The trouble with cheerleading

For the past three years, Laura has bugged me about being a cheerleader. Back in the day—I said in my most crochety tone—we didn’t have cheerleading in elementary school, I expect because we also didn’t have football. And while I don’t have really serious problems with either cheerleading or football on general principle, I hate so much the way it’s handled at Orange Elementary that I have to restrain myself from running over the parents in their handy folding chairs all watching the practices as they block the driveway with their giant SUVs when I’m trying to pick my daughter up from her after-school program.

I know, I know. I’m probably just jealous that even with my supposedly flexible job I can’t take off afternoons to sit and watch my kids do sports. Maybe I’m jealous about their SUVs because I’m driving this virtual antique of a car, literally as old as my fifth-grader (although not when it’s time to fill up—gas was $3.09 in Rolling Hills today!! My God!). I’m also a notorious athletic spoil sport, admitting freely that I have never understood the attraction of organized team sports, much to the dismay of everyone around me. I really do watch the Super Bowl to see the commercials. But that’s not my real problem.

The real problem is the shaking-your-booty thing. I would prefer my ten-year old not shake hers in front of people. Maybe if there were one or two boy cheerleaders, or one or two girl football players I might not have such an issue with it. But I have no intention of allowing my daughter to participate in an activity that means not only does our entire family have to give up any semblance of life four weeknights plus Saturday mornings each week, but also means she is a sexual object at the ripe old age of ten—and plenty of these girls are younger.

If this cheerleading was athletic, physical exercise, a real sport—if that were it, it’d be fine. We’d still have a scheduling nightmare, but we might be able to work around that. But the bumping and grinding! The choreographed routines! Here cheerleading is more of a short skirt pom-pom waving erotic dance routine, complete with glamour shots to accompany the season. I hesitate to define this globally as a southern phenomenon, since for all I know, it could just be specific to Orange—maybe it’s just the one cheerleading coach here in town?

Either way, though, I can hear them right now, all the angry parents—how dismissive I am of sports! How girls who participate in sporting events are less likely to be anorexic and more likely to be confident! How my snobby reverse class jealousy is the real problem here! I know all too well the counterarguments. A year or two ago I expressed some of these sentiments in a very much more understated way to Kristina’s mother, and I’m afraid I may have hurt her feelings—this was before I knew she was so vested in cheerleading that not only was her daughter on the squad every year, but she actually offered to take Laura along with her to every single practice and game, without me needing to do one lick of transportation—because she felt it so important that my daughter cheerlead. I don’t mean to judge Kristina’s mother, or anyone else. But I simply cannot get past that booty shaking.

So my problem is the cheerleading, and that’s fine. But there’s also this other person involved, my daughter, who has different problems and different ideas. At what point does my enforcing my ideas about her life get a little out of hand? Why, if she wants to cheerlead, won’t I just let her? Imagine the difficulty, explaining to a person you are raising to be independent, that you cannot permit something important to them. Well, I’ve tried, at the beginning of every year. Every August I lay out the schedule arguments—which I’m afraid are dreadfully insurmountable. I really cannot be a carpool mom with my job. But it got much harder the year Kristina’s mom trashed that rationale with her offer. Finally I did what I probably should’ve done before—just explained to Laura my objections, my desire that she be valued for her mind and not her body, that even though it’s only elementary school cheerleading, it has a cultural message behind it that disturbs me. She doesn’t entirely buy this argument, I think, but maybe she respects it—because this is the first year she hasn’t nagged me about being a cheerleader.

Today I waited in the school driveway behind yet another Hummer-sized SUV, watching one mom try to hold onto her younger child while keeping an eye on practice and talking quickly with the car’s driver. Will wondered why all the boys kept falling down, and I explained about stretching, and still we waited. When the discussion broke up and the car pulled ahead so I could pass, I could see the girls getting water out of the back of another SUV, a gaggle of slim blonde girls, cute as buttons, clearly the popular kids. I couldn’t help but wonder again if my difficulty is less with my feminist principles and more with my own memories of an isolated and unpopular girlhood, which thankfully, my daughter seems well on the way to avoiding. Maybe in middle school the cheerleading changes tone. Maybe it gets more about the athletics and less about sex, as the coaches and the kids themselves become more conscious of themselves as sexual beings, before they embrace that sexuality (please God let that be in high school. or maybe college?). All I can say is the terrible mixed message I keep giving Laura, trying to offer both hope and realism: “We’ll see, honey. I really doubt it. Maybe, if things change, maybe next year.”

Proclamation of Amnesty

The honeymoon days of school end so quickly. It’s the first day, everybody wears their new clothes and loves their new teachers, and then only days later you notice how nasty your kid’s tennis shoes are and what on earth is that teacher thinking sending home this insane homework?

Laura, who unlike her little brother already understands all about consequences, has also begun to settle into her new room. A big fifth grader, a Safety Patrol member, a Star AR Reader, she positively floats around feeling confident and sophisticated, and when I pick her up from her after-school program, the little kids flock around her as if she were their own personal movie star. She wiggles her new loose tooth, one of five she’ll lose soon, her dentist tells us, and can’t wait to be that much older. I look at her and see this beautiful half-grown woman, and keep my mouth shut, without mentioning to her how the Queen of Fifth Grade will be a peon again next year, lowest of the lowly middle-school students. She may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

In typical public school fashion, though, all is not well in the Queen’s new world. The other night we spent eternity, I’m pretty sure, on her social studies homework, though, and it’s only the second full week or school. This does not bode well for the future. Her assignment seemed simple enough: read a chapter of her social studies book, come up with the proper names for each of the questions from the readings, and then find those names in a word search grid. She worked on it a little earlier this week but only had about four or five of fifteen questions answered herself and so asked me to help her. We looked together at her book—which was all history, by the way, but evidently history is now “social studies”—and found the next one or two answers in about the first two paragraphs of the chapter, so I fussed at her and told her, basically, to sit her sorry behind down and read that chapter carefully and then go back through it looking for the answers, because obviously they were all right there, no problem.

