Some Pig

By Choice and By Chance

Being the good card-carrying member of the northeastern liberal elite that I am (ha! our bank account begs to differ), I've been reading David Brooks' recent musings in the NYT about the selective homogenization of our society.  He calls it 'affinity grouping,' which means that we increasingly choose to associate only with other people who think like us.  Since we live surrounded by other people who reflect our own views back to us, we are shocked and surprised when we find out that not everyone thinks the way we do.  Because we aren't regularly exposed to other points of view, we tend to demonize those who don't fit into our affinity groups.  This kind of thinking creates suspicion and isolation between groups, which continues the cycle. 

Reading this post (NB: Link removed because apparently the poster has been bombarded with nasty messages, which was not my intention AT ALL.  Didn't you people learn any manners when you were little?)  recently brought this to the forefront.  I am pro-choice.  This blogger is pro-life.  I understand that for a certain group of people, their religious beliefs preclude taking any other position.  As an ardent fan of our government under rule of law, I adamantly support their rights to freedom of expression, petition, religion, assembly, all those things that our forefathers (supported by the far less renowned foremothers) so presciently preserved for us in the Bill of Rights.  The disconnect for me comes when a significant portion of the pro-life movement wants to deny those of us on the other side the same right to live according to our moral standards that the Constitution has given them.  I realize that for people of certain religious views, "heavenly law" supercedes civil law, but civil law is what we have that allows people of all religious views, and no religious views, to coexist in a functional society.  Trying to use heavenly law exclusively in place of civil law results in the Taliban. 

Letter From A Broad, Celebreality Edition

Dear Bret Michaels,

First, a confession:  I am not a regular viewer of your Rock of Love series, but I have discussed it with my coworkers and surfed around the show's website enough that I have gotten the general hang of things.  I must say, what I have learned alarms me not a little.  While it's true that you don't know me and didn't ask for my advice, I would be remiss if I didn't alert you to what my husband with the MBA would call a serious flaw in your business plan.  You purport to be conducting your private affairs in full sight of the viewing public because you are searching for that one special someone with whom you can share your dreams, your hopes, your hair products.  While I don't doubt the sincerity of your efforts - well, okay, actually I *do* doubt the sincerity of your efforts, but we'll deal with that later on - your methodology is a little suspect.  Why?  Simply put, the very qualities that make someone a good life mate (maturity, predictability, emotional stability, a lack of homicidal impulses) make for crappy reality TV.  People don't watch your show to see you make a meaningful connection with a fellow human being on an emotional and intellectual level; they tune in to see crazy dames with unrealistically large implants and a surfeit of tattoos catfight over you.  The women selected as contestants on your show seem to trend heavily toward bartenders, "lingerie models," and practitioners of the burlesque arts.  While I'm sure all these ladies are genuinely interested in you for yourself and not for your ability to give them fifteen minutes of notoriety (cough, cough), they seem to share a certain lack of, er, equilibrium, let's say.  Call me naive, but somehow I don't think someone who is willing to dump salsa all over a fellow contestant's belongings will make a good life mate, hmmm?

I Yam What I Yam

Recently I made a passing reference on this site about how I was going to strive to attain MILF status.  And I was, too. I had grand plans about how I was going to step up the ole fitness plan, get back into my skinny jeans (as in, jeans I only wear when I'm skinny, not as in, jeans that so tight the people wearing them lose circulation in their feet), and in general just kick it up a notch.  Yessir, I was bringing sexy back to places it had never even been before!  Yup, that was me!  You weren't going to recognize me, I was going to be sooooo fiiiiiiiiine.

And then I got an up-close look at a real live MILF.

