The Bullet Points of Extreme Crankiness

Do not read this post if you have actual, real problems with your local or regional schools.  Seriously, if your school does not have textbooks or if there are 40 kids in a classroom with only 30 desks or only half the schools in your city have reopened two years after a hurricane and the federal government's incompetence destroyed the place, do not read this post.  If you are a teacher and you've been snowed under with last-minute idiocies from the district office, or school hasn't even started but you're already being abused by parents, and you cannot take one more complaint from anyone, do not read this post.

Because you will end up as irritated and cranky as I am, and trust me, you don't need the hassle.

We're clear then?  I'm in A Very Bad Mood and am about to complain about Not Real Problems?

Good.

• There are five full first grades and one first/second grade combo at our school this year.
• Wilder was assigned the combo class, which is fine, except that there was no indication that it was a combo class on his teacher-assignment card.  If not for the grapevine and the teacher's own completely unadvertised website, none of the first-grade parents would know it was a combo class.  How the second-grade parents felt when they saw a first-grade teacher's name on their child's teacher-assignment card, I have no idea.
• How hard would it have been to include some kind of note on the card?  How hard would it have been to send out an advance letter, explaining the circumstances and kissing up to the parents whose kids were assigned the class?
• I was a third grader in a 2/3 combo class and it was the best year of my elementary education.  I'm sure Wilder will have a great year.  But I'm still pissed off about the complete lack of communication.
• Also, everyone said, "well, one of the great things about combo classes is the lower enrollment to make teaching easier" but in fact, Wilder has 22 kids in his class, just like every other first-grade class but one.
• Elba's and Gemma's teachers were both hired in the last week.  Even though the kindergarten teachers sat down with the principal and planned five classrooms during the last week of school in June.  At least one of the teachers moved 750 miles on Monday and still doesn't have her personal belongings in the state.
• Elba's been slotted into a "half classroom" which is, as its name suggests, about half the size of the other classrooms.  Gemma's been assigned the science lab.  Neither of the teachers had anything in their desolate rooms, what with the last-minute hirings and all.
• Neither of these improvised classrooms has an in-room bathroom (all the standard instructional rooms do) and Gemma is already worrying about how disruptive the teachers might find her necessary bathroom breaks to be.
• Elba's camped out in a corner of the kindergarten hallway, Wilder's in the long-coveted first-grade hallway, and Gemma's on the opposite end of the building (this is an infamously dispersed one-floor school with a warren of incomprehensible corridors), near the cafeteria.
• Gemma's teacher has been told that, because her classroom is on the opposite end of the building from the K-2 hallways, she should take recess in the courtyard outside the cafeteria.  They've given her extra money to buy hula hoops and jump ropes for recess time.
• Last year, Gemma's teacher took her to the first-grade playground, with its monkey bars and fancy climbing sets, for two full weeks at the end of kindergarten.  Gemma has been looking forward to those monkey bars all summer long.  Mastering them was one of her greatest pleasures last spring.
• If Gemma is still getting recess in the courtyard -- which is, as its name suggests, nothing more than a green space with sidewalks and a few picnic tables -- at the end of one week, I am going to raise the mightiest stink of all time.  I am not kidding, I will mount a goddamn campaign to get these six-year olds back onto the fucking playground.
• In other well-though-out-leadership news, Elba's "reduced" class (reduced to fit into the smaller space) consists of thirteen girls and four boys.  Because  our principal and her staff are geniuses at last-minute demographic shuffling.  Not.
• Now we know why none of Gemma's female classmates were assigned to her class.  75% of them are in Elba's.
• I hate transitions.  I hate this period when we know enough to be upset and anxious and worried but not enough to do anything about it.  I hate the fact that, in a month, everything will be fine and everything will be running smoothly, but right now, my daughters both know more of the support staff and more of the school rules than their teachers.  I hate the fact that my son has a specific set of issues about which everyone working with him to resolve them said, "well, at least first-graders are still very forgiving, it's really not until second grade that kids get vicious about these things."  And now half his class is composed of second graders.  [These are issues that Wilder is expected to outgrow as he matures.  I know that makes them minor concerns, I do.]
• I hate that this morning I was so ready for my kids to be someone else's problem for a few reliable hours every day for months on end, because if I had to listen to one more squabble or get into one more debate about whether no means no that I was going to scream [wait, I was already screaming....], but now it's 10:30pm and I'm crying because I'm so upset about the new school year.
• I hate that we moved to an extremely expensive school district and our property taxes went up 9.6% this year and yet our principal is still incompetent and non-communicative.
• I hate that Wilder's teacher has a bizarre system for assigning snacks (each kid is responsible for an entire week's worth of snacks at a time, "prepared family style" for the entire classroom) and that her number-one recommendation for ingredients is peanut butter.  Although in some ways that one's easily solved, because I fucking think NOT.
• I hate that I'm such an ass that I'm distraught about these luxurious little concerns.
• I hate that I've failed the anonymity test so completely that I could get myself and my kids into serious trouble if anyone in town gets their hands on this post.

