Its unseasonable hot for September, the humidity is off the chart,its sticky,everyone is filmed with sweat. Its fuckin gross.
Today is Meet the Teacher Night,sounds innocous right?
WRONG!
Its NOT meet the fucking teacher! its a HOME AND SCHOOL meeting,and THEN meet the fucking teacher!!!
Let me make this clear,my kids teachers are absolute saints! they are kindness and dedication personified, I love them.
BUT, if I wanted to drag the little bastards(Maaaaawm, he’s kicking me! Maaaaawm… he is looking at me!) to a one hour fucking Home and School(PTA) meeting in the UNventilated gym, with a hundred other folks, breathing in their stale air, inhaling their fetid putrid smells,I would join the cockknocking Home and School!!!
DO NOT try and fucking well trick me into sitting through one of your lame meeting with the promise of meeting the teacher and looking at my son’s classroom.
I am NOT mrs fucking CLEAVER!!! I havent been to the hairdresser, made cookies and I dont clean my house in a skirt and pumps!
This fucking shithole city, the school boards think thats what all the kids have, TWO parent homes with a stay home Mom! Idiots. After I work all day (or now, go to school) make supper, feed and clean up the monsters, GO to this stupid meeting, then get them home, its bedtime! when do they do their homework? when do I do mine???
I dont waste their time, DONT FUCKING WELL WASTE MINE
Been there, done that, Kelli, and you’re right. It sucks.
Just a heads up, too, they have gotten me TWICE with this one:
“Come sign up for Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts/Whatever! (Time/Place)”
And you drag the lil fellers out to sign them up, and lo! They aren’t signing kids up. They are signing adults up to be Scout leaders. It absolutely infuriates me. All these little boys sitting there looking soulfully at their parents, while the Nice Man up front gives the earnest, “We need 2 parents from each age group to be new leaders so that these guys can have troops.”
I have NO problem with them asking for anyone who wants to be a leader to come in and sign up. However, I don’t want to be a leader. Personal issues regarding the Boy Scout policies aside, I have four kids and a house to run, and that keeps me busy enough. And it’s patently unfair for them to LIE about the real reason for the meeting.
errr… I’m assuming Home and School is the equivalent of the PTA?
WORD!!
I haven’t been to a PTA meeting since The Cat Who Walks Alone was in kindergarten (which makes it 12 years ago), when, thrilled by my new-found parental responsibility as “Mom who goes to PTA meetings”, I got all dressed up in a nice slack outfit, put on lipstick and everything, and then spent an hour sitting in a stuffy auditorium on a hard wooden fold-down seat, listening to the PTA board list all the fundraisers it was going to have during the school year, with heavy emphasis on “what a LARGE amount of money we need to raise for this that and the other thing.” And I sat there thinking, “WAIT a minute, who exactly do they think is going to come spend money on Face Painting and Beanbag Toss at the Halloween Howl and the Spring Fling? Me, that’s who. Those fundraising funds are coming out of MY pocket. Isn’t it bad enough that I’m paying tax dollars plus school fees for my kid’s education, and they want MORE money?”
I haven’t been back since, although I did man the DuckPond Scoop one year and the BeanBag Toss another.
But to address the OP: No, my school is quite straightforward about what you’re in for. “Sitting on a hard wooden fold-down seat for an hour in a stuffy auditorium” is quite clearly marked on the program, as is, “come in and wander around until you’re lost and talk to teachers that you will never recognize again on the street”.
And, interestingly, for the last three years, they have completely dropped the Halloween Howl and the Spring Fling and are just asking for money. “Donations”, they call it, making it quite clear (they think) that it’s “optional”. Except that they just sent home a reminder note with all the kids saying, “We know it’s difficult lately, with all the other calls on your pocketbook (those pesky terrorists), but could you possibly see your way clear…”
I threw it away and told La Principessa to ignore all future notes.
Speaking from where Duck Duck Goose was sitting twelve years ago, my answer to the OP title is, “no.” Last night was Back To School night at Michaela’s school. We sat in a stuffy cafetorium (cute, huh? cafeteria and auditorium mixed together in one fun-sized dual-purpose word, like a verbal Peanut Butter Cup) for thirty minutes, while the principal introduced the entire school payroll by name, then proceeded to our children’s classrooms for the main event. The teachers presented us with the state standards for end-of-year achievement expectations for kindergarteners, showed us what homework folders and report cards are going to look like, and requested that each parent donate five dollars for a pro forma membership in PTA. No mention of even being invited to attend a meeting.
