tuckova

Pretty much every year the elementary grades spend one week of school
out "in the nature"– it’s camp, basically. Squire’s first grade
teacher didn’t take them because she was afraid they’d all drown in the
lake or get eaten by bears (that one did wonder for the fears of a
number of students, I am sure, since she saw no situation without
seeing a positively Gothic ending). But anyway, Squire’s enjoyed the
camps he’s been to: he comes home with a dozen adventure stories, rich
with the smell of campfires and unwashed boy.

He decided he didn’t want to go this year because they’re combining
the two fifth grades and he doesn’t like the other fifth graders and he
particularly dislikes their teacher. He decided so firmly that he
didn’t even bring the forms home, so the first I heard of it was at the
parent/teacher meeting when everybody was talking like they knew all
about it. Awhoops: CAUGHT.

So anyway. The last week has been kind of a battle of him trying to
put his foot down and me insisting that he doesn’t have a leg to stand
on. It is school. If he doesn’t go there, I still have to send him to
school every day to be babysat by the fourth grade teacher, and he
still has to do the work. So. I’ve told him if he has a compelling
reason, a logical articulated reason, then I will consider his REQUEST
to not go, but he cannot REFUSE to go on the basis of "don’t feel like
it". We’ve gone rounds.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not unsympathetic to disliking people. I
myself dislike wide swaths of humanity. It’s just, I ground my dislike
in actions and outcomes. I dislike people who drive through crosswalks
without checking for pedestrians because they hit me. I dislike people
who are sloppy because other people have to clean up after them. I
dislike teachers who talk about everything in terms of fear and danger
because they frighten children into paralysis. So if he can say he
dislikes this other teacher because of some action that has affected
him in some way, I am behind him. But I suspect that the reason he
doesn’t like her is because she is the teacher of the rival class,
which is the elementary school equivalent of being the coach of the
opposing team: they make good lightning rods.

Since the classes will be combined next year, the sooner the two
groups of students get over this rivalry and start learning to exist in
each other’s spheres (and respect each other’s teachers) the better. I
wish I knew more sports cause I bet there’s a handy metaphor in their
lexicon somewhere. Here: Imagine an apt sports metaphor for me, and
I’ll meet you in the next paragraph.

Anyway, so today he came home and said he’d decided to go because
however bad the other kids would be, it wouldn’t be as tedious as my
constant harping on logic and reason, and the kids from his class would
probably be enough fun to balance it out, and resisting it was taking
the opportunity for fun out of it. He is smart, no?

So.

In other news, we’re reading "To Kill a Mockingbird"
which is just a great book to begin with and is enhanced now because
I’m really enjoying Squire’s interpretations of it as we go.
Understand: this is a child who has not lived in the States, so on the
one hand he’s reading it as a foreigner would: it describes a past
world that is not the world he knows or even an ancestor of a daily
world he knows. On the other hand, he goes to school with a bunch of
Roma kids, so he does understand what racism looks like (and xenophobia
too of course) and the amount of sense it makes and what it’s like to
batter your head against it. And then plus there’s sentences that are
so simple and delightful, and the secondary characters (especially
Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, who I would like to have run my house and
garden respectively)– they’re like snapshots of a person you know or
you’d like to know better, and it’s a pleasure to read a book like
this, that makes my head hum.