Hours or days later, she was down to the four or five still unanswerable questions. I’d been almost forcibly restraining myself from grinding my teeth for all that time, because I can’t stand watching how slowly she works sometimes, how she will make fifteen questions last until the end of next week or possibly even the end of time, but I was keeping my mouth shut still, which I believe must be the second most important role of the parents of the tween set, right after delivering long lectures. And then she started getting this whiny tone to her voice too, the one that immediately changes parents like me from rational college-educated folk to ravening maniacs. “Give me that damn book,” I snapped at her, “and you start finding the answers you already got in the word search.” I started with “Who was the founder of Tuskegee Institute?” and scanned the chapter over, pretty sure already it was Booker T. Washington, because I teach a little of his Up from Slavery in my American lit class, but I couldn’t find it in the chapter. I checked Tuskegee in the index. Nothing. I found the page number for Washington’s biography and looked that up. Nothing. I read the chapter before and after the one in question. Nothing.

Laura and I had a little conversation at this point. Did her teacher talk about this in class? She didn’t think so. Where were her notes? I inspected them, finding nary a mention of Mr. Washington or his school, and we moved onto the next topic of discussion. How are you taking notes in class? On her honor, she is only supposed to copy down what Ms. H. actually writes on the board. And there was nothing about Tuskegee on the board. My first impulse was that my daughter, like my own students, needs to learn to take better notes, so I politely mentioned this little fact to her, Googled “Tuskegee founder” just to be sure and told her to write down Washington. The next question asked about the law in the south that segregated blacks from whites; easy enough, a whole paragraph in her book talked about black codes, so while she was looking up another answer, I started looking for “black codes” in the word search. I scanned the entire grid, looking at every B. Then I did it again. I tried C. And did it again.

I asked Chris to look for it. I checked one more time. Black codes was simply not on that sheet. Chris, who is much better at word puzzles than I am, found Jim Crow laws. “But the book says black codes,” I wailed, and pointed out the passage. We looked up Jim Crow in the index—nothing. Looked for it in the chapter. Nothing. He actually wrote it on the sheet, before I reminded him that it was Laura’s homework and perhaps she should at least write it on there herself. Molly’s mother called us—could we find black codes in the word search? And did we know who founded Tuskegee? Let’s just say that this sort of thing went on for quite some time. Finally we Googled one last time more to find out that the pardon granted to white Southerners after the Civil War was Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty (shockingly enough, also not in the book), handed Laura her sheet to finish the word search, and nearly collapsed. At this point, she made the strategic mistake of asking “Did you find all the words in my word search for me?”—and dear Reader, I must draw a veil over the events that next occurred.

Before the social studies incident, I’d already written Ms. H a note asking how grades were weighted on the progress report she’d sent home that day, so I wasn’t going to write another one. So Chris and I sent Laura off to school the next morning, reminding her to tell her teacher that we couldn’t find the answers in her book and so her parents had helped her find them online—as if I’d let my ten year old lose on Google without me glued to her chair. Then I charitably spent the morning trying to imagine that maybe Ms. H was in a hurry and sent the sheet home without realizing that the answers weren’t in the book. Molly’s mom wrote a note to Ms. H about the assignment, and told me tonight that Ms. H wrote back that all the answers were in their notes, handouts or books except for two of them, and she wanted the worksheet to be challenging. “Well,” Laura said, “it certainly was,” and I couldn’t help but silently agree. Probably Laura’s just not taking notes like she should be. But I imagine that this homework assignment was some kind of test to see which parents are doing their homework for their kids, or maybe just who has internet access at home. Having spent about a half hour tonight relearning decimals, I do have to say that I’d really rather not go to fifth grade again, and I wonder if Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty might cover that eventuality? Somehow, I doubt it.

Stop signs

After two weeks, Will is finally convinced that he can’t go back to the Glowworm Room, and he is now in fact a Caterpillar. He seems to like his new class well enough and loved being the bell ringer last week; their jobs are so cute—door holder, line leader, bell ringer—and they take them so seriously. He already knew how tag names work: each child has a little laminated picture of a box of crayons with their name written on the front and with a strip of Velcro on the back. When a kid wants to play in the block center, she puts her tag name on one of the three Velcro spots in that center, and when three kids are playing there, that’s all she wrote. Everybody else has to wait until one of those kids come out. I guess this keeps the block wars down to a manageable level. The Glowworms used tag names and had a similar meal and nap plan too, so Will had no problems adjusting to most of the room’s already familiar routines.

But my sweet William has also been discovering consequences this past week. Not to say we don’t have them at home, but it’s different when it’s a new teacher dishes them out. I have to say too that my initial impression that Ms. Tammy is a clam has been confirmed. I picked him up the other day, hello how are you?, nothing out of the ordinary, and didn’t realize at all until the next morning that Will had gotten in trouble the day before.

I had a meeting out of town early that morning and needed to hit the road pretty quickly, so of course when I dropped Will off at school, he was in that leg-clingy hold me hold me hold me mode. His favorite spot in his classroom is currently the housekeeping area, where they have your pretend stove and fridge and dishes and fake fruit and whatnot, but most intriguing of all, the dress-up closet, filled with costumes and old clothes that kids have grown out of. Last week’s winner was a police office costume, complete with a little cloth cap, and so I offered to help Will “dress up into a policeman,” as he likes to say. It took me a while at first to realize what was going on, but he just got weird all of a sudden, literally hanging his head and refusing to make eye contact and mumbling something I couldn’t quite catch. Ms. Kisa, who comes in first thing in the morning and has left by the time I pick Will up, is a little chattier, and she finally filled me in.

Evidently the day before he had one of his little moods when he can’t make up his mind. I find decisions difficult myself at times, so it’s not hard for me to imagine that choices for a three-year old could be just staggering. Will had two dolls, but was playing with one, and another child asked to play with the second. With some encouragement from his teacher, he decided he could share, but he couldn’t make up his mind which doll he wanted to give up. It sounded to me as if Ms. Kisa and the other child must just possess realms of patience, as she described swapping dolls back and forth several times before she told him his next decision was final. Predictably, he gave up a doll and then had a fit because he wanted to share the other one, and at this point, in a movement I imagine as one long melodramatic sweep, he knocked all the toys off the table they were playing on.

