Glad This Wasn't My Kid...This Time.

Glad This Wasn’t MY Child. This Time.
Current mood: blustery
Category: School, College, Greek

Each month, the second graders in Luke’s class compile journals. These journals consist of one-to-two page blurbs including riddles, poems, short stories, observations, et al. Neatness counts, as does originality of subject matter, "using interesting words," proper capitalization and punctuation, blah blah. (Thank you, English teacher, Andrea, for the emphasis on the "blah-blah.")

My son loves to yack about unproven scientific theories, superheroes, riddles, meteorlogical phenomena and stories about his best friend, Adam, and Adam’s new Ewok-esque, squirrel shaped dog, Sparky. Some entries are banal, some monontonous, some downright charming (much like Luke). On occasion, the teacher will have the students read from these journals aloud to the class before the journals are handed in for the month and the teacher can rip the children’s creativity to shreds and then suggest the parents "discuss" the journals with their children. During this discussion, Luke’s father and I typically high-five his utilization of words No Other Second Grader Knows and affirm that in all likelihood, his teacher wouldn’t know a dangling participle if it was hanging from her nose snot.

Such was the case one day last week. Sort of.

One of the girls, let’s call her "Sally," read her journal entry out loud to the class. Sally is a snippy little tike, for sure, who takes after her Chicago cop father with the potty mouth (great, I’ve just narrowed down the possibilities in Luke’s class of who I’m actually talking about to, uh, about 3/4 of the children). Sally has some major anger issues, to put it mildly.

Whereas my son knows in what proper context to whip out an "F Bomb," I’m not sure Sally does. Sally was reading to the class, about what Luke doesn’t remember, but then just threw a random "fuck" into the story. According to Luke, the teacher’s eyes bugged out and the rest of the students looked on, astonished, puzzled, frightened and confused. Naturally, I didn’t scold my child when he told me of this story, because, well, I wanted to know WTF happened.

What mother wouldn’t?