, our district handles all notifications like emergencies, blasting out information across every available channel. If there's an already-planned change to the next day's schedule -- one I put on my calendar when they told me about it last month -- I don't need to get four separate notifications about it. They call my landline (at dinnertime, natch). My cell buzzes from across the room. They call my office, even though it's 6:30 in the evening and I won't get the message until the following day, after the schedule change is in effect. And they send me an email notification for good measure.

This is excessive. Strangely, they never call my husband, even though his work number is current in their system. Is there an automated decision process somewhere, some algorithm deciding that five notifications would be a bridge too far? Or is it institutional sexism, in which the assumption is that moms handle school issues and are more likely to do work that can be interrupted?

I also get four separate notifications every time a school official wants to remind families about something. Go to the restaurant that's giving us a portion of their proceeds tonight! Come to the dance tomorrow! Wear nice clothes for pictures on Friday! Listen while I read aloud the policy on lunch accounts or tank tops or both!

I do not need four separate notifications about any of those things.

It's unlikely but not impossible that I'll take the whole family to Noodles for a school fundraiser. But I really seriously do not need four separate notifications about things that don't pertain to my family at all. The junior high vice-principal is the worst offender. The first time I got a menacing message saying, "Parents, this message is going out to families whose students have received multiple detentions this term," I was pretty alarmed. I didn't know about even one detention! What could have happened? 

What happened, and what keeps happening, is that the vice-principal is having a hard time figuring out the messaging system. Instead of targeting the families whose kids have received multiple detentions, or the families whose students are actually on the delayed bus, he sends his messages out to the whole school. That's nine hundred families, each getting four notices (or more? almost all dads have cell phones, right? even though my husband is trapped in the last millennium searching fruitlessly for a pay phone?), when the target audience was a tenth or a twentieth that size.

I don't even listen when he calls these days. In fact, the district has taught me that the best use of my time is to ignore all of their calls, to assume they're calling about a minor issue that I can deal with at my convenience, or never.

It's like a newer version of a 1990s car alarm. At first we all whipped our heads around -- emergency! Then we all learned to disregard them -- even if they were telling us something worth listening to.

This fall has brought a record number of email contacts telling me that the schools are using new third-party sites which require me to sign up for effective communication with my children's teachers. Also, the teachers can choose which platform they prefer, so I'll need to check multiple platforms for optimal results. Also, Google Classroom is going to send me weekly updates that describe every assignment my seventh-grader is doing. What would my mother have done if my seventh-grade teachers had wanted her to review every assignment I did in a week, I wonder? Something emphatic, I am certain. Some days I think 1982 took place on a different planet.

I am having a wicked thought: maybe all of the frustrated Gladlyville parents could make a pact: we could filter our unwanted email notifications so that they skipped our inboxes and were forwarded to the technology-challenged vice-principal at my son's junior high. Probably then he'd be too busy with his delete key to spray out grumpy messages to the wrong audience. Win!

Cautiously Optimistic

This morning we met with one of the theology teachers to talk about the presence of antisemitic slurs at our sons' Catholic high school. I think it went well. The teacher was not surprised to hear about our concern. "I just gave somebody a detention for that," he said. The kid pushed back, apparently, arguing that he didn't deserve a detention ("there's nothing wrong with saying that!") (for real, he said that to a teacher) (in the year 2017) (can you even?) (my even-er is fried), so the teacher was also not surprised to hear that our son's efforts to make it stop hadn't gone anywhere. On the plus side, he said the kid in question was in a group of 5 other kids at the time, all of whom winced and said, "You can't say that!"

In the car afterward I said to my husband that it seemed serendipitous that this teacher had just seen firsthand the very same issue and the very same resistance that have been worrying us. "I think you mean horrifying," said Elwood, which is also true. But it's a serendipitous kind of horrifying, because the theology teacher is going to talk to the rest of the theology department and to the principal today, and say, "How can we address this problem that I myself have observed with my own eyes and ears?" And maybe his detention write-up will satisfy part of the principal's need to know who exactly is saying this stuff.

