Help Us Save the Academy!

Click here to save the Academy!

For those of you who may not know, my kids are fortunate to have attended an incredible elementary school, Los Penasquitos Elementary. This school was the first "No Excuses University" and was featured in the book Whatever It Takes: How Professional Learning Communities Respond When Kids Don't Learn. Los Pen, as we fondly call it, wasn't always a successful school. In fact, when we moved to this area, we were told repeatedly, "Don't enroll your kids there." Wondering what all the negativity was about, I scheduled a meeting with the principal before enrolling my kindergartener. I asked him about the school's reputation, and he told me that it had once been earned, and then explained in detail everything that had been done and was being done to improve the culture of learning at the school.

After two hours with him, looking at reports, touring the school, and visiting classrooms, I was sold. I enrolled my son and never looked back. Within a couple of months, I became the president of the PTA. I volunteered in classrooms. I tutored kids. I saw firsthand exactly why this very diverse school with a large non-English-speaking population and federal Title 1 status (meaning more than 40% of its kids qualify for free or reduced lunch) was becoming such a success. In the years since then, Los Pen has become a model of success which other schools seek to emulate. It consistently ranks among the best schools in the state, despite its demographics.

One of the key components of Los Pen's success is a unique "school within a school" called The Los Pen Academy. Kids in this program have a longer school day, longer school year, and a remarkable culture of accountability for both parents and kids. The program is open to all Los Pen students from third through fifth grade, and for students of other schools in the district in fourth and fifth grade. Every year there is a lottery for spaces, and every year there is a long, long waiting list. Parents and students alike recognize the value of this program. The program costs approximately $1000 per child, per year, in addition to regular school funding. Parents are not required to pay tuition as part of this program, and children are never evaluated for admission based on parents' ability to pay.

Although the program is a model for many other schools and has frequent visitors from around the world, it has never had permanent funding. Every year, the task of raising money to fund the Academy falls on a small group of dedicated parents. In prior years, we have been fortunate to receive grants from several different organizations, as well as many private donations from parents and supporters. This year, unfortunately, we were unable to raise enough money to cover the full costs of the Academy. As a result, the Academy is now running on a modified schedule with shorter days and a shorter school year.

Due to California's budget crisis, our school district's funding has been cut to the bone. Grants have become almost nonexistent, and a private fundraising drive failed to raise a significant amount of money due to the current economy. The Academy has not raised enough money to operate next year and faces the likelihood of closing its doors. This would be a tragedy; this is a program that works for kids--all kids, no matter their home situation, ethnic background, or income level.

The Los Pen Academy has just learned that it is in the running for a $50,000 grant from Pepsi which would allow it to operate next year. To get this grant, we need people to VOTE for us! It costs you nothing to vote, but you must register your email address at the Pepsi website. You can vote once a day for the month of April. On April 30, voting will be closed and the idea with the most votes will win the grant. Please, please help us save our school! Click this link and go vote. Vote every day; ask your contacts to vote, or link to this blog post to get the word out.

Thanks for your help!

Click here to save the Academy!

WTF?!

I can just see the headline now:

Middle School Maniac Manages Minor Miracle!

No one was more stunned than I was, although he may have been a close second.

Parenting, Part Two

The Middle School Maniac is not pleased.

As part of the last round of "What the &*%! is up with your grades?", my husband and I concluded that the cell phone Older Son got for Christmas (that he would have just died without because absolutely everyone else has one and he feels so diminished by being the only kid without one) is an integral part of his current focus problems. He's so distracted by talking to his friends and texting and what new games he can get and how to play music on his phone that everything else is secondary. I know I'm not the first parent to discover this, and I'm sure I won't be the last to decide to restrict cell phone usage only to the weekend. But, boy howdy, my kid thinks I'm the meanest mom ever. I think that means I'm doing something right. At least I'm not alone in the the doghouse; my husband took the phone away for the weekend, too, in response to an act of defiance and disrespect. I suggested to Older Son that he might be able to get some lenience if he apologized sincerely. He responded that he had nothing to apologize for, and to prove it, he spent the evening digging through the law books in our office, searching for proof that "kids have the same civil rights as adults" and that he is "entitled to a fair trial." Poor kid; with two lawyers for parents, he doesn't stand a chance.

