Tag: school

Drunk Shopping: It's for the Kids!

Published on March 27, 2014

I have a rule against drunk shopping. But I didn’t always. The policy sprang from necessity after attending my first-ever school fundraising auction. Poured into an oxygen-inhibiting costume, plied with signature cocktails, and woozy from watching wealthy parents race to the bottom of bid sheets, I lost my shizz and wound up owing \$500 for a one-night chocolate fountain rental.

Five hundred dollars. For wet chocolate.

When sobriety surfaced, I literally wept with panic. What had I done?! I had a young kid, a new mortgage, a mediocre salary, and, like, six friends — none of whom were likely to pay $83 each to lap gurgling goo from a humming appliance atop my hand-me-down kitchen table. No, you know how this ends. I took a bath on that chocolate fountain. And possibly … also … in it, but that’s my business.

A dozen years and as many auctions later — at Cabarets and Carnivals, through the Enchanted Forest, and aboard the Orient Express — I’ve learned to sip my wine and hide my bid number. But I can’t say I’ve learned to love the annual campus clusterfund that is the school auction.

Transgender Students

Published on November 21, 2013

A new California law will allow K-12 public-school students to use restrooms and join sports teams based not on their sex — but on their gender identity. That means that starting January 1, transgender students who are biologically male will be allowed into girls’ bathrooms and those who are biologically female will be welcome on football teams and in boys’ locker rooms.

So, naturally, some folks are freaking out.

Signed by Governor Brown in August, the School Success and Opportunity Act is the first of its kind in the U.S. But a group called Privacy for All Students has gathered thousands of signatures hoping to bring the issue to a public vote — and ultimately overturn the law. They say it’s unfair to regular guy-guys and girl-girls to have to share their facilities and, I don’t know, bonding zones with someone who has differently shaped private parts.

This particular fight centers around urinals and communal showers, but the transgender rights movement neither begins nor ends at plumbing. It’s happening on Dancing with the Stars, where Chaz Bono cha-cha-cha’d; and in the U.S. Army, where Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning reinvented himself as Chelsea; and in the Girl Scouts, where a Colorado troop’s decision to allow a 7-year-old transgender child to join its ranks inspired a cookie boycott; and in the Miss Universe pageant, where a transgender Canadian contestant won the right to compete in 2012; and so on, and so on.

No, I Won't Go to Your Kid's Show

Published on May 23, 2013

The last few weeks of the school year are a grueling gauntlet — a narrow, clamorous chute of activity that swallows every last hour of a family’s free time. Evening performances. Weekend tournaments. Early-morning muffin-and-melon affairs in Appreciation of Someone or Other. The only way to get through it all is to keep your eyes focused straight ahead and be impervious to distractions.

It’s like Zumba class or (from what I’ve been told) the urinals in a public restroom: You’re supposed to just mind your own shakey-shake and pay no attention to the person next to you.

And yet you have a friend — we all do — who is going to break this sensible, unspoken rule and invite you to her child’s concert/meet/ recital/play-off even as you’re scrambling for something clean to wear to your own kid’s ceremony/championship/potluck/musical. And when you don’t show up to her child’s event, because, let’s face it, you haven’t hit a grocery store in 19 days and your family is eating old trail mix for breakfast, she is going to judge you. She is going to raise her eyebrows, purse her lips unattractively, and be wounded by your conspicuous absence.

Paranoid or Preventative?

Published on February 14, 2013

It’s a typical day in classrooms across America. Students turn in last night’s homework, take their seats, open their notebooks, and settle in for a lesson in handwriting. Or calculating the diameter of a circle. Or avoiding being shot by a madman.

Schools from elementary to high school are now putting students through “lockdown drills” to rehearse what to do if someone starts shooting up the campus. Some have been practicing like this since Columbine; others only began after the Sandy Hook school massacre in December.

The drills usually begin with a loudspeaker announcement from the principal, after which teachers lock and/or barricade their classroom doors, close any blinds, and instruct their students to huddle in a corner and remain absolutely silent for 10, 15, or even 30 minutes. Sometimes staff members bang threateningly on classroom doors or fire blanks in the hall to add realism. One school had students lay down “dead” with fake blood.

“I cried the first time my son came home and told me about these,” says a friend of mine. “They told him, ‘If you’re in the bathroom or hall when the classroom doors are locked, find somewhere else to hide because the teachers won’t let you in.’ He was 9.”

