Gimme a Break

We are only a couple of days away from winter break, and I don’t know who is happier about it, me or my daughters.

Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have felt that way. Having my two girls home from school added the responsibility of activity director to my already ridiculous list of jobs. Not only did I cook and clean for them, but I had to entertain them too, or at least help them entertain themselves. It was fucking exhausting, all the arranging of playdates and planning of outings and baking of sugar cookies, which to this day I won’t eat if decorated by a child. Are their hands ever really clean?

Now that my babies are teenagers, they don’t require that level of interaction, but when they do, it’s more on their own terms and generally in small doses. Plus, they like to sleep, a lot, and I can go to the gym and be fairly comfortable they won’t set the house on fire or beat each other to death with Barbies. They can make their own hot chocolate and grilled cheese sandwiches. They know how to turn on the Blu-Ray player, and they are tall enough to reach it. In short, I don’t mind having them around.

They really need this break from school, and I really need the break from them bitching about school. I am not one to bash teachers. Teachers do a thankless job with no supplies for no money, and a lot of people discount what they do as not being real work. I value them, I appreciate them, and I support them. Well, most of them. The few bad ones, and it seems there is always at least one a year, those are the ones from which we all need a break. They are making my kids crazy, and my kids are making me crazy, and for two weeks, we get to stop the insanity.

My older daughter’s arch nemesis is her biology teacher. This is a woman who thinks she is cool because she wears palazzo pants and kicky little heels and slutty librarian glasses. She likes to use technology, Edmodo and homework assignments by text, because she thinks it makes her innovative. What she doesn’t like to do is be fair or grade work. She thinks if she tells one of her classes a detail about an assignment that the other three classes will somehow magically know the information as well, and if they don’t, well, that’s their problem. She likes to say that a lot: that’s your problem. She’s right, too. When she assigns projects the night before but doesn’t give them a rubric, when she decides to cancel the science fair work after the kids have already written a preliminary experiment, when she gives them an entire chapter on genetics to outline the night before she quizzes them on it, having never once covered the material herself, having never taught fucking genetics to a whole honors class of teenagers who actually want to be taught, it is their problem. So yes, we would all like a winter break from that bullshit.

My other daughter was blessed this year with not one but two of “those” teachers. She would like a break from the science teacher who prefers to cover DNA sequencing with a SpongeBob handout and teaches the parts of a microscope with a worksheet instead of a, you know, an actual microscope. She would also like a break from the social studies teacher who makes all the girls put their purses in a bin at the front of the room, who stands at the door with her hand out for assignments before the students are allowed to enter, who won’t let a student stand near her desk if she smells perfume or the kid accidentally coughed. This social studies teacher, who has already had them write a paragraph long definition of over three hundred vocabulary works, who makes them outline in great detail the entire textbook, then takes away points when the kids mess up their roman numerals since none of them ever learned how to actually do a technically accurate outline, this one we could stand a break from. I’m happy that my kid learning how to outline; what I mind is that she was somehow supposed to know it without ever being taught. Don’t you think if you want middle school students to format the homework in a certain way, you might give them a little clue on how to do it?

Every night, my children engage in a bitch fest that rivals the most disgruntled workers, bitching about how unreasonable some of their teachers are. They have a minimum of two to three hours of homework every night, and weekly group projects that they always somehow get stuck doing on their own. They are overwhelmed, and I don’t blame them. The homework they have assigned ranges from busywork to independent learning, which might benefit them in some ways, but on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to be teaching?

I realize that learning to deal with difficult people is a life skill that every student, nay, every person, must try to master. We all have had a horrible boss at some point, and we had to find a way to do what they wanted without going postal. Kids seem to have it worse because they have the potential to have up to six bad bosses at a time, each with their own unreasonable demands and narcissistic tendencies that young adults really don’t know how to navigate.  

For two weeks, I won’t have to listen to anyone bitch about the horrible Ms. Crotch Rot Douchebag and the crazy ass ho Mrs. Fuckface. If we are truly #blessed, we might even make it through the vacation without a project or paper, no ancient Greek epic poems to buy (hello, this is public school; why am I buying books??) and memorize, no cells to diagram or current events to debate. Just hot cocoa, sleeping in, presents, and fighting with each other, something we just haven’t had enough time to do.

It’s going to be a fabulous fortnight.