The School Year: An Assessment

So it's June now - the time of year when school winds down, wraps up, and then goes away for a few short months - and I am officially shoulder deep in the process of organizing the summer for the Tornadoes. Organizing the summer pretty much consists of signing them up for camp. Camp after camp after camp after camp.

At this point, I have things pretty well lined up for them. I've left a few weeks open in case they actually want to loll about with me, at least a little bit. Now that I have that beastly project under control, with just four weeks of school remaining (three really, since the last week is basically a wash), I can turn my attention to other matters. Other matters like considering just how well this waning school year has served us all. Was it successful? Did we learn what we needed to learn?

My overall evaluation of the year can be summed up in one word: Unimpressive. Not a stellar experience at all. The Tornadoes, personally and individually, can consider their careers as Third and Fifth Graders a rousing success. Really, best efforts made and noted by all...given what they had to work with, which was a real disappointment. It's like someone let all the air out of the whole faculty this year. The whole "no homework in the fifth grade" thing that I thought was such a sweet deal at first? What a freaking crappy idea that turned out to be. Do you know what happens when you tell a fifth grade girl that she is essentially not ever going to have homework, and then, on a rare occasion, you send her home with a math paper to complete? Fits of tears, people. Throwing of own bodies onto the floor. Not pretty, especially when actually doing the math paper ends up taking about six minutes. I'm not sure what the logic was behind this - if it was supposed to allow the kids to free their minds after school, or perhaps the teachers just didn't feel like grading homework this year - but it's a really, really bad idea.

And really, everything else that has bummed me out about the year can be traced back to one change, which was the replacement of the school librarian. Yep. The librarian. Forget the fact that we had a new principal this year. Please. This is the third principal in five years. It's the school where principals go right before they retire and open their own handyman businesses. The glue, the force behind the whole operation, was the librarian, people. She did EVERYTHING. And she left this year because, why? Because, I believe, they pushed her just a little too far. Because on top of running the sixth grade culture fair, on top of running Invention Convention, on top of directing the chorus, on top of leading reading enrichment, on top of keeping all of the parents actually informed on a weekly basis about what the *&(!@! was going on down at that school, and, oh yeah, also being the librarian, they wanted her to take on even more, and I'm just guessing here, probably without any appropriate and highly deserved pay increase.

And so what were we left with when she left us? An Invention Convention where my own Third Grader made the most fantastic invention ever (really, it was the marketing) and it didn't matter, because the whole thing was "unofficial" and "just for the experience"; a chorus that does a bang-up job of standing in a line and holding black folders, but failed to memorize their songs and, oh, to SING SO YOU COULD HEAR THEM. I'm pretty sure the whole Culture Fair thing didn't even happen - but I don't actually know, because without the librarian, there's no weekly newsletter, and without a weekly newsletter I have no *^%#$! clue what's going on. Which is why Fifth Grader missed out on the babysitting course. And also why Third Grader ended up spending five winter afternoons learning how to knit when she could have been learning how to snowboard, because nobody bothered to tell the parents that all the other sporting alternatives to snowboarding had been taken away this year in favor of things like compass reading and knitting. The good news: she now knits like a pro. The bad news: not planning on taking any family knitting vacations anytime soon.

I can see that I've gotten a little worked up. Sorry. It's just, you know, I am basically living in this itsy bitsy, commerce free, hole-in-the-woods town for one reason and one reason only, that being the historically exceptional quality of the hole-in-the-woods elementary school. You take that away from me and I'm just living unreasonably far away from a decent cup of coffee for no reason at all. Things need to improve. Pronto.

You know, all of this thinking about the quality of the school system got me thinking about something else. Once upon a time, I was twenty something, and kid less, and - I remember this part distinctly - exactly the kind of girl who rolled her eyes and left the room when she found herself listening to young mothers fervently discussing the quality of school systems. So, yeah. Sorry about the eye rolling.

And rock on, librarians!