Dear Teachers,

I’ve been trying to write this for two days. I keep writing and erasing, writing and erasing.

Because the truth is, I can’t find enough words of gratitude for what it is you do for all of us on a daily basis.

I started to think back to my own years of schooling and all of the amazing educators I was fortunate enough to have. Every single one of you were brilliant, even those that I didn’t care for, especially the ones I didn’t care for because I probably learned the most from you.

Your patience, your dedication, your passion. It all resonated with me. I remember your names, your faces, your messages, your encouragement, your wisdom, your individual skill sets, your special qualities that made you unique, your ability to remember our names 20 years later, your ability to show up for us.

You set me up for success to brave this world. You paved the way for me and all of your students, because that’s what you signed up to do.

You chose your career on sheer selflessness. You chose it on passion. You chose it based on the love for children. The love to educate our youth and to make them better. We are all keenly aware that you didn’t choose this path based on the financial reward.

You spend your own money on supplies, you have very little free time in the evenings and on weekends. You spend those hours grading papers, answering parents’ emails and texts, planning, conferencing, organizing, thinking, crafting.

Now I have a school aged child of my own. In the most violent time in history, I’m raising a child. And you, dear teachers, are raising my child right along with me, carrying burdens that I cannot fathom.

You spend more time with our children on a daily basis than we do during the course of the week. You know them better than we do in some aspects. You have tasks so large that we as parents can not reconcile in our minds how you manage not only the personalities of 15-60 students, but of their parents too.

You are an educator, a babysitter, a therapist, a nurse, a referee, a judge, a mediator, an analyst, a friend, a confidant, a mentor, and a coach all rolled into one. There’s no other profession like yours where you have to wear so many hats.

You have to bear the brunt of how much each and everyone of us suck at parenting in a million different ways.

And here, in 2018, you now have to enter your school on a daily basis faced with a fear so large, so insurmountable, that my heart aches for you. In addition to all of the responsibilities you already have, you now have to worry, and even prepare, to take a bullet for our kids. You have to have that additional nagging stress of “what if today is the day it’s our school?”.

I just can’t sit with that comfortably. It rocks me to my core that this is what it’s come to.

And as I scroll through social media today, I see some offering up your services to arm you with guns, train you to also be policemen and women of our schools to combat the evilness that has penetrated our schools over and over. Some want you to bear that load of being the one to pull the trigger in the face of danger, of delineating and diffusing a violent situation, basically taking on second profession, wear yet another hat.

I see these people, most whom are not teachers, offering this as a solution without even asking you how you feel about it, without even considering the tremendous responsibilities you already carry without having to also worry about carrying a concealed weapon.

And I’m sorry.

I’m sorry so much has fallen on you. It’s unfair. All of it.

So much stress, so much worry, so much anxiety, so much thought process that already goes into your daily grind. I cannot imagine how this all feels to you right now.

As a parent, I have felt sick to my stomach this week when I’ve dropped my child off to school. I should never have to have the thought in my mind that this might be the last time I see her when she’s simply going to school, a place that should obviously be a safe haven.

I cannot imagine how you feel inside these buildings in these times of uncertainly, with the amount of tragic events happening weekly within schools’ walls. It’s too heavy.

And I want you to know I’m fighting for change.

I am one fed up mama. I’m fed up for our children and I’m fed up for you, our educators. And I’m pledging to fight until we see more and more years pass before the next tragedy, not just days.

I will fight until there’s a time when this is all a distant memory and we can look back and say, “man, that was a scary time but look how far we’ve come”. I will fight for schools to be a safer place and fight for a day when you feel like you don’t have to have your guard up. I promise, I’m fighting.

I know we can do this and we will but in the meantime, teachers…thank you.

Thank you for showing up.

I will never have enough words of gratitude and thankfulness.

You are true heroes. My words will never fill that statement with enough power.

Parent-Teacher Conference 101

I had Lily’s first ever kindergarten parent-teacher conference this week. To all of my friends that have kids older than Lily, I am side-eyeing the shit out of you right now for not telling me how stressful this is.

I was really nervous, as in, I felt like I was going into a job interview.  It just felt like it was going to be a test of my character, a test of what kind of parent I am, what kind of parents we are, even though we’re not technically we anymore. I felt like it was judgement day, a meeting of first true impressions, a meeting where this teacher would predict Lily’s entire future based on what kind of mom I seem to be. I had this enormous battle in my mind about how this teacher was going to view this split life that my child is now living, since she was already aware of the impending divorce. Does she judge me for this? Does she know that I’m fucking up my kid? I’m assuming we’re all fucking up our kids somehow but surely those who divorce are doomed. All a bit irrational and dramatic, absolutely, but that’s how my monkey mind works.