On a side note, has anyone else seen the show "The Strictest Parents in the World"? I think it's new; we watched it out of curiosity over the weekend, wondering what strict parents look like. The premise of the show is that indulgent parents who can't control their defiant teenagers send them to live with strict parents for a week. About halfway through the show, my husband turned to me with a look of dawning horror and exclaimed, "Are we the strict parents?!" Huh. Who knew?

And because this is still a knitting blog...or (ahem) at least a fiber-y blog, here's the update on the GGGSS:

I'm still loving working on it, despite the unwieldiness of such a huge single piece. The constant color changes remain endlessly entertaining (I'm simple that way). And I think the mindless repetition of double crochet is about all I can handle at the moment.

The end is not yet in sight, but we are slowly closing in on the goal of seven feet square:

Very slowly.

Parenting, Middle School Style

The school year is rapidly drawing to a close, and I, for one, couldn't be happier. I'm not one of those parents who love summer vacation and the chance to bond 24/7 with my little darlings. In fact, when I signed my last son up for kindergarten, the school secretary asked me if I was sad, and I laughed hysterically and responded, "Are you kidding?! I've been waiting for this for years!" (The principal almost swallowed his own tongue laughing. I'm guessing that wasn't the socially-appropriate response.) Normally, the approach of summer vacation corresponds with an intense desire on my part to move to some remote village in the Himalayas--alone.

But this year is a little different. This summer vacation marks the end of Older Son's first year of middle school, and I'm just barely hanging on. For some reason, I foolishly expected parenting to get easier as my kids got older and I could do away with things like marathon midnight nursing sessions, mountains of dirty diapers, and screaming temper tantrums punctuated with repetitions of "NO! NO! NO!" because I callously threw away a used napkin that had become someone's best friend.

I didn't count on the insanity that is Middle School.

To say I wasn't looking forward to Older Son starting middle school would be a vast understatement. The middle school years ("junior high" when I was a kid) were the worst years of my life. There isn't enough money in the world to convince me to be 12 again. It's a horrible time of life for many reasons, but the crucible of middle school can turn even a relatively well-balanced kid into a raging maniac.

Older Son is not necessarily the most well-balanced kid in the world. Oh, don't get me wrong; he's a wonderful kid: funny, outgoing, interesting. But he's also smart. Really smart. He's what they call "highly and profoundly gifted." And he knows it, which can cause problems for him. He tends to think that, since he's so smart, no one else could possibly have a better idea than he does so he doesn't need to listen to anyone else. And he doesn't get why he has to prove that he knows how to do things--like how to work out math problems--when he's obviously got the right answers. And he's impatient. About everything. If it takes more than two minutes, he's not interested. All of which makes him that kid on the playground that other kids are itching to smack. And often that kid in the classroom that teachers are just itching to smack.

So when my kid started middle school, I watched him carefully. And for a while, everything seemed fine. He was happy to go to school, had a lot of friends, and brought home straight A's and glowing teacher comments on his first report card. I heaved a sigh of relief and decided maybe middle school's not as bad for boys as it is for girls. Or maybe things have changed since I was a kid. Or maybe his school is better at dealing with the whole pre-teen hormone-steeped culture shock. Or maybe I'm just an idiot.

The second report card came home and I was stunned. He got a B- in math, which was a shock, since he's always had A's in math, represented his school last year in the regional math field day, and was bumped up a grade level in math when he started middle school based on his test scores and his teacher's recommendation. Many parent-child-teacher discussions ensued. The end result was weekly math tutorial sessions at school, daily tutoring and homework sessions from Mom (we'll just gloss right over the irony of that, considering my checkered history with math--at least I'm finally understanding pre-algebra), and a new-found relationship with his math teacher. He's now getting an A- in math.

Now, granted, a B- isn't the end of the world. So how about that D he got in band, of all things? He loves band. And he's good at it. He was in the elementary school district honor band, and a soloist in the elementary school jazz band. How the heck did he get a D in band?! Many more parent-child-teacher discussions ensued. Hmm...could be all those practice sheets that he diligently filled out every day and had me sign every week...and then didn't turn in. Or maybe it was that final he never bothered to take. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the fact that his saxophone was so damaged--who knows how?--that when he finally told me it was damaged and I took it to the shop, the repair guy informed me he didn't know how the kid had even gotten a sound out of it. $130 dollars and a re-test later, his grade is up to a B+, with a potential A in sight.