We talked with the teacher for about 20 minutes, and he mentioned a lot of the same issues that have been weighing on me. He tells his students about Church teaching on social justice and preferential love for the poor, and hears "but they didn't earn it!" He is married to a woman whose grandfather immigrated from Mexico, and so immigration questions have particular resonance for them. I said, "There are some pockets of alt-right nastiness here that concern us," and he nodded in agreement. "Before the election..." he began, and trailed off, shaking his head. We talked about possible responses together. (And oh, you guys, thank you for your comments here! I pulled some of my suggestions straight out of your comments.) This teacher wants to do the right thing here, I am certain. I don't know what will happen from here. I don't know how much influence the school can wield if some kids are getting a steady diet of Breitbart and worse at home. But if they're willing to listen, and willing to try -- that's all we're asking.

In the morning

My husband and I are sitting down with the junior theology teacher tomorrow to talk about the antisemitism issue. Pray for a fruitful meeting, please.

Update

I called the diocese, where I talked to a very sensible associate superintendent. "What's the most productive way for me to proceed here?" I asked him. He had an excellent suggestion for me: request a meeting with the chaplain (he advised me to mention his name in my request), and ask the chaplain to think about ways to address the school culture issue together with the theology faculty. He wants to know what happens. He struck exactly the right note, you guys, and I am feeling much less like setting something on fire or flouncing over to the school to withdraw my boys. I'll keep you posted.

Your questions answered, sort of

Three of the comments on my November 1 post about potential NaBloPoMo topics had to do with education. Swimmermom asked about picking colleges. My answer is not very illuminating: the Venn diagram of "colleges he got into" and "colleges we could (just barely) afford" contained exactly one school. Jody asked me to write about how much high school stinks, which makes for a short post (Jamie says: yes, it does; hang in there, Jody). And Rosemary asked about homeschooling.

I homeschooled for four years, motivated by my firstborn's tricky combination of adamantine will and superconducting brain. I was, frankly, kind of a nut. Last week I was flipping through an old file folder in search of his vaccine records and came across this record of a week in the middle of his kindergarten year:

"Finished Great Expectations!" enthused 2003 Jamie. I think if I had a piece of advice for my 2003 self, it would be to chill out. I was facing some pretty fierce grandparent opposition to homeschooling (from one grandparent in particular, who had a regrettable tendency to make stuff up in support of dubious assertions), and I felt the need to be a one-woman demonstration of the power of homeschooling. I would help them steward their gifts! I would enrich their environment! I would share the wondrous world with them! I would occasionally get really crabby and stressed out because I was trying to make a kindergartner and his third-grade brother memorize all 1085 words of The Raven! (Oh, wait, the crabby/stressed out bit wasn't actually part of the plan.)

Maybe the most important thing I have learned about kids and education is that I don't need to be quite so wound up about it. Kids are wired to learn: they're going to pick up things I don't even expect them to. Good luck with your decisions, Rosemary -- probably Bearing or Melanie B. would have more current advice about third-grade options. But I can tell you that it will probably work out fine, whichever way you decide to go.

Meekness, Mistreatment, and Mama Bears, or What Will the Ursine Inherit?

For a while after our meeting with the principal, things were better. But Joe came home on Thursday feeling glum. He had been drawing during a read-aloud, which is okay during normal read-alouds but not during this one, for some reason. And then later, during some down time, he had been folding origami. He didn't get in trouble for folding origami per se, but for folding it too loudly. (This baffles me. I listen to a lot of origami being folded at my house. It is not a noisy affair.)

This pair of infractions meant that he would miss out on the next lunch in the classroom. While his classmates stayed in their room, he would go alone to the cafeteria, where he would sit alone to eat. He said he didn't think it had ever happened to anyone else, all year. At bedtime he said, tearfully, "Sometimes people have to clip down twice in one day but she always gives them a chance to clip back up. And I tried all afternoon to clip back up but she never noticed when I was doing anything right."

For a moment I wanted to go to her house and ring her doorbell repeatedly and point my finger in her face and say, "You, Mrs. Rutabaga, you are the embodiment of all that is wrong with American public education." I wanted to pick Joe up at lunchtime on the day of his scheduled exile and take him somewhere extravagant and feed him lots of garlic so he would stink up her classroom for the rest of the afternoon.