What do I love?  Next year, we're being re-assigned to the new elementary school in the district.

Comments

[Naomi]

I so feel your pain. Except I only have one kid in school, and it doesn't start until the day after Labor Day, and we don't even find out her teacher until a week from tomorrow.

Nearly all my concerns about this school are relatively trivial but all together they add up to an amazing amount of frustration. And transitions do completely suck, and I borrow trouble by worrying endlessly even though my kid is mostly very positive and optimistic and is convinced it will all work out fine.

[chichimama]

I'm with you. Come on over, grab a cup of coffee and settle in. As you said, I am sure it will all work out, someday, but until that happens it is all horrifically awful in a anticipatory buildup sort of way.

We still have no idea what school C will be in. School starts in a week. They have redistricted us 4 times now. I currently have a phone call into the full day kindergarten at our church in a last ditch effort to escape the insanity for an outrageous price, even though it goes against everything I have said for the last five years about schooling. Because come on, school starts in a week folks. Let me prep my kid about where (and how) he is getting to school.

[Suz]

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. If your school district isn't the answer, I don't know what the answer could possibly be.....other than winning the lottery and homeschooling, except the only thing I could teach my kids would be medieval literature and Latin.

[Shandra]

You need chocolate. And a lot of that really is annoying.

[Elizabeth]

Gah!!!

[Anjali]

Gosh, what a complete headache. Get yourself a massage pronto.

[Sarah]

So are you seriously facing changing schools next year?

Your post has been the only thing that has made me at all glad that I have sucked at being social and have not met any parents from my new school district. So I have no gossip. And my worries center around getting my daughter to go into school without crying.

Fight the good fight.

[Madeleine]

Oh, my. Many of those are seriously annoying. I'm particularly galled by your comment on Wilder's placement. Isn't the whole point of working with the school on these issues, that they can arrange the environment to help him succeed? Gah!

[Denise]

Peanut butter? Has this teacher never worked in an elementary school setting before?

[Emma Jane]

My goodness do you have every right to be Annoyed as Heck. Your having three kids in the same grade at the same school (hitting over half the first grade classes) means you're getting enough data to be pretty sure that there are serious management issues behind this vast accumulation of Small Things.

[Spacemom]

I don't find any of your complaints horrible.

To be honest, I am amazed at how well our school has balenced the grade (K) in terms of getting almost equal boy/girl ratios in every of the 8 Kindergarten classes.

I would also raise hell about recess. That is so horrible for the kids.

[Tulip]

These things would bug me, too. I have horrible memories of a year spent in a combo 2nd-3rd grade, with me as a 2nd-grader. Awful.

[maggie]

Damn - I am so not looking forward to kindergarten and these kinds of things. I hope things get better - and you're absolutely right to be pissed off and cranky.

[Lilian]

Oh man, all that sucks BIG TIME!! I'd be extremely upset if I were you, probably even more than you are.

[Lilian]

(I just might not have been able to post so articulately about it)

[ccw]

I don't blame you for being cranky. I would complain to the school. There is no reason for one class to have only 4 boys and it is mean to take away the nice playground b/c of their location in the building.

We (parents) once found out about a sexual assault on the playground from the evening news. The school was trying to keep it in-house so as to not tarnish the district's good name. The longer Kid L is in school, the more amazed I am by the things that go unsaid.

[Karen]

I don't think this is trivial in the least. I think if you had ONE of these complaints, it would be easier to handle. But having all of them compounded, and three kids to handle at once, each with their own unique issues, you've got your hands full. And the school surely does not have its shit together.

Combine this with your subsequent post about the principal, and well... gosh. I don't know how you're holding it together!