Snow Day Two - school update rant!!!

Yesterday Miss J came home from school and told me that today would be a snow day, of course I told her that it was not going to snow, she said every one was talking about it at school. I thought it was just wishfull thinking since it has actually been warm and almost all of the ice that had been on the ground for weeks had melted away. Infact I had only just noticed that the last pile of ice which was in the garden bed next to the front steps and had been quite high because all snow and ice had been swept or shovelled there from the steps evey time it fell, had melted almost completely.

So you can see by the photos that I was wrong and Miss J was right, the recorded (I am used to it now so don't try to converse with it) message came at 6-30 this morning and advised that the schools would be closed for the day. It was a half day any way for some teacher conference/training stuff. Gosh these teachers have it easy. When they do Parent Teacher Conferences, they close the school and the conferences take place during school hours. All us Aussies and Brits comment how our teachers back home have to stay after school and prep for the meetings in their own time.

We got an email the other day via the PTA from the Principal reminding parents not to enter the building before 3pm, not to enter the hall ways until 3.10 and the second bell and not to go into the class rooms at all. If we want to speak to a teacher we have to call the office and leave a message for the teacher to call us. So when Mr W had to find a homophone (that is a word that sounds the same but is spelled differently and has a different meaning to another word - i.e. sea and see) for the word 'do' I wrote the teacher a note which Mr D delivered (before heading to Africa for two weeks)because I thought it was just dumb to have to call her about it but did not want to cause trouble by speaking to her about it in the class room. I thought the note was kind of half way to the right thing to do. Any way, turns out the word is - wait for it - 'due'. I just thought that they pronounced it incorretly because they were being lazy, an accent is one thing but totally changing the way a word is pronounced is just annoying. Any way, I had to say to Mr M that the word is due, but they say it differently to the way we say it so we will just pretend it sounds like do and use it in a sentence.

It is funny how things like that are so annoying but it is usually the little things that add up because there are some things that you expect to be an issue and they turn out ok, like a flood for example. The other things like fitting into first grade that you think will be ok, because you expect that the school would be supportive of little children and recognise that the child would need some help to adjust, or at least help to learn and remember the rules. When the child shows clear signs of anxiety and distress you would imagine that the teacher and school psycologist would want to help the child to relax and feel part of the group. You would expect they would have some idea of what the child may be feeling, and if they themselves had never moved from their home town, you would expect that they would at least as adults be able to put them selves in the childs shoes, just a little bit and have a little empathy for the child.

In stead I see a system that just wants everyone to be the same, fit in and adapt and know the rules. I got into trouble from a parent after the principal herself told me I was alowed in the hall way outside the class room after the first bell. I suggested to the parent she may like to tell the principal the rules too, since that is where I got my information from.

I hear about a little boy who is sent to the back of the line becasue in week two (week one was only 3 days) he sees is big sister in the hall way and calls out to her. Then because he feels embarrassed and sad about being sent to the back of the line he stops walking and then gets into trouble again because he did not stay with the class. Then, another day when he was supposed to go inside to eat lunch after play time, he forgot and was left outside. They found him 15 minutes later, crying outside the door, and he got into big trouble again. No compassion, instead of realising he was crying becasue he was scared they said he was immature because he did not find some one to tell them he was meant to be inside eating his lunch.

That is a few weeks in the past now and we don't hear about those things any more thank goodness. We resisted the return to kindegarten and it is such a good thing we did. Mr W is improving everyday with writing and reading and had moved up a level at Kumon. He is doing addition now and is pretty happy with his work. We have Spring Break in two weeks and then the summer break starts on June 23rd. They have until the 5th September on holiday. We are planning lots of activities to practice writing and reading over the breaks and some exciting little trips around the place.

It is hailing now, on top of maybe 1/2 foot of lovely snow, we now get crapy hard ice which is just going to make it really hard and yucky. It is difficult to make a snow man with ice and it has sealed our stay at home fate today for sure. No hamburgers for dinner, since I had to go to the shops to get the bread rolls today and now I can't. Well, I probably could but it is not really worth it.

Hope you are all enjoying the end of summer, I hear it is still warm in SA and that Jerra and the ACT have finally got great rain...Yeah, our water tanks are full and our lawn and fruit trees live to face another year. Our neighbours tell us the fruit was good this year, glad that they at least, got to enjoy some of it.