::: thicket dweller and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad morning :::

It's 6:33 a.m.

How can the day suck already?

I'll tell you how--when you're the mother of children who feel that they're failing.

Late last night, before bed, after Monet was sound asleep, I signed on to Edline, the school's academic tracking system. It's a system that has great potential, except that I keep believing that the teachers are actually using it, so if I sign on and find that there's no homework or class notes for Monet, I believe there's actually no homework or class notes. It doesn't occur to me that a school system would set up, maintain, and point parents to a system that some of the teachers use and some of them don't.

Apparently, however, when it's time to put up weekly progress reports, they do.

And Monet is failing History.

HISTORY!

How can a person FAIL History? Math, I can understand. English? Not in this house, buddy. But HISTORY?

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is that someone would make history boring, would give a kid a list of names and dates and measure their success in the class by whether or not they can memorize them. That is totally not what history is about. History is US! It's the story of where we came from, what mistakes have been made, what successes have been celebrated. It's about human beings, and triumph, and tragedy, and passion, and drive, and LIFE. How can a person hate History? How can a person fail History?

Well, I'll tell you one way a person can hate it. If, like I did, they have a History teacher who was only there because he was the boys' basketball coach and you couldn't be a basketball coach unless you taught a class, so he taught History, and he didn't care about it, and he leered at the high school girls, and he was totally and completely boring. Completely.

Now, here's my son, and I'm thinking, "Heck, it's twenty-five years later. Surely they've made some advancements in the training of History teachers," but then I log on to this sometimes used, sometimes not Edline and I see that he's not just failing, but he's REALLY failing. So, while he's dead asleep, I pull out his five-subject binder and flip to the History tab. Page after page after page of photocopied worksheets with fact upon fact and obscure name upon obscure name that they're supposed to define and identify.

He's only been in class for THREE WEEKS! Each of these people listed lived an ENTIRE LIFE! How in the world can you cover one whole sheet of names, one whole sheet of lives in THREE WEEKS? How can you absorb that, let alone CARE about them?

I guess this is the Charlotte Mason in me coming out. I don't understand the need to cram a bunch of facts into a kid that he won't remember, won't care about, when you can spend some good quality time on a few key things and really give them a passion for them.

It doesn't help that, when we were trying to make the decision to send Monet to this small private school, people assured us that he'd do fine. People have been assuring us all along the way that he'll get plenty of help, that he'll succeed, that the staff won't let him fail. And in spite of my worries and concerns and careful questions and requests for extra help and extra patience, he's struggling in Math, he doesn't like English (be still my HEART!), and he's failing in History.

Sigh.

Then here's me, carefully composing two e-mails--one to the Math teacher and one to the History teacher--asking what we can do to help Monet succeed, and when I press "send," I find that Edline has "logged me out" because my account had been "inactive" for a period of time. Writing, I think, is an activity. It's pretty active. No logout warning, no autosave. Two carefully composed e-mails...gone.

So I'm feeling pretty upset about this, right, when I read a note on facebook from my college-aged daughter, who apparently bombed at an improv and didn't make it into her school's production of Into the Woods, which she really, really, really wanted, and who's feeling like a failure in her Media Production class, and I find that she's really struggling right now, that she's really feeling down and rejected and pretty much like a failure, and, as I read the things she's upset about, I wonder how much of it I planted in that head of hers--her need to be funny, her need to hide her emotions, her need for perfection.

Then I start beating myself up, and I wonder, "Why didn't I plant confidence? Why didn't I plant resilience? And God! Why didn't I plant the need for God?!?"

And so here it is, 6:49 a.m., and it's a sucky day already.

So I'm going back to bed, and I hope when I wake up, the new day won't be as sucky.

But then I remember that I have an appointment today to have an ultrasound done on my apparently failing gall bladder. Today.

9/9/09 at 9:00 a.m.

I could use a lift, God, okay?