Not to brag or anything, but my kid, he was one of the first in line when they were handing out the brains.

Wait, that is bragging, isn’t it?

Well, tough.  I call it like it is.

He has sailed through math this year, except for one chapter.

The chapter where he had to look at a clock face and figure out what time it was.

We had visited this concept last year, and I thought he had retained it. But, there was some frustration along with wrong answers at homework time. You see, my home has absolutely zero old-timey clock faces. And yes, I am going to label them old-timey. I don’t care if that makes you feel old.  If it does make you feel old, you probably are.  Again, telling it like it is.  Ahem, back to the story…

 If we had inherited a certain grandfather clock, then we would have one, but we didn’t and so each and every clock in the house is digital. The one on the microwave, the one on the stove, the DVR, all the bedroom clocks. And yes, I do have some watches, but wouldn’t you know, all of them needed new batteries and were thus useless in demonstrating how the big hand follows the little hand around in a circle. I found myself biting back a flippant, “You know, the hands go in a clockwise direction!”  Which of course, he really had no frame of reference for and would not have found the least bit enlightening.

Even though telling time on a clock face is second nature to me, my son has grown up with a distinct lack of them. There might be a few scattered here and there in his life, such as at the library, but not enough to make any impact upon him. He doesn’t even have one in his classroom.

So try explaining to someone totally unfamiliar with the concept of an old-timey (yes, yes, it makes me feel old, too) clock and how it works, and you are met with a blank stare. And possibly a question as to why anyone would use such a complicated time-telling device when you could just look at the numbers on a digital clock. 

We struggled a bit.

Eventually, of course, he got it, but I began wondering if telling time this way was already pretty much obsolete. And if, in this age of computers and cell phones, if reading a clock face is a skill that needs an entire math chapter devoted to it.

What do you think?

Candy’s Storktionary entry o’ the day.

Cynthia gives me new knowledge that there are four verses to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  My son was robbed all those years ago because I only sang two!

Class Factotum lurves Wisconsin! The beer! The motorcycles!

These breakfast cereals ain’t all that.  Prevents swine flu? Rilly?

A Stormtrooper a day keeps the blues away!

The gold digger resents having to share her blueberries.  With a baby.

A four day school week? Hmmmm…

The Environmental Working Group just came out with their new sunscreen ratings.

(via)

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week, but hopefully if you attend school or have kids in school, you already knew that.

I want to tell you about the teacher who had the biggest impact on me, and who remains a friend even to this day.

Her name was Sister Mary, and she was having none of my laziness. Or anyone else’s in my freshman AP English class, but I think I was probably the worst offender. Every day we came into class, she had a quote of some kind on the whiteboard, and we had one of those old-skool composition notebooks which we had to write a page worth’s of reaction to the quote. She gave us ten minutes, and let’s just say most of the time, I never made it to the half-page mark. And my writing was quite purposefully large. We didn’t have to turn in the notebook until the end of the quarter, so I breezed along thinking all was good.

When I got the notebook back, all was not good. The inside was dripping with red ink and sarcasm.  Sister Mary must have taken an entire day to write snide remarks about my inability to form a cohesive sentence, and the fallacious nature of ninety percent of my reasoning. This along with her horrible temper made me quite dislike Sister Mary, although it certainly felt wrong to hate a nun. You know, being Jesus’ bride and all that. But dislike her I did, and I even wrote a note to my best friend describing my great dislike, which her parents promptly found and read, then banished me from being their daughter’s friend forever. True story.

But isn’t it always the teachers who constantly hound you to do better that you wind up respecting the most? Even as she glowered at me from behind her glasses, I knew that she was trying to make me a better writer and thinker. She had high expectations of me, and for the first time as a student, I rose to meet them. I think I learned more about the art of writing in her class than I did from any other class in my high school career.

I don’t know how it happened, but one day after school we began talking, and I found out a lot about Sister Mary. That she had been taking care of a terminally ill mother, and her famous (you would totally know who he was if I told you!) brother was of no help, thus her crabbiness. That she was truly one of the wittiest and most intelligent women I had ever met. That she had a plan to write her own book, she was just waiting for retirement. Sister Mary and I actually became friends, writing letters to each other for years after her retirement and relocation to another state. Every year she would send me a Mass Card, and I kept every one.  And yes, she wrote and published her book.

Thank you, Sister Mary. You made a difference in my life, and I am forever grateful that you were my teacher.

I’m not sure what exactly the impetus was for the husband and I to begin viewing homeschooling as a valid option for next year.   I know that we regarded kindergarten as a big frakking waste of everyone’s time, and we were more than willing to give first grade a chance to redeem public education in our admittedly jaded eyes.  Private school would technically be an option, if it weren’t for the fact that the ones that seem to have a curriculum/philosophy that we can get behind costs the equivalent of a year of college.  And that, my friends, just isn’t going to happen.  Because even if we had loads of money and could afford it, it seems obscene to pay that much for elementary school.

All I know is that the Munchkin doesn’t like school, doesn’t like homework (really, who does?) and I don’t like the fact that there is no art instruction, music instruction is now something after school that is paid for, critical thinking skills are sacrificed on the altar of standardized tests and worksheets, and the schools in my state are having their budgets slashed to the point where certain districts are cutting the school year short.  And the budget problems are only going to get worse.  In fact, in my most humble opinion, it is the worst time in the history of my state to be a public school student, what with NCLB seemingly up for passage even though it is a horrifically misguided piece of legislation, and the morale of teachers being sucked down the toilet as they are asked to do more and more with less and less.  And just so you know, the Munchkin’s current school is in the top ten pecent in the state as far as test scores go. But test scores don’t always tell the whole story.

