We don’t do this much anymore, because we don’t go to church anymore. More about that at a later date.

Because I spent the last post judging other people for the petty and annoying crap they do, #judgementalbiotch, I will now list (some of) my postable transgressions. Rest assured there are many, many more. You are not learning about them.

• The skin on the outside (and inside) of my nose gets dry and itchy. I totally pick. Deal with it.
• When I am in a meeting or grad class and I am supposed to be working or taking notes on a laptop, at least half the time I’m not really working or taking notes. #Facebook
• I speed. Like, always.
• I am still (I think?) supposed to eat a very low sodium diet, and I totally cheat when I feel like it. #heartcrap
• I make fun of what other people name their children. Sometimes. Just the dumb names, though. Yours are beautiful.
• I make fun of children. Although they are still better than many adults.
• That “red wine is good for you” thing is my new favorite medical tidbit, and “special occasions”, where I am allowed to consume various other alcohols happen so often that they can’t possibly be that special.
• Screw singing the ABC’s; often I wash my hands for only like 5 seconds and dry them on my hair. (Wetting it down discourages the frizz.)
• I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be drinking so much coffee. But nobody wants to see how that story ends, so I conveniently forget to ask about that every time I see my doctor.
• I swear a lot.
• I know that I should keep cash in my wallet for the collection for this, and the collection for that, but I never manage to keep cash in my wallet.
• I yell at my kids for their messy rooms, but mine generally has crap all over the floor.
• The 5 second rule applies around friends and family, but around strangers, I pretend like I’d throw it away no matter what, for germs & stuff’s sake. But if nobody is around…eh.
• For social reasons, I pretend to care about a lot of stuff that I actually don’t. But I believe that’s called “Being an Adult”, so again…eh.

They smell. Haven’t we had the deodorant talk yet? 

They wear inappropriate shoes – we told them to wear sneakers from here on out, darn it! Mostly little girls in pretty sandals.

They ignore us and do what they want; talking, goofing around. Then they tattle on each other. They skip out on homework. Aren’t we done with homework yet?

They get fresh. They get hot and lazy, and participation sucks. Get up. Off the floor. Now. 

They act like they’ve forgotten all the rules we’ve carefully enforced all year.

They act like they’re already on Summer Vacation.

*****

Every day we come in and act like zombies. Who wants to go on a Dunkin Donuts/Wawa run? 

We wear flip flops. Isn’t that against teacher dress code? Oh well.

We text each other how many days we have left. We text each other lunch orders and inside jokes. We text in class and in the hall.

We can’t believe it when there’s not an assembly or end-of-year festivity to take up class time, today. Aren’t we done with class time yet?

SGOs, APRs, PDPs; we turn nothing in by the due-date. We don’t even start them by the due date. That was due when? 

We get hot and crabby and bitch about stuff. We act like it’s an imposition that we’re still here.

We act like we’re already on Summer Vacation.

*****

Personally, in the last two weeks since hubby isn’t home and the pool is open, I generally have the girls in suits and wine or beer on the pool bar by 5PM. Today I also ate a hotdog, leftover from a weekend pool party. With mustard. Yes, in the pool. What? Just cause I know how to live…

How is it not already Summer Vacation?

1.  I was really sick and I didn’t know it. Always tell your parents and go to the doctor when you feel like you can’t breathe right.

2. My heart doesn’t pump very well right now. (My phrase for this is “wussy heart syndrome”. They eat that up.)  It might get better and it might not, but either way there’s no reason to think I won’t be ok. I am tough.

3. I have to take medicines that  will hopefully help my heart get stronger. But, they make me very tired sometimes, and dizzy. If anyone ever faints, we do NOT touch them. We find the nearest adult to help. This is not likely to happen to me at all, so relax.

4. I have to wear a special undershirt that has little circle things in it to check how my heart beats, day and night. It’s connected by a wire to this box I’m wearing like a purse. If my heart stops pumping right (“wusses out”), the special shirt will zap me with electricity so my heart will work again. The black box might ‘ding’ sometimes when the shirt isn’t working right. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong.

