On opentable.

When I thought about coming here to write (which happened about 600 times…)

and then finally found a moment to write (which just happened now….)

I went to, you know, where you type the website address and shit?

and ended up on Open Table.  Which, if you don’t know what that is, is a website for making dinner reservations.

Open Diary didn’t come up immediately in my suggestions, which goes to show where my life is right now.

Some of that is this place.  Yes, I am going to blame Open Diary; a blameless, lifeless thing.

Some of the people on Open Diary are, and remain, Cunts.  And that’s always been the nature of this place and so it goes.  Some people are Cunts.  Sometimes I am a Cunt. I accept this.  In this forum, I am using the C word the way the British use it; genderless and with far less vitriol than we use it here in the states.

I am jealous of how the British use it.

But I decided to come back, because this space is mine anyway, and I can ignore the Cunts.

It’s not too much longer before it is the 11 year anniversary of the worst day of my life.  The day I delivered, and then lost my twin boys.

There aren’t too many faces here that would remember that, and it’s not worth rehashing.  What worse, the memory of That Memory and This Place is sullied by a super Cunty Cunt who hurt me because she was a Supreme Cunty Ill-Informed Cunt.

I have to accept that. I do. I move on.

It’s funny because, as I get older, I realize just how much I am not other people’s cup of tea.  I am trying to decide if that bothers me.  On some level, it does.  But on others, it doesn’t.  It is kind of surprising how much it doesn’t.  I feel odd because…it should bother me more, shouldn’t it?

So I try to make it bother me more.  Then I feel sad.  Then I feel angry and then it doesn’t bother me as much.

I am not everyone’s cup of tea; in fact, I find I am few people’s cup of tea.

Do people even drink tea anymore?  I swear my life revolves around Diet Soda. 

Whoops, there’s a tangent again.

My son doesn’t want to return to school.  He wants to remain in homeschool.  And although he is young, he gave very reasoned, articulate reasons for wanting this.  His reasons were so compelling, I found myself rethinking everything I have ever thought about homeschool.

God dammit.

That is precisely the last thing that I needed.

I have made it abundantly clear that I hate homeschool.  I find it pretentious that parents (like me – yes, I am including myself here) feel as though they can impersonate real teachers with just a flick of some curriculum.

Would you just throw on a white coat and pretend to be a doctor because you watched some episodes of ER and read a medical textbook?  (Some would.  That’s the definition of anti-vaxxers, but that’s another post entirely).

Would you just walk into a dentist’s office and sit beside a dental hygienist and say, “No, really, we’re good.  See, I read a few books about cleaning teeth, and I am an expert of my own teeth, so step aside and gimme that crooked little water-shooty-thing.”

FUCK no.

Why then do we think we can teach? I am not a teacher.  I am a mother with books, a master’s degree, and access to youtube.  Youtube, mind you, that contains videos from real teachers that – bless their heart – share their training with idiots like me.

Oh yes, yes. I have read the “you are your child’s greatest teacher” and “you talk him how to [walk, talk, insert thing here]” but let me tell you something, Pretentious Homeschooling Parent:  If you think teaching long division is the same as teaching your kid to talk….well, see this is why you are not actually a trained teacher.

I mention long division because we were stuck on this.  For almost two weeks.

Two

VERY long

weeks.

And it wasn’t until I finally gave up, my knuckles white, my head pounding; when I found the video of a real teacher talking about Dead Monkeys Smell Bad.

Dead monkeys would, of course, smell bad.  But in this context, it is referring to an acronym that discusses the steps in learning long division.  Which, if you don’t remember, are:  Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down.

God bless this sweet teacher who shared this.  The REAL teacher.  The one who was trained to manage subject matter and teach it to large groups in the most effective and efficient way possible.

Most homeschooling parents that I have read seem obsessed with their little snowflake; convinced that the public school just “isn’t good enough” for their cherub, and willing to trade the expertise of well-trained teachers for the endless choices of curriculum that promises to do just about everything, including making your child a certified genius.

Then there’s the rest of the homeschoolers who believe that the common core is Satan incarnate and God isn’t in the public schools so we should run, not walk.  I try to ignore them because, come on.  Really?

Well now my son wants to stay home.  He doesn’t want to return to school and he has given several excellent reasons why.  And truthfully, for him, he might be right.  He is a rare child.  Not a prodigy.  Nothing like that.  His struggle is that he learns in ways that are far from linear.  His classrooms, whether in special education or in mainstream settings, are either too slow or too fast for him.  In his last class, he was pulled out several times in an IEP that I helped design that I thought was amazing.  I knew he missed some science work, but I didn’t think he cared or that it mattered.

I found out yesterday that I was wrong.  He did know how behind he had been in science, and it bothered him.  He was behind, he explained, because he was pulled out often during science for various therapies and supplemental instruction.  When he would return to class, he would not be able to copy the work quickly enough (due to his incredibly poor hand strength and overall coordination issues) to copy the work he missed.  Although science wasn’t really a graded subject, he knew he was behind and it bothered him.

He was also deeply distracted in his reading groups, in part because of children with other special needs that were distracting to him, and in part because he is an easily distracted child who struggles to keep focus as well.  This is not to blame those children, or my own son.  The combination of the two created an environment too difficult for him.

And in other ways, he was ahead.  Being in a larger language arts group of varying abilities, he was sometimes ahead of his group as the group worked to include all of the children of all abilities.  Which isn’t a big deal, except then he would get bored and distracted, and…..well, there you go.

I have framed the argument of send-him-back vs not-sending-him-back as more of a How Much Do I Really Love My Kid Over Myself.

That isn’t quite the way to frame it, but that’s mostly what I am doing.

I know what I want, and I want his ass on the bus come September.  Because I have lots of things to do; lots of good things, lots of things that are meaningful to society and valuable and align with my degree.

And I deserve something too. And I don’t deserve to play fake-teacher when there are amazing Real Teachers who are qualified to teach my kid.

But he deserves things.

How Much Do I Really Love My Kid Over Myself?