School wants my kids to peddle crap

my daughter is all about animal planet.

 

Long Beach, CA?

It has not improved. I was visiting a friend there a few years ago and we were on the bus and a teenage girl spit at our little tiny babies because they were looking at her 'wrong'.

My friend wanted me to move there. Um, no thanks.

 

You couldn't get me near California with promises of millions per year.

 

I totally sucked at it, too.

Once, when I was desperate for a job, I tried telemarketing. I suck so bad at selling stuff. Even when I read the script with all the enthusiasm I could come up with I couldn't convince people to renew memberships to things they had belonged to for years. Also, if I called during the day and men's wives answered the phone, about 2/3 of them didn't believe I was a telemarketer and accused me of being their husband's girlfriend. WTF?

I know! At first I thought it was just for a week, so I did it, no problem.

Then he sends home that thing for me to sign that says she hasn't watched any at all and some other things that make it quite apparent that this is all year. That's when I got annoyed.

My kids love animal planet. I reward them with it. If they finish their homework in time, for example, we can watch a little bit of Planet's Funniest Animals or those shows where they count down the 10 weirdest animals in a particular category. We watch it together, we talk about it.

One of the notes he sent home said that both of his daughters have Phd.'s and neither one of them ever knew that there was a channel other than PBS when they were growing up. Well la-dee-freakin'-da! I'm so impressed. Does he expect me to say, "Oh, Wise One, please tell me more about your parenting methods so that I can emulate you in every way!"

He is, to his credit, a good teacher in may ways. He has the kids doing things that some teachers might think are ambitious, but he's willing to try it, and it seems to be working. He has 3rd graders keeping track of bank accounts and taking turns running the bank. He does other creative things in school. He's a good teacher. It's just this business about telling me what to do at home that I don't like.

Something like 80% of the kids at our school live in poverty, and around a third or so don't speak English at home. I get the impression that the teachers, including him, just work here and then go home. They don't relate to our neighborhood. Our school is around 40% Latino and every last one of the teachers is white. I know this situation isn't unique to our area, though.

So, yeah, he's a good teacher, but in some ways he's out of touch.

Anyone who can be an elementary school teacher without losing their mind is more patient than me. That's just a fact.

 

long beach isn't bad. i'm pretty fond of it, actually. it's an interesting and highly multi-ethnic place with fascinating history, architecture, shopping and food. lol. it's just a matter of putting out the right vibe, really. teenagers are pretty much shit-heads everywhere, so far as i can tell.

 

it's a cesspit, truly. every time i have to go there to visit my family i get depressed. when i fly in and the sky turns from blue to brown i just wanna start whining. the traffic sucks, and the people are phoney.

i lived there most of my life. i mighta liked it if i hadn't live so many other places, too, and saw how much better everywhere else was.

 

Well, I don't think the toddler meant to challenge them with that look. I think he just happened to be sitting across from them, so when he looked straight ahead, there they were. He hadn't learned to stare into the distance on the bus yet.

Then one of these teenagers spit on the 3-year-old and started calling us racial slurs.

LOL. That's true.

I can't drive, so my time spent navigating Long Beach on the bus and some other stuff that happened didn't make feel like packing up and moving down there.

The teenagers where I live aren't all a joy to be with, either, though.

 

Where are you now?

 

Northern California.

That Long Beach story reminded me of something. My mom is a teacher. She had a class of teenagers from up here, north of San Francisco, that she took on a field trip to a Museum in the Mission District in San Francisco. Some of her students thought they were really tough gangsters. Well, they witnessed some violence down in the city on their field trip and some of these rural gangsters almost peed their pants. My mom said they were scared.

Oh, they're really tough up here when they just have to contend with each other. Drop them off in the city, though, and they're babies.

 

This smacks of Big Brother.


TV is fine. It is educational. I plan to let my kids watch as much tv as they want. After all, I watch it 24/7.

 

you know, there' so many EXCELLENT programs out there. i'm on bedrest, so i'm become very well acquainted with them. unfortunately, with me on bedrest, kai doesn't get to do much at all, so she's getting pretty well acquainted, too. but the shows on Noggin are really helping her learn to count and communicate in ways i just don't know how. she's made so much progress with her flash cards and games since watching some of the shows. i'm sorry, but a lotta those poeple putting out those shows know WAY MORE about how to educate my kid than i do. so between her child oriented programs and her hour a day dance, gym or swim classes, i'm afriad i just don't feel that guilty about kai watching some tv. she's creative enough with her clays and drawings and play time that i'm just not worried.

 

varying drugs, both pharmaceutical and illicit have brought about that kind of irrational rages in several kids in my old neighborhood. paranoia, inability to reason, and plain old rage. it's pretty sad.

 

You are talking about a child being educated under your guidance. That is very different from using the TV as an unsupervised babysitter. I think what you are doing is wonderful. The key issue is still that the schools are showing a trend toward Big Brotherism.

 

...

 

well it is. would they even bother to examine the difference between my daughter watching excellent programming and a child watching garbage 24/7? and in some children's lives, usually living with a single mother, TV is all they can have when mom's at work. i was a latch-key kid, we saw a LOT of tv. can't really jump mom's ass over that. it wasn't her fault my dad was a deadbeat.