5. This is not something that is likely to happen to you, or anybody else you love.

This has been a nice time to sit down and just talk to my 500+ kiddos. Their concern has been real and their questions and responses have been a little too real.

But hey, if you can’t laugh at cardiomyopathy, what can you laugh at, right?

So these are questions and responses I have gotten from my 5 – 11 year old students when I explain the above list to them. I started writing them down to share, because I love these little nutjobs.  My responses are italicized.

“Will your heart tell you when it’s fixed?” No, they will take pictures again, but that would be cool.

“Do they let you keep the pictures?” I doubt it but if it’s good I’ll frame it.

“My grandpop had a heart attack because he ate too much red food. Did you do that?” You mean did I eat too much red meat? No, I –  “No! Meat is brown.”

“Did it hurt when you died?” Um…No. I’m good.

“Will it hurt if it zaps you?” No. I would have probably fainted by then. “But it will zap us if we’re touching you?” Possibly, but you’re not going to touch me or anyone who has fainted, you just get an adult. “Will it reach out and like lightening, and zap us?” NO. You’re picturing Return of the Jedi.

“Can you use the box to save somebody else’s life? Like the school’s one? [Defibrillator]” Yes, I’m going to be the new super hero, Defibrillator Woman. Zap zap. Just kidding. But cool question.

“What are you gonna do if you can’t go swimming in the summer!?!?!?!” I will most likely be done wearing this, one way or another, by summer. Hopefully. Otherwise, I will cry.

“Um…it [the box] blinked red. Are you OK?” That just means it’s on. I’m good.

“What would happen if ALL the adults in the school fainted at the same time?” I’d say we would leave (extremely unlikely, quiet student) in charge.

“So, like, you can’t take it off? Are you not gonna shower?! For months?!!” Um… I take it off to shower. EW.

“What happens if you faint in the shower with the shirt thing off?” Well this is getting personal. It’s not likely that I’ll faint at all. But I guess then it would turn into taking a bath.

“What happens if you faint when you’re going to the bathroom?” Well that would be bad, but wouldn’t I have worse problems, at the time?

“What happens if you drop it [the monitor box] in the toilet?” Thanks, now I’m going to worry about that, too.

BUT the winner is:

“Did you know that the hospital is where they take babies out of your tush?” Yes. Yes I did.

Parents, teachers, and friends, I need you to tell me what you think of that move.

Here’s the background:

I have the feeling that my kid has been put in the ‘rough’ class several times now, probably because she can fend for herself academically and assertively.  Talking to parents whose children are in other classes in my daughter’s grade has confirmed it: They’re having a lot more fun. There’s always a ‘rough’ class. How do you know if your kid has landed there this year? Count the rings under her teacher’s eyes. 

But it’s a teacher conflict too. We all have a story about that teacher, who seemed miserable and possibly scared the #$%@ out of us in grade school. Mine had a foot-shaped hole in the tile floor where it was rumored she had screamed and stomped her foot so hard that it Broke. The. Floor. She supposedly left it that way as a grim reminder to future students that things could get UGLY. 

The elder offspring’s 2nd grade teacher has decided that whole-class punishment is her classroom management tactic. Several times now, all the kids have missed recess as punishment for bad behavior. Yes, like when we were in school. Although for me, that was the 80’s and I don’t remember much of this happening. 

Although I (empty) threaten individual students with this consequence sometimes (actually quite effective), I disagree with this policy on several levels:

1. Though occasionally necessary, regularly punishing the whole group is unfair and bad for morale.

2. These are 7 year-olds. They need recess. If you make the mistake of keeping 7 year-olds from running outside and being crazy, you might as well feed Gremlins after midnight, because that’s what you’re gonna get. 

Cute before you make a giant mistake. Just like 2nd graders. It will be a loooong afternoon.

