Don’t Smile Until October

Posted on September 20, 2007
Filed Under education, kids, milestones, parenting, suburban joys | 6 Comments

While O’s school year is off to a kick ass start, he’s hit the ground running, he’s gloriously ecstatic about his teacher, his chums and the dearth of homework assignments, my G suffers. She is melancholy and remote at day’s end. She comes tearing off the bus and banging through the bathroom door to release a stream of urine worthy of a seven hour day. She claims that she is not allowed to use the school rest room unless it’s an emergency. She is not allowed to scratch an itch or itch a scratch or read a book while waiting twenty minutes for second bus. Her teacher, who I imagine as pinched and shrew-like, has stated that children who miss their parents during school hours are not ready for first grade. This was uttered to the class after a small boy began weeping for his mother.
Clearly this teacher uses shame as a deterrent. If one child speaks out of turn the whole class must stay in for recess, making that child the pariah, the asshole that screwed up, the person everyone else loves to hate. My daughter’s little friend with the brown hair and the impossibly large eyes made this very mistake and now, after having made the crucial error of fouling things up for everyone and having faced the social consequences of her mistake, refuses to go to school, cries in her bed at night, has begun anxiously plucking out her eyebrows.
I can appreciate that a teacher’s job is often difficult, maintaining order among twenty-something six and seven year olds requires strategy and consistency and infinite patience but I venture to say that she’s got a far too literal interpretation of the old teacher’s adage “Don’t smile until October”.
My G is not an overly sensitive child, she is not weepy or afraid of strangers. She is unusually confident, well adjusted, mature. So I can only wonder what this hellish school experience must be like for the children that are nervous or self conscious by nature. If Mrs. C can break my G, then she must be absolutely crushing some of the other childish souls in her care.
Tonight is Back to School Night and I promise I will not be that Mom that attacks the new teacher at Parent’s Night turning what is meant to be a celebration of school’s beginning into a public stoning. But believe me, come Friday morning, Mrs. C is going to find me at the door of room 110 awaiting her arrival. This bully needs confronting and I’m just the Mom to do it. I will try not to be combative. I will hold my voice steady, controlling what promises to be a trembling rage. And I will quietly ask her, “How does it feel to be a professional teacher who inspires fear and misery while fraying a child’s self esteem?”
That should get things off on the right foot, don’t ya think?