And so it seems to me, that this where I can step in.  This is where I can be proactive with my child’s education, rather than reactive.  Where I can take charge of the direction of his studies instead of sitting there wondering why the school does x a certain (crappy) way and fighting a rather entrenched bureaucracy with barely a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding.  I’m already at home, so no need to quit a full-time job, we learned years ago how to get by on just one income.  I have a degree in English, but I do suck at math.  Somehow though, I think I can handle it.

So the huz and I are in heated talks about perhaps not enrolling the Munchkin in second grade next year.  And let me assure you that my husband is actually anti-homeschooling and has been one of the major reasons I haven’t already tried it.  I realize that however much work I think it’s going to be, I should automatically double it.  However, I think that as my son’s steward, it is almost my duty to ensure that he can learn at his own pace and not have to fill out worksheet after worksheet after worksheet after worksheet.  I swear, if we want to focus on saving some damn trees, schools should be looked to as some of the main offenders.  I digress…

I will be the first to admit that I don’t know everything.  Shocking! I know!  But the one thing I do know is that the Manolosphere has some of the best and brightest minds in all of the intertubes, so why not ask for your opinions before I embark on a life-changing course?  Is there a flaw in my reasoning?  Am I being unrealistic?  Am I being too harsh on the public education system? Would you homeschool if you could? Will  my good intentions put me on a nonstop flight to hell?

So I turn to you, dear readers. I truly want to know what you think.

The New York Department of Education has deemed homemade baked goods unfit for bake sales.

But Pop Tarts? Good to go.

With yet another example of a heavy-handed attempt to “combat” childhood obesity, I’m going to go ahead and state that things are getting a bit out of control.  They can say that it’s only the whole-grain version of the Pop Tart that is allowed, but who the heck wants those?

The Department claims that it is not possible for them to know the calorie and fat contents of goodies made in the home, so off limits they shall be.

May I be one to stand up and say that a child is not going to become obese from the occasional bake sale purchase?

If the edumacashional people were truly concerned about childhood obesity, they would ensure that all children partake in physical education, serve truly healthy and tasty meals at schools, work with parents on nutrition at home, and would become leaders in the fight for more open spaces and parkland in urban areas.

But you know, it’s just so much easier to ban chocolate chip cookies, isn’t it?

I remember when the Munchkin was born, the hottest thing for babies was the “Baby Einstein” DVD set. Actually, I wasn’t really aware of them until my mother brought them up, and told me that there was a set of ten available at Costco, and did I want them?

Well, as the sleep-deprived mother of an infant, I said yes. But really, who says no to free stuff for their kid?

I read the promotional materials that accompanied the DVD’s, all of which claimed that simply by watching puppets do things to classical music, your baby would become smarter.

Seriously.

To be honest, the Munchkin really did love watching those things, and I will admit that I would put one on when I needed to go to the bathroom or take care of something really important. I tried to limit his time with them, which I think I did successfully.

I  watched all of them at some point, and I remember wondering why in the world these particular skits with puppets and things floating around the screen would make my child smart. I know that classical music has been shown to aid logical thought processes, but that was about where the educational value of those DVD’s began and ended.

Did anyone truly think they were raising their child’s IQ? And if they did, were they also the kind of parents who made their in utero baby listen to classical music via headphones? Or read Voltaire out loud, hoping that by osmosis, their baby would somehow pick it up?

Ah, the vulnerabilities of the new parent!  In this competitive day and age, it seems they will stop at nothing to gain even the slightest advantage over other people, even subjecting their children to nonsensical, non-verbal, hand-made hand puppets that make the Muppets look extremely high-tech.

It seems that quite a few people did think these DVD’s were magic, and now due to pressure from a child’s advocacy group, they are offering a refund for up to four of the DVD’s, no receipt required.  It says that the videos had to be purchased after 2004, but I’m hoping they aren’t really going to look, since mine were purchased in 2003.

It certainly doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s an offer well worth taking advantage of.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the recent case of six year old Zachary Christie, who ran afoul of his school’s zero tolerance policy for knives on campus when he brought his Cub Scout eating utensil to school.  The utensil included a fork, a spoon, and of course, a knife.

Zachary was instantly pulled from school, and a hearing was set to determine if he should spend forty-five days in reform school, as was the punishment outlined in the zero-tolerance guidelines.  The School Board decided to make the policy a bit more lenient in cases dealing with kindergarteners and first graders.

I have never been a big fan of any of the zero tolerance policies that school districts have recently enacted.  It seems to me that each incident should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis rather than a one-size-fits-all mentality.

But then in the article I linked to above, it was stated that the policies were enacted in part to reduce discrimination in cases like this, as evidence had shown that African-American students were being punished more harshly than their peers.  The policy was meant to level the playing field, so to speak, so that everyone caught would face the same consequences.

That did make me pause for a bit.

But, I still don’t like the idea of zero tolerance. 

And what I really don’t like even more is that we have to have such draconian measures in place because there are still people  in authority positions in our educational system who discriminate.