The kid has been a little down about this. I am extremely tempted to be that mom and email the teacher, questioning her policy and telling her my kid doesn’t like school. It’s not the academics. It’s not for lack of friends. It’s this feeling that she’s in a “bad class”, that needs to be punished all the time. Additionally, a few times her librarian has also denied the whole class the chance to take out new books, because of ‘bad behavior’ in library class.

So one (tearful) night the elder offspring was bemoaning her class’s situation. I asked her if she was very, very sure that she was not part of the problem. She may have inherited my inability to shut up in class, how do I know? I suggested that she do something more productive than complaining to Mommy, like writing a R-E-S-P-E-C-T-ful letter. Writing is her thing, and mine. With email and texting and handwritten words like that above, you can think about how to phrase important things…as opposed to the “word vomit” that usually comes out of my mouth. #meangirlsreference This way, I could monitor her, uh, “tone”, too.

I let the kiddo give that letter to her teacher, and she got no response. For what it’s worth, that day they had recess but the next day, they missed it again. As a teacher who has been questioned many times by parents myself, the next-to-last thing I want to do is undermine another educator. I’m playing it cool and wondering exactly how bad this class really is, till conferences. I can’t wait to hear the teacher’s side of the story.  It’s not that big a deal; this may just be the year my daughter isn’t in love with school. Or, I may have to grow some Mommy balls.

The last thing I want, of course, is for my kid to hate school. At least until she has to take Calculus. Then it’s genetically inevitable. 

So, I’m curious: (Comments very appreciated!)

• What do you think of the policy?

• What do you think of the letter?

• What would you ask at conference time, if this were your kid?

This quote and stunning portrait of Secretary Duncan popped up on social media last week. It’s from his speech during a 2009 visit to a Brooklyn elementary school. It is, of course, taken out of context here.  But that just means it’ll fit right in with every other quote on the internet, ever. Here’s a post about Mr. Duncan addressing the “educational crisis” in this speech.

He seems to be claiming that you can tell where kids will end up, higher education-wise, because of how they’re testing in second grade. Reading this on a friend’s wall, I actually said aloud,  “You leave my second grader ALONE, Arne!”  Yes, that’s a tad dramatic, but Arne is a fun name to say aloud.

Though well-meaning, this is some serious oversimplification, and rhetoric to sell the need to test small children.  I teach K-5 and let me tell you: By second grade, a couple of them haven’t even really mastered holding a #2 pencil yet, let alone having one help decide their future.  In second grade, they’re about 8 years old. Meaning that every bit of their little life has occurred in a shorter time than Seinfeld was on the air. Just let that sink in.

No, Arne, we should not.  I mean, I can totally pick out the future trophy wives by the time they’re leaving 5th grade, but that’s as cynical as I’ll allow myself to get as a teacher.

Let’s put aside the fact that college is not the right path for every person in the first place. We’ll also try to excuse the elitist undertones in his poor choice of the phrase “good college”.  Although I would never rule it out, I have no iron clad plan for Ivy League schools in my children’s futures. Arne would probably not approve.

But I do have my own second grader. Right now she is, if I may brag, one of those kids who is intrinsically motivated to learn and madly in love with reading and writing. She also thinks practical applications of Math is “neat”. Sadly, her school is already test-happier than I’d like them to be.  Last Thursday night she gloomily announced that she had three the next day. My kid is 7, but she’s known for years how to fill in test bubbles because how-to-take-a-test knowledge is woven into their little homework sheets each night. This is the direction that education is moving, and it’s quotes like Arne’s up there that point to the cause.

I think we’ll be lucky; my kid will still love reading and writing and (dare I wish it) probably even Math when all is said and tested.  Others definitely won’t be so lucky.

I’m fortunate enough to work for a school district that still clings (some years by its fingernails) to the ideal of growing the whole child. The humanity, not just the testable parts. The arts are still offered, and the students have easy access to artistic and performing groups within their regular school day. I’ve also had a close view of others that weight the tested subject areas doubly in the student schedule, and jam in some test-prep classes for good measure. If scores go up, on paper, it looks like students are learning, and all is supposedly right with the world.