Great galloping GlamourShots, Batman, what the hell was I thinking???  There is no possible WAY I could be a MILF, in this or any other incarnation!  No. Possible. Way.  Have you ever seen a MILF up close?  In case you haven't, I will fill you in:  Being a MILF is high maintenance.  As in, Ferrari Testarossa high maintenance.  Space shuttle high maintenance.  Beauty-queen-from-Texas high maintenance.  It takes a lot of time to get your long hair professionally layered and subtly highlighted every six weeks, not to mention the mani/pedi touch-ups and the regular facials.  Then there's shopping for the designer oversized sunglasses you need to wear on top of your head to hold back the expensively-groomed hair; the Pilates classes you always look like you're on your way to or from; the gumball-sized diamonds on your ears and fingers; and oh yes, the expensive SUV you use to cart around your three towheaded children, all of whom are perfectly behaved and impeccably dressed, of course (they need to be perfectly behaved so you can do all that shopping and not run screaming from the mall, I guess).  Geez, just thinking about the effort involved in doing all that makes me want to lie down and take a nap, or better yet, have some cookies and milk and THEN lie down and take a nap (which could be why I look the way *I* do, and the MILFs of the world look the way *they* do).  There aren't enough hours in the day for me to do all the work necessary to attain MILF status! 

I can't speak for the rest of the country, but New England specializes in the glamour-active MILF.  The ones I've seen hereabouts are usually dressed in super-expensive, ultra-high-tech athletic wear, generally consisting of some kind of black yoga pants and a zip-up top, with the vest/top strategically unzipped just low enough to show off a figure better than the one I had before I had kids. MILFs in my neck of the woods all have the ability to wear lipstick without rubbing it off their lips within five minutes of application, unlike yours truly, and the whole kit and kaboodle is skillfully accessorized with plenty of David Yurman jewelry and those Pandora bracelets.  The full jewelry and makeup is a bit incongruous with the wardrobe; these moms look simultaneously like they're about to start jogging at any minute and like they've never broken a sweat before in their lives (I know. I don't understand how they can do both at once, either.  It must be genetic or something.). 

Since I have lowered my sights from full-blown MILF status, I will just have to content myself with being comparatively sexy; e.g., I am the sexiest person Warren better be planning to, um, encounter any time in the near future (i.e., the rest of his life).  And compared to not having any sex with anyone ever again, let me tell you, I am one red-hot mama!  Now pass those chips this way and be quick about it.

P.S. I'd love to hear from my readers around the country (for which read, aside from my local friends, I have one reader in Virginia and one in California) about what subspecies of MILF you encounter, and whether or not you live up to the local standards. 

Lunchtime Conversation

Me (wonderingly): What do you think the Rock of Love Bus smells like?

Co-worker Kristen (not missing a beat):  Booze and vaginas.

NB:  After spending five minutes cruising the VH-1 web site, I have to say, I think she's right.

Mountain High, River Deep, Person Tired

Years ago, when I was younger, stupider, and a lot more energetic than I am in my current incarnation, I used to go backpacking with my friend Karin and her mother.  Karin was, and is, tall and athletic, which became an issue because she was the one who used to set our hiking routes.  "Now, this part is going to involve some climbing," she'd say, pointing to an area on the topographical map where the little lines indicating rise in elevation were so closely packed together, they formed a black blotch on the paper, "but then we'll be traversing all through here!"  She'd point to an area that looked like easy hiking by comparison.  All of this would be true, of course, for people with legs approximately five feet long.  For stubby people like me,the trip would be one endless round of trying to hoist myself up, over, and around obstacles twice my height and keep up with two people who were both significantly faster hikers than I was.  Then (here's where the stupid part comes in), after bitching and moaning my way through the weekend, I'd let Karin talk me into going out again the next weekend on the ride home.

Finally Karin's mother and I begged her for a nice, easy hike - something scenic, please, that would take less than ten hours of hiking per day, with maybe just a teeny-weeny bit of a climb at the end.  She said she'd found one for us, a hike that took us past a picturesque waterfall.  As far as easy, part of the hike was on a boardwalk!  We were sold.  Which is how we found ourselves "climbing" on our hands and knees with full packs on our backs, desperately clinging to roots and branches on the Flume Slide Trail while skeptical day hikers looked askance at us as they traveled the other way.  See, Karin had confused the Flume Slide Trail, one of the hardest day hikes in the White Mountains, with the Flume Trail, which was the aforementioned scenic-hike-with-boardwalk.  By the time we got the issue sorted out, we were too far along to turn around and go back. The only way out of it was through.  So we just kept on plugging, stopping occasionally to catch our breath and take in the view - which was stunning, by the way, or would have been if we hadn't been too afraid of falling off the mountain to do more than glance over our shoulders.