After-School Gospel

Published on February 16, 2012

I have a severe allergy to evangelism. Shiver-me-creepies, the very word sends me into spasms of fretful swatting punctuated by explosive shrieks of “Get ’em off me! Get ’em off!” I dislike religions that dole out piety points for saving souls, or make it their mission to convince me that I’ll wind up Satan’s scullery maid without their handy pamphlets.

Imagine my anxiety when I learned that a Christian evangelism group was recruiting young souls in our public schools. Thanks to a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, the Good News Club is allowed to operate after-school Bible study classes on tax-supported campuses in order to carry out its self-stated mission of reaching “unchurched kids” and “establishing them in Bible-believing churches.” The club operates at more than 3,500 public schools across America, including 10 in Santa Barbara.

I first learned of them in 2009 when my journalist friend Katherine Stewart noticed the club at her child’s school and wrote a cover story for The Santa Barbara Independent about the infighting its presence caused among students, parents, and school administrators. “I started getting email from parents across the country saying, ‘This came to our community, and it blew us apart,'” she told me.

Gift Wrap This

Published on October 13, 2011

I’m not what you’d call a natural salesman. Having never worked in retail, and rarely even hosted a yard sale, I’m uncomfortable pawning merch onto other people. My idea of a solid marketing pitch: “Hey … you don’t want one of these, do you?”

Yet in 15 combined years of my children’s schooling, I’ve hawked enough nearly useless junk to fill a 3rd-grade classroom. And not one of the tiny portable ones either: a huge classroom, like the kind we used to have before schools were penniless and begging for bucks.

Sucked into countless school fundraiser sales — whining and grumbling all the while — I’ve slung chocolates and coffee. I’ve moved magazines, pushed potted poinsettias, and hustled gift wrap. I’ve hit up friends, trapped neighbors, and pleaded with long-since-tapped-out family members to buy muffin tins and scented candles and macadamia nuts.

I’ve done it for two reasons: to funnel field-trip/assembly/art/lab money to our sickeningly cash-strapped schools, and so that PTA moms don’t mutter “slacker” when I skitter past them, hoping to avoid being tapped to work the clean-up shift at the scrapbooking booth. (I will write a check for \$100 right this instant if you promise never to make me scrape craft glue off of someone’s decorative scissors.)

Online Grades

Published on May 11, 2011

The house is finally quiet, the kids gone. She pours her coffee and slides in front of the computer. Pulse quickening, she grabs the mouse, clicks the bookmarked page, clacks out her password — and steels herself for what she’ll see.

“I actually get this adrenaline rush as it’s loading,” said the mother of two. “It’s like you’re watching the stock market. I’m almost holding my breath going, ‘Is it going to be good?'”

She’s peering at her kids’ grades via an online gradebook, where today’s students — and their hand-wringing parents — can monitor scores for every assignment, in every class. More and more middle schools and high schools across the nation are adopting these grade-reporting systems. And it’s churning up anxiety among parents I know.

“I checked obsessively when I first had access to it and cursed those teachers who didn’t update regularly,” confessed a friend on the school board. “Then I realized the system administrator could see which parents were accessing their child’s grades morning, mid morning, noon, afternoon, evening, midnight, and at 2 a.m. — and I backed off in shame.”

Chasing the Empty 'A'

Published on January 6, 2011

Take out a pencil. This is a test.

Which of the following best describes parents who pick up their children from school and ask,

“Hey, how’d you do on that math test?”

Attentive
Supportive
Involved
Contributing to a high-pressure academic culture that’s hurting our kids’ health without actually helping their intellect.

Yeah, take your time on this one. It’s tricky.

Home School

Published on April 15, 2010

I teach writing to college students. I school them in story structure and tone, coach them in voice and diction.

My students teach me things, too. I’ve learned, for example, how ridiculous the phrase “Professor Starshine” sounds. I’ve learned that making literary analogies to Ghostbusters — no matter how clever it seems to me — is inscrutable to people who were born in 1992.

But the most important thing I’ve learned from my students is this simple fact: When a four-year old pees on the floor, he ought to clean it up. You’re looking at me as though I just made another impenetrable Ghostbusters reference, but let me explain.

Parents are working harder than ever to get their kids into college. They start saving when their children are born, help them choose college prep courses as early as middle school, and schlep them to transcript-dazzling extracurricular pursuits throughout high school.

But from where I stand — at the front of a classroom of legal adults who show up at a writing class without a pen — I fret their efforts may be off the mark. In fact, some of my campus colleagues and I agree that while today’s parents get an “A” in Getting Their Kids Into College, they get an “F” in Teaching the Entitled Little Buggers What to Do Once They Get There.