Because Jesus was all about shaking his finger in people's faces and plotting passive-aggressive stunts.

The next day Joe came home with two further minor infractions: while waiting for a lesson to start, he had been folding a Post-it note in quarters. Neither of us can remember the other one now but it was exactly the same kind of thing. He said, "It doesn't really matter. I wasn't bad enough to get a pink slip and she already took away my chance to eat lunch in the classroom."

You shouldn't work with kids for years if you don't know a basic truth: when you come down hard on their minor infractions, when you don't let them find a way back, they stop caring about your rules. (Especially if they are rules about loud origami.)

This is exactly what I meant when I told the principal I wasn't sure their relationship was salvageable. The thought of him sitting there hopefully at his desk, doing his best to please her all afternoon and getting exactly nowhere, makes me very sad. Also wrathful and disgusted, but mostly sad.

Elwood wants me to email the principal. I feel like That Parent emailing the principal without listening to the teacher's side of the story. The thought of listening to the teacher's side of the story makes me want to swear pre-emptively. So! I am complaining about her on the internet instead. Jesus probably did lots of that too.

This is one of the hardest things about being a Christian woman, I think: how do we balance meekness and assertiveness? What should our stance be toward people who don't treat our children as we think they ought to be treated? The extremes are easy to figure out: you do your best to send the predator to prison (while seeking grace to forgive), and you teach your child to extend grace to, say, the blind person whose cane trips him up as he's walking down the street. And then there is this vast uncertain middle ground. My kids need to know that they do not ooze sunshine and rainbows from every pore, that sometimes they goof things up and life is hard and they have to suck it up with all the good cheer they can muster. My kids also need to know that I am always, always there for them, and that I will not let people mistreat them or bully them.

(I am writing in haste because I should really be working, not blogging, and because a deadline approacheth. Please pardon any murkiness in my writing or thinking.)

Elwood is right, I think. I should write to the principal, just to let her know what's going on. I will do that today, internet, even if it leaves me feeling like That Parent, because my previous exchanges with Mrs. Rutabaga have left me reasonably confident that she and I are unlikely to see eye to eye. Here's the deadline part: do I leave my office hours early so that I can go and have lunch with Joe? Nothing fancy, just a friendly sandwich somewhere outside of school? I think I do, internet; I think I do.

I was walking to the office this morning thinking, "This is exactly why people get so caught up in dictating others' behavior, because it's easier than addressing our own shortcomings." For today, the plank in my own eye is feeling like plenty to deal with. (Hey, does anybody need a little mote-ectomy? It might be a welcome distraction.) For today, my path to holiness requires me to love my son, tenderly and fiercely and in a way that will help him to grow. It requires me to love my enemies patiently and forbearingly (shut up, spellcheck), even when I would rather buttonhole them and gossip about them. And do you know what? I'm not finding it easy to walk that path today.

The Meeting

You guys, thanks so much for your prayers and support.

Some backstory: Mrs. Rutabaga has been at this school for as long as we've had kids there. I don't view her as incompetent. I think she's kind of rigid. I think she doesn't know exactly what to do with kids who are moving faster than usual. I think she's not a person I'd want to meet for coffee and chitchat. I'm not going to try to get her fired based on what happened Tuesday.

When our oldest son was in fifth grade, she taught his math class. He spent most of the time out in the hall, working ahead on his own. This is the teacher who stonewalled us when we asked if she had any ideas about how we could prepare him at home for the junior high math placement test. She said, "No one from this school has ever placed out of sixth grade math and I can't help you." She wasn't ugly about it; it just hadn't occurred to her that he would be the first one (apparently? hard for me to believe that's really true) to nail that test. He's taking calculus as a sophomore now, but I can't say she helped him get there.

She was in the meeting today; her students were in art class. I forgot to take my beta blocker beforehand, and so my heart was stuttering in angry bursts as I told her how baffling I found her reaction, how poorly her emphasis on answering (inane) reading comprehension questions meshed with my own long-term goals for Joe, how concerned I was about Joe's recurring Sunday night malaise and increasing stomachaches. I am desperately bad at conflict, you guys, so I am pleased that I was able to say, in a level voice, that my son had been consistently bored and miserable in her class and that things needed to change.

