First Quarter Blues

It’s the end of the 1^st marking period in the oh-so-odd world of high school, and I am completely exhausted. This job of acting “in loco parentis” (emphasis on the loco) to 150 kids or so takes a lot out of a person, both physically and emotionally. With essays and benchmark tests to read, this turned into a 60 hour work week.

When I finally get home each day, it’s to a smaller, yet scarcely less formidable group of kids - soccer practice, dinners, homework supervision, baths, and stories -perhaps my exhaustion is understandable. Nevertheless, it worries me when it feels like it’s getting worse by the week.

I could reluctantly chalk it up to age. After all, when I started teaching, I was considerably younger. But I certainly do everything in my power to maintain my stamina, so I don’t think it’s simply a matter of passing years. There must be more to it.

When I went into education, teachers were complaining about the additional paper work burdens that accompanied the more-inclusive classroom movement. Frankly, we had no idea what lay ahead. Nowadays, whatever happens, whatever the home situation, the ultimate responsibility for every kid comes down to the teacher who balances that child’s needs against the needs of 149 others. Somehow, we’re supposed to juggle our roles as mentors, coaches, disciplinarians, detailed record keepers, cheerleaders, friendly-kick-in-the-backsiders, and so much more to so many more. We’ve got to maintain equanimity in the face of volatile teenage hormones, inspire reluctant readers, keep every parent informed (even when they change phone numbers without telling the school), and offer students multiple ways to master the material and multiple chances to display that mastery.

Our step-pay increases have been frozen for three years, but our responsibilities have not remained similarly static.

We work in windowless buildings with faulty HVAC, arriving long before dawn , and leaving as the sun sinks towards the horizon.

Come to think of it, maybe exhaustion is a reasonable response.

Guns and Readers

My county likes kids to read classics. My students, as a rule, don’t take kindly to this policy. The modern vocabulary is no match for the rich, nuanced language they encounter. They balk and read Spark Notes – if they read at all. I get frustrated with the ensuing alliteracy. Sigh.

As an experiment, I visited the Gutenberg Project and downloaded The Swiss Family Robinson onto my Kindle to read to my fifth grader. I was curious to see how he would take to it, and whether or not he'd be flummoxed by the 1812 vocabulary. Turns out he loves it.

The boys in the story tote all kinds of weaponry around the island so they’ll be ready to battle marauding jackals and the like. My son pictures himself with a fully loaded weapon belt ready to take on the best of them. Although we started out with me reading the book aloud to him, he picked it up one night when I was unavailable and read quite a bit on his own despite the cumbersome vocabulary.

Maybe I have a little literati on my hands – or maybe just a weapons maniac. It’s hard to say.

The Top Five Things Not to Buy For Your Son This Holiday Season

5) Clothes from a premium priced store. Trust me on this. Take a look at those adorable Baby Gap or Gymboree styles, then go buy your son’s clothes at Target or Sears. Take the money you saved, and put it in an account for when he’s a teenager and has a deep, psychological need to dress like everyone else. In the meantime, he’s just going to wear through those clothes anyway.

4) Any toy whose on-screen advertisement features kids playing in a setting that does not even remotely resemble your yard. Through the years, my kids have been suckered into wanting so many toys because the kids in the ad are out playing in – what – a swamp? We don’t live in a swamp, and if we did, Shrek would have something to say about it.

3) Most advertised toys in general. My boys seem to have the most fun when big sticks fall off the trees. Cheap entertainment rocks.

2) An iPod. Why start ruining his hearing early? By his teen years, you’ll begin to think that he went straight from the umbilical cord to the earbuds.

1) A cell phone. Nothing says spoiled like seeing elementary school kids exit the building yakking on cell phones. Whatever happened to being in tune with the world around you?

You Can't Always Get What You Want

Today’s parents don’t read their kids nursery rhymes. It’s shocking, I know, but many high school students do not know the line that follows “Jack and Jill went…” or “Old Mother Hubbard, went” – you know, come to think of it, there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in nursery rhymes, and maybe that doesn’t sit well with today’s society either. I’m not sure. But perhaps parents today want to load the kids into some kind of conveyance and to and fro themselves, not sit around reading about it.

In any case, as a 10^th grade English teacher and parent of five kids ages 26 to 4 (gulp), I can tell you that my rhyme-savvy little one is in the minority.

I freely admit that someone who had a crush on David Cassidy, remembers when the Six-Million Dollar Man took to fighting crime, and can say “I love it when a plan comes together,” should not, by rights, be the mother of a pre-schooler, so I guess I shouldn’t quibble with the literary shortcomings of Generation…what are we on now, Z? But as a curmudgeonly old English teacher, I hate seeing yet another sign that we’ve lost that common language derived from a canon of literature. Sigh.

I was talking to my oldest son yesterday, and whenever he refers to his (advanced) age, I wax poetic about how when I was his age, he was a darling little blond-headed tot who turned heads everywhere we went (not unlike his youngest brother is now, but I digress). The discussion turned to the age when one feels ready to have a child, and he claimed that in LA, where he lives, many women – most in his estimation – wait until their early to mid-thirties to have children. Perhaps that explains why – even on the other coast – I have not yet been mistaken for the grandmother of my youngest two. People just imagine I’m a California girl and start humming Katie Perry tunes when I traipse by. Or maybe not.

Anyway, I wanted to name this blog “Old Mother Hubbard” in reference to nursery rhymes, my “mature” years, and my parental status, but that title belongs to someone from Japan who writes about eating seaweed. I guess it’s better than a bare cupboard. So I had to come up with another name. We’ll see how it goes.