Definitely a Rant. Apologies Made Now!

The thing about having a blog is you need to write it.  And besides time, you need your computer to actually write it on.  And when you have 3 kids...who have bidness to take care of in cyber world...and one desk computer for everyone, well, time is precious.  Especially this time of year when everyone seems to be checking out cool last minute additions to their Christmas lists.  News flash - the shopping is DONE!  Ha ha ha ha.  Don't you just hate when people tell you that just as December is cresting?  Once and only once have Bill and I been 99% done by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.  But I'm pretty sure that last 1% dragged itself out for the next 4 weeks, culminating in my purchasing some last minute gift cards Christmas Eve morning when I was supposed to be cooking the potato soup for the family that was arriving very, very soon.  Just keeping it real here.  We are not done.  But we have begun, and have a pretty good idea of the who what when and where.  Wish me luck....what's that saying about the best layed, laid, lade plans going haywire, inviting chaos, I don't know, but there's a saying.  Right?!  I need a little moral support here.  I'm not bragging, but I did just put my cards in the mail.

So, the other thing on my mind is the situation with my daughter's high school.  She's missed weeks upon weeks because of this ongoing, still undiagnosed, health issue.  So finishing the semester is tricky, but quite possible. I'm being generous when I say I have been under-impressed with the administration, the counselors and a teacher.  One in particular, demonstrated such unprofessional behavior in our parent/teacher conference last week, that I couldn't help but be shocked he had a job.  I have fired people, immediately, for treating a client the way he talked to us.  And every time we have a meeting set up, somebody from the school can not attend because they are tending to a personal matter...taking an ex-husband to surgery, a doctor's appointment scheduled during school hours, a grandmother becoming ill necessitating crossing the entire country to help the mom, delivering Thanksgiving baskets during school hours.  If you teach aren't you expected to be there anymore?  Aren't you expected to schedule your appointments first thing in the morning or at the very end of the day so as not to disrupt your workplace?  I think people have gotten a little confused as to what really constitutes a situation that is worthy of time out of the office.  Maybe I'm just getting old.  Maybe I've absorbed Bill's hardcore work ethic, but c'mon people, show up, do what you say you're going to, and I don't know, get out of teaching if you hate it.  I don't care if there's no market for somebody with a geometry degree.  Not my problem. Get a different one.  Work at Home Depot, but DON'T suck the life out of my child's inspiration to take calculus her senior year by telling her...hope I don't catch anything from you and my best advice to you is to just take a D and the credits and retake the class at the junior community college over the summer if the grade is that important to you...  What?!  Did you just really tell my kid to strive for the lowest possible denominator???  Really?  That's the best you've got?  Funny how his tune changed when his Vice Principal called him about it the next day.  So yeah, I've got to try and get her out of this guy's class as soon as she has some sort of a grade for this semester.  And then it is ON.  If he thinks I'm done with him yet...he might want to start thinking like a redhead and be a little proactive with his career.

I'm not teacher bashing.  I promise.  Before I get hate mail from some of my favorite family members and friends who are/were teachers, I will say that a committed, fantastic teacher can still pull a lot out in a traditional classroom setting.  And knowing these people as I do I'd venture that they are certainly the type of teacher who has former students looking them up years in the future because they were one of the most outstanding teachers they had in all the years they were in school.  Unfortunately, they are few and far between.  If you know me, you likely know I'm not the hugest public school system fan and we homeschool the boys and homeschooled Isabel for 6 years.  And I've got at least one foot in the camp that thinks the public school system doesn't need revising, changing, overhauling and most certainly didn't need No Child Left Behind.  Let's not even bring up the relentless (and proving to be fruitless) testing the kids now endure.  No, I lean towards thinking the whole thing is irrevocably broken.  Starting wholly fresh is what is really needed.  I don't have any solid ideas about how that could actually happen, so mostly I keep my mouth shut.  But I'm pretty sure if you took the best teachers and looked at what they are really doing to inspire kids, and held some high standards...well, something pretty amazing could happen.  If you're not part of the solution, you're just a whiny part of the problem in my book.  So my rant ends here.  If you stayed with me this long...I can only thank you for letting me get this off my chest.  The world is probably a safer place.  And I wouldn't look good in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Definitely I thank you, because I am so not looking forward to my 7am meeting with Isabel's geometry teacher and her counselor tomorrow morning.  You might want to pray for my composure and dignity.

xoxo
~Sherri