okay. i now have three kids in school. you would think this would be pretty cool, maybe even lighten my workload a bit. the twits are just in preschool, monday wednesday and friday from 8:30-11:30. evilgremlin is just in first grade. no sweat!
somehow, it ain't that easy. there's the whole thing where i have to get up on time, get three kids fed and watered, dressed appropriately, with teeth brushed and bladders emptied. that's not such a big deal, actually. but throw in the massive amounts of homework and other crap that i have to remember on a daily basis, and it goes to hell pretty quickly. about once a week, it's someone's turn to bring the snack. once or twice a week, it's someone's turn to bring a lovingly-chosen show-and-tell item. there's the weekly behavior reports to sign and return, eg's daily homework, the twits' weekly homework, the monthly tuition checks, the weekly library books, the biweekly "reading counts" books. then there's the miscellaneous paperwork - on any given day, there's an average of three forms i have to have filled out and returned to one teacher or another: field trip permission slips, school picture order forms, book order forms, etc, etc, etc. every freakin school day there are at least a half-dozen things that have to be dealt with one way or another and stuffed back in the right backpacks, and if i actually remember all of them, it's a pretty good day. it's kind of a mess, but they're all more or less reasonable demands on my time, so it's cool.
then there's the stuff, all of it from EG's backpack, that's started to really bring out the "fight the power" in me. stupid stuff that i find personally insulting and refuse to bow down to. sound like i've gone nuts, shaking my fist at freaking grade school paperwork? well, i am in fact disturbed, but that's beside the point, so read on:
EXHIBIT A: THE "TITLE I SCHOOL CONTRACT"this two-page form had four sections, which were to be signed by the principal, the teacher, the parents, and the student. the principal's section detailed how she agreed to provide a safe school, foster an environment conducive to learning, blah, blah. then the teacher's section was pretty much an identical bullet list of vague platitudes. fine. they had both signed their sections, and were awaiting my signature and EG's so the form could be added to his (dum-dum-DUUUUM) PERMANENT RECORD.
okay. fine. so i read the parent section, wherein i was to sign my agreement to, among other things:
-read to my child every day and let him see me reading every day
-have him do his homework in the same place at the same time every night
-provide him with alternative entertainment to tv and video games
awww, sounds so nice, huh? so ozzie and harriet? man, fuck the nelsons. had they left room on the form for me to state my line-item objections, i would have filled out something like this:
-EG doesn't like me reading to him. he likes reading stuff himself, maybe out loud *to* me if i promise to be good and not crack jokes about the text. also, i do 90% of my reading either on the toilet or naked in bed. so, fuck no, he doesn't get to see me reading every day.
-he does his homework when he fucking feels like it. if he's bored when he gets home, he does it right then. if he's tired and hungry or has more fun stuff he wants to do, he does it at night. if the kitchen table is dirty, he does it in the living room. if his brother's puking in the living room, he does it in his bedroom. or my bedroom. jesus christ, are they going to tell me what position to have sex with my husband in next? GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, BIG BROTHER! i think flexibility is an important lesson, myself. on all counts. especially sex with my husband.
-bitch, please. they might as well have said "since you're in this school district, you're obviously some flavor of trash, and need to be told that excessive video game playing is detrimental to children. we're going to make you sign this so that we know you you listened to our condescending lecture on the matter, said lecture being devoid of any actual, concrete suggestions for alternatives, because our job isn't to be helpful, but rather to be smug."
(or maybe i'm reading too much into that one.)
then came the student section, wherein EG was to agree to platitude, platitude, platitude, duh, duh, duh, no biting, no peeing in the classroom, no setting things on fire, doing his homework and following the rules, being a good little child who doesn't get left behind, and finally, to "reading for pleasure every day." excuse me? i am NOT forcing my literal-minded, obsessive-compulsive six-year-old to sign a binding fucking contract stating that he will read something EVERY GODDAMNED DAY. firstly, if it ever comes down to doing it because you signed a paper saying you would, it ain't for pleasure. secondly, if he doesn't feel like reading one day, he goddamn well doesn't have to, and i'm pretty sure he gets to keep all his IQ points if he lets that happen from time to time. thirdly, you're probably thinking (as were the idiots who wrote this document) that hey, you know, it's just a nice idea, no big deal if they don't actually do it every single day, the point is that we told them to and they said they would and maybe they kinda half-assed tried and that's pretty good and whatever.
that's the one that pisses me off the most. they don't REALLY expect anyone to live up to this contract every single freakin day. so the lesson is: sign a binding contract, give your word, and then it's not really essential to follow through. i choose not to teach my child that's okay. so nyeah.
WHAT I DID WITH IT: threw it away. because fuck the man!