The rule in the Caterpillar Room is that if you misbehave with toys—throwing them, for example—or if you refuse to clean up after playing in a center, you get a stop sign on that center. The teacher cuts out a red construction paper octagon, writes the offender’s name on it, and then tapes that up where their tag names go, so when a child gets ready to play in that area, he’ll see his name on the stop sign and remember he can’t play there for a whole day. So William was banned from the housekeeping center.

We’ve seen this sort of tantrum at home periodically, and certainly Will can be stubborn. I’ve watched him once or twice feeling guilty about this or that, like last night when Laura had been cutting out pictures for a school collage and then left the scissors lying around. So Will picked them up and started trying to cut a stray thread off his sock. I came in, saw my baby trying to cut his foot off with these giant scissors, and hollered—well, I can’t even remember what I hollered, but evidently it was loud, because Will about went through the roof. He looked so guilty, although admittedly it was more of the “whoops, I’ve been caught” look, rather than any expression of true remorse.

Whatever happened with that stop sign hit him harder, though. He’s talked about it for days. When other kids got stop signs later that week, he came home full of news about their misdemeanors too. Apparently he’s also been quite prompt at school lately about picking up his messes. Just the threat of the stop sign is enough. He spends such a long time at school everyday while we’re working—and I don’t feel very close to either of his teachers yet, so I imagine him warily watching Ms. Tammy to see if he’s about to be banned again, wishing his parents would come take him home. While I’m glad to hear the Caterpillar discipline methods seem so effective, that morning in his room I just looked and looked at his little red stop sign, his scarlet letter out for all the world to see, and felt just the tiniest bit that his teacher had to be the meanest person on the planet—just for a second. Now, of course, I see red stop signs everywhere; three kids had them in the housekeeping area yesterday, so probably it’s a much more normal part of the day than I imagined that morning, as I contemplated the beginning of Will’s life of crime. I remember Laura’s Butterfly class had the Manners Tree, and how her leaves would float right off that tree at times, and how she survived quite nicely, thank you. So Will and I talked about being patient and sharing, how important and how hard it is, and how stop signs make us very, very sad, but how not sharing also makes our friends sad. Today he might get to turn the lights on and off at group and nap time to get everybody’s attention, or maybe they’ll take a field trip to the library, so no doubt he’s moved on to other things—but oh, that first stop sign.

Not old enough for this

For Chris’s birthday, we had unconventional party stuff. Small cookout, his brothers and mine and their families only. He asked for banana pudding instead of cake, which he doesn’t like, so I made this whopping one with something like ten bananas in it. On his birthday itself, I made madeleines—they were light, warm, beautifully yellow and barely browned, and we ate them with lemon sorbet, and I can’t quite understand how we weren’t immediately assumed into heaven, but somehow he’s forty now and I’ll be thirty-nine soon, he borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder to fix the gutter this weekend, the house is still dirty, and I still have to balance the checkbook. I used some night repair crème that came in my last makeup bonus, and now I may have to buy a bottle of it. How did this happen?

Tiny typos

On Chris’s fortieth birthday, he was recognized at the School Board meeting as the Teacher of the Year for at Rolling Hills High School. Unfortunately, we discovered a little problem when he got home. And let’s just say further that this email does not accurately reflect my contributions to the conversation.

From: “Christopher R”
To: “Anonymous Friend at the School District”
Date: 8/22/2005 10:54:23 PM
Subject: Ummmm.....

..I’m not normally one to complain or anything, but my wife says that someone (obviously not you by any means!) misspelled my name on my Teacher of the Year certificate.

Now, I know, I know that in the grand scheme of things that this is very small, very miniscule, but you know how women are....she’s all like “Well, they’re just gonna have to fix it...” and I’m like “Now, honey, it’s an honest mistake. Anyone can make a mistake. Remember that time that you...” Well, to be honest, I don’t remember much after that point--just a long, long period of blackness followed by hollow voices calling to me from far, far away--you know, that sort of thing. But, no matter, the long and short of it is that I was wondering if there was any way that such a certificate could be reprinted so that “Christopher” was spelled “Christopher” and not “Christoper,” but if it can’t I certainly understand because (if it’s all the same to you) I could just as easily squeeze a little “h” in there (I mean it is a pretty tiny letter, after all. And, to tell you the truth, who really reads those things anyway?) with like a Sharpie or something that I bought with district money (of course!).

Ok...I’m sorry to take up so much of your precious time with this insane request. It really is ok with me as is and there is no one in the room making me write this at all. Really. No one standing over me with any sort of bludgeoning device. Just me, writing to you on my own volition.

Really. Get back to work and forget about it.

Ok. There are noises in the hall. I’ve got to go.

Shhhhhhh!

Thanks!
Chris

Dreaded silver wombats

I still haven’t found my Ursula Le Guin bracelet.

From: Lisa
To: Chris
Date: 8/22/2005 8:55:32 AM
Subject: woe is me

My heart is still broken. The good thing I got there so early this morning that nobody was at either Target or Wal-mart and I could walk through the entire parking lot and over all the newly scrubbed floors and even ask at the customer service places without waiting. But I am really really really really sad. Some mean person has my bracelet and not turned it in to lost and found. REALLY REALLY REALLY sad. I was going to call the gallery where I bought it, but they don’t open til 10. Do you think they still have them? :(
Going to class now. Tragically and whatnot.
L


From: Chris
To: Lisa
Date: 8/22/2005 10:11:14 AM
Subject: Re: woe is me

You WILL possess this bracelet again if it is the last thing I ever do!!! If I have to, I will visit the rare silver mines of Australia and fight the dreaded silver wombats and recover enough silver to forge with a mold crafted directly from Ursula Le Guin's own personal steel driveway gate and MAKE YOU ANOTHER ONE....

The point is...YOU SHALL BE MADE WHOLE AGAIN!!!

Love,
c

The new you

Changing your look can be complicated, but I try to make things like this simple. I usually make a little effort at the beginning of the school year. A new haircut, losing enough weight—just a pound or two—to get back into a favorite pair of pants from a year or so ago. Nothing drastic. But still, just one week in, I’m finding the consequences seem rather larger than one might expect.

