Monday, October 13, 2014

Pledging For Prizes

Our aide called in sick, but we did have one from 3:30-6. That gave Judah lots of one-on-one play time. The aide and I chased the kids around the backyard for a while. She is from another country and has never experienced our holidays before. She's very confused about Halloween. Judah showed her the monsters on our playroom windows. "So, you're trying to scare people?" Halloween is tough to explain without sounding like an idiot. We scare kids.. your children go door to door collecting candy... they say, "trick or treat!" but they aren't really giving you a choice.. you have to give them a treat.. kids eat handfuls of candy, from strangers even, and the parents don't seem to show a lot of concern.

At bedtime Scott said, "Here's your pig Judah, oink! oink!" and handed him his Angry Birds pig to sleep with. I asked Judah if he wanted to dress up like a pig for Halloween. "Do you want to be a pig Judah?" His response? "Oink! Oink!" haha

I sat in a parent club meeting at Sebastian's school for 2 hours this evening. There were MAYBE 30 people there, total, that's including the principal and board members who HAVE to be there. We voted on the design for the new school t-shirt this year. Only 20 something kids had submitted designs.. ?!? Budget was discussed in and out of the meeting, so much of the meeting was budget. Some people did bring some clever ideas on how to cut costs & had ideas on healthier ways to help the kids enjoy school more. I should have counted the number of times "prizes" was said at that meeting. If a school could win a prize for giving out the most prizes it would be this school!! Gift cards, a bike.. ? It's really good stuff! It's not fair at all how they are being awarded and the parents are very much unaware of this (unless their kid wins a prize and they investigate to see what their kid did to "earn" this prize). And most important of all, it's completely unnecessary & unhelpful. At the tail end of the meeting there was enough time for someone to get in a couple of really good, important questions. He talked about how excited his family was to get his kid into a Spanish immersion school in the beginning & now things have changed so much. He told the principal that parents are not being informed of what is going on & what changes may be ahead in the road to come. The principal said she will now wait a couple of days before she sends out her newsletter - it was almost as if this was news to her, that parents aren't being given information. Another woman mentioned that the teachers should use the I-pads we were talking about funding to communicate with the parents! ha. Had there been 6 more parents there that really wanted to know what was going on & had genuine concern & interest in their kids education, it would have been a very worthwhile meeting. It was informative, I know how much money goes towards each teacher toolbox and how much weight prizes hold, a lot!!

When it was mentioned that the kids were being rewarded for having the most number of pledges on their jog-a-thon sheet, a parent brought up something that seemed to knock reality back into the room. "The parents are the ones doing that job." At that moment I realized that my mind was being sucked into believing that prizes & competitions were hugely important to the education system, because her response actually surprised me! Gahhh!!! If you don't allow your kid to go door-to-door, like we didn't allow ours, then he probably won't win that contest. Your co-workers will sign up as a pledge.. a couple of your other parent friends might do it because you did it for their kid last year. The parents take on the job of getting pledges & the kids have fun doing the jog-a-thon with their friends. The parents bring you the money with hopes that you will use it to better their child's education. Reality. It's not a competition.

Judah missed fish oil, nebulizer, probiotic. Skin rash med wasn't needed but the aide did notice some red bumps on the back of his right leg.. need to have Scott look at those. He is much better at that stuff than me.
We did eye drop & powder b-6.

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