We learned some useful things in the meeting: there have been licensing issues, now resolved, with the math software that let Joe work ahead painlessly last year. He's been getting sucked into the antics of a group of troublemaking boys, which explains some of the teacher's background frustration.

After the teacher left the principal said, "You don't seem to feel at peace about the situation," and I said, "No, I do not. I am not at all convinced that their relationship can recover at this point." We talked about switching him into the other fifth grade class. The principal is open to the idea but is somewhat reluctant to do so. This year Mrs. Rutabaga is teaching math and language arts to the faster-moving kids from both classes, so it's far from a perfect solution. For a few different reasons, the principal said she'd prefer to switch him after Christmas break if the problems continue -- not yank him right away. Part of me wonders if I should have pulled a flounce at that point: "No, you will move him TODAY or we will take him OUT of your school." I'm not really a flouncer, though, and she made it very clear that she's willing to work with us.

The principal pulled Joe into her office shortly after we left. She told him that no one -- at school or at home -- wants him to be bored and unhappy. She told him that it will be fine for him to work ahead as long as he demonstrates mastery of the basic material first. On a recent math pre-test, not realizing that it could be his ticket to working independently on interesting stuff, he tore through the front and skipped the back. Elwood and I agree that it's important for him to be diligent. It's that same old thing with math education, though, one of the very things that spurred me to homeschool: when are you measuring and fostering competence, and when are you drilling your students into counterproductive boredom?

So. The short-term plan is for him to run with the happy math software and to have ready access to books that interest him. Mrs. Rutabaga is not going to send him out in the hallway to trudge through pages of reading comprehension questions as punishment for his initiative and interest. The gifted program has just started up, and he will have access to his current gifted project in the classroom as well. If things do not improve rapidly, we'll let the principal know and we can try switching classes. I do think she has his best interests at heart -- she sent me an email about their meeting that said, "He is a fabulous kid!"

If that doesn't help, putting him in our parish school would be the next strategy. We've talked about homeschooling, but Joe agrees that he would be lonely if it were just the two of us -- he is the most social of all the boys. Still, it could be an option if we needed it to be. I'll keep you posted. Thanks again for your prayers and good wishes.

Next

We're meeting with the principal in the morning.

I decided it was unwise to reply to the email that so incensed me, because I couldn't draft more than a sentence without swearing and because I was getting sucked into the petty. I'm not going to be petty. (MOVING ON now, sailing serenely past the temptation to regale you with details.) I sent a brief email saying that Elwood and I wanted to talk in person.

She said we could meet six days later.

I think it's generally a bad idea to go over someone's head without trying to work things out first, but -- really? Six days? I don't think so.

So. Nine o'clock. Prayers appreciated.

Getting it out of my system

Dear Mrs. Rutabaga,

I started receiving email in January of 1993, almost 20 years ago. In all that time, the email you sent me last night is the only one to which I've ever been tempted to reply with an obscene and anatomically improbable directive.

My son, your student, is miserable in your class. I know it is frustrating for you that he is not meeting your classroom expectations. You have apparently failed to consider, however, that the reason he is not meeting your classroom expectations is that your classroom is not meeting his expectations -- namely, that he would be learning.

It was a red flag for me when I sat in your classroom for half an hour at the meet-the-teacher event in August and heard nothing, not a word, about what the kids would be studying. I learned a lot about your discipline policies, about how they move their clothespins up and down depending on whether they've been good or bad, about how they can buy potato chips with their good behavior points. I have no idea -- none -- what your goals are for social studies or science or math or language arts.

My son came home yesterday with unhappiness etched all over his face. When I asked him what the trouble was, he burst into tears and begged to be homeschooled. You had told the kids they needed to read The Giver according to your schedule. His crime, his unspeakable transgression, was to get so excited about the book that he came home on Monday and dug up our family's copy to finish the story. He was so eager to talk about it with me -- why did it end that way? What would it be like to live in a world like that? Your response, when you found out about this deplorable enthusiasm, was to tell him he'd have to do all of the reading comprehension questions -- approximately 200 of them -- for all 22 chapters.