• When your hairdresser congratulates you mid-cut on being brave, that’s a very bad thing.
• If you stop drinking soft drinks, you can lose a lot of weight really quickly.
• People love to ask you how you lost weight, and generally what they also mean is that you looked like a fat pig before.
• When you lose weight, you can also lose other things, like your favorite bracelet, because your arms also lose weight, evidently.

I may have to take up Sprite again.

Will's version

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.
You make me happy when skies are grapes.

I am such a good mommy, I didn’t even laugh. I just spent the whole morning singing all about those grape skies.

The first week

I guess the first week of school is usually a partial week so everyone doesn’t die from exposure to new bookbag fumes or something. But every year, I am just so grateful it’s only two or three days of school, even though I complain about it before—why not just wait and have a full week? What’s the point in just having two days? So you can survive. I’m sure the teachers and administration probably feel the same way.

Saturday morning after our first days of school I am uploading 212 digital photos to Target so that I don’t actually have to stand over that photo printer thingy manual selecting every single picture I want to print. Instead I can just select them all in one fell swoop and then wait an hour or so for my upload to complete. Now just in case you’re imagining that these 212 photos are of my children on their first day of school, don’t. These are pictures since Laura’s last birthday, back in January. Using my well practiced math skills—in other words, my calculator—I can count the number of months on my fingers and tell you that’s an average of about 26.5 pictures a day (and you wonder why Laura has trouble with math). Almost one a day. Of course, they’re really all bunched up around the two birthdays and the resulting four or five parties, not to mention a few trips to the zoo and aquarium, plus a random one here or there of Laura and Adeleigh or Will wearing his dump truck pajamas doing some cute thing like riding his giant stuffed Bullseye. Even though we took many of these pictures during school, there’s such a summer’s over quality to looking at them all, Will in his shark-covered bathing suit that afternoon at Carolyn’s pool and Chris and Laura kayaking and me with the Ferengi.

Summer’s over.

I am reminded again how much life Laura has outside our home. William is still mostly living in our own little Fantasy Island, despite the introduction of other boys eating their peanut butter sandwiches into the shapes of guns, but Laura really truly lives in another world now. She and I argued over school clothes, actually measuring one pair of shorts that I really could not believe were four inches above her knee (she won). I bought her one cool new outfit for the beginning of classes and then refused to buy anymore because it was too hot and she couldn’t wear any of the fall clothes we bought her now, and anyhow she’s on a growth spurt and will need all new stuff by October. I am not exactly one of those officially mean moms now, but close. Fortunately on the second day of school, Molly’s mother, surely as amazed as I am at how her daughter grew an entire head taller than my daughter this summer, handed down seven pairs of cool Mudd jeans that don’t fit Molly anymore, which Laura has been wearing around the house while I yell, “put on a belt, your underwear are showing again!”

She has told us just a few things about school so far. After-school Safety Patrol is loads of fun, but very hot (imagine, in your new fall outfit with three-quarter length sleeved sweater and boots). Her teacher says she hardly gives any homework (the letter home says it should take about an hour each night, so perhaps this is a matter of interpretation). She can’t remember if I’m supposed to sign her agenda every night (although I have this image of Ms. H. standing there saying over and over, almost droning, “be sure your parents sign your agenda each night”). She took quizzes in math and reading to find her level and did great in reading, she’s sure (long silence followed by a brief discussion of how she’d really forgotten everything about decimals). Her first spelling pretest doesn’t count, Mom (and a good thing too). Your basic beginning of school, and I’m old enough now to know that even though I did have that terrible moment when an absolute herd of vampire bats fluttered in my stomach when I saw her first spelling pretest grade that she’ll take the real test next Friday, and by then she will have remembered how to spell all those words again.

Actually, now that I think of it, this is quite a lot of information to have about the first days of school, a veritable flood of news. Especially compared to William, who like all preschoolers seems to remember only about the last thirty minutes of his day unless it involved some momentous event like a horse coming to visit their class. He tells me that a new friend was sad yesterday, but he doesn’t want to tell me why, he earnestly explains, leaving me to wonder if perhaps my sweet William might have something to do with that sadness. He can’t remember the child’s name, and if he was Baby #1, I’d probably ask the teacher in some convoluted way if William did some strange thing to some new child he doesn’t know, but since he’s Baby #2, I just figure that if he did anything really unfortunate his teacher would surely have let me know. So far, Miss Tammy is one of those clam teachers, who you watch through the classroom door just chatting up a storm with the kids, but who limits her communications with you to something innocuous and chirpy like Will had a busy day today! before she heads back to stenciling with Dalton.

Stenciling, in fact, resulted Thursday in one of Will’s first life crisis moments, which is directly related to his coloring problems: staying in the lines. Maybe we all were either little people who just color happily and shout “who cares!” about the lines, or else we were those practically suicidal children because the universe would shatter if we went outside them, I don’t know. But the only times I’ve ever heard William say “I can’t do it” occurred during coloring and stenciling. He’ll draw dogs and monsters all day, I suppose because he can make his own lines. William is sitting at the tiny table pushing the stencils away, saying more and more firmly as I ask him to just try, “I can’t do it!” And I’m standing behind the stencil table in the bright new Caterpillar room thinking mean thoughts about this unreasonable teacher asking my darling baby to stencil when he’s only three, when Peyton, his little friend who’s been with him since the Roly Poly room, whips her stencil off the page to reveal this perfect and I mean perfect daisy. Miss Tammy says, “Wow, Peyton, I guess you’ve done this before,” and William and I slunk off home, where I did not make him practice with stencils, you will be happy to know.

Chris has missed a lot of this, just getting the at-home reports at dinner, which are always much abbreviated than the pick-up at school version, when it’s still fresh, because he’s been busy starting his own classes. He came home exhausted and hoarse the first two days, I think from having to explain the dress code and name tag policy over and over again. Not only to students, mind, but also to the other faculty, as his administration keeps reminding them that peer pressure is important if any teacher is not enforcing the rules. Seems like in the fun old world of teaching high school, the administration is often as much trouble as the students. I understand this myself, from teaching college, since I have learned that at least students understand that you will be grading their papers, whereas your own colleagues and administration know you can’t do anything to them if they forget to show up for a meeting. My own classes start next week, which I can tell because I’m beginning to get my usual giant cold sore on my lip, always a sign of stress, and such a fetching addition to my own first day of school outfit.

