The kids all started back at school this week and, although I realise that it’s normal for this to prompt a range of different responses, I’m fairly sure that despair isn’t supposed to be one of them. So ever since Monday night when out of frustration I defaced the first send-back school notice on the first day and it occurred to me that the real problem here is my attitude, I have been working on getting a grip.
The notice was an internet-use consent form and in the space of a list about twelve sentences long it contained five glaring errors of punctuation and grammar. Now, we can all understand the occasional typo. They happen to the best of us. My issue is that the school applies completely different standards to the students’ work and to their own written communication. The notice in question was Daniel’s and Daniel once spent six whole months – two complete school terms, half the school year – on one spelling list because, although he could spell every word on it, he never managed to get all forty correct at the same time. Under the school’s spelling programme you must achieve 100% to move up to the next list with no exceptions. Now Daniel has a mild form of dysgraphia and he is a visual-spatial 3D learner (don’t ask me, I don’t know) which means that he likes Lego and computer games but not reading and writing and he just can’t spell. A vitally important part of this programme is that motivation is provided in the form of every child’s photo being on the wall next to their spelling level, so that every parent, child and teacher who is in the room can see at a glance that someone is on list B (out of, you know, A to Z) and has been for six months. This helps them learn, apparently. We are just waiting for it to start working in Daniel’s case. During that six months Josh and I had a sort of parlour game every Wednesday when the school newsletter came out. We would read aloud all the grammatical errors to each other and laugh condescendingly. Because we had to cope somehow. And then we pulled him out of the spelling programme.
But I digress. Now to be fair, I spent Monday at a family funeral for someone who should still be here, so I wasn’t in the best frame of mind. And I was working through a large pile of correspondence from two schools, mostly asking for money. I was in full-on rant mode. Josh dared to point out that a camp notice I was waving around technically wasn’t asking for money but that didn’t help because it was asking for: parent help, transport to and from camp for the kids using the parents’ own petrol, tents, and pre-cooked lasagne and macaroni cheese. It followed a previous notice at the end of last year which did ask for the $150 to pay for – well, not transport, accomodation or food, but other important stuff.
So when I got to the notice resplendent with mistakes I went through with a pen and corrected them all. Don’t want to waste the expensive education that qualifies me to do that, you know? Daniel has been at school for almost five years and the vast majority of that time has been absolutely wasted by a school system which blames him and his parents for the fact that they don’t teach the way he learns. And the heart-breaking frustration and despair from all that time is such that over summer whenever I thought of him going back to school I physically got a knot in my stomach and felt like buying a house bus and running away. I went through the notice with my pen thinking, best this new teacher gets clear right now on the fact that I will be doing the tiger mother thing (which does not come naturally to me) every step of the way. I have seen this child’s enthusiasm crushed, his behaviour changed, his attitude poisoned and his self-belief turned inside-out and there are other schools out there so just give me a reason.
I showed it to Josh who feels the same, believe me. But he had not spent the day being wrung out over the really important stuff as I had so he had a bit of perspective. He said that, as much as he shared my frustration over the fact that a school which requires nothing less than a hundred percent from small children consistently sends home such low-quality crap, he wondered whether it might be better to save the teacher-alienation for when we really need it which is bound to happen soon enough. And he was right.
I told Daniel to ask for a new form to fill in and I faced the fact that if I am this ready to lash out at the school on day one then I am in some danger of being the cause of problems that don’t need to arise. I need to get a grip. I need to approach this year and this teacher constructively and aim to get her on my side to make a good year for Daniel. I need to give her the benefit of the doubt and avoid dumping the accumulated misery of the last few years at her door. I need to start drinking earlier in the day.
So this is me, trying to be the bigger person. Telling myself that nothing bad has happened, yet, and that if it does I will deal with it without resorting to pettiness. Trying to mother up and advocate for my child without bringing other people down. Knowing that we will be watching so carefully this year and that we do have options. Hoping to at least keep my dignity and feeling that passing things by Josh first is probably the way to go – although I also know that if it all goes pear-shaped in the worst way and I end up packing up Daniel’s books one day and wiping the school dust from my feet as I leave the premises, Josh will be right on board. The reduction in blood-pressure alone would justify it.
Surely it’s not supposed to be this hard? But here I go, doing my best at getting a grip.