So when the mid-term progress reports came out, I wasn't too worried. What could go wrong? Ha. Can you say D in Science?! This is more astounding than math and band put together. Science is his Great Love. When he was three, I gave him a CD player to take apart, and he promptly built a "satelite transceiver." It didn't work, of course, but he explained to me exactly how it was supposed to work. When he was four, he announced he was going to Cal Tech to become an inventor, and I never doubted it for a moment. At six, he calculated the rotation of the earth by sticking a pencil in a block of styrofoam to make a sundial, and then watching as the shadow moved across a protractor for half an hour. ("Hey, Mom, did you know the earth rotates 15 degrees an hour? The shadow moved seven and a half degrees in half and hour, so that means 15 degrees in an hour, right?") When he was seven, he wanted to fly a kite, and I told him it wasn't windy enough. He asked me how windy it needs to be to fly a kite. I told him I didn't know. The next day, he announced he had figured out how to measure relative wind speed by hooking a propellor up to a dynamo and the dynamo to a multimeter. The voltage reading on the multimeter would correspond to the wind speed.

So, yeah, that D in Science was a stunner. As you may have guessed, it called for yet more parent-child-teacher discussions. One week, several extra credit assignments, and a major project on volcanoes later, he is up to a B+ and heading for A territory.

That was Thursday.

Friday morning he handed us two detention slips. It seems he got an F on a Language Arts test. (Do I even need to mention this kid was reading at college level in third grade? That I have to buy him new books every week to keep up with his reading habit, because the school library doesn't carry anything at his reading level and we've exhausted the resources of the public library?) He then failed to get the test signed, so he got detention. He got the detention slip signed, but lost it. So he got another detention. And forgot to get the slip signed. So he got a third detention. Plus the F. Sigh.

School ends on June 11th. I'm counting the days.

I think I need a new career path. The luster is wearing a bit thin on this "Mom" gig.

School Daze

It's official. The new school year is kicking my butt. (No, we didn't just start school today. I am competent enough to handle one day. This is week three for us, and I'm apparently not competent enough to sustain that first day performance for three weeks.)

Getting up at six am is the worst part. I'm not a morning person. I'm not even a before noon person. It is still dark out at six am. My body flatly refuses to accept that it is daytime when it is still dark out. The alarm goes off and I have the same reaction every morning: "WTF?! Who set the $@%#!&^ alarm clock for the middle of the night? Oh...no. That's just not possible. Already?! &*%!"

But my scatterbrained kid's morning performance is a close second. My older son is very, very bright, and very, very distracted. He talks at me a mile a minute while my brain is working in slow motion, and somehow manages to misplace his glasses/wallet/bus pass/homework/shoes every single morning. Last night I asked him 16 times, "Are you ready for school tomorrow? Do you have any homework left? Is your backpack packed? Are you SURE?" To which he responded each time, "YES, Mom!" with much disgusted eye-rolling. At eleven, he's just on the brink of coming into his own as a teenager. I shudder to think what he'll be like in two years, once he's in the full grip of testosterone psychosis.

This morning, he couldn't find his glasses, his wallet, his student ID, or his bus pass. He hadn't done his reading response and hadn't added his reading totals, nor had he given me any of the papers that needed signing. He discovered each of these lacks individually, after I asked him, "Do you have your [fill in the blank]?" To which he responded each time, "Uh...no! I'll go find it." Note the choice of word here. Not "I'll go get it," which would imply he knows where it is, but "I'll go find it," which implies (correctly) that he has no freakin' clue where it is.

By the time I finally got him out of the house (after sending him back in from the car when I discovered he had socks but no shoes), I knew we were going to be racing the bus to the bus stop. We lost. So I hung an illegal U-turn and hauled him through three different school traffic jams to the middle school, sans sunglasses, which were in my purse on the counter, in the brilliant morning light, and before my morning coffee. "Why are you so mad, Mom?" he asked, bewildered.

By the time I got home from that little unplanned jaunt, I was 20 minutes late waking up my younger son for school. "Come on, Sweetie. Time to wake up. We're really late today," I whispered. Younger son smiled sleepily, stretched leisurely, opened his eyes slowly, and looked at the clock. "Oh, you think?" he exclaimed, with a vast wealth of sarcasm. "Next time, wake me up earlier, Mom!"

It's eight am. I'm going back to bed.