Despite all these traumas of having to wear old clothes and stencil in new classes, both Laura and Will seemed happy enough after their first days. Despite Laura yelling at me in this anguished way as I drove up to drop her off the first day, “Don’t run over Sparkle,” the aged beagle that roams around the school grounds every afternoon, as if I actually might hit the old arthritic thing, she still doesn’t seem embarrassed to see me or when I wave at her friends on the morning Safety Patrol. Despite my insistence Thursday that William really could learn to stencil if he tried, he was still as happy to see me Friday at pick-up time as ever. Despite the administration and cold sores, Chris and I are still plugging along, and one night we actually had real cooked food for dinner, unlike the cereal we ate last night. All in all, not a bad beginning.

Fifth Grade Parent Survey

From: Lisa R
To: Ms. H
Date: 8/12/2005 8:50:35 AM
Subject: Fifth Grade Parent Survey

Ms. H, I’m attaching (and pasting below in case there are any problems with the attachment) Laura’s parent survey. I took this to work yesterday to fill out so she could turn it in this morning and then left it on my desk—I had a meeting that ran over and then had to leave early to take Laura to the dentist. So you will see when you read this that she’s probably not the only one who needs to work on organizing her work better.

Sorry this is not only late but so looong. I get kinda carried away with my homework. :)

Thanks.
Lisa

______________________________________________

Dear Parents and/or Guardians,
So that we may become better acquainted with your child, please fill out the survey below and return it.
Thank you,
Ms. H. and Ms. W

Fifth Grade Parent Survey
Student’s Name: Laura R

1. What are your child’s favorite activities/interests?

Laura loves to read and to swim. She collects Build-a-Bear stuffed animals, and also likes to watch TV. She spent a lot of time this summer reading Goosebumps books and also finished the new Harry Potter novel in two days after it was released. She took swimming lessons again this summer and loves to swim in pools, but also in Six-Mile Creek, a tidal creek in near the coast where her grandparents have a house.

2. What responsibilities does your child have at home?

Laura has to keep her room cleaned up, which is a big chore since she shares a room with her little brother and it’s too small for both of them and their stuff. She cleans her bathroom (when ordered to do so). She watches her brother for us while we work on the house often too. She helps set and clear the table at meals.

3. How does your child get along with his/her brothers or sisters or playmates at home?

Very well. Her little brother William is three, and she loves him. He gets on her nerves when he plays with her Polly Pocket toys, but she wrote an “I am” poem last year that included this line: “I understand that Will’s a baby.” She is also patient with our neighbor’s children, one of whom is near her age, but less emotionally mature, and two of whom are very much younger. She is very mature and responsible with these kids.

4. About how much time does your child spend watching TV?

Too much. This summer she’d turn on the Disney Channel and leave it on all day if we let her. Generally we allow both kids to watch something in the morning while they eat breakfast, but that’s usually a Disney movie or Arthur. She attends Challenger and doesn’t get home until around 6, so I do let her watch some TV while I get dinner fixed and on the table. Most nights we turn it off after dinner for a while, but it’s not unusual for us to let them watch something for a few minutes right at bedtime—they will lie down on our bed and watch Star Trek for half-an-hour or until they fall asleep. As I said, it’s probably too much. But we do at least limit what kinds of programs they can watch very strictly.

5. How does your child interact with books at home?

Laura reads a lot. She reads at most meals (yes, sometimes even when the TV is on), and in the car while we’re running errands, and often we’ll listen to the Harry Potter books on tape in the car on trips too. She has a reading light on her bed, and a book light in the car. Her father and I both teach English, so she has grown up surrounded by books and loves them. Our favorite family outing is to go out to eat and then go to the bookstore after dinner.

6. What kinds of writing or drawing does your child do at home?

She writes and draws a fair amount. I believe she’s keeping some sort of diary or journal, but this is apparently a secret. She likes to write stories sometimes, and she often helps me write various types of lists. She had a poem published in last year’s Southern Sampler. She also likes to draw, which she and her brother do together sometimes. She draws lots of landscapes. Here’s a little essay she wrote in fourth grade last year about her writing (for PACT, I think?)

The thing I like to do most is writing a story. Writing is fun to me because you can put in as much adventure as you want. you never have to draw the line anywhere when your using your imagination. When I sit down at the computer about to start a story I always think about what my story’s going to be about. Lots of the time my storys always start off adventure and exciment, it makes the reader want to read more. I write stories as often as I can, like after homework so I can stay active. When I start to write a story I always remember a story’s 3 main parts. I rember—topic sentence, body and conclustion. It always helps to remember those. It’s really important to me because writing could be my future. I’m going to stick with my writing and see if I can get some publised.

7. What do you see as your child’s strengths?

Laura is an emotionally mature child who listens well and respects other people, children and adults alike. She is very loving and can be generous. She loves to “teach” smaller kids, and worked with Mrs. B’s Challenger kindergarten kids until the older kids weren’t allowed to do this anymore. She is smart and funny and an excellent reader.

8. What do you see as your child’s weaknesses?

She can be impatient with her work sometimes, and can also be careless and a little disorganized (like all of us, I think). She thinks she doesn’t do well at math, which generally means she doesn’t. I think she got a little behind learning her facts, multiplication tables and whatnot, and she also doesn’t conceptualize math the way I think many people do—when I try to think of 23-13 I can see the numbers written on top of each other, but she tries to count up from 13 to 23 to get the result. Because she conceptualizing problems differently (and I haven’t figure out how she does visualize them), she doesn’t believe she does well in math at all.

9. How does your child feel about school?

She loves school. She is always excited about coming back, and she has loved all her teachers, and we’ve been fortunate that she’s generally had very good teachers. She enjoys her classes, especially art, I think, and she is thrilled about being in Safety Patrol, although she doesn’t want to think about the fact that this means she’s leaving Orange Elementary after this year.

First Grade Fourth Grade

And one more paper from fourth grade. I promise that’s it! Evidently the assignment asked Laura to compare herself in the fourth grade to her first grade self.