I have to tell you that reflecting on this threat, and remembering the reading comprehension questions to which I was subjected as a grade-schooler, makes me want to gather up all of the school's reading comprehension workbooks, shower them with napalm, and watch the flames with glee. Afterward, calm and moderate soul that I am, I will spit on the ashes.

I do not intend for my son to remain in your class much longer, but there is something you need to know anyway: if you were to succeed in your efforts to teach him that assiduous reading is less important than a grim determination to stick to the schedule, you would be doing him a grave disservice. It is difficult for me to imagine that a teacher would really want to drive a stake through the heart of a student's zeal for reading, his willingness to be drawn inside a fictional world, but based on this and other encounters I have to conclude that you find his alacrity unacceptable.

I myself find your attitude unacceptable. Your email indicates to me that we have fundamentally incompatible philosophies of education. And yours? Is wrong.

Yours most irascibly,

Jamie Gladly

PS This thing you do where you call yourself Mrs. Rutabaga while calling me Jamie? It doesn't fly. First names are fine. Mrs. + Surnames = also fine. Power-trippy games -- not fine.

In which I grumble

Oh, internet, I'm really ticked off. Remember that email I sent last night to my sleepless son's teacher? The movie in question was The Watcher in the Woods. I remember seeing previews for it on HBO in the early 80s and hoping to heaven that I was never in a situation (slumber party, etc.) where I had to watch it. Alexa Flotsam wrote about it recently here, if you don't have similar memories of your own. I politely requested that he be allowed to complete an alternate activity.

So I got an email back, along with a PACKET from the teacher. She said she was surprised that my son was frightened. After all, he's reading Eragon, in which people get decapitated. She's using the movie to teach literature, so she'd like us to choose an appropriate book for him and he can complete the packet over Christmas break.

Did I mention that I'm ticked? Is it really so surprising that a kid would be more comfortable with a book, which he can put down if it gets too intense, and which has no pictures and no scary soundtrack and which is, let's not forget, fantasy, than with a movie designed to be suspenseful?

And teaching literature? Come on. It's December 16 and everybody wants a break, kids and teachers alike. Don't tell me it's about literature. And don't even THINK about giving my son (and only my son) homework over Christmas break, a packet full of character maps and examples of foreshadowing and symbolism charts. (Apparently they are spending a little time on the packet in class but it's pretty informal.)

And ALSO?? Don't send my kid off to write about worms by himself for an hour when everybody else is relaxing in a big gaggle. Couldn't he just go to the library? That sounds more like punishment for my (perceived, not intended) arrogance in requesting an alternate activity than anything else.

One of his brothers is on the case. He thinks the solution is to do that packet up right. They are kicking around book ideas, trying to come up with one destined to create a character chart to remember. War and Peace! Decline and Fall! That book about a day in the life of that guy in Dublin!

Reading Ulysses was not on my list of things to do over Christmas break.

PS Did I mention that my third-grader was required to write a letter to Santa Claus? I don't know what these teachers are smoking.

Dear Principal

I try to read every piece of paper you send home, really I do. It's a whole lot of pieces of paper, and I have to say I get a little vexed when you tell my kid to ask me for names and addresses of extended family members whom you can ask to buy ugly costume jewelry, but I try to keep up.

So where was the announcement about today's early dismissal? Where exactly? The clue phone is ringing: schedule weirdness is a big pain for employed parents, especially parents employed out of town.

Yours  grumpily,
Jamie of the unexpectedly shortened workday (who supposes that if she were a truly dedicated employee she would not be taking ten minutes of her valuable time in the office to write a blog post lamenting her shortened workday)

Oops

Last night I put up a post about a conversation with my oldest son. This morning it smacked me in the face that it was inconsistent to say I wanted to protect his privacy at school even as I posted his story on the web. When I wrote the post, I was trying to think through my own role in an awkward exchange and what I needed to do next. Thanks to everybody who responded helpfully overnight.

I think a nutshell question is probably reasonable, though: is there anything useful I can do about really nasty locker-room misogyny, without opening up my son to any flak along the lines of "Dude, I can't believe you talked to your mom about that"? I'm not talking about sensitivity training for junior-high boys. I just want an adult nearby to say, "Hey, watch that language," but I don't have a great feeling about the (female) PE teacher. Is locker-room nastiness inevitable?

