Tag Archives: Middle school

The spirit is unwilling

Every so often, our schools have “Spirit Week.” Students are encouraged to dress within a common guideline each day.  I’m unsure what spirits they’re conjuring, but it hardly seems like school spirit. One day is for wearing school colors, but the other four could more accurately be termed “Dress Up Week.”

Our older two boys were, to put it mildly, never very keen on Spirit Week. Big Brother tried it in kindergarten. After one Spirit Week, the thrill was gone. It was too much like homework.

Buster was never interested. If you’d asked him about Spirit Week, Buster would have replied, “I don’t know what it is; I don’t know when it is; and I don’t care.” Maybe you can see why Buster is a Gen X dad’s delight.

Big Man, the youngest of the three, is more interested in Spirit Week, though not fully indoctrinated into the cult of uniformity. He does not always observe a full Spirit Week, but on occasion he remembers that he’s supposed to wear a tie-dye T-shirt on a given day.

Unfortunately, he remembers this within two minutes of needing to leave for school.

Also unfortunate, his dad ranks Spirit Week low on the list of events worthy of last-minute disruption. His mom, though more sympathetic to the cause, is not prepared for an unexpected deep dive into the closet when she’s holding car keys in her hand.

This leads to Spirit Morning Strife.

Exhibit: Thursday, September 24, 2026.

At school commute -3 minutes, I was informed that it was “Anything but Backpack” day.

When I was a kid, nobody wore a backpack. We carried only what we needed at any given time. I wish it were that way still, but it’s not. Young hermit crabs, carry all their belongings on their backs. I don’t love it, but I’ve accepted it. A backpack is core to the routine.

Except this day. With tardiness looming, our kid announced that he must transport everything in his backpack to school in something that was not his backpack.

Once we get the laptop, gym shoes, and sweatshirts packed, we can move on to the real school supplies.

I told him he had two minutes to find a substitute.

“Daa’ aad!” he whined in the tone that attempts to dump responsibility for his fiascos on my shoulders.

I said he might better just use his backpack, but he was invested in this ill-conceived special occasion.

He tried a picnic cooler, which fit his water bottle and nothing else.

“Use a garbage bag,” I said.

He shuddered and attempted a wicker basket, which was too awkward even for him.

Mom appeared, noted the spilled backpack contents, and raised her voice. After the squall, she used some mom magic to produce, from thin air, a huge food service bag with straps.

Big Man frowned as his parents’ faces told him this was his last option.

The sulking boy loaded school supplies into the bag. He was last seen lumbering behind and tripping over the unwieldy parcel that would make him late for this episode of Spirit Week.

I’m glad I was young at a time when our schools left us responsible for our own morale.

3 kids x 3 different schools = 9 billion emails

I attempted to write a post about having three kids in three separate school buildings this year, and how I’m feeling, more than ever, like I am going back to school alongside my kids. That post wasn’t good: it came off as whiney; it wasn’t entertaining; and its tone insinuated that the blame for parents being inundated with emails and homework belonged to the schools and the teachers.

While some schools and teachers are better than others at managing the information dump on parents, they are all following the dictates of a society that, yearning so mightily to make things easier, has made things more difficult.

The best way to illustrate this may be to compare school life today, with school life during the 1975-76 academic year, when I was in third grade (the same grade as my youngest child today).

During the 1975-76 school year, my mother became a single parent. She had seven children still in the public school system. There was no such thing as email. This, no doubt, prevented her jumping off a tall bridge.

CAR LINES

Our schools’ car lines block traffic in the streets around the schools. They allow parents to display the worst of their angry impatience or disregard for the time of other parents. Consequently, every school sends out a two-page email of car line procedures.

In 1975, the car line was three cars speeding up to the front door 15-30 minutes late. Only kids who had fallen behind schedule were driven to school. Everyone else walked or rode the bus.

LUNCH MONEY

The web site our schools use to keep track of lunch accounts changed. I must set up a new account and register each of my children. To do this, I need a student number for each child. I know one of them. My high schooler also needs a PIN number to access the money on his account in the cafeteria. I wish he could just be concerned with the numbers in math class.

