Education/teacher

Ranting Mamas


UPDATE: This post got me unfriended on Facebook by one of the mommies who inspired it. I’ll leave you to guess which one.

There is so much about the mommy blogosphere that I am out of step with. I don’t worship at the Buddha bellies of my offspring (who are too old to be Gerber baby round and Downy fresh anyway). I don’t believe motherhood fulfilled me in a Frodo-esque LOTR’s type of way. I am not terribly concerned about how much time other women put in or out of their homes. Blogging for the trinkets of the marketplace doesn’t interest me and, generally speaking, my husband is for snuggling, bragging about and thanking God for (if I inclined in that direction and mostly I don’t anymore).

I can rant with the best of them. I have ranted. My dear readers will happily step up and attest to it, but I will disclaim for honesty’s sake anyway.

But  there are some places that the mommies go that I just don’t get or can’t follow along with like these recent examples.

The woman who greatly embellished her recent TSA encounter for instance. Being no fan of heightened security in any of its forms in the United States, I feel her frustration, but she didn’t really tell the truth. In fact she was so over the top that the TSA actually deigned to defend itself in the form of releasing the actual footage of the incident the woman, Nic White, ranted about on her blog.

And there was the woman who went ballistic because her honor student daughter’s feelings were hurt when she was correctly busted for a dress code violation. While I agree that the VP in question needed schooling in bedside manner – and for the record not being polite is almost a prerequisite for being a VP in most of my experience – her child was in the wrong, and the fact that schools have big issues to take care of these days doesn’t mean they should ignore things like dress code violations even when the offender is a good kid with excellent grades. It’s really beside the point.

In my experience, far too many “good” kids are taught that their academics and overall nice personalities somehow put them above the rules that lesser children/students are held to. That’s simply not real world. What is real world are superiors who blow up at you for minor things out of the clear blue even though you are a good employee. Or being pulled over for being 5 miles over the legal limit even though you were being passed right and left and are an exemplary driver. And generally not being immune from the occasional self-esteem ding even though it’s widely acknowledged that you are so incredibly wonderful.

The first rant example apparently backfired to the point that Ms.White had to close comments. The second resulted in a disturbing yet typical hen-fest of sympathy where almost no one bothered to point out that perhaps being an honor student did not exempt a child from the rules that the trailer park set are subject to and on a common sense level, no one held forth with the radical idea that summer wear is as inappropriate to the school setting as it is in the workplace because the way things are going economically most of our kids are going to be wearing some version of a work smock anyway.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Rob. “When I venture into the mom’s realm, I read about women who find motherhood so overwhelming and under-stimulating that they need to drink daily, shop excessively, pop antidepressants and Xanax like Pez and believe that husbands are snark targets for the enjoyment of their readers.”

He didn’t comment. He didn’t have to. As I have noted before, I am not a mommy-blogger and therefore I don’t understand.

Columbine: 10 years Later


I was teaching in middle school in Des Moines, Iowa on the day the tragedy at Columbine High School occurred ten years ago. I was 35, engaged to be married that summer and had been teaching for a dozen years, working mainly with working class and at-risk kids.

By the spring of 1999, Des Moines had seen some of the worst gang violence in its history. At the middle school where I had worked previously, many of my students were involved in gangs. They were drug dealers who hid their weapons in the lockers at the beginning of the school day, wore bling – before it was called that – and flashed wads of cash that no fourteen or fifteen year old should have access to.

“Any time you need some extra cash, Miss Cox, just ask,” one of my newspaper students, Chris, informed me one afternoon, and he pulled a roll of paper bills bound by a rubber band out of the pocket of his baggy jeans. He smiled and nodded as I politely declined but thanked him for his generous offer.

Chris was a sweet kid, but a gangster who ran with a dangerous crowd. Despite that I was never afraid of him. His teachers in the Behavioral Disorder program marveled at how well we got on with each other. I was one of the few regular ed teachers whose class Chris attended regularly and without incident. His helpfulness and work ethic never surprised me. You could see the good kid underneath the bad circumstances that life had thrown him into.

But I taught my fair share of kids who were not simply products of their dicey environments. Children who suffered from mental illness who truly didn’t belong in a class with ordinary kids or in a school ill equipped to monitor them or protect others from them. And I went to work a few years afraid of a few of them and glad to see the backs of their heads come summertime, knowing that they would be someone else’s daily nightmare in the fall.

I think we locked the school doors for a few weeks after the Columbine killings. The district stepped up its half-hearted attempts at emergency procedures and lock-down drills. Every spring thereafter, we would get a little nervous and wait for the newspaper reports of another school shooting or thwarted attempt somewhere.

We joked that there wasn’t a student in the building we’d throw ourselves in front of a bullet for, war zone humor to hide the fear that one day we might very well be put in the position of choosing. Despite my promise to my husband-to-be that I would not sacrifice myself for someone else’s child, I would have. I would have protected any one of them. In fact, from then on I assessed my classrooms for possible defensive tactics and multiple escape routes. Every classroom I ever had thereafter in every school I worked, I knew what I could block the door with and how I would get my kids out if the occasion ever arose.

I taught for another seven years, and might still be teaching today if I hadn’t come to live in Canada, though I knew it was a vulnerable profession in terms of students and violence. I never let on to anyone but my husband if there was a kid I thought had the potential for a Columbine episode, and I made sure to point these kids out to counselors and administrators if they hadn’t already caught their attention – which was not often.

People scoff at teachers. We are considered people who opted out of real jobs for weekends off and summer vacations, but we are people who daily deal with a microcosm of society which includes kids like the two young men who murdered so many at Columbine ten years ago.

This is an original 50 Something Moms post by Ann Bibby of anniegirl1138 on April 20th.

And I Voted for this Guy Too


The President of a country in financial meltdown due to the incompetence of regulatory officials and the outright greed of the financial industry in general needs to distract the nation and, apparently, the health care thing and the commission on women’s issues (which is an outrage for another day) aren’t enough.

So who’s he gonna call out?

Teachers. But only the “bad” ones who are the root of the growing imbecility problem we seem to have with our young people today.

Yeah, that’s right. If your kid is lazy and/or unemployable, blame it on his or her teachers. They screwed up because they only went into the profession for the summers off and the life-long job security courtesy of those evil unions who only care about lining the pockets of their membership and making sure they have better health care packages than Joe Sixpack and his spawn.

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