First Grade Fourth Grade

In first grade I had different friends. I used to hate baseball but now in fourth grade I love it! In first grade I was shorter than I am now. In first grade I had very short hair, but in fourth I have long beautiful hair. When I was little I kept my hair short and down, but as old as I am now I keep it up and long. We had to go to the bathroom as a class but now we can go by ourselves! I could read a little then, but now I read I read like a cow eats grass. I learned to add when we did math, but I learned to divide. I remember I was six years old back in the past, but here in the present I am 10! In first grade I couldn’t write a single thing in cursive, but in fourth grade I sure can! I had two recesses when I was younger, but here when I’m older, one. I got to eat in the room when I was little. It was so cool! But now I eat in the lunch room. I used to love math in first grade, but in fourth grade I hate it. Boy did I hate spelling in first grade. That’s funny because I love it now. We worked a lot on writing back then, but now we work on math. I used to love sloths but now they’re not so fun anymore. I used to hate mice. I would squeal in terro, but now I love them! I used to love movies so much I watched 3 a day! Now I only watch 1. I used to love Barbies with all my heart, but I only kinda like them now. I was just so weird in first grade.
February 15, 2005

"I am" poem

Another snippet from last year’s school papers—this is evidently a classic of the elementary poetry genre, although I never read any of these until this year when I worked on the local district literary magazine. I love Laura’s poem.

I Am

I am Laura R
I wonder if we’re having pizza
I see kids doing PACT
I want a million toys
I am Laura R

I pretend stuffed animals are real
I feel angry when my brother messes up my room
I touch my hermit crab’s shell
I worry a certain build-a-bear will go away
I cry when my dad yells at me
I am Laura R

I understand that Will’s a baby
I say things like a counselor
I dream nightmares
I try to do good in Math
I hope to go to RH High
I am Laura R

May 16, 2005

Body talk

William and I are having one of those bizarre body conversations this morning, which started when I was trying to get out of the shower and get dressed in some relative privacy, because really explaining tampons is not a subject I feel like discussing this morning.

Mommy: “William, is Arthur still on?”
William: “I think so.” (disappears briefly, then reenters from stage-right) “Mommy, can I wear Laura’s boots?”
Mommy: “Ok, but just since Laura’s not home.” (brief zipping ensues)
William: (stomps off. Returns a minute later) “Mommy, the poops need to come out, and you will say, ‘Oh my goodness!’”
Mommy: “Ok, let’s take off those boots and go to the potty, then!”
William: “Why do I have to take off the boots?”
Mommy: “Because you can’t sit down with them on.”
William: (pooping) “Mommy, why don’t you have a penis?”
Mommy: “Because boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina.”
William: “Why do girls have vaginas?”
Mommy: “So that when they grow up and want to have a baby in their tummies, the baby will have a way to come out.”
William: “The poops want to stay in their house now!”
Mommy: “OK, let’s wipe. Do you think Arthur’s still on?”
William: (brief departure to check on television status) “Mommy, we don’t have a fancy house.”

I am already exhausted, and I am still not even fully dressed.

World’s smallest rejection

Well, I’m still collecting poetry rejection notes, but the latest entry to the contest measures in at a relatively miniscule 3.18 by 2.5 inches. That’s at least eight notices to a standard size piece of paper—I mean, I know the economy’s tough and that we should save trees and all, but dang. I guess brevity really is the soul of wit?

One rejection in today, one set of poems out.

First day

I just dropped both my babies off at their respective schools, and yes, I know they’re not babies. And it doesn’t make any difference.

This morning I actually had everything organized the night before. I had the new class paperwork already filled out, with the practically fifteen obligatory emergency contacts—always difficult since we don’t have any close friends or family in our town. I had the various markers and crayons and pencils and glue sticks and play dough all assembled in Will’s bag and Laura’s bags. We picked out school clothes and had them laid out with their appropriate shoes and tights, and even remembered to put Laura’s glasses with her bookbag. Chris packed lunches for all of us and loaded everything up in the car beforehand—because he had to be out early, since it’s his first day of school too—and we got out of the house on time. We were ready.

And still I dropped both off in their classrooms and got a little sniffly. This is a big improvement over Laura’s first day at kindergarten, but I am just not ready yet. I have a preschooler and a fifth grader today.

Fortunately while they’re growing up I am too. I was just sniffly, not even teary-eyed and certainly not hysterical (I have seen some of those parents the first day, and they’re not always moms either, you should know). I hard-heartedly told Laura I wasn’t going to park and walk in to help her carry her bags and bags of stuff, as about every single other parent in the school was doing that morning to judge by all the cars on the grass, and that if she couldn’t carry it all she could just leave the printer paper and tissues in the car and take them the second day—what would her teacher do, kill her? And William and I haven’t had time to find the perfect water bottle for his new classroom, so we just labeled a sippy cup to serve in the meantime. I finally know that he won’t die because he doesn’t have a new water bottle the first day in the Caterpillar class.

Of course this also means perhaps now that I’m a more grown-up mom, I also am a little less on the ball. My mother and I took the kids to the beach for their last two days of freedom—poor Chris had to work—and I let them stay up too late, and we missed Laura’s new classroom orientation and half of Will’s class transition time, which won’t, I expect, kill them. And we did have a good time at the hotel pool and the aquarium. We got a late start to baths last night too, so everybody was in bed later than they should’ve been, and unsurprisingly, people were a little hard to wake up this morning too. We used to start waking them up early a couple of weeks before school started to give them a chance to adjust, back when we were obsessive parents. Now I’m just happy when we make it to school on time. Adjusting expectations, I suppose.

But still, the first day expectations are pretty high. I don’t think the last year or two I managed the first day of school photo—this year I did, though. Laura posed for hers with tween panache, a little jaunty angle on the hip to show off her knee-high boots and mini-skirt to the best advantage. Which about killed me, I should add. William and his tiger dressed in their matching Panthers tshirts so he’d have some company his first morning, and in his first day photo he typically hid a bit behind the animal while he snuggled his sister—he wouldn’t pose for his own by himself. While I worried in the car about whether Laura’d have time after afternoon safety patrol to have her snack and also do her homework, she rolled her eyes at me and said, “Mom, they’ll save me a snack, they always do for the safety patrol,” as if I were the dumbest person alive even though we had this conversation a couple of times last week and she never bothered to inform me of this little detail before.

