punchdrunkmom

In which we go back to school

Hey! Welcome to the very first day of kindergarten!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re all, “I know that child already started kindergarten because I read about it here.”

But then there was a teacher strike and we had some time off, and I figured that we could start fresh on the other side. You know, pretend that whole thing was all just a dream! 

 

A horrible, horrible dream. 

:::

So yesterday, I took the kids to get first-day-of-school haircuts. I washed their school clothes. I packed Kai’s Bento box with Sun-butter and jelly fixin’s and a little drawing that I made of Kai and me holding hands inside a heart. I tucked him sweetly into bed.

I wasn't convinced that we had been out of school long enough for it to feel like a true do-over. When we thought that the strike would be over last Sunday, I mentioned that we would go back to school the next day.

"No," Kai said. "School is yucky."

"That just breaks your heart, doesn't it?" my mother said. She was in town for the weekend.

And yes, it does. It breaks your heart. Because he's only in kindergarten, and there are so many, better opportunites for school to be yucky. Middle school comes to mind.

We got a reprieve for a couple of days, but in the end, we had to go back to school.

He got up this morning sometime before 4:30, stimmy and wired but cheerful. He ate his breakfast and got dressed, and didn’t protest until I got out his backpack.

“No!” he wailed. “I’m not ready!”

I shouldered the backpack and took out my phone.

“We need to take pictures for the first day of school,” I said.

That got him. It took us a while to negotiate the portrait. He wanted me to hold him upside-down and take the picture. But although I am strong and tough, I am not strong enough to do that.

This was the pose we finally settled on:

First day of kindergarten 2012

I got this gem on the way to the car:

:::

He rebelled when I tried to buckle him in.

“No school! I’m not ready!”

I kissed his nose. “We’re just going to try,” I said. “That’s all anyone can ever ask.”

Kai relaxed a little in his seat.

“Just try?”

“Just try.”

:::

And then we went to school on the back of a unicorn which followed a rainbow to a pot of gold. It was so awesome, you guys.

Of course, by “back of a unicorn” I mean my car, and “followed the rainbow” I mean drove through Bucktown, and by “pot of gold” I mean that Kai refused to get out of the car and tried to climb into the way-back, and the woman working the kiss-and-go line had to pry his hands off of the seat and haul him out of the car, where he kicked and hit, and I had to keep moving because I was holding up the line and the last I saw he was on all fours while his (new) paraprofessional was trying to coax him into the building, a vision that is now seared into my brain and will stay with me for the rest of my life.

So I did what any red-blooded American does when they feel helpless and angry. I called a lawyer. I went to boxing class.

:::

Later, my friend Annette told me she had an extra ticket to Madonna tonight, so I cancelled Kai’s speech therapy appointment and called Scott, who graciously agreed to come home early.

I guess there was a tiny pot of gold after all.

Stri-cation Day Two: Why we fight

Dawn on Tuesday came and went, and for once, Kai slept. Past 7 and then 8, and it was right around 9 when I finally heard his feet on the stairs. I’d hoped to take the kids to visit the striking teachers, who were supposed to be on the picket lines until 10:30.

Of course, I was woefully unprepared. I had no sign, I didn’t have time to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts and get them breakfast and coffee. I didn’t even have a red shirt to wear in solidarity.

Red isn’t really my color, you see, and I have only one article of red clothing in my entire closet: an off-the-shoulder mini-dress, questionable attire for hanging out with striking teachers and my two children.

I finally found a red t-shirt in Scott’s closet. It said “World’s Greatest Dad.” I ripped the tags off and threw it on. I had given it to him for his first Father’s Day five years ago. He doesn’t wear it because “World’s Greatest Dad” is not his official title, as you can see here.

I dashed off a quick sign and tossed the kids in the car, hoping to catch the teachers before they went off to the downtown rally, or home to watch their own kids.

:::

I know that you know one reason I’m all for this teacher strike. But I’m all for it for some real reasons, too.

This weekend, I spent several hours with a friend, a special education teacher in another district, going through Kai’s IEP line by line. This is the mythical, magical document that entitles Kai to whatever services he needs in order to get an education, things like speech therapy so he can talk to you and occupational therapy so he can use a pencil, special education services to help modify his work so that he has a chance of completing it ever.

 

In another district, a child with autism might get 90-120 minutes a week of speech therapy. Kai gets a grudging 30. Then the therapist spends 15 minutes telling Kai’s teacher what to work on.

In another district, Kai would have more time with a social worker to work on the social-emotional component to his education, creating social stories, working with peer groups. Ours spends 30 minutes with him, and then tells the teacher what to do for the rest of the week.

In another district, our teacher and our son would get a lot more help.

Our social worker is only at our school two days a week, the speech and occupational therapists are only there on Mondays. In our district, they just don’t have enough people. They can’t afford them.

There are 375 social workers in the whole of CPS, a student body of between 350,000 and 400,000. That’s one social worker for 1,000 kids, in a city where 80% of the student body qualifies for free and reduced price lunches, a city that saw one of the bloodiest summers we can remember.

How can someone be expected to teach, and also be a speech therapist and an occupational therapist and a social worker and child psychologist, and have a kid come to school hungry or traumatized, to a school in some cases with no air conditioning and no playground and no textbooks? How on earth can you educate a child that way and hope to compete on a global scale?

How?