Except that it was scheduled for the time period when I usually make dinner for my family, it was an unobjectionable experience (on the whole; kellibelli’s decsription of the climate had me thinking she had been in the room with me).
OK, I was actually going to let all this go, but I re-read it, and nope, I’m not.
If you have “issues” with the Boy Scouts, why would you take your kid to sign up? Maybe it gets the kids out of your hair for a while? As a Girl Scout leader, I can tell you that the LARGE majority of parents are happy as hell to have their kids in a supervised setting, learning all kinds of neat things like tolerance, responsibility, ecology… but ask those parents to volunteer for anything, and you hear “Oh, but I WORK.” Oh, OK, you work. So obviously I couldn’t possibly ask you to make a few phone calls or pick up your cookies, let alone spend an hour a week serving snacks at a meeting.
About fund raisers and PTA: You send your child to school and what? Your job is done? You think it’s enough to pay your taxes and school fees and get the kid there on time every day? You don’t go to the meetings, so you have no input on where the money is spent, but you’re willing to bitch about it? And where do you think the money IS spent? Obviously not on comfy chairs for the PTA.
Last year our PTO paid for landscaping of the school, reading recovery training for teachers, field trips, technology equipment like computers and calculators, cork boards to dispay children’s artwork, sports equipment, textbooks and playground equipment. We’re not fond of the fundraisers, either, but without them, you’d be bitching about how your kids don’t have up-to-date textbooks or a playground slide.
Good thing there are people like me who are willing to bust their asses for YOUR kids.
but I take any opportunity I can get to shout out that the only issue I have with the Girl Scouts is that I still can’t get over the disillusionment I felt when I learned that not only do the Girl Scouts not bake their own cookies, they NEVER DID. I mean, I spent YEARS believing that the whole Girl Scout cookie thing originated as a massive nation-wide bake sale that was so successful that it just got out of hand and they had to bring professionals in, and then I found out that from DAY ONE, it was nothing more than a plot to guilt people into buying commercially-made cookies, on the grounds that it would prevent the young women of our nation from growing up into peroxide-blond, razor-blades-in-their-bouffants-hiding floozies straight out of Reform School Dropout, meanwhile swelling the already-swollen bank accounts of fat-cat cookie company executives with the earnings of pint-sized door-to-door salesladies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the Girl Scouts, and I expect I’ll be encouraging Michaela to become a Brownie at first opportunity. But if in the meantime, I come across a girls character-building activities-oriented organization whose idea of a fundraiser is selling vacuum cleaners or encyclopedias, I’m gonna have to give some serious thought to how many points they get for being straightforward about it.
We have been in 3 different school districts over the years, and without exception they all cry about lack of parental involvement. Well… I give them maximum involvement, I call constantly and visit the school regularly. I ask lots of questions and hold administration and teachers feet to the fire (so to speak). What I have learned is that the “we want parental involvement” many times is just lip service. When a parent is truly involved they can’t handle it. After all these are my kids, probably the single most important thing in my life :), I am not wiling to let some disinterested third party have more influence over them than I do. We have been very lucky to have had only 3 teachers and one principal that needed to be “retrained”. This is over 10 years and 3 kids.
If you have “issues” with the Boy Scouts, why would you take your kid to sign up? Maybe it gets the kids out of your hair for a while?/quote]
Obviously we haven’t met, or you would know better than to make this kind of statement to me. Let me try to answer you in a more polite fashion than you bothered to take, okay?
No, I did not take my son to the Boy Scout sign-up to “get him out of my hair”, and you have no right to imply that I did. I took him, in spite of my issues with the Boy Scout no-homosexuals creed, because he was eight years old and he wanted to join. I would be happy for him to be involved regardless of my own feelings, because he would enjoy it and I have no doubt it would be good for him.
I would be happy to have my son involved in that kind of situation. I don’t have an issue with “supervised activity” etc. I do have an issue with a hidden agenda. If they want parents to sign up to be leaders, they need to be up front about it. That is my ONLY complaint, and I stand by it. It is unfair to mislead parents and children alike. My apologies if I was not clear enough.
You talkin’ to me? Hope not, because you’re going to be embarassed. I don’t do fund raisers. I donate money outright. The school makes more of a percentage, and my child doesn’t have to accost the neighbors. I’m perfectly happy to donate time, cookies, etc, as are most parents I know.
Well, hon. While you were busting your ass making cookies, I was teaching special education in a public high school for the last ten years. You donated time? I stayed after school tutoring, giving free haircuts, doing major “delousing” projects, and delivering food to some of the families I worked with. You donated money? I and my fellow teachers paid for dental work, medical care, school clothes, shoes, lunches, school pictures, graduation announcements, SAT fees.
