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Monday: early release, farm share
Nov. 15th, 2021 02:49 pmI walked with M.
There was a 1 pm early release today.
Before that, R. and I attended a zoom meeting with A.’s teachers and special ed folks (mini team meeting, basically) about homework expectations. I went into this thing not really understanding what it was about, and I came out of this meeting _still_ not knowing what it was about. I, personally, don’t think that much of anything changed, altho there were some pretty minor action items (we committed to consistently communicating when A. was committed to not doing a homework assignment / she was not able to get to an assignment in time. We had been doing that mostly, but people want reassurance *shrug* ; various other people committed to doing various other, equally unimportant / minor changes). If there was anything significant that was communicated at this meeting, it was that I started out by saying (twice, because people arrived in stages) that we don’t care about grades / assessments / wtf, nor do we care about making up “learning loss”. We do care that if she is so far behind that she is not gaining anything by being in class, we want to know, because that means the placement is wrong and needs to be changed (I thought this initially about the English placement, but apparently not). I also don’t care if a teacher thinks she’s capable of doing “more work” than she is actually doing, because I have yet to meet a person who is consistently right in making that assessment about other people. Usually, if someone thinks person A can do more, and gets person A to do more for that someone, then one more more other persons B, C, etc. abruptly have to deal with A doing less for them. That’s just jockeying around in the priority queue, which is fine to do, but it not a matter of getting the person to do more work.
The various teachers seemed to have entered the meeting with some anxiety about what was going to happen when parent / teacher conferences rolled around in December, and left the meeting apparently less anxious? Yay? I went into the meeting with the expectation that the social studies and science teachers were probably fine, the math teacher was provisionally okay, and the English teacher is a problem and came out of the conference with the conclusion that my daughter has charmed the shit out of her social studies teacher, the science teacher is definitely fine, the math teacher is a lot more of a problem than I had realized, and the English teacher is an English teacher and therefore a problem but I don’t care. This year is clearly going to be a Ride for everyone. I’m starting to understand why the team is not engaging with my request to move my daughter to a lower expectations English class. (Even when the parent asks for that, it’s very hard to move a kid who talks like my daughter talks into a lower expectations English class.) That’s fine. They’ll learn the hard way. If they want to leave her in the regular or whatever English class(es) over the year, that’s just a fancy way of punishing English teachers. I will continue to explain to my daughter the power differential between students and teachers, and what the various options are.
The farm share arrived. It’s awesome this time: squash for squash soup, lots of mushrooms (in the mushroom share, of course, but also in the farm share), nice looking spinach, arugula, butter lettuce, broccoli greens (!), kohlrabi, radishes, carrots and sweet potatoes. Other than we now have two kohlrabi and way too much radish, all good.
There was a 1 pm early release today.
Before that, R. and I attended a zoom meeting with A.’s teachers and special ed folks (mini team meeting, basically) about homework expectations. I went into this thing not really understanding what it was about, and I came out of this meeting _still_ not knowing what it was about. I, personally, don’t think that much of anything changed, altho there were some pretty minor action items (we committed to consistently communicating when A. was committed to not doing a homework assignment / she was not able to get to an assignment in time. We had been doing that mostly, but people want reassurance *shrug* ; various other people committed to doing various other, equally unimportant / minor changes). If there was anything significant that was communicated at this meeting, it was that I started out by saying (twice, because people arrived in stages) that we don’t care about grades / assessments / wtf, nor do we care about making up “learning loss”. We do care that if she is so far behind that she is not gaining anything by being in class, we want to know, because that means the placement is wrong and needs to be changed (I thought this initially about the English placement, but apparently not). I also don’t care if a teacher thinks she’s capable of doing “more work” than she is actually doing, because I have yet to meet a person who is consistently right in making that assessment about other people. Usually, if someone thinks person A can do more, and gets person A to do more for that someone, then one more more other persons B, C, etc. abruptly have to deal with A doing less for them. That’s just jockeying around in the priority queue, which is fine to do, but it not a matter of getting the person to do more work.
The various teachers seemed to have entered the meeting with some anxiety about what was going to happen when parent / teacher conferences rolled around in December, and left the meeting apparently less anxious? Yay? I went into the meeting with the expectation that the social studies and science teachers were probably fine, the math teacher was provisionally okay, and the English teacher is a problem and came out of the conference with the conclusion that my daughter has charmed the shit out of her social studies teacher, the science teacher is definitely fine, the math teacher is a lot more of a problem than I had realized, and the English teacher is an English teacher and therefore a problem but I don’t care. This year is clearly going to be a Ride for everyone. I’m starting to understand why the team is not engaging with my request to move my daughter to a lower expectations English class. (Even when the parent asks for that, it’s very hard to move a kid who talks like my daughter talks into a lower expectations English class.) That’s fine. They’ll learn the hard way. If they want to leave her in the regular or whatever English class(es) over the year, that’s just a fancy way of punishing English teachers. I will continue to explain to my daughter the power differential between students and teachers, and what the various options are.
The farm share arrived. It’s awesome this time: squash for squash soup, lots of mushrooms (in the mushroom share, of course, but also in the farm share), nice looking spinach, arugula, butter lettuce, broccoli greens (!), kohlrabi, radishes, carrots and sweet potatoes. Other than we now have two kohlrabi and way too much radish, all good.