This teacher, God love her, is a 35 year veteran of the field, which made my irrational fears even more pronounced. I was feeling as though she could smell the fear on me, like an animal would. She is by no means a scary woman. She is a sweet, southern belle from Tennessee with long blond hair that reaches past her butt, wears long flowing skirts, and has the most gentle voice I have ever heard. But knowing she’s been assessing parents’ and dealing with our shit for 35 years, she can certainly smell fear on us. I truly felt as though she could see right through me, knowing that I don’t even like kids, aside from my own. I was prepared for all the judgement… especially when I realized less than 5 minutes into the meeting that Lily’s dad wasn’t going to show up. Oh.My.God. Now we’re that dysfunctional of a family.

As she started diving into the gigantic stack of paperwork she had to go over with me, the anxiety in me shifted from my own insecurities over to the metrics she started slapping in front of me. Computer generated assessments with Lily’s name stamped all over them that truly looked like they were written in Japanese. The teacher was feverishly explaining each piece of paper, what it was assessing, how Lily faired based on “standards”, where Lily needs improvement, what grade level Lily is preforming at for math and reading, what a 1.25 in math meant versus a .78 in reading meant, what they will assess each quarter. I’m pretty sure I stopped listening at one point because this was so overwhelming. The whole dynamic of the meeting began to shift as I slowly began to realize, this teacher does not have time to judge me. All she has time to do is “assess and reassess”, in her own words.

I watched her as she was relaying all of this “necessary” information to me, as she is almost breathless because there was just so much to go through and surely we were in a time crunch because she needed to get to one of the other 17 parents in the class right after me. It started to become clear as day that the only judging she’s doing is on herself because that’s what the government is telling her to do. Assess and reassess. These kids are supposedly just a reflection of her in the state’s eyes. This poor teacher, along with all of the other public school teachers, have a ridiculous amount of stress put on them with all of these assessments and standards.

All of my original questions went by the way-side because honestly, at this point, I just wanted to know why the hell my five-year-old needs to know what a trapezoid is. I do not even know what a trapezoid is, for Christ’s sake. Seriously. Screw wanting to know if my kid is well behaved because I doubt that this lady has one second to truly focus on a student’s behavior, as long as it’s not extreme, because she’s too busy with these damn metrics. We spent approximately 25 minutes discussing assessment results and 5 minutes discussing Lily. That is beyond backwards to me.

So, I did what every obnoxious but well-meaning parent would do: I stopped her mid-whirlwind discussion and said, in the nicest way possible, “Um, what happened to kindergarten?? Isn’t Lily just supposed to learn her ABC’s and 123’s? What IS all of this? They’re FIVE!”. The teacher took a giant deep breath and paused. “Well, I know. I agree. I really dislike what we have to do here. My first kindergarten class in 1978 had nothing more than a kitchen, some books, and a playhouse. None of this”, she explained, as she looked down at the pile of paperwork that was now accumulating in front of me.

Listen, I already had a tremendous respect for teachers before this meeting. This is one job I could honestly never do. First and foremost, I hate kids, but for what teachers get paid compared to what they have to do is nothing short of obscene. Paperwork, grading, lesson plans, puking kids, behavior problems, shitty parents, the list goes on, but then to have these Core Standards, or whatever the hell they’re calling it now, dictate how these teachers are required to teach? It’s complete bullshit.

As a society, we’re all sitting around scratching our head’s wondering why ADD/ADHD is on the rise? Why are mental disorders such as depression and anxiety showing up more often in childhood? Why are our kids getting sick so much more often than in previous generations? Why are teen suicide rates climbing every year? I will tell you something, this academic pressure that begins at the age of five is not helping any of these issues. I will even be so bold to say, in my unscientific opinion, that it is probably one of the most severe contributing factors to all of what I mentioned. How can it not be? No matter how this work is being presented to children, it’s still work. There’s no rest time, very little extracurricular time for things like art, music, and science, there’s no pretend play anymore. It’s mostly work. Hard work for these babies. The work Lily is doing in kindergarten is what I did most likely in first or second grade. Why this pressure? I honestly would like to know why, because let’s face it, America is extremely far behind when it comes to education. We don’t even crack the top 20 in proficiency in math in reading globally so don’t tell me that these government mandates are working.

So, what was my lesson learned in my first parent-teacher conference? Well, first I learned that it wasn’t about me, which was shocking, but more importantly? Our educational system is failing our kids and teachers. Getting back to basics and taking some of the pressure off would benefit everyone. Let’s go back to rest time, playing house, doing more crafts and less homework, talking to our kids about how things work instead of letting computers assess how our kids work, playing puppets instead of looking at active boards. Kids need to be kids. Let’s not force them into the rat race and monkey mind so early.

As for Lily, yes, I learned she’s pretty smart…but I knew that without having an assessment tool. And right now? She’s playing on a playground with her dad, not doing any one of her 20 pages of homework. I wouldn’t have it any other way.