30 things I can't do while I'm in the shower

For years now, my showers have been a public event. If I want privacy while showering, I have to go to the gym. In my house, when I step in the warm spray, it's like the kids hear the theme song for "Phineas and Ferb". They come running to see the spectacle. I've tried locking the door. They actually walked into the yard and entered through the slider. They've also staged sit ins outside the locked door. So, I'm hoping to clarify exactly what I can not do while I'm in the shower in order to gain a shred of privacy and may be a little peace and quiet too.

I cannot:

1.) Brush your hair

2.) Open the tooth paste

3.) Make your breakfast

4.) Find your missing soccer sock. (By the way, the game isn't for several hours.)

5.) Tell you where Thomas Jefferson graduated from college or how many children he had

6.) Time your reading

7.) Help you conjugate verbs

8.) Get the new tights out of your dresser

9.) Spell check your email to your friend

10.) Find your missing tap shoe

11.) Change the channel on the television

12.) Remove the parental controls on the television, even if it is a show you're allowed to watch

13.) Reach a water for you to take to school

14.) Read the school lunch menu, which is hung conveniently where you can read it yourself

15.) Find your library book, when I didn't even know you had a library book

16.) Help you trim your toe nails

17.) Find hair ties

18.) Find your back pack

19.) Find your bootie shorts

20.) Make brownies for pulga

21.) Explain why it doesn't snow here

22.) Explain why Santa doesn't visit Jewish kids

23.) Explain why the tooth fairy sometimes forgets you lost a tooth

24.) Explain why "Susie" tooth fairy brings $5 per tooth and yours only brings $1

25.) Tell you what People magazine means when it says "It's Over" next to Taylor Swift and some guy

26.) Tell you why the lady in people magazine wears a dress that almost shows her privates

27.) Explain you why you shouldn't be reading People magazine.

28.) Change the cookies I put in your lunch for goldfish

29.) Cut the crusts off your peanut butter sandwich

30.) Stitch the piece of elastic onto your hat for dance, when I never even knew you had a piece of elastic that needed to be stitched on by today

Finally, I'll never understand why you are bugging me while I'm in the shower when your father is sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper and sipping coffee in complete quiet. He is completely capable of covering all of the items above.

A Rare Happening

This has been a strange couple of days. Both kids are sick at once. Both are running fevers. Both are complaining of headaches. Both are complaining of sore throats. It's not odd to have sick kids this year, but to have two kids sick at exactly the same time, odd.

Then today, it's all explained: 11 out of 25 kids in their class stayed home sick. Obviously, the whole room full of kids caught some nasty bug at once, not just mine. But this has led us to discovered an unexpected aspect of having kids in the same class: they get sick on the same schedule. Whodathunk?

It's not completely inconvenient. 1.) I made one appointment with the doctor for the both of them. She was happy to combine appointments. It saves us both time. 2.) It condenses the overall time of people being sick in