In the Mail

Alex is good at math. When he was being homeschooled for second grade, I taught him to solve two equations in two variables. (I'd give him a word problem. He could set it up independently, and then needed a little help isolating one variable. Once that was done, he could solve for both variables on his own.) He has spent most of his math classes this year in the hall -- he would do well enough on the pretests, usually, that his teacher would send him out to work ahead.

So we were surprised when she was unenthusiastic about the spring placement test. He had a chance to test into pre-algebra, but she was not encouraging. No student from his school had ever passed the test. She didn't know what it covered. Maybe she could email the coordinator, she said, or maybe we should call the middle school. She never emailed and the school was similarly unhelpful. Alex took the test in early May, but we didn't know what to expect.

The results came in today's mail. He passed!

Decisions, decisions

Just back from our tour of the parish school. Alex chanted all the way home, "PLEASE don't make me go there. PLEASE don't make me go there." Joe chanted, "PLEASE can I go there? PLEASE can I go there?"

I'm leaning toward Catholic school but still uncertain. They have no gifted program, but the public school gifted program is kind of a joke. (I had that experience myself with gifted programs: too many poorly-thought-out units, dragging on for weeks until something designed to be enriching became something to dread.) There standardized testing is a once-a-year thing, and classroom time is (reportedly) not dedicated to test prep. Standardized tests are given twice yearly in my kids' school, and getting ready for the tests has been the primary focus of their days recently.

There was a mental hurdle for me to overcome in regard to paying tuition for grade school. Why shell out that much money for something you can get for free? But I love the idea of faith integrated with education -- loved seeing the images of the Sacred Heart and the little holy water fonts in every classroom, and the posters with quotes from the Bible next to the posters of the multiplication tables. The classrooms are spacious and full of books. I can see them there.

But Alex does NOT want to go. I could tell that we wouldn't be able to have a productive conversation about it right then, so I just listened. "I shouldn't jump in and argue," I told myself. "I'll just treat the feelings respectfully until the intensity dies down." I said aloud, "So you really feel like public school is the best choice."

In a Faber & Mazlish cartoon, he would have said, "Yeah, that's exactly what I think," or even, "Yes. But I guess we could talk about other possibilities." Instead he said "DUH!"

So much for active listening. I'll keep you posted.

"Important Skills"

I was digging through the mountain of backpack papers last week when I came across a note from the principal exhorting us to provide opportunities for our children to work on important skills. What important skills? you might ask. High-powered math skills? Sophisticated reading skills? Strong people skills?

Nope. The important skill in question is taking multiple-choice tests. She wants us to tell our kids to spend their free time on a website that lets them practice for the next round of standardized tests.

To which my first response was, Are you HIGH? Are you sitting in your office SMOKING CRACK?

My second response was a little more temperate: I get that she's under pressure here. Our kids' performance on those tests is viewed as a statement about her performance as principal, and who doesn't want to perform well?

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate No Child Left Behind? No? My friends, I hate No Child Left Behind.

Only about 60% of what I want my children to learn before adulthood is something that can be measured on a multiple-choice test. I want them to learn math, yes, but I want them to have fun with numbers -- to be excited about the possibilities and to play with different ways of finding answers. You can do that only if you're not under the gun to finish a certain number of problems in a specified amount of time. Of course I want them to be able to read a passage and parse its meaning, both surface and subtext, but more than that I want them to love reading. I want them to dive undaunted into the Iliad, and be both stirred by the courage they see there and a little put off by the blood-drenched details. The great epics don't lend themselves to multiple-choice testing. ("When Dido realized Aeneas was gone, she was (a) sad (b) relieved (c) indifferent (d) wrathful." Inadequate, much?) In the current climate, that means short shrift for the epics. Kids have to be prepared for the multiple-choice tests, you know, because those are "important skills."

If multiple-choice tests had much to do with the rest of life, my husband and I would rule the world. Or at least be in the Imperial Cabinet -- we're both good at standardized tests. But I am thinking about our recent conversation in the bathroom, where we were grouching about the broken shower valve. I opted to turn my shower into a bath. He said, "If you wait a little while [shivering in the halfhearted trickle] it gets better." Fat lot of good those GRE scores are doing us in the face of a real-world problem.