And William gave me a tour of the tadpoles and the farm and the new cubbies and his place at the snack table before he ran off to the climber in his new room—he climbed up two steps, turned around, and said (he really said this), “Have a great day, Mom!” and was off. He stood for a minute at the Caterpillar window and waved while I walked to the car, waving back—and then I rewarded myself with hot chocolate at the coffee shop on my way to school. It seemed a little crowded this morning, as a matter of fact—maybe a few extra mothers there today.

Normal kids

Most of the things that happen at our house are boringly normal.

Last night I stepped on Cerberus. Well, the small plastic model of him, anyhow, not the actual guardian of the underworld.

William pitched one of his occasional three-year old temper tantrums tonight—he had a little melt-down.

Laura packed five DVDs and three videos for her trip to her grandmother’s house this weekend and decided about halfway through packing her clothes that she really really really wanted to stay home—and could she?

Nope. Chris and I banned Cerberus to the toy box again, hauled Will out of the bookstore hollering “but I WANT the dragon,” and sent Laura off to Siberia, otherwise known as Grandma’s. And probably the most normal thing of all—I have been busy worrying about my beautiful talented children and what will happen to them in another year of school.

I keep thinking about our parent-teacher conference with Will’s teacher last month when we asked about why he’d been placed in the Caterpillar classroom instead of becoming a Butterfly. We’d found out that Will, who turned three back in April, would be in the younger kid class, while one of our friend’s daughters, who won’t turn three until September, is going into the older three-year old class, and asked about this in conference. Age, apparently, isn’t the only placement factor, and in Will’s case, the center carefully considered his “emotional maturity.” Evidently when Will has one of his little melt-downs every now and then, he is just too needy. He’ll do better, his teacher earnestly explained, in the smaller classroom, where he won’t have to compete for attention quite so much. Now I am just sure that no other kids in the Glow Worm class ever have tantrums and want attention. My bright little William, who when Laura was red-eyed and sniffly as she got into her Grandma’s car, asked “Are you bringing my sister back?” William, who tonight reeled off his plans for the immediate future: “Tonight we’ll go home and I’ll brush my teeth with my Batman toothbrush and go to sleep, and then I’ll wake up and eat Honeycombs and go to school with my friends, and then Mama will take me out somewhere and we’ll see a Spiderman suit and she’ll say yes and I can play Spiderman.” My “emotionally immature” three-year old.

And my beautiful bright daughter, who scored badly one a test one afternoon in second grade and has been ineligible for the district’s Gifted and Talented Program since—because the only factor considered in placement is some combination of the test scores from the current year, and those from second grade. Not grades. Not teacher recommendations. Test scores. At work, I had a sticker on my office door for a while that said “My child is not a test score,” but I’m thinking maybe I need to start wearing it now. Laura only became truly conscious that she was missing something with GTP this past year, and we had one of our “purple cloth talks”—a story for another day—in which I explained to her as well as I could why schools use test scores and that test scores aren’t always a predictor of intelligence and how the fact that she’s not in the program means it’s the sorriest excuse for a Gifted and Talented Program there could be—and well, I was sort of losing my objectivity at that point and had to stop.

I want, like most parents, more for my children than I had myself. More opportunities, more education, an easier time finding those things. A better job when they grow up (especially since at the rate Chris and I are going they will have to support us in our old age). I want everybody to love them as much as I love them. I can’t understand why every teacher doesn’t fall over to praise their great intelligence—what vocabularies! What reasoning abilities! And even great manners. What more could you want from a kid? Empathy? A three-year old who worries about whether Kitty had dinner yet? A ten-year old who will play Heigh-Ho-Cherrio with a three-year old over and over, even when he doesn’t play right? My two normal kids, both already with files and assessments and paperwork laying a path down a nice normal road.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shopping for colleges yet. Nobody had Harvard onesies, although we do have a savings bond or two tucked away for tuition some day. I just don’t quite understand this path for one child with Cerberus and a plan for life, another with glasses perched on her nose reading and rereading all summer long. Not that I think either will stay on the road their files are mapping for them now—but I wish they didn’t have to start out straying, because it’s just so simple for a teacher to check one box instead of another, based on a tantrum one day, a test another, the weight these normal things take.

School surprise

Laura, my almost fifth-grader, has been cleaning up her room for almost a week. We’d been discussing how her room needed cleaning, how impossible it was to walk in, and was there in fact any carpet in the room at all? since it certainly wasn’t visible. I had just decided to keep the door closed and make her work on it on her own, because usually when I help her clean her room I holler. And holler. And holler some more for the sake of variety. And I am generally not the hollering type. Room cleaning days are my worst parenting days ever. She finally started on her own when her school supply list came in the mail, after weeks of her asking daily if I thought her letter would come today—because I told her we wouldn’t go shopping for school stuff until her room was clean, even if that wasn’t until September. She finished last night, so all four of us marched off to Wal-Mart to shell out what ended up being $74.00, and we’re not even done yet.

Will got really excited about this notion of shopping for school supplies, unsurprisingly since we realized in the store he thought we were saying school surprise. A rather crushing disappointment, somewhat leavened by the fact that we let him pick out a Batman toothbrush and toothpaste for his new room. Yes, even Will has a school supply list, since he’ll be moving up from the Glow Worm class to the Caterpillar preschool room:

1 pack glue sticks
1 bottle glue
2 boxes tissues
1 box or refill of FLUSHABLE wipes
1 pack washable markers
1 pack play dough
cot sheet/blanket (crib sheets work best)
complete change of clothes
toothbrush
water bottle
toothpaste
pictures for class collage

Laura’s list of twenty-two items includes various organizational dividers and band-aids and two reams of printer paper, as well as the annual prohibition against rolling book bags and Trapper Keepers, which evidently are two of the major sources of evil in elementary school, as they have been forbidden on every supply list we’ve ever gotten from Orange Elementary.

