Like a pill

To say that I have a lot on my plate at the moment is a stupendous understatement. I have enough on my plate for three people at least. I have the plate of a teacher and department head, I have the plate of a graduate student, and I have the plate of a single mom to three boys. Any of which by themselves is a lot. Together, its almost nightmarish. And yet I singed up for it. Maybe I am just getting older, I've been this busy busy busy, go go go almost all my adult life. Certainly since I went back to school after Isaiah was born. WOrking, school, baby. Working, college, kids. working, more babies, working grad school kids.

There are times when I am almost dizzy with trying to keep straight what I need to do, when I need to do it, and how it all fits together. I find myself talking fast, and walking fast, and doing tasks so fast that its like I'm this physical cyclone with my mind trying to play catch-up.

Its also exhausting. And to that end I have in the past year graduate from the occasional coke, to slamming down coke zeros all day, to slurping up cups of overly doctored hot coffee, to drinking it cold so I can get it down faster, to taking "diet pills high in caffene to make tht actual partaking of liquids moot.

The diet pills are a recent thing. ITs actually a product you can get in any walmart, I'm also taking a women's multi-vitamin and a B12 pill. I know the caffene in the pills has an effect because I feel it kick in, there's a tightening in my sinuses and slight headache at first, but oh the boost!, and I feel it wear off. TIRED! like a wall, hits me.

I know that TIRED was always there, but the caffene was hiding it from me. And I know, in a purely philosophical sense, that this probably isn't all that healthy for me. I'm guessing a good rule of thumb would be that if you can't find time to eat, rest and need pills to have enough stamina to get through the day, then what you are up to isn't working.

BUt in the short term, its helping me transition from summer laziness to school business without feeling like I need to be a couch surfing zombie all night. In the short term, its working.

But part of me, the part that is fully aware that all the addictics I am related to started out with what they were doing working to help them cope with life, wonders how healthy this can be. And if in a year I've graduated from casual soda sipper to caffene pill popper, what am I risking in the long term?

Money makes the world go 'round

So, I did something eith incredible brave, or exceptionally fool-hearty. Remember I was bitching about the emphasis placed on poverty have causitive connection to disability in kids? Well, part of the assignment for the class is to write "reflections" which are little one and two page papers about someting you experienced, how it related to the topic at hand, and how it will affect your future teaching. I guess the idea is to create teachers who alter their practice instead of teaching the same thing, the same way, year after year after year.

Well, I wrote my first reflection opposing the revailing theory about poverty and disability. I breifly described how I came from a disadvantaged background, and how I have managed to not be the crashing, disabled, crippled failure that my biography would predict if I were to leave it up to those people. I desribed how I was a decent mother, plugged into my children, and still had two that need speech services with one being ADD and the other being either extremely ADD or OD. I pointed out that the people who do the research come at it from a position of power and priviledge, and I recommended that someone look into the idea that in come cases, poverty is a symptom of the same problem that may have contributed to the disability, and the cause of disability.

And by symptom, I mean that when the parents are drug and alcohol abusers, the household is probably poor and the kdis are being paid attention to. I mean that when the parents are busy abusing one another, they probably aren't looking after the kids or coping well with work. I mean that mental illness in a parent can lead to weird kids, and un or underemployment. The poverty is a symptom or the problem, addicition, abuse, mental illness, not the cause of a learning disability in an otherwise healthy child.

I also happen to think that when people are poor because they just can't get a better job, like people who work as nursing aids, custodians, cooks, home ehalth aids, factory workers, then they are jsut poor. The kids live in a small house. They share a bedroom with siblings. They don't have the newest game system or the fastest bike. But the parents love them, get them as involved as possible, keep them on their homework and refuse to accept laziness in chores, homework, or any other endevore, that family is no more or less likely than the riches down the road to have a disabled child.

The problem is caused by BAD PARENTING. But POVERTY is not bad parenting. Poverty is a lack of funds.

Or maybe I am a raving lunatic.

The mouths of babes

So tonight marked the begining of my education as a special education teacher. I think its going to be disasterous. Not because I can't do the work, I can. But because so far things seem to be based around some assumptions that I find to be both flawed and offensive.

The big one is that poor people and poverty and being from poverty doom children to lives of poverty and to needing special education. The implication is that somehow parents from poverty aren't as good as parents who aren't poor. That kids from more affluent parents are just getting such a better childhood that just being from a poor background makes a kid at risk of droppin gout of school, ending up unemployed, in jail, or a parent at too young an age (which also pisses me the teen mom off).