And you know what else? Mayor Rahm Emanuel campaigned on the longer school day for CPS, and he did exactly as he said he would, lengthening the school day without any idea how to do it or how to fund it. In our school, it means that Kai’s teacher has to take a break in the middle of the day. It was during this break that Mr. X was able to hurt Kai. If his teacher had been there, it never, ever, ever would have happened.

Just sayin’.

This strike isn’t about money. No one goes into this profession expecting to get rich.

It’s about a district that’s failing the students and blaming the teachers for it.

It’s enough to make you long for the green grass, the extra-wide parking spaces, the pizza shooters and extreme fajitas of a land I like to call The Suburbs, which is exactly where we went afterwards, to a place where the floors are made of trampoline, and two frozen treats and a Diet Pepsi only costs $4.

A place I never thought I’d want to be.

 

Stri-cation Day One: Make a little birdhouse in your soul

You guys, it was so awesome not to go to school Monday, to not drop my son off at a place that makes my insides churn until I can taste bile in my mouth.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little melodramatic.

But only a little. There’s been some churning. And a little bile.

We still had to get up before dawn. I hustled the kids out of the house at 6:45 in the morning, so we could drop Ryan off at pre-school and then go to the suburbs for Kai’s occupational therapy. The drive took an hour and twenty minutes, but I passed the time listening to non-stop coverage of the strike, honking at the picketing teachers. They seemed to like that a lot.

Kai had his OT session, and then saw our friend Sue the social worker. He made this kick-ass birdhouse in her office:

They also read a story.

“What was the story about?” I asked him.

He pointed to his head. “Guy has gum in his hair,” he said, which, according to Sue, was the absolutely true.

I admired the birdhouse.

“I can’t believe you just had all of that in your office,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, handing me the paper kite that Kai had tied to the birdhouse with a rainbow string. “We had a good time. He’s a lot of fun.”

Don’t I know it?

Later, he went to the childcare at the gym instead of to kindergarten. As we were leaving, Bridget texted me to say that Jovan wanted to show Kai some dirt, and could he come over?

Did Kai want to see dirt at Jovan’s house? Um, does Garfield like lasagna?

Later, when I picked him up, I was informed that he’d had a snack of Fruity Pebbles, something he asks me for every time we go to the store.

“I’m not sure what’s on his face,” Bridget said. “Uh, I think it might be Skittles. He had a few Skittles.”

We both laughed. High-fructose corn syrup and red dye #5? You guys, that’s what stri-cation’s for.

Kai held my hand, and actually skipped to the car.

:::

The talk among parents is all about how long the strike will last. Some want to know if there's enough time to go to Michigan for a few days. Some call it a tragedy.

I hope it lasts for a while. Or at least long enough to have a few more days like this one.

I know that I'm being selfish. I am a stay-at-home mother who doesn't have to scramble for childcare, and if my kids don't go to school, they still get breakfast and lunch, and dinner to boot.

I also know that Kai has to go back to school, and we both have to learn to trust the administration again.

But not today.

My neighbor sent me a message on Sunday night, wanting to know what I thought about the teachers’ strike.

I told him that I was overjoyed, that Kai and I could hang out for a couple of days, and start fresh when this thing is over.

“Had to be at least a little silver lining somewhere,” he wrote back. “And it’s next door!”

In which I long for a do-over

So, like, is the school year over yet? Because I’m exhausted, you guys.

It’s possible that my exhaustion stems from the fact that Kai never actually slept last night. Like he never slept. At all. He didn’t ever go to sleep.

He woke me up every half hour or so to ask if it was time to watch TV yet, to which I mumbled “No, go to sleep.”

He was in and out of my bed, doing what-all, I don’t know. I think he ate a popsicle and played with my iPhone, and if I’m a horrible mother because I didn’t get out of bed to check, just put in on the list of things I’ve done wrong lately, including letting him eat a sandwich that consisted of bread and marshmallows for breakfast.

:::

But seriously, I can’t remember ever having a worse start to the school year, including the one where two soft-spoken pre-school teachers told me that Kai should have his speech evaluated, the looks on their faces not those of concern, but of pity.

It’s not just this whole thing with Mr. X, although that is a very large part of it. The school day is also an hour and a half longer for him, he has to sit through 64 minutes of Spanish one day and writing enrichment the next, and learn to read on a “G” level and sit for a test whose entire raison d’etre is a baseline for gauging teacher merit pay, and while his teacher is doing a great job with him, it’s all a bit of a struggle.

His teacher sent me a picture of him today, fast asleep in the book corner.

And, aparently, he was crying in his sleep.

Oh, yeah. We've rocked it this year.

:::

I’m actually hoping that the teachers go on strike next week. I think the boy and I could really use a do-over on the start of school—just some unstructured time during which we have to stare at each other until we're remind why we like it when school is in session.

We had a lovely Labor Day weekend, the four of us Judys seemingly in tacit agreement that the best thing we could do was to just be together, which we did—at the park and at brunch and during a lazy last afternoon at the pool.

Kai swam around with his little green Dollar Store floatie, singing a song to himself.

I waded a little closer to him so I could hear what he was singing. He’s been making up little songs lately. That morning, he’d laid in bed singing, “Coconuts falling down, down, down, down.”

I wondered if the song he was singing just then was the coconut song, or something different, and when I got close enough, I could make out the lyrics.

“With my family,” he sang, “with my family, with my family, with my family.”

And it was instantly my new favorite song.

I dare say that it was the greatest song, ever.