EXHIBIT B: SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, EGGS, BACON AND SPAMokay, the amount of pure freakin junk mail that gets sent home with my child absolutely pisses me off to no end. i understand that they're offering me things that i might like for my child, and that anything i buy might result in a small donation to my child's underfunded school. okay. fine. but aside from the sheer number of trees that die for the sole purpose of marketing to the captive audience of impressionable children in public schools (i counted 23 sheets of paper for this purpose in eg's backpack last week alone), there's the fact that some of them use extremely questionable and deceptive high-pressure tactics. for example: i got one come-on last friday that rhapsodized about the magazine "highlights," which is a really boring educational rag that you probably still have burned in some deep corner of your skull from hours spent staring at it in doctors' waiting rooms during your own childhood. (yes, the magazine still sucks as bad now as it did then.) this advertisement was on screaming yellow paper, stamped "urgent" in red, and had a big sticker on it that said "SIGN HERE AND RETURN TO TEACHER." you were supposed to check either "yes, start my subscription now!" (the fact that it cost money was in the fine print at the bottom) or "no, not at this time." in either case, you were to fill out your name and address and return it to the teacher.
fucking excuse me? why is my son's school allowing corporate entities to use him to try to force me into getting on their goddamned mailing lists?
WHAT I DID WITH IT: threw it away. fuck the man!
EXHIBIT C: THE MOST OFFENSIVE OF THE MANY FUNDRAISER COME-ONSokay, at least twice a month, i get some crap about fundraisers. that's fine. i'm a little annoyed that these for-profit corporate entities want to prostitute my kid as door-to-door child labor for their own massive profit margin, and get away with it by giving a sliver of the profits to the school. but i understand that the school is underfunded and just doing something that they've had some success with in the past. so, cool. whatever. i can just choose not to participate, and instead of spending 50 hours to raise $5 for the school, i can write a $5 check, donate it directly, and go to bed guilt-free. not worth dwelling on.
the one that gets me, though, is the "innisbrook wraps" fundraising corporation. for $7, your neighbors and family can buy two sheets of wrapping paper. my kid comes home with massive, heavy, oversized catalog of this overpriced crap. his other, apparently less-important stuff - like his homework folder - are falling out of his bag because this stupid piece of shit is so big he can't zip his bag, and it's printed on such heavy, glossy paper that the one corner of the catalog that he did manage to wedge into the bag is poking a hole in the fucking bag that i now get to repair or replace. the catalog includes a huge section of all the awesome prizes he can win, like a shitty plastic gumball machine that will break within a month if he sells at least fifty items. that would take at least twenty hours of his time to accomplish, and the thing is worth all of about four dollars, meaning he'd get paid better working in a malaysian sweatshop. the final straw is that, whether he sells anything or not, we're expected to carefully safeguard this huge piece of shit and return it in perfect condition to the school in three weeks time.
WHAT I DID WITH IT: as you might have guessed, i did not babysit their stupid fucking catalog for them in my home for three weeks. what i did do was pull out the cool squares of wrapping paper samples, amuse the boys with some origami tricks, and throw the rest of the catalog away. because... you guessed it... fuck the motherfucking MAN!
EXHIBIT D: THE PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE FORMokay. so parent-teacher conferences are this month. that's cool. a whole bunch of blanks to fill out. okay. so i filled out "childs name." and "names of parents/guardians attending conference." then it gets down to a list of twelve really odd questions, like "write one special thing about your child," and "write one area where your child needs improvement," and the like.
uhhh... okay. i really wish i could remember all the questions that were on there, but they were all pretty odd, extremely personal, ambiguously open-ended, and smacked of things that could be used against you in a court of law. now, first and foremost, my main problem with the form is that the space provided for answering each question was about 3/4 of an inch by an inch, which is absolutely not enough room to say anything meaningful about any of the things they asked. it was stupid. no, i am not going to write, in 8 words or less, about my child's innermost thoughts and problems. that's a great blueprint for misunderstandings. also, some of the questions were none of their damn business. finally, as you may have noticed by now, EG has a strong personality and there isn't much he keeps quiet about; i am strangely certain that there really isn't anything i could tell his teacher about him that she hasn't either already seen or heard about from him directly.
WHAT I DID WITH IT: okay, i know, bad mommy, but goddammit, i'd already spent a full 20 minutes sifting through and dealing with all the crap that came home in his backpack that day, and i really didn't feel like spending a bunch of time composing cute little "positives" and real-sounding-yet-not-damning "negatives" about my child for a woman i've never even met - especially when i know damn well that nothing i write on that form is going to change the fact that he's going to be expected to keep his head down and trudge along the same dull rut imposed on every kid in our tested-to-hell educational system. it won't change a thing. so after filling out names, i left the rest blank and sent it back.
we can talk face-to-face. that's great. we exchange emails about specific problems and successes, like me begging her not to send him home with another "look, look/ see the baby bunny/ bunny rolls down the hill/ down, down, down" book and tell me to force him to read it three times for the "reading counts" program. after carefully explaining that this was an awesome program if the intent was to insure he hates reading for the rest of his life, he came home with a better book the next day - 2nd grade level, with a plot and stuff. problem solved. now that's real communication. i'm not filling out another useless form full of vanilla buzzwords and cookie-cutter phrases that say nothing.