I get tired of going to class after class where these people from comfortable middle class backgrounds either teach this or sit and share about how horrible these poor people are. The kids are dirty, cause their poor, the don't have school supplies, because they are poor, they don't have manners, they live in filth, they watch too much tv, they have no culture, they never travel, they are just not as good or as smart or as adept at fitting into society because they are poor. And they are never going to succeed.

ITs bullshit. I'm sorry, but it is. There are lots of poor families who make sure they never miss a kid's play, that the kids have clean, well fitted clothes that look nice, and do homework every single night.

Poverty isn't a cause of failure, poverty is sometimes a symptom of the same thing that causes the failures. Poor parenting. Drug abuse. Addiction that takes parents' time and attention away from their kids, and house work and jobs. Mental illness, a lack of mental and emotional toughness that leaves people unable to move on from setbacks and losses. These things lead both to poor parenting that can result is kids falling behind in school and to permenent poverty.

But they don't talk much about that in education classes. Just about how poor kids are worse off, about how poor people need "help" finding "resources" and about how us knowing about the help and the resouces, we as teachers are better at helping them.

I call bullshit. I say that people who have lived a long time in poverty KNOW who to call for help with groceries when they fall short, how to apply for help with utility bills in cold months, and where to go for cheap food and how to get by without electricity for a few days. They don't need someone who works all day in an airconditioned building who wears nice clothes and drives a nice car and lives in their own nice house telling them these things. What they need is teachers who are willing to see things from the family's point of view and work with them. What they need is someone who doesn't talk down to them and doesn't act like a child turing out just like the parents would be the end of the world.

So, anyway, I get tired of hearing it. And I'm just plain tired because I am short of sleep from dealing with parent night last night, I am sick with a bad head cold, I was late because Tom spent all day texting me begging for money for food. And then this teacher who talks barely above a whisper sets the semester's assignments all in one night, and one is to find "resources" for a particular task and present from the parent's point of view.

The tasks were things like being new in town and finding childcare

Being single parent and needing low income houseing

Being sinlge parent and unemployed and no money

Being the parent of a teen mom

I'm telling you, half this list was things I had experienced to one degree or another. And it hurts me as a parent to keep hearing about what a lousey start I've given my kids. I know I'm a fuck up, but I do my best and I don't need to hear about it all the time.

So on the way home I asked Isaiah if he thought I was a good mom, he says no because I don't pay him enough allowance. I ask him if he feels like he misses out on things, and he says well sometimes I don't take him over to friends' houses when he wants and I don't let him ride his bike to the mall or as far from home as he would like. I ask him if he thinks he should have two patents instead of one, he says he likes our family.

Then he asks me why all the questions. I tell him basically what I jsut told you, and he says "mom, you need to tell those people that's BS".

GOd, I love my son.

I sometimes wonder if I will ever be anything but poor white trash who shops at the wrong stores, has noisy mess kids and is next to a modern day spinster. I wonder if I will ever fit into this field that is so entrenched with old, upper class, conservative ideals. But I love my kid.

Neglectful blogger

I've been neglectful here lately and I am not sure why. It isn't that I don't have shit going on that can be stressful. It isn't that my life has magically gone from dark to light.

I think it may be that things are certainly better than they were three years ago. I am not homless, pregnant and unemployed, so that's better. I am not living in my father's house with his new family letting me know just how unwelcome I am, so that's better. I am working a job that requires me to use all my smarts, creativity, and talent, versus working a job that a well trained monkey could handle, so that's better.

Things aren't perfect. I could always use a little more money. And somedays I feel so tired, stressed, and pissy that I wonder if I'm not every bit as crazy as mom was. Yesterday was one of those. I wish I had someone in my life that I felt like i could absolutely, positively count on no matter what. I don't have that, and I kinda doubt I ever will. I am already looking for a teaching job for next year. Some hair-brained part of me wants to throw away caution and apply all over the country instead of just all ove the state. Why live in butt fuck egypt, when we can live in las vegas (Isaiah's pick) or the pacific northwest (cooler summers and minimal winters, what could be better?) Or somewhere metroplitan enough that I don't have to worry about the lack of intelligent, educated people to meet (Definitely lacking here). My mom had the opportunity to leave parsons when I was still in grade school. She tunred it down inorder to keep us in a small town, close to family.

It didn't result in healthy happy successful kids, that's for damn sure. For all I've accomplished, I think that what people will always look at is the fact I was a teen mom. That I am a constantly single woman raising three rowdy little boys. I think that no matter what I do, that people will look at that and think to themselves, "what would she have been able to do if she hadn't fucked up her life."

I don't want to have people think that, I don't want to think that.