Parenting young children is a lot like hiking the Flume Slide Trail.  At first you think it's going to be all panoramic views and gentle inclines, and no amount of proof to the contrary will convince you.  Then the reality of your situation hits: There's a lot of slogging uphill with your eyes planted on the ground in front of you, a lot of wiping noses and prompting thank-yous and tying shoes, and only occasionally do you get a chance to turn around and appreciate the view.  But recently we've had glimpses of a new phase.  We caught a peek when the girls spent half an hour - an eternity in little-kid time - playing contentedly downstairs in the playroom; and again when we went to a family potluck and the girls scattered, India to play with a pack of chattery little girls while Celeste towed an old dolly around the room in a toy stroller.  We find ourselves together while the kids are occupied elsewhere, and for a few golden moments they don't need our assistance or want our company.  At those times I briefly entertain thoughts of a world where I won't be on call 24-7 to do the million and one mundane things little kids can't do for themselves that we grownups do without even thinking:  Cutting up dinner.  Buckling seat belts.  Putting on pants right-side-out and facing in the right direction.  As much as I loved having little babies around the house, I love hearing the sound of little voices playing and talking together without needing me around even more.  I sometimes even allow myself to think that just maybe, this hike won't last forever and just maybe, we're actually managing to raise two reasonable human beings who are happy and healthy and at least somewhat well-adjusted.  Those moments make it possible for me to put my head down again and go back to slogging.  "Just you wait," Karin, who has an elementary school-aged daughter now herself advises, "it keeps getting better." So, even if believing what Karin tells me is a calculated risk, given our past history, I choose to believe her again now.

(P.S. For those of you who want to harsh my mellow by reminding me that if childhood is the Flume Slide Trail, adolescence is Mt. Everest; let me live in my little world a few years longer.  I work with subhumans on a daily basis, don't forget, so I know exactly what we're headed for.)

Spring Fever

Please save me from the "nice" middle-class kids of this world.

When I started teaching at Suburban Middle School, I was excited to be working in a district known for its high-achieving students.  After spending my entire career to date in schools that were not particularly academically ambitious or competitive, I was looking forward to being part of a school system where students are expected to work hard and excel.  One of the many things I like about this district is that it has a true cross-section of the population, socioeconomically, but included in that is a large subpopulation of students from high-achieving families.  In some ways, we get the best of both words - a district where not everyone drives a Porsche, but the resources are ample and the expectations are high.

Well.

What I didn't realize was that this subpopulation of "good" kids from the "right" side of the tracks (note heavy sarcasm here) includes many legitimately high-achieving students, to be sure, but it ALSO includes a lot of students who are - how shall I put it?  - entitled, self-centered, egotistical, manipulative JERKS.  Because these kids come from reasonably affluent, successful families, a lot of them have absorbed the message that they are unique in their own special unique specialness, and therefore rules that apply to everyone else in the whole rest of the universe need not apply to them.  They have learned that all it takes is an angry parent phone call, one that invokes the words "lawyer," "school," and "court", and suddenly they need never fear the consequences of their actions.  They have learned that their parents equate their own (the parents') success in their careers with their student's success in school; thinking that goes along the lines of, "Well, I'm a successful (fill in the professional white-collar career here), therefore, my child is naturally going to be equally successful at eighth grade." I know; I can't figure out the logic of that one, either, but there it is.

So now spring has come, and with it, the opening of fight season.  (What, you didn't know this?  Spring may be the season of love, but it is also the season of fisticuffs.  I swear there must be some kind of spike in hormone levels after the hibernation season ends, because tensions run HIGH in the young-teen-boy set from now 'til it gets too hot to move.)  A whole cadre of boys on my team got caught up in a huge donnybrook recently - words were said, glances were exchanged, punches thrown. The parties responsible were apprehended and sent to the office and justice administered. Then, in the post-mortem afterward, one name came up over and over. 