Complex problem-solving (in whatever domain), nuanced critique of difficult ideas, fearless enthusiasm in the face of new material, lifelong intellectual curiosity -- that's what I hope my kids gain from formal education. NCLB erodes the truly important skills in the name of "tough standards." There isn't time for exploration, because they have to learn to fill in the right Scantron bubbles.

GRE scores notwithstanding, I am not Queen of the World or even her Secretary of Education. I am not optimistic about my ability to make changes in federal law. But I am queen of my castle and here is my ukase: my children will not be visiting the test-prep website.

They have football games to play with the neighbor kids. They have books to read, perhaps curled up on the floor by the heating vent and laughing out loud, or perhaps sprawled on the loveseat, chewing a knuckle in anticipation. They have noodling around on the piano to do, and castles to build and stories to write and Lego Star Wars missions to complete. (BTW, do any kids in this country really need more screen time? I fight that battle often enough -- I don't need the principal telling me to give them more computer time.) The current emphasis on standardized tests has sucked enough real learning and fun from their days. They will not be spending their free time drilling. They have more important things to do. 

Borderline Grinchiness from Gladlyville

I went to Target this morning to pick up a few things and it was surprisingly un-crazy. But I heard two women having a conversation that tempted me to burst in uninvited. One said to the other, "How's he fixed for aftershave? Doesn't he need some?" I wanted to say, "Nooooooooo! No one needs aftershave!" I am not being earnest and grim here, not saying that the only true needs are food and shelter so go give your money to Food for the Poor instead of Target. (But do think about Food for the Poor if you are looking for a good charity. They do great work and keep their costs low too.) You could tell me you needed a cell phone or hair gel and I wouldn't bat an eye. But aftershave is not, will never be, a need. I know I am biased here: I haven't worn perfume since high school and I am married to a man who would no sooner wear aftershave than a crinoline. But that is the most vexing aspect of the retailers' Christmas madness, in my view -- the "need" to find something, anything, that someone on your list might "need," in the loosest possible sense of the word. I should stay away from Target on the 21st of December. It brings out my inner Ebenezer.

My other grinchy thought is about the public schools and their multicultural approach to "the winter holidays." Earlier this week one of my friends described her son's holiday concert: two Hanukkah songs, two Kwanzaa songs, two solstice songs, two Christmas songs. My own kids' teachers seem to be taking a similar "equal time" approach, if the worksheets they're bringing home on the days of Kwanzaa are an accurate indicator. This is somewhat mysterious to me. I think it's a great idea to teach kids about other cultures, other celebrations. But I would be surprised if 1% of the families in this town celebrated Kwanzaa or solstice. We do, however, have a large South Asian community -- I've heard it's almost 3% of the population. This means we can get scrumptious idli and dosa here in a town where Italian food means Olive Garden. More importantly, this must also mean that kids in the schools were celebrating Eid al-Adha yesterday...but I have seen no Eid al-Adha worksheets. Families must have been celebrating Diwali last month, but the Pilgrim hats and Mayflower models came home unaccompanied by stories about the Festival of Light.

And that's not all. I understand, of course, that the public schools are not going to teach my kids about Christian belief. But it vexes me that the "some families celebrate a day called Christmas" materials are exclusively about Santa and flying reindeer. Because, news flash: some families celebrate a day called Christmas with no flying reindeer anywhere in the picture. Some families celebrate a day called Christmas because on that day love enfleshed entered the world to be its redemption, and some families find (okay, this member of this family finds) the Christmas = Santa equation to be intensely annoying. Gah, I guess I should just send the kids to Catholic school next year. But I don't see how "some families celebrate the birth of a baby" is so terribly inflammatory in a discussion of culture and belief.

It seems to me, in sum, that the schools are looking for a way to justify a week of indulgence. (Wednesday: indoor field day. Thursday: class parties. Today: morning in the gym, doing the dances they've been learning in PE; afternoon of movies.) They talk about a seemingly random assortment of holidays along with the secular version of Christmas, while they say nothing about what many real families are celebrating in their actual homes. And that makes me say a hearty "Bah, humbug."