Aside from keeping Laura from her school shopping for almost a whole week, I have done other interesting bad Mama things lately. Like earlier when I was driving Will to his dentist appointment and realized that not only did I forget to brush his teeth that morning, but I am pretty sure we didn’t brush them the night before either. And this year I was determined not to forget Laura’s new classroom open house like I did last year (I swear, it was in tiny print, in a really long letter, nothing to set the date and time out, and it’s the only one we ever missed!)—and I didn’t forget, but we had plans already to go to the beach with my mother for one last fling before school. Laura kept trying to think of how to somehow do both. I guess that’s not a terrible bad Mama thing, since I didn’t have advance notice, but after five years of school you’d think I might remember when they usually have open house.

And then I cheated on William’s summer reading program record. The librarian gave us this sheet with a picture of ten clowns, and each time he read for 90 minutes, he was supposed to color in a clown. Once they were all colored he could get his reading medal and put his name up on the library window with all the other kids. I watched Laura like a hawk, since she’s rather prone to thinking that reading for a half hour was really twice as long, but she’s on her third sheet and has read every minute of those damn clowns—she filled up one alone just reading the new Harry Potter novel. But Will is only three, and I really think the library should have a little more reasonable expectations about a baby’s attention span. I counted every clown as fifteen minutes, and if the library’s got a problem with my commitment to reading, that’s just too damn bad.

Somehow summer’s ending and school beginning is such a vexed time, odd for a family who loves school and with two teacher-parents. So I tossed all those washable markers and pencils and forty-eight packs of crayons into the cart, grumbling about how expensive everything is, knowing full well that we have about two thousand markers and pencils and crayons at home. But I also know that both my children will show up, shiny and new on their first day of class, with markers just as bright and fresh as they are. Will doesn’t quite know the difference yet, but boy, does Laura. She’ll be marching off with her new Polo messenger bag, hoping nobody can tell we bought it way cheap at T. J. Maxx, five neon highlighters tucked in the outside pocket for any reading emergency.

I’ll take a picture that morning, like I always do, and smile when I remember the great drama of Laura in her little first-day of school dress marching off to kindergarten, me sniffling along behind her. This year she’ll be a safety patrol kid, towering a good foot over the baby kindergarteners. William will show up with a Batman toothbrush, far too old now for last year’s Winnie the Pooh, and ready to start writing, since he knows Laura writes at school. He asked me the other day to help him write his name, so we did. He needed, he explained, help with his homework. My God, don’t we all?

Potty training addendum

Will just had a tiny accident in bed this morning and came bolting in here so fast the pee-pee hadn’t even made it down to the bottom of the mattress pad before I got it stripped off. “I had an accident, I’m sad,” he announced. He tried to make it to the potty, he said. Poor little thing. He’s been doing so well, too. He has this powerful bladder control, which he must have inherited from Chris, who has teacher bladder—basically you’re lucky if you get to pee at all during a public school day. Will wakes up and eats breakfast and will get dressed and sometimes still isn’t ready to go potty. We aren’t people who have faith in this stuff either, and so long after he was ready to go all night without a diaper we were still putting them on him because after all we still had half a pack and he wasn’t exactly complaining about it. Finally a while ago he announced he was ready to sleep in his big boy underwear, but we’d no doubt still be diapering him at bedtime if he hadn’t mentioned it himself. Will’s definitely a case of the child-led potty training.

Sending off poems

I am getting poems ready to mail off tomorrow when I go to work, and I just can’t imagine any world in which the editors won’t boredly open my envelop and glance at my first poem and then gasp and read every word and yell “stop the presses” as they pick up the phone to call me and offer me great amounts of money if I will only let them publish my fabulous work.

Of course, tomorrow when I go to campus I’ll already be back in the time-to-check-mail-for-my-rejections mode, but I love that sending poems out feeling, before it feels futile.

Big Hoity Toity U

I met this woman at Will’s new preschool classroom orientation the other night who teaches economics with her husband at The Big Hoity Toity Liberal Arts University here in town. Although I live in the same city as BHTU, and my own campus is less than 30 miles from here, my beloved home town doesn’t really know My Teeny University exists, and we only see MTU in the local newspaper when our former student famous country music chick comes to concert at MTU. So she asks me where I teach and commences to rave about how good I must be since it’s so hard to get jobs at those “community colleges.” Now MTU is a small school, and we grant a only a few bachelor’s degrees every year and mostly give people their first two years of their coursework before they transfer to Our Bigger and Hoity Toitier U’s main campus. But we are most definitely not a community college. And I have been trained to shudder at the very words (although of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong with community colleges—it’s just MTU’s little bugaboo).

So I’m standing there in the Caterpillar Room at the Child Development Center trying to figure out if I’m being obscurely insulted purposely, or if it’s just the usual unintended insult, and can I possibly work up a book manuscript in two years and get a real job? This comes after I talked to one of my friends about whether I should apply to this journal that’s looking for editorial board members—I have some small expertise in the journal’s field (and yes, it’s fairly small) but I also know the editor. Worst case I was thinking maybe I could review some manuscripts. Good for the promotion file, you know? So my friend who also knows this editor says, well, without a book, you probably don’t have a chance. This rather floored me, seeing as I was thinking more along the lines of “is this a crazy time commitment” and surely I could at least review manuscripts. So I am feeling all fourth- or fifth-tier professionally, and I’m sure that’s probably not low enough. Good grief.

I actually have been working on this book idea (well before the BHTU I-have-a-year-long-appointment-but-my-husband’s-in-the-
tenure-track-and-I-am-an-insecure-mother-so-I-need-to-ask-
obnoxious-questions-during-orientation-about-the-classroom’s-
fostering-of-child-development-and-also-one-up-this-other-
mom-who-teaches-at-a-crappy-school-and-picks-her-kid-up-late-
so-I can-pretend-I’m-better-than-somebody woman). I am having some problems with the one of the basic premises of the manuscript right now, but I wrote a very brief chapter-by-chapter summary the other day and got really excited. I might actually be able to do this, if I quit giving conference papers and don’t do anything else for senate, and maybe drop every committee I’m on—and get a sabbatical in 2007. Whew.

So far this morning I’ve paid bills and figured out how much Laura’s tuition for her after-school program will be every month next school year (how much per week? and how many teacher workdays?) and balanced our checking account, and I think I need to eat some breakfast before it’s time to wake Will up and get him ready to go to the dentist. Probably I’ll just write the first chapter after breakfast while I’m at it.

What, me, insecure? Nah.