I should never be allowed to read books to children in public. [read more @Parenting.com]
Education
What Do you Need to Know?
When a boy from our local junior high was arrested for planning to kill several students and teachers, the school district decided not to inform the school’s parents. [read more at Parenting.com]
A Letter
Laylee’s been learning about letter writing at school. Here’s a transcription of a letter she recently wrote to her teacher:
Dear Miss Snop/Rachel,
I woke up early. It was 7:00. First I got dressed. Next, I looked at the clock. Then, I did my homework. Last, I played. Did you wake up early? What time did you wake up at? Do you know that I know that yar name is Rachel? Are yar perents dead yet? Can you come to my birthday party next year?
From,
Laylee
Dan thinks it’s funny that she’s come to think of her teacher as being so old and authoritative that it’s highly unlikely her parents are still living. I find it more amusing that she finds nothing insensitive about asking her about it straight out, followed by a birthday party invitation.
The juxtaposition suggests that she’s either trying to be sensitive – perhaps the party invite is a gesture of consolation in the event that the parents have passed away – or she is seven years old and the death of a parent and the event of a birthday party carry roughly the same level of importance in her eyes.
The Good
“Yes, I think there’s a lot to do to make quality education available and relevant to all children. Yes, I’m still trying to figure out what I can do to help. Today I’d like to focus on what’s going right. Have you or one of your children brushed shoulders with an inspiring educator?”
Education and You
Laylee has had 2 classroom teachers and several subject specialists since beginning school 2 years ago. We have enjoyed them all. They are energetic, kind, talented educators and I think she’d move in with several of them if given the choice of staying at our house or going home with them. The quality of these teachers however does not keep us from wanting more for her education.
I had breakfast yesterday morning at the Pacific Science Center listening to Jeff Raikes, the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation talking about the importance of quality STEM education (Science Technology Engineering and Math). Wheels are turning. People with passion, knowledge and resources are working to improve things for the kids of the future. But what can we do right now?
Parent/Teachers
I love parent/teacher conference time. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. As an elementary school student I enjoyed talking to my parents when they came home with glowing reports of my academic and social excellence. As a keener and a hard core pleaser, there was nothing I liked more than to hear about how much my teacher liked me and exactly which ways I was exceeding her wildest expectations for a student of my age and station.
Now I like conferences and progress reports for a slightly different reason. [read more at Parenting.com]
Great Job!
10 points go to Jen @ The Short Years for guessing that the terror alert meant only that the teacher had grabbed another stamp. When Dan asked Laylee about the stamps she said, “Oh yeah. We get some kind of stamp or sticker for every day we bring our folder to school.” There is no method to this teacher’s particular brand of madness.
Laylee loves her even if she hates her name. Before the school year started, the teacher sent home a small picture of herself so the kids would know what she looked like in advance. Laylee was smitten with Ms. Snop’s youthfulness and beauty.
“Do you think she’s about the same age as our babysitters?” she asked.
“No. She’s a lot older,” I sort of lied. She’s older. That part was true.
“I think she’s WAY too pretty to have a name like ‘Snop’,” Laylee announced.
About thirty minutes later she approached me with a thoughtful expression, “You know? Maybe ‘Snop’ is just her LAST name.”
“Yeah. I think you may be right.”
How could any parent name such a beautiful child “Snop?” It would just be wrong. And I was worried at the beginning of the year about what to expect with a first year teacher. I wasn’t sure she’d be up to the job but I have to say, we’re loving her. She is creative in her approach to teaching, she’s full of energy and the kids haven’t broken her yet. We’ll see how she’s doing a few years from now when she’s taught a couple hundred more 6-year-olds. Maybe she’ll look more like a First-Name-Snop at that point.
First Grade Terror Alert
I recently found a calendar in the pocket of Laylee’s school folder. It’s the folder that we use to send communications back and forth from home to the classroom. Her young, fun and perky teacher is always coming up with new exciting ways to motivate and reward the kids and I assumed the calendar was part of this rah-rah go-team-ishness.
