Tides of Change

So today is the first day of school for the kids. As a parent, I'm hopeful that they make new friends, learn new things, and generally have a good year at their new school. But for us, today is a milestone that is a little more significant than typical first days of school.

Almost a year ago, both our kids kept coming home from school in a bad mood. Not a typical bad mood, but seriously depressed. We asked both of them what was going on, and their stories were almost identical: the other kids in their classes were inappropriate, and their teachers had no idea what to do to keep everyone in line.

Granted, kids are kids, and they could have been just as much of a bother to the teacher and their own peers and could have just been giving us lip service, but we investigated and found that their teachers were relatively new to the gig and basically had no idea how to handle discipline problems.

Instead of singling out a bad student and isolating them, they would punish the entire class. Instead of rewarding good behavior and performance, they would ignore the good stuff and focus on only the bad. Instead of proactively reaching out to parents or other staff for assistance and behavior modification, they went with the status quo and treated the class as if it were an army platoon. Everyone had their collective benefits taken away (no recess, no free time, constant yelling), and everyone was shifted into the guilty category instead of seeing any sort of reward for good behavior.

Both kids were exhausted by the end of the day. They got good marks on tests and homework, and both kids always got good behavioral notes, but they acted as if they were being punished all day every day.

My son's first grade class seemed to be run by a group of three children, with the teacher doing all she could just to move the class forward by inches. My daughter's fourth grade class seemed as if it were a boat left adrift with barely a paddle amongst all thirty kids.

My wife and I tried to console the kids. We tried to advise them on things to attempt to get the other kids in line. Nothing seemed to work.

The district as a whole seemed to be flailing in failure. Test scores were at the bottom rung of the scale. Funding was being cut right and left. The public school seemed to cost more than private schools in the area, what with the uniform costs and the fees and the supply list to purchase every year. Seriously, the cleaning supplies they wanted every kid to bring in was enough to keep a whole house clean for six months... Why ask thirty kids to each bring in four large containers of Chlorox Wipes?

But we knew the thing that would help our kids quickest was to get the fuck out of there.

Now, there were other benefits to us moving, don't get me wrong. I'm a lot closer to where I work now, so my morning and afternoon commutes are a fraction of what I once had to endure. And now we're much closer to commercial areas where my wife can hopefully find a job while the kids are in school. But I believe the main meat of the move was to get the kids in a school where they wouldn't be victims of a beaten down drill sargeant trying to corral all the kids together in a boot camp.

And I understand that by moving out of the district, we could be seen as adding to the problem. Less kids in the area means less state funding. Less state funding means less money going to the kids. But really, why continue to pay for something that just isn't working? And I'm not just talking about money, I'm also talking about the future of my children. Why pay with their time for other kids who just aren't getting it? And the whole argument about public schools being a catch-all for everyone and that everyone must share the burden is bullshit. There could be classes separated by abilities and behavior. I went to public schools almost all my life and the best schools had different tracks available for high achievement kids. That district just didn't care, or was broke, or the governing parties involved just didn't get it.

I just hope our choice of venue was good, and that the kids can find peace and enjoy their quest for knowledge in this new school. If not, we can always move again.

Scary Funnels

Sometimes I turn off the wake up alarm in the mornings and drift back to sleep. Usually when I do this, I seem to drop right back into deep sleep, the kind with weird dreams. This morning was no exception.

I don't remember much at this point, but what I do recall was that my family all lived in a very old single floor house, no basement, and everything looked brown. Sorta like a black and white movie, but brown. Not sepia tone, because people were full color, and mirrors weren't brown tinged. It was as if everything was made of wood perhaps?

Anyway, I think I was cooking? Chopping veggies? Suddenly the lights went off, and I could see through a huge window that some really serious storm clouds were rolling in fast. They were dark but had accents of a weird electric blue. Like a plane went overhead and dropped some really sharp blue dye into a big body of swampy, oily dark water, and that water became a cloud with little swirlies in it.

I see the clouds and know something bad is about to happen, so I start shouting for my family. They're not in the house, they're all hanging out in and around some weird smaller building in the back yard. It's like a garage, but without cars. There's a deck on one side with a bunch of chairs and stools and so forth.

I run outside, and as I'm running to them, I see a HUGE funnel cloud come out of nowhere and churn slowly, almost softly. There was very little noise that I could remember, maybe a low hum? The churning cloud seems to be lazily mouthing the countryside and in its wake there's nothing. It's not even like it leaves behind destruction, the ground is just completely stripped, like how a very efficient vacuum cleaner leaves behind no crumbs.

I get closer to my family and I'm shouting and pointing at the cloud (like, how the fuck can you miss a big electric churning funnel cloud the size of Oklahoma coming at you?), and they're all laughing, drinking lemonade, chillin. I believe there were snacks on a table.

In a way, looking back now, this all sounds very Black Hole Sun-ey, but at the time that wasn't the feeling. It was more like the cloud was only visible to me, and no one else cared.

At any rate, I convince everyone to huddle down inside the house. We're in there for what seems like forever, then I kinda check it out to see if it's safe to come out. I look outside and there's hundreds of these tornadoes, just like the first one but with different color swirls in the cloud. A green one comes by and scoops up the house, and me, and I wake up screaming.