In which I remember what had me so annoyed last year

So, I was all sorts of enthusiastic to get started this year. I knew what I wanted to do with the kids. I knew how I was going to award grades, I knew what I would be covering. I had documents made. I have a website set up. I was looking forward to meeting my students and getting better at the art of teaching.

And I still am, but I remember what had me so stressed. The inturruptions of my day with nonsensical stuff like "ice breakers" which took up first and second hours today. "Newbies day" which will desimate half my classes on friday. "Reverse days" which shortens the hours to the point of uselessness for stuco games and pep rallies, constant inturruptions from the intercom for nonsense, and then there are the other teachers.

There's the art teach who's always talking about her starvation diets and trying to fit into smaller clothes, but she wears this stuff that is too big for her and she's tiny compared to me. there's the business teacher who likes to hold court in her room and ruminate on what's wrong with the school compared to how it used to be. There's the Spanish teacher who's been cut to half time who is making her self both obnoxious and ingratiating at the same time. There's the english teacher who's been putting kids in VPL science classes so they are free for religeon class and for honors english and for theater. Who needs an actual teacher for science when you could be learning about some obscure saint or at yet ANOTHER juco production of shakspear?

But I am resolved to maintain a positive attitude. I cannot change anyone else's actions or feelings, but I can avoid those people who would polute my joy in my job. I have spoken with several of the students who ended up taking virtual classes that I could have offered and told them to PLEASE come to me if they are feeling like they are behind or struggling. I also want the to have a chance to experience a lab or two.

That being said, I'm tired and I'm not sure what all my classes are doing tomorrow.

And so It Starts

Well, the school year opened today. It was just meetings and mass, but it was still a full day of work BS.

I have to admit, that I LIKE working. I LIKE having a purpose and an intent to my time and actions when I wake up. I know I complain about being busy and not having enough time for fun stuff, but the truth is that I like being busy. I like that challenge to getting all the things done and done well in a timely manner.

I like the kids and the chance to interact with adults. Of course, not all of the interaction is all that adult. There is the religeon teacher who likes to glare aggressively at people, including me, for no apparent reason other than we teach some thing other than religeon. There is the librarian/tech person who is ALWAYS too busy to take care of the issue you are having, yet never fixes anything for anyone else either. She also gets a bit miffed if you by pass her and do something your self. There are the language arts teachers who are both much more important to the school than anyone else. There is the teacher who always claims to be on some sort of starvation diet, even though she is tiny, and then procedes to eat more than anyone else at the teacher's breakfast. There are the teachers who start off being very negative about the school, the students, the boss, the parents, everything.

Sad thing is that all these little attitudes are so insideous, rubbing off until I seem to share them as my own. I want to resist that better this year than I did last year.

Anyway, I am hoping to be less stressed than I was last year.

Final Days

Just of summer really, not THE FINAL DAYS. Still feel like I could do a lot of getting ready. At the same time I realize that until I have rosters and students, there isn't a lot more I can do. I know how I want things to look, but I also know that I cannot minutely plan everything. IT just has to be done.

Isaiah had his appointment to get his meds changed today. I was hoping to get away from stimulants, but that didn't happen. Maybe I should have pushed a little harder for the non stimulant kind, but the doc and his nurse practitioner are willing to revisit the topic later. My biggest gripe with the stimulants he was on was that they suppressed his apatite. Its been so nice to see him gaining weight and filling out. By the end of school last year he was clinicly under weight, looked tired and with sunken eyes and his whole body looked a little wasted. NOt normal for a kid in middle america.

I have an actual, honest to gosh date saturday. Is it sad that with everything else on my mind I'm not feeling all that into it? I plan on going, trying to relax and enjoy myelf and thats about it.

We have to go to parent night tonight at Isaiah's school. NOt looking forward to it. Last year when we went it was not pleasant. The little kids were running around all over the place, the teacher was busy talking to "real" adults, and ignored me and my rowdy kids. Isaiah dropped his stuff off and we left. That's it.

But this year he got the teacher he wanted and is more enthusiastic about going, and wants to meet this teacher he's been hearing about since last year. I hope he isn't disappointed, sometimes kids, him especially, build things up in their minds and confuse the fantasy of how they want things to be with how things actually are.

Hmm, what else, my brothers are moved out and for the most part leaving me alone. I hear from them when they want a ride somewhere and when they want to barrow something from me. I guess that's a normal sibling relationship for us. I've had to tell them no a few times to rides that were just unreasonable. I have a car that only holds five people, including the driver. SO when the guys call and want me to come get them and take them out to eat, along with my little kids, its kinda impossible. But when I say no, I am being an unreasonable bitch.

I hope that normalcy returns soon.