A September article in the Washington Post explains what this emphasis on testing does in lower-income districts. The arts, proven for years to improve acquisition of testable knowledge and life in general, are not offered to all students equally. As the Post article states, the kids who need arts education the most are often the ones not receiving it, as their “failing” schools opt instead to focus energy and funds on performance of a much less humanistic sort. Non-tested subjects (and sometimes, the people who teach them) are not valued, because frankly, there are tests to take. And there are no mandated score growth objectives for Art and Music that relate to the school’s status or funding. Do not get me started on the concept of punishing failing schools by removing funding. I kick stuff when I get angry, and I presently not wearing any shoes. Ouch. 

I’m sure we’ll find other sources of funding somewhere.

However, in a quote from August 22,d 2014, Mrs. Duncan said, “[I]n too many places, it’s clear that the [testing] yardstick has become the focus.” And, “No school or teacher should look bad because they took on kids with greater challenges. Growth is what matters. No teacher or school should be judged on any one test, or tests alone — always on a mix of measures.”

 Am I nuts, or does this sound more reasonable?  What a different tune he’s singing than the one usually sung by those who legislate education reform. Probably because somebody reinstated the choir program that got cut in 2009? This is also coming from someone who had an idea (test the crap out of kids to prove we’re teaching something), ran with it, and found it wasn’t working exactly the way he planned. Could it be, after some hands-on experience and trial and error, he’s acquiring new knowledge and gaining a better understand that may help in the future? Isn’t it great when actual education takes place?

In teacher world, the last week of summer means one thing: DO ALL THE THINGS.  It’s an understandably huge checklist of Must Do This Before September, so as to delay the inevitable transformation into a tired, crazy person once the year starts throwing its punches.

Being an immature and slightly irresponsible person (my husband patiently calls it “spontaneous”), I get a different urge that last week: Go places and do fun stuff, because life is for the living and the tired crazy person thing is gonna happen anyway.  It’s like Jekyll and Hyde for educators.  We rode the train and ate and drank in Philly, went to playgrounds, went out, had friends over, swam, slept in, did absolutely nothing, went on a pirate ship…

(Did you think I was kidding? This is my new mental happy place to go to when in-service meetings run long…)

So here we have this, From Parent Further, Back-to-School: A Parent’s Checklist. Isn’t it great?

“One month before school starts, do this…Three weeks before school starts, do this….”  Yeah. “Great”, as in, “Haaaaa, I laughed so hard, that was ‘great’!”

I have my own special check list for you, guaranteed to bring you back-to-school happiness. Feel free to print and post on the fridge for your own convenience, as we return to school this week in New Jersey. If you’re already back… my condolences.

• Children who watch a maximum of 2 hours of TV and eat a balanced diet including 5-7 fruits and vegetables a day do better in school. Encourage your child to sit near one of those kids.

• Enjoy a high protein, child-friendly lunch together, while they’re home: the classic peanut butter sandwich. Because tomorrow, it’s contraband. 

• ‘Help’ them with an early draft of the “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essay. Edits should include many trips to museums and libraries. This will also improve your child’s skills in writing fiction. Example: “My family spent four hours on Independence Mall in Philadelphia this summer, soaking up history.” A lovely way to say “playing in the dirt, in the bocce court, in the beer garden across the street from the the Liberty Bell”.

• The week before school starts, maintain contact with your child’s teacher via regular emails and phone calls. Why delay her dislike of you and your child till September when she could start hating you now?

• Clear out an organized space in your home for optimum homework completion. Make sure there’s an extra chair there for your kid, too. 

• Check the school calendar for important dates, like “Back to School” night and Parent/Teacher conferences. Now schedule meetings at work that you’ll have to attend instead. To avoid all that unpleasantness. 

• Shop for school supplies early and pack up their backpacks ahead of time. Don’t forget a little present to make their teacher feel appreciated on that important first day.

Happy B2S week to all, and to all a quick good year!

Give us another one: What would you add? Other than ONE MORE WEEK. Comment below.