12:53 p.m. - 2020-05-12
this is the hill i will die on
Just shat the bed on the email front. One of Eldest's teachers got a strongly worded email after I received a voicemail fucking up Eldest's name and pronouns quite laughably.
Turns out the voicemail was from one of the 4 vice principals at Eldest's school. (Fucking four, jesus, I knew this whole school thing was completely fucked up this year but that seems excessive)
So I strongly worded one of Eldest's teachers for a voice mail he had nothing to do with, and it's the one that has been in contact with me this whoooooole covid-19 time, so that's fucking great.
He replied bafflingly, and then I relistened to the voicemail and realized I had the wrong person.
So now Im combing school board websites looking for an email for this dude, but there doesnt seem to be one... god fucking damn it i cant call because i live in a basement apartment and i need teh stars to align for a phone call to go through properly
alright, i found one. and I'm 90% sure it;s the right dude.
Okay so I have apologized to teacher, found he's a nice guy who likes videogames, so that's cool. Hopefully Eldest won't treat him like dirt for the whole of this month and next.
Also emailed this One of Four VPs guy, and we'll see how that goes. left the strongly worded stuff in there, because im sick and tired of being nice about this. There are other trans kids in the school system this should not be a path we are forging our own selves for fuck's sake.
Just. its exhausting and it's not even me that has to go to high school. But these people, man, no one takes responsibility for shit.
Basically, Eldest came out and socially transitioned within a couple of months in early 2019, like Jan - Mar. The counseller at the original school was a good egg, helped me write an email to the school at large basically, that they could use to tell the teachers to get with the program and stop pushing back against my kid and his pronouns.
We had like some shit to deal with from kids in his class not believing him and his father being a complete selfish dick about everything, but we made it through that only to have the whole school get shut down for renovations and all the kids getting transferred to the other school in town that accepts gr7+8, without knowing that we had to restart the social transition at that new school. So there was a few agonized months when Eldest didn't tell me what was happening in class and just got more and more angry and tired, until we got the first quarter report cards and everything was dead named and wrong pronouned
So now apparently at the end of Grade 8, we have to deal with the change again to the 'high school' (gr 9-12) side of this school, when it's ALL THE SAME BUILDING AND OFFICE STAFF and I guess we have to start all fucking over???
What the fuuuuck.
Anyway, here we go. we'll see what this VP says to my email. Also if the grade eight kids going into grade nine next year are getting calls from VPs about mental health now, I'm guessing June is a write off for school as well and they are just going to jump in at Sep and start wherever they can.
Also, I have Eldest in therapy, every two weeks. So we are already on top of mental health stuff, thankyousomuch random VP dude.
ALSO ALSO I'm not sending either kiddo back to school if they are running it like a prison with only 6 kids in a classroom and no one is allowed to come near each other and the adult in the room is terrified of your literal breath.
Are you fucking kidding me
Look, I get physical distancing is important, I practice it right now every time i leave the house and all shift long at work. BUT even I feel like a plague carrier and it's super fucking tough for me ME a 36 year old person, to keep in mind that this isn't personal and it's for the best of everyone.
I'm not putting that psychological load onto a ten year old and a thirteen year old. That's not fucking happening. There is no way. My ten year old would come out of it like one of those abandoned monkeys in that experiment, it would scar him for fucking life. Like we are as locked down as his mental health can stand and I'm not sending him into something out of a goddamn horror movie.
I'm not physically distancing between myself and my kids, and I'm not putting them into an institution being run like a prison for 6 hours a day. My kids can learn from home for the rest of their school careers if that's the case. I'd rather us be isolated and all of us have to relearn what a crowd of people is rather than go through a school system operating like that. Also I'd prefer getting a courseload dropped off in the mail that we have to learn on our own to submitting my kids to that environment.
Fuck that noise absolutely and forever. There is technology that can allow teachers to talk to kids every day, from home, and do the school thing every single day. Through zoom or whatever. we can make all of this shit work. You don't have to psychologically scar an entire generation of children to get through this.
