No, I'm not going to blame the teacher

I admit that in the heat of battle, I wanted to email Eldest’s teacher and USE ALL CAPS!!!!!!!

This morning, I’m thinking I might send a quick note asking that, in future, she make Eldest do these sorts of things at recess, not after school.

But I’m not mad at her about the whole adrenaline-inducing scene yesterday. I don’t think she did anything wrong – honestly, I’m glad she’s doing what she’s doing for Eldest.

People who know us comment on how Eldest is just like me. It is kind of uncanny, actually – she is a little Mini Me, right down to the nasty case of ADD and associated ‘how can a child who has an IQ in the stratosphere, who tests at something like the 99-percentile, be failing fourth grade math?’

This teacher has made it a mission to help Eldest learn the skills she needs to do well in school. Motivating her to clean out and organize her desk is not easy. I know. I go through it every week here at home, trying to get her to organize her backpack or dresser. Even with my direct, hands-on help, she can seldom keep things together enough to be able to find a shirt in there. (“Honey…THIS is the SHIRT DRAWER. Why are you shoving shirts into your underwear drawer intead of the SHIRT drawer?!” “Uhhhhhh…{blank stare, because her mind has suddenly shot off to more important questions, like, Do golden dragons really eat gemstones, and if so, what is the nutritional content of them and I wonder if they taste good?}”)

Ms. X didn’t know we have a hard-core “you get out here the instant the bell rings, missy!” deal going. She couldn’t possibly have known that I was going to go completely ape-poop because she was late. That I was going to have my special needs son melting down in the van while I waited. She definitely couldn’t have foreseen that someone would tell me “she isn’t in the classroom, it’s closed up and locked”, when in fact Eldest and her Best Friend Forever AND Ms. X were all in the classroom at that very moment!

That’s what really set me off. I was merely annoyed right up until that point. I assumed she would be in the classroom, or the bathroom. When I was told she wasn’t in either of those places, I lost my @*^@.

I can’t blame Ms. X because I didn’t check myself, but asked someone else to check for me – and then that someone reported back in error and sent me on a downward spiral of fear and panic.

She only knows that Eldest seems to think it is perfectly OK to hang around cleaning out her desk in her usual languid fashion. At the fourth grade level, the majority of the kids walk home on their own – Best Friend Forever does – and generally speaking, they won’t do things they know are going to get them in So. Much. TROUBLE!

I’m not going to blame Ms. X on this deal. She does a wonderful job, and works extremely hard to help my dreamy daughter do well in school, in spite of herself.

Eldest, on the other hand…SO! MUCH! TROUBLE!!!!

(And we shall ignore all the times her mother did EXACTLY this kind of thing, only worse, like the time I simply walked away from school at recess and spent the day wandering around the walnut groves and generally hanging out waiting until I saw other kids walking home so that I could casually go on home myself like nothing had happened, because nobody would notice, right?) (I was in second grade. THEY NOTICED.)