Finley*.

Letter From A Broad: We Don't Get Spring In New England Edition

Dear Winter,

I want to thank you - no really, I'm not being snarky for once - I want to thank you for providing us with a season of snow and cold and general bad weather.  As an introvert, I appreciate any opportunity I can stay home and not feel like I'm missing out on a chance to put myself out there!  And be sparkling and witty!  And connect with people!  Nothing like a good 12 inches of the white stuff to put the kibosh on plans for forced socialization, so please accept my most heartfelt thanks.  It may have been a leeeettle bit of overkill to ice up the First In The Nation Primary State for five days in December, but I appreciate that you were just doing your job.  Plus there was some excellent cross-country skiing this year, or so I've been told; I think I managed to get out exactly two (2) times this winter, which kinda sucks, but that's not your fault.  So, um, like I said, thanks.

Okay, now that you know you're loved and appreciated, can we discuss the rather nasty tendency you're showing to not go away?  We've had several instances in the past few weeks where a stretch of nice days would lull us into complacency, and then, BOOM!  Cold and snowy again!  Last week was a case in point:  cold! warm! sunny! rainy! hats! mittens! sunglasses! raincoats! fleece!  C'mon, is that any way to treat a friend?  I know that seeing all us pasty-limbed New Englanders running around in shorts and t-shirts on the first fifty-degree day has to hurt. I mean, how can you avoid coming to the conclusion that we'd rather hang with your buddy Spring, or better yet Summer, seeing that we leap on the first chance we get to ditch the winter duds?  So here's a tip: If you make a dignified exit, people will actually miss you more than if you linger around making statements like, "gee, I guess I'll be leaving now unless you want me to stay," and, "you know, I don't really have anything pressing to do for the next twelve weeks or so if you just want to, you know, get together and hang out or something."  It's not that we don't like you, Winter, it's just that we know that once you're here you have a dismaying tendency to stick around, tracking snow all over the kitchen floor and rusting the underside of the car. So instead of playing the now-I'm-leaving-now-I'm-not game, just GO already. After all, in the words of the immortal country song, "How can I miss you if you won't go away?"

Cheers,

Some Pig

Dear Cat,

When we have one of these anomalous 50+ degree days that we so rarely get before late April in the frozen North, it would behoove you to take advantage of the nice weather and go outside.  I would think that such a highly evolved predator as you would be eager to foray into the wild and find something defenseless to murder instead of sticking to your usual pursuits, those being barfing, sleeping, and shedding on the furniture.  Also, after I've booted your lazy self outdoors, I would appreciate it if you would do what cats are sent outside to do, and not wait at the door with your legs crossed so you can dash inside at the earliest possible moment.  After all, what is the great outdoors if not your own ginormous litter pan, hmm?  I suggest you pay careful heed to my words, lest I suddenly enforce a policy that all members of this family have to start paying their own way, either with cash or with labor.  I'm sure there's something you could do to contribute to the greater good of the household aside from the three skills aforementioned (the barfing, sleeping, shedding trifecta).  Now scram, before I decide to use you to dust the furniture.

Love,

The female human with opposable thumbs and the ability to open the cat food container.

Dear readers south and west of New England,

What is this "spring" of which you speak?  Could you try to define it to someone who hasn't left the house without her coat and gloves since November?  I am puzzled by this term.

Thanks,

Some Pig

As I Was Going to Saint Ives

This week definitely ended on a bad note.  First the curriculum stuff I ranted about earlier transpired, and then I found out something REALLY demoralizing:

I am low wife on the totem pole.