I am quite sure that you do a great job for your school and your kids. I do a great job for mine, too, and you have no right to assume or imply otherwise. Maybe I’m a newbie, especially to the Pit, but I would never make this kind of judgement about anyone. For shame.
Right now I’m staying home to raise my two youngest (2 1/2 years and 8 months) so that people like you don’t have to raise them for me. I do hope that’s okay with you?
I dunno where you’re at, Kamikazee, but that is most definitely NOT the case here. We are in the second largest school district in the state (right after Chicago Public) and policy is set in part by the involved parents. There has never been a decision made by our school district that has not had the active participation of parents.
My daughter is in her second school within the district, and the PTO at this school is phenomenal… this was NOT the case at her first school, which no longer has a PTO because they can not get ANYONE who is willing to do it. And even at this school, where parental involvement is relatively high, it’s like pulling teeth to get most people involved. I see the same faces at every meeting, the same volunteers at every school event, the same names in newsletter after newsletter. In a school with roughly 500 individual families, there are probably 50 parents who do everything. And every single time one of us calls on a parent to bake a tray of cookies, or chaperone a field trip, we get the same story: “I can’t, I am too busy.”
Funny, though – all of our PTO board members are moms or dads with one or more kids, all but one of the moms works outside the home, two of the working moms are ALSO going to school part-time, and one of those is a single mom! So you can just imagine how much we like to hear “I’m too busy to get involved with my kids’ school” … always, of course, with the implication that we have a lot of nerve to be asking.
(PS: kaylasdad, the cookie companies make about .30 per box of cookies – 90% of the funds collected go right back into the Scouts, and the larger portion of that amount back to the individual troop.)
We didn’t get the PTA meeting, but the parent/teacher night I went to last week was pretty bad. They had us go to each of the kids classrooms, in order, and the schedule they immposed on us was ten minutes per class, rather than just letting us wander from room to room as we wished. No problem. The teacher has a few minutes to give a brief overview of his or her teaching style, then answers a few questions, then meets the parents. Cool. We can do this.
Until they realized they didn’t schedule any time BETWEEN meetings for people to go from one room to another… so they cut it down to five minutes.
“Hello, I’m Mr. Schwarzendingle, and I’ll be teaching your kids…” BRRRRIINNNNGGG! Time’s up! Next class!
bodypoet, nope, I was not talking to you about fundraisers. I was taking umbrage with the way you presented your Boy Scout gripe. As far as “hidden agendas” all I can say is that I know exactly what happens when you put up a sign asking for Boy Scout or Girl Scout leaders - nothing. Out of curiousity, when you attended this sign-up meeting, how many parents did volunteer to take on a troop WITHOUT having to be shamed into it? These organizations simply can’t run without volunteers, and volunteers are in short supply.
As for the rest of your reply, I am going to assume you were responding to what you thought was a flame directed at you, and you got unnecessarily defensive. When I was writing that first rant, it originally had a shitload of “and you have no idea how much of what is done for your kid comes right out of the teacher’s pocket” stuff – because I am fully aware of how much does. And I can’t believe teachers keep on doing what they do for so little thanks. One of the reasons I am involved as much as I am.
OOOOH! We had that, too! Except, with the sixth grade, they just go between two classrooms and two teachers, who were connected with a short hallway in addition to the main hall. Travel time could be cut to seconds, but the meetings were still of the “Hello, I’m Ms Jones” BBBBBRRRRRIIIINNNGGGGG! variety except we kept switching between Ms Jones and Ms Smith. Then it rained and I ruined my shoes getting the car.
LifeOnWry, I’m glad to hear the PTO is so good where you are at. Often that is what makes a mediocre school good. To be honest, in the past I had been leery about moving into your neck of the woods because that school district is SO big and, years back, didn’t have a good reputation. It sounds like things have improved. Now it’s just too far from my work.
WHY are so few schools air-conditioned?? This was a major peeve of mine when I was a kid. Anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, asking children - and teachers! - to work at full capacity in typical early September or June weather is cruel and unusual punishment.
dropzone, the best thing about this district is that it’s so big, and can therefore provide a lot of things for the students. The worst thing about this district is that it’s so big, there is a tendency for individual students to get swallowed up For The Greater Good. And of course, everything varies from school to school in terms of teacher quality, parent involvement, etc. Just an observation, NOT a criticism, but these factors do seem to be inluenced by the economic standing of the individual community, so YMMV. If you do end up out this way, I recommend getting involved with the Citizens’ Advisory Council… we get to boss the district BigWigs around