Every day Laylee’s calendar came home marked with an orange stamp that said, “GREAT WORK!” I assumed all was well. Each day I’d check the folder and each day the orange stamp would appear… for the first couple of weeks. Then all of a sudden on one day she came home with a black stamp that said “good job.”
“What!?” I asked Dan. “I don’t want to be one of those parents who’s overly involved in her kids’ schooling or who freaks out when she gets a ‘good’ instead of a ‘great’ on her report card but I want to know why she’s fallen from her pedestal on the stamp scale. She’s not even getting orange anymore. Today’s stamp was black and I want to know why. I think I’ll email the teacher and get to the bottom of this.”
Dan offered some sage words of wisdom in regards to, “Do NOT do that. If you do that then you ARE one of those parents. So she got a lower level of stamp one day. It’s really not a big deal.”
“Well, at the very least I want to know what the different stamps mean. If a teacher’s going to use a complex rating system for our kids, represented by random stamps, I at least want to know what the different levels mean.
“It’s like if the government came up with a new terror alert system but didn’t tell anyone what the different colors meant. Like if they just came on TV one day and said, ‘The terror alert level is purple,’ but no one in America knew what the ‘Purple Alert’ meant.”
“You should just ask Laylee what they mean,” Dan responded.
“That’s all well and good,” I replied, “But if I want to know what a ‘Purple Alert’ is, I’m sure as heck gonna want to hear it from the administration, not from the crazy old guy waving a shotgun outside the gates of the White House.”
“So, who exactly is Laylee in this analogy?”
“The terrorist.”
Everyone But Papa Survived
My parents were out visiting from Montana this weekend and we wanted to hang out with them in a relaxed way, a way that didn’t involve driving into downtown Seattle to see something quintessentially Seattle-like.
Instead, we ate steel-cut oats, played games and explored the Titanic… in Redmond. Country Financial is sponsoring a free traveling exhibit of artifacts from the world’s most famous shipwreck and it happened to be in Redmond this weekend. I was pumped to go. I think my parents were a little less than pumped but they just wanted to hang out with and spoil Laylee and Magoo so they came along for the ride. Maybe their reticence was due to the fact that my dad had a premonition he wouldn’t make it out of the exhibit alive.
There’s something about that boat that’s always fascinated me long before Leonardo DiCaprio cavorted around on the silver screen. I’ve seen movies, documentaries and pictures about the events surrounding the disaster and the efforts to recover the artifacts from the ship and I’ve always wanted to go down in one of those bubble ship things and, I don’t know, look for ghosts and jewelry and such.
The exhibit was set up in a mall parking lot with a few huge semi-trucks linked together to form an impromptu museum. We got our picture taken in front of a backdrop of the grand staircase and each of us was given a boarding pass with the name of an actual passenger on the Titanic. They told us that at the end of the exhibit we could find out if our passenger survived or not. Is it just me or does Magoo look a bit trepidacious about spending his Memorial Day weekend entering things called “exhibits” that look like giant trucks smooshed together, where the chance of survival is highly unlikely?
In a fun gesture, the exhibit organizers gave local bloggers special treatment, letting our group skip the lines and giving us permission to take pictures inside, although picture taking was not allowed by people who do not publish their thoughts, opinions and whims online. The coolest thing they handed out to the geeks in attendance was a certified piece of coal that was actually retrieved from the titanic. I’m not sure what to do with said piece of coal. If I had a coffee table, maybe I could put it on there on some sort of special gilded dish and wait for people to ask me about it. In all likelihood its usefulness will only come next time I play Two Truths and a Lie at a sleepover party and I’ll say, “I have a piece of coal from the Titanic in my sock drawer.”