The back story:  Our school breaks the students up into teams, so that a group of 120-ish students will have the same math, social studies, English and science teachers.  It just so happens on our team that the gender division is three women and one man.  Our male co-worker was feeling seriously under the weather one day and was trying to gut it out for the day, against the express advice of the three female teachers.  The school nurse happened to stop by to fill us in on a student's medical needs when we were all in our team room, and we asked her to prevail upon him to go home.  She then proceeded to do so by telling him how team members have to look out for each other, how school is home away from home, and so forth and so on.  To emphasize the message of solidarity, she concluded her soliloquy with, "This is your family!  You have three wives!"  The statement struck a vibe far more Old-Testament-slash-polygamist-compound-in-Utah than it did the Sister Sledge solidarity the nurse was striving to hit.  It caused us all to give each other the, "my, isn't this uncomfortable?" look, particularly since our relationship is far more fraternal than spousal, if by "fraternal" you mean, "making fun of each other mercilessly at every opportunity."  So ever since then, we female teachers have been dubbed wives 2, 3, and 4. 

On Friday the joke got revived, and out of curiosity I asked where I stood.  Guess which wife *I* am?  I'm fourth!  Last and least on the list!  Wife #3 wondered aloud who got to be wife #1, which earned the answer, "uuuuh... my WIFE," and apparently the legal spouse's status as Wife #1 is supreme and inviolate.  Hey, I'm down with that.  I'm already Wife #1 in my own crib, I don't need to hog the spotlight in every venue.  But FOURTH???  Out of four?  Dude, that's harsh.  I asked Male Coworker if this was based on seniority, since I am the newest member of the team, and he said NO.  Our status is always in flux.  So it's not even like I can blame my relative newcomer status!  Fourth!  Do you know which chores Wife #4 gets to do?  The sucky chores, that's what!  I'm sure everything stinky, inconvenient, grubby, time-consuming and smelly will get passed down the line to yours truly.  And you can imagine what kind of "marital duties" the FOURTH wife gets.  All the unfulfilling ones, at least from my end!  Look, I'm the younger sibling, I know how these things work.  I spent my formative years having to play with the Barbie the dog chewed that one time, or having to be the baby - or worse yet the daddy - every time we played house, or having to share the ice cream with my mom when my sister got a whole bowl to herself.  Yeah, no way am I settling for fourth wife.  I've got to work my way up the power rankings to at least third, or preferably second.  I mean, this is socially awkward!  As Warren said to him, "It's a little weird when my first wife is your fourth wife.  What relation does that make us?" 

I already know Male Coworker likes banana cream pie, and Wife #1 suggested a box of Oreos and a half-gallon of milk.  If the way to this guy's heart is through his stomach, then I'm going Betty friggin' Crocker on his ass. 

PS If you ever need to keep a crowd of 13-year-olds entertained, recite the "As I was going to St. Ives" nursery rhyme to them and challenge them to figure it out.  I had one class counting fingers, scribbling on scrap paper and punching calculators for half an hour, no exaggeration.  They were SO mad when I finally told them the answer - totally worth it on that basis alone.

Deja Vu All Over Again

I thought things were going to be different, but clearly, they're not.

One of the eternal frustrations of my job, one which threatens to make me bitter and cynical and burnt out, is the constant reinvention of the wheel forced upon us by various administrators, central office honchos, and legislators, none of whom are responsible for actually implementing their decisions and none of whom actually have to deliver content instruction, day in and day out, to real live living breathing students.  After a baker's dozen of years in this profession, I've learned to take every new initiative, reform, and mandate with a whole fucking mountain of salt, because you know what?  After we teachers do all the grunt work of rewriting and revising and revamping and reconfiguring and rewhatevering everything we do to meet the demands of the NEW! and IMPROVED! program we're now currently using as our guidebook, something comes along - a change of personnel, a new law, something - and then guess what?  We're not doing that anymore, oh no, that's not at all what we need, we need to change direction entirely and go do THIS now, and by the way, all that work you did?  All that time you took away from preparing classes and correcting papers and meeting with students and researching your lessons and basically DOING YOUR JOB???  Yeah, all that was basically a big,fat waste of time because everything you did is now going to be THROWN OUT as old news and now we're going to start all over again!!! 

