The Aerie

Everything and Nothing

So life seems to be settling into a rut or groove, depending on your (or my) point of view. I bike to work and back on good days, drive on others. On Mondays I sometimes have an evening meeting; on Tuesdays I sometimes have writing group; on Wednesdays either I have a meeting or my wife does or both. On Thursdays I go gaming at Professor Barker's and on Fridays we often have events. Saturdays we take one or both of the boys to the Monster's Den so they can play games, and Saturday evening something is inevitably going on. Sundays we go to church, and sometimes an extended-family event.

I feel like I'm simultaneously doing everything, and nothing. I'm going around and around in a week-sized circle, doing everything that must be done, but as for actually 'getting anywhere,' well, progress is slow. Yes, if I do this for two more years, then at the end of that time I will have 1) paid off our debts, 2) maybe gotten my degree, 3) kids who are about to graduate from high school. But TWO YEARS. Bah. I'm too impatient.

Meanwhile I'm here, beating the children to do homework, beating them to do their chores, beating them to get off the computer and get some exercise, and beating them to play their piano. By "beat them" I mean of course "nag them," since we don't lay a finger on them otherwise, but the sentiment is the same.

Tonight we have parent-teacher conferences at my younger son's school. This will be difficult, because I will want to bite people's heads off, and my wife will not want feathers ruffled. Our differing metaphors are bound to clash and result in ruffled heads and bitten-off feathers.

My problem is that this school has been terribly abused, both by slashes to education spending and by mismanagement at almost every level of administration. A principal who lasts two years is exceptional, and every single year all of the teachers are laid off in the summer and rehired randomly in the fall, resulting in a chaotic reassignment of students to teachers that, this year, is still ongoing. Yes; six weeks into the school year, they are ending the term early so they can reallocate students to teachers yet again.

On top of it all, the boy has a teacher who, by his reports, has twice made what I consider "smartass" comments to him. The latest was that when he failed to turn in a form on time, she said to him "Too bad, so sad."

My wife is quick to point out that this is just HIS story, but I am not inclined to care. I am so sick of this ruinous school situation I can hardly stand it, and he has to be there two and a half more years. I wouldn't let the boy mouth off to a teacher like that, I won't let the teachers mouth off to him, either. Grr!

So I'll go and I'll stew and I'll keep my mouth shut if I can. Like last year, when my wife repeatedly wrote to one of our older boy's teachers, and he didn't reply to her for three weeks, until AFTER the mid term grades were set. Of course, he was too busy campaigning to become the president of the Minneapolis Teacher's Union to respond to e-mail. Or teach, apparently. We went, and I did speak firmly to the man about replying in a timely fashion to communications, but as we now know he didn't give a rat's ass about is 40-person civics class held in a 12x12 windowless concrete room, because he was off to bigger and better things.

I should have bitten his feathers off.

This kind of crap is why I can understand those people who pull their kids out of public schools. Of course those same people ELECT the people who cut the funds which result in this crap happening, so it's a kind of a self-fulfilling policy.

All I want, and is it too much to ask, is to have my kids get a solid basic Three R's education, in rooms with a teacher-to-kid ratio that allows for some individual attention. All my kids are gifted - all my kids are bored shitless in the classroom. The present system hammers down their pointed exceptionality into blunt little nubs of boredom.

If these people who pull their kids, if they would pitch in with a sense of civic duty or connectedness and help improve the situation, then it would get better for everyone. Instead by deciding to go it alone and looking out for themselves, they leave the rest of us with a more and more dire situation. How does a community support itself when no one is willing to share the good and the bad?

Anyway, after conferences tonight I'll be off to a friend's house for the evening. And then tomorrow is Thursday, and then it's Friday, and then it's the weekend.

And then it starts all over.

Sigh. Just a year or two of this, and then maybe it'll be time for another home exchange or something. I can make it. I know I can...

Posted by Albatross at October 18, 2006 3:00 PM | TrackBack