As we entered, I heard one tween boy rush ahead, “Come on mom. Let’s just hurry through. I just want to see if we survived.” Laylee and Magoo seemed equally unimpressed by the artifacts although they peeked inside each case and listened intently as we explained what an iceberg was and how the ship crashed and sunk. They have a great and strange love of all things morbid.
In the end, everyone but Papa survived. Pretty good odds, I’d say considering the odds of the actual passengers on the ship.
This sign puts a lump in my throat:
Go to the site and have a look to see if they’re coming to your town. It was a cool exhibit and the price was right. It’s a great chance to teach your kids a little history and maybe instill in them a healthy fear of ice. It may be good in a watered-down glass of ginger-ale when you’re pregnant but when you least expect it, it’ll tear a hole in your hull and send your one true love on a one way trip into the frigid drink.
*Besides the lump of coal in my stocking, some silly putty and the chance to cut in line, I was not compensated for attending or writing about this exhibit. I just appreciate a company willing to support the arts and education in these tough financial times so I’m giving a shout out to Country Financial.*
Googling Solutions to Cleaning Blood Stains While Teaching Preschool
Do you remember a while back I wrote a post about the level of sheer carnage occurring with my brawling preschoolers? Well things have calmed down through the months. The kids have stopped the smackdown and their attention spans have stretched to include schoolish activities lasting up to 15 minutes in length as long as the mother who’s teaching does a pretty elaborate song and dance routine to keep them engaged. It’s been going pretty well.
There are six moms in my group and we all take turns teaching our group of 3-year-olds from a purchased curriculum, complete with activities and pre-cut craft projects. Then we get 5 weeks off to run errands, go to doctors’ appointments or simply lay around the house bonding with our much loved inter-uterine parasite.
This morning the kids arrived at my house and I was optimistic. I was ready. I’d even vacuumed the floor and laid out all the supplies.
Over the last few days Laylee and Magoo have set up a spaceship playhouse under the stairs, under the staircase with the 8-inch wooden beam along the outside of it. It’s a cramped space and they’ve pushed the couch up against the opening so there’s only the teeniest space for them to climb in and out of their hideout. I decided to let them leave it up for a few days and the preschoolers were thrilled.
15 minutes into the playdate, one sweet teeny 3-year-old smashed her nose at full speed into the wooden beam while jumping around inside the spaceship. Blood was EVERYWHERE. The poor kid was in pain and completely traumatized by the red dribbling all down her clothes, the couch and smeared all over her face. I ran her into the kitchen where I sat on the floor, holding her and sent Magoo to get a full roll of toilet paper and my cell phone.
The bleeding was intense for someone so tiny and in a soft voice she kept saying, “I want my mom.” But her mom was unreachable and I was the next best thing.
While I tried to stop the gushing, the other kids ran around like total insane sun-starved maniacs from the rainy northwest who CANNOT HANDLE ONE MORE DAY TRAPPED INSIDE. They were squawking, sword-fighting and hitting the walls, the furniture and each other with various objects.
Then another one started screaming. Poor little S-Dawg with the cast on his arm and the brand new baby brother at home had smashed the back of his head on the wooden beam and was howling in pain. All the other kids came running. “S-DAWG SMACKED HIS HEAD.”
One of my most basic parenting instincts kicked in and I decided that hemorrhaging trumps concussion so I called out comforting words to the poor little guy while rocking the bleeder and changing her compresses. Meanwhile the other children, forgetting their fallen friends, went all Lord of the Flies again.
Eventually I got her cleaned up and convinced her to change into some of Laylee’s clothes. She insisted that the shirt be pretty enough or she’d remain happily in her gore. If she were 3 years older, she’d be Laylee’s very best friend.
I dealt with Head Wound Boy, outlawed the space ships, outlawed the swords and light sabers and got everyone to chill while I googled “how to remove blood from upholstery” and followed the listed instructions.
We started preschool over an hour late today but all the children were alive or at least clinging to life when they left my house. That is my story.