EXHIBIT E: THE HOMEWORK CALENDARokay, in addition to his regular nightly homework, EG gets a monthly homework calendar. each day has a different "fun" (i use the term loosely) activity for me to do with my child (because hey, we'd never have fun on our own, let alone learn anything while having it, without someone telling us how to do it). we are supposed to choose two activities each week, do them, check off the ones we did, then fill out the "response journal" on the back of the calendar and return it on the last school day of the month.
okay. not to get my kid in trouble or anything, but let's just say i give the boy credit for shit he's already done and wouldn't get anything out of doing again. kinda like how a community college (or better yet, online university) will give you class credit for "life experience." like "collect some fall leaves and sort them by color, shape and size." he did exactly that last weekend at da wocks an da wadder. on his own, even, and he helped his little brothers do the same. so, unless the point of the homework calendar is to teach him that anything, no matter how fun, can be turned into a tedious chore (which it may well be), i see no point in making him do it again. especially since our other choices for the week included "find a recipe that uses pumpkin. cook it." (pumpkin flavor makes all three of my kids gag) and "learn your phone number" (yeah, i know, conventional wisdom says that every kid should know his onw phone number for safety reasons, but for me, this one falls into the "gun in your home is 30 times more likely to harm a member of your household than to save them" category, since EG would tell his phone number to anyone who would listen and encourage them to call often to listen to him talk.) he already asked his grandparents for their full names (and made fun of them for sounding funny!), so i checked off the box for finding that one out. he's already lined up all the family members in age and size order (and drawn diagrams, complete with measuring sticks, to boot) so he got life experience for that one, too. i also think he's done enoough of the "count to 100 by 1's" (and if they expect me to listen to him do it AGAIN... hell no) and "what year will it be when you turn 8? 10? 15?" (again... if i hear one more time about how many years and months it is before he gets his driver's license, what year it will be, and how old his brothers will be on that holy day...) but, you know, i'm not a complete turd in the punch bowl - i thought a couple of the activities had merit, and we did them. like "take a handful of beans, guess how many you have, then count them." my little rainman guessed 30 to his 31 of pinto beans and was pretty impressed with himself.
then there's the response journal, wherein EG had to fill out:
-what did you learn? (EG looked at me blankly, and finally said "i didn't learn anything. i just did what they told me to do." and i couldn't really argue with that. so i reminded him about the beans, and told him to just write "guessing." he pointed out that he already knew how to guess, which is true. so he wrote some elaborate diatribe on guessing beans being a little different than the other kinds of guessing he'd done in the past, and left it unfinished when he ran out of room.)
-which activity did you need the most help with? (he looked at me blankly again. "i didn't need help. they were all easy." again, couldn't argue with him. finally, he decided that me getting up on the counter to get the beans off the top shelf counted as help and wrote something about that.)
-which activity did you like the most? ("i like beans." fair enough.)
then i had to fill out answers to the same questions.
WHAT I DID WITH IT: well, i figured i ought to leave it blank, since if i wrote anything, i was going to write that:
- i learned nothing new about my child,
- the tasks were so lame that any "help" on my part would have constituted me doing them for him, which would be even lamer
- i didn't enjoy doing any of the activities "with" my child, since he damn well wanted to do them on his own
okay. yeah. i'm just a grump. i know this. but dammit, i am not the mom who wears winnie the pooh overalls and sings educational songs like "clean up!" on car trips with my children. i'm the mom who wears a punisher belt buckle and sings the songs *i* like with my kids (which leads to heartwarming moments like spazmonkey screaming out "MAH GIRL, MAH GUUUUUURRRRL, DON'T WIE A MEEEEEEE, TELL ME WHERE YOU SWEEP WAST NIGHT??!?!? IN DA PINE, IN DA PIIIIIIIINE, WHERE DA SUN NEVER SHIIIINE, AN I SHIVERRRRRR DA HO NIGHT FWOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" in a truly awesome kurt cobain voice.) i'm not the mom who reads parenting magazines for ideas on the perfect educational activities to give my kids that all-important edge over their peers. i'm the mom who builds space stations out of legos even though it doesn't directly support their getting into college. i'm the mom who throws away any flash cards that somehow make it into our house.
because fuck the man. he don't know shit.