Here's a prime example:  When I moved back to the State Formerly Known As Home lo these eight years ago, the school where I taught was up to its (figurative) eyeballs in rewriting its curriculum to align with new state standards in order to comply with new legislation that mandated standards-based learning.  [For those of you not blessed with a working vocabulary in educationese, what "standards-based learning" means is that students are assessed against an absolute standard, not against a norm.  So, for example, if the standard says that all eighth-grade students will be able to write an essay with a thesis statement, three paragraphs, and a conclusion, a student who is unable to do so has to work on that skill until s/he is able to produce it.]  Where this becomes tricky is when high school graduation is at stake.  The State FKAH wanted to make high school diplomas standards-based, meaning, if a student did not meet a state-level standard, that student would not get credit for that subject area. This may sound fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, but think about what happens when a kid misses ONE standard but can complete all the others.  Or if the kid has a special ed disability.  Or moves in from another state that doesn't have standards-based diplomas.  

All of the above issues and more were raised to the grand wallahs at the State House, but they insisted - insisted! - that standards-based learning was coming, there were deadlines and benchmarks that had to be met, schools not in compliance were going to be penalized, blah blah blah yada yada yada.  For my first two years at this school, we spent every professional development day, every faculty meeting, every department meeting, every spare moment scrambling around trying to get everything in place that the state required so that we wouldn't be out of compliance.  Well, I say "we," which means "everyone except my friend Sue" - she was too smart to fall for the trap.  The day of reckoning, when we would be held accountable to the state, loomed.  And then - guess what?  At the eleventh hour, fifty-ninth minute and 57th second, the state Leg, in its infinite wisdom, decided they were going to "suspend" the movement toward standards-based grading "indefinitely."  For which read, "we realized this law was too FUBAR to implement, and the first time we denied a kid a diploma based on standards we were going to get our asses sued off, so, oops!  Never mind!  We call do-overs!  Um, go back to doing whatever it was that you... were doing... um, before."  In the words of Sue, "I told you so!"

So I, like many stronger and wiser folks before me, decided to split my efforts in two.  The bulk of my effort went into TEACHING - you know, trying to get kids to understand something that they didn't understand before in a way that makes their lives richer and more meaningful.  Or is that just too Hallmark-channel-ridiculous for words?  Then, a small sliver of my time and energy was dedicated to paying lip service to the latest and greatest snake oil being peddled from on high.  A teeny-weeny section of my brain was reserved for stupid jokes, gossip about co-workers, the lyrics to the theme song of The Jeffersons and the answers to trivia game questions, all of which would turn out to be fodder for future blog posts, but that is a waaaay different story.  To make a long story short (oops! too late!), I went on this way happily for many years, glad to be in the classroom and willing to let the rest of the nonsense roll off my back.  But then, in my new job, we were told that we were going to have a new decision-making model.  And it would be ground up!  And teacher-centered!  And focused on being honest about what was going on in the classroom! And you know what I did?

I fell for it.  I believed them!  Even as I type this, I can't believe I was that damn dumb!  I actually thought to myself, gee, this might actually work.  I actually let myself get invested in our curriculum work.  And you know what?  We were doing good stuff!  My fellow social studies teachers and I were setting common goals, planning assessments together, coming up with a coherent, cohesive curriculum that I BELIEVED IN and FELT I COULD TEACH.  We spent hours and HOURS on this stuff and I was actually willing and able to do MORE of this extra work because for once I felt like we were actually accomplishing something USEFUL AND CONCRETE. 

I'm sure you know where this is going.

Today I was told that all the work we have done over the past three-quarters of a calendar year is, um, well, useless.  Because our NEW curriculum coordinator doesn't agree with what the OLD curriculum coordinator did, we are basically THROWING OUT ALL THE WORK WE DID ALL YEAR and starting over.  Why?  Well, who knows, maybe she needs something to do to justify her salary that is probably TWICE WHAT I MAKE.  Oh, and by the way?  We have three, forty-five minute meetings left this school year for curriculum writing, and we have to rewrite our ENTIRE curriculum according to the NEW template.  By the end of JUNE.  Oh, and this decision?  Came from the top down.  So bye-bye, bottom-up planning; sayonara, teacher-led decision-making. That was a nice six months we had together!  Next?