My mom gave me enough money every Monday to buy a lunch ticket for the week. Each day the lunch lady punched a hole in the ticket. After five holes, the ticket was discarded. If I forget my money, they made a note in their book that I had “charged” lunch. The next day I got two holes punched in my ticket. There were no extras to buy; lunch was lunch, no more, no less.

Demonstrating car line procedures in the days before PDF diagrams and email.

PROGRESS REPORTING

Our schools use another website/app for parents to follow their kids’ assignments and grades. I set up an account this year. I was able to get one kid on it, but only the app accepts my login. Of course you can only add students via the web site (which doesn’t recognize my credentials). Also, you need a separate code number (different from the student ID) for each kid. This is another secret number I have for only one kid. Looks like the others will be monitoring themselves.

My mom monitored our progress by leaving things alone until she got a note from a teacher. She would address the issue and then go back about her own business. But things were far less competitive then, and she already had one child attending a state university, so she understood that not going to Harvard would not mean the end of the world to any of us.

RULES OF CONDUCT

Today I received an email with a link to the Orchestra Handbook for our middle school. My son and I are supposed to read the handbook together and sign the last page. This is just one of the multiple school activities where the rules need to be in writing and the parents must acknowledge receipt of them.

If any rules were in writing, it was most likely a placard on the wall of the classroom that read:

RULES:

Sit Down.

Shut Up.

Rules beyond that were based upon the general principles of proper decorum, and if the teacher had to explain them, it was already a bad day. When we broke the rules, we were punished, and if we whined about it at home, we were punished there too. However, we were almost never sued for breach of contract.

There are other examples, but this is already a long post. We shouldn’t be surprised that our schools reflect our frightened, angry, litigious, password-protected (without so much protection), ease-of-use (difficult) society. But nobody needs to carry cash, so that’s awesome.

School on Screens

Well, it’s happening. God only knows how it will play out, but this train won’t stop now.

Online schooling begins tomorrow.

Even though I haven’t been a real Catholic for 30 years, I have an impulse to cross myself when I make that statement, or even when I think about it.

The emails have been coming fast and furious from the middle and elementary school administrations as well as individual teachers. We’re drowning in informational attachments.

The boys have all gotten their schedules. Big Brother’s 7th grade schedule contains an elective called “The Great Outdoors,” which was not one of his top choices. The schedule was silent about the irony of learning all about the outdoors from a computer screen inside his house. His schedule is the most detailed, which is good, because he’s going to have to manage his responsibilities largely on his own.

The Great Outdoors, transformed into screen time for educational purposes.

His little brothers will need lots of help.

It used to be that 3rd grade and 1st grade schedules looked like this:

Morning: Drop them off at school

Afternoon: Pick them up from school

This year we have a day-long schedule of live and taped events the children must access on the computer every day. I am happy to see there is a break each day at 10:15 for the students to have a snack and the parents to crack open a bottle of wine. We weren’t in the habit of drinking in the morning, but as they say, welcome to the new normal.

Lunch is at 11:45, which is just about the time we will be realizing that wine is insufficient to our needs. A couple shots of something a little more robust should help us prepare for the afternoon sessions

Preparing our learning devices for the big day.

I think whoever made up the schedule gave up on it once they hit noon. The afternoon is a hodge-podge of pre-recorded sessions, which seem like they could be done in any order, but also seem to leave the administration entirely in the parents’ hands.

As daunting as this is, it may not turn out to be a bad thing. Parents have been lulled by our system into believing they are not ultimately responsible for their children’s educations. Some have leapt onto that slippery slope to the point where they don’t feel responsible for their kids’ emotional development.

Maybe this experiment will bring some parents back to their responsibilities. It won’t be fair to all parents, but nothing ever is. How fair it is to my family is not our top concern right now. Our top concern is that ourchildren progress, in all the facets of their lives. This, we are determined to see them do.

Maybe there’s a silver lining in online schooling, if it gets parents more involved in their children’s development. Or, maybe it’s just a train wreck in the making. Maybe it’s both. I was always partial to D: All of the above on multiple choice tests when I didn’t have a clue what was going on.