You wanna know what really fries my cheese? (You must, if you've hung around this long.)  What gets me is that for ONCE, I was actually BEING TRUTHFUL ABOUT WHAT I DO.  For ONCE, I was being HONEST about what goes on in my classroom and not just going through the motions to make the bureaucracy happy.  For ONCE, I was PROUD of what we were accomplishing as a grade-level subject area.  For ONCE, I felt that I didn't have to close my door and play make-believe in order to do what I feel is ethically right by the kids.  Because you know who my customer is?  It's the KIDS.  You know what my job is?  My job is to deliver CONTENT to my STUDENTS in a way that is challenging and engaging and thought-provoking and skill-enhancing, and to do so in a way that makes them BETTER and MORE WELL-ADJUSTED citizens of the world.  And when STUPID SHIT LIKE THIS gets in the way of me DOING MY JOB I get ANGRY.  

So parents, do you want some free advice?  (It's worth every penny, I promise.)  If you want to know if your local school is any good, ignore the principal and the assistant principal and the central office hacks and the PTO moms and the reports in the local paper and go talk to the teachers directly.  Don't listen to the official arglebargle about curriculum and standards and lifelong learning and all that crap.  Why?  Because if my experience is any indication, and I've been in four districts in my career, what the teachers are DOING IN THE CLASSROOM and what the official party line is are often two very different things.  So go talk to the teachers.  If they seem smart and on the ball and engaged and connected to kids, they probably are and you can trust them with your kid.  If they seem to be playing the jargon game or don't seem to know which end is up, they probably don't.  The rest of it?  Is just window dressing.  And, because I like my job and I like my district and I want to keep teaching here preferably until I retire or die, this post will be up for a limited time - but if I don't get this off my chest, that final moment's going to come sooner rather than later.

I'm Doomed, I Say, Dooooooooomed

Something truly terrible happened this morning.

My four-year-old daughter - FOUR YEARS OLD, may I remind you - tore through at least four outfits before settling on something to wear today.  She wouldn't wear this dress because the buttons on it were purple and she doesn't like purple buttons.  She rejected two other dresses in short order because they were the wrong color, or didn't have flowers, or just weren't right somehow.  Then she finally decided to wear a skirt instead, but had a hard time choosing which tights to wear because she didn't want to wear tights and reluctantly agreed to only after being informed that it was too cold to go bare-legged.  What she really wanted to wear, of course, was the same pink velour dress she wore to school yesterday; she was completely put out by the fact that, gee, her mom and dad weren't going to let her wear the same thing two days in a row.  All of this took place this morning, five minutes before I had to walk out the door, of course.

While India was summarily rejecting every clothing option suggested (Pants?  I spit on your pants!  Corduroy jumper?  Fie on corduroy jumpers!), I had a vision - a flash forward, if you will - of the two of us nine years from now.  In my vision (nightmare?), I'm shrieking up the stairs that I'm leaving for school this minute and India needs to get a move on RIGHT NOW OR ELSE while my daughter's having a meltdown over which of the seven exactly identical pairs of jeans currently scattered around the room she should wear.  At that point I will no doubt say incredibly helpful things like, "goddammit, India, what difference does it make, they all look the same anyway," and "I don't see how you can not have anything to wear when you have enough clothes here to outfit the sixth fleet."  I then follow that up by grumbling under my breath about ungrateful teenage daughters who don't appreciate having a ride to school every morning when lots of other kids would love a ride to school and would get dressed on time in order to have one.

Want to know what's even worse?  While we were negotiating India's Great Clothing Dilemma, Celeste - the TWO YEAR OLD - opened her drawer and pointed to a specific top, saying, "I want dat!  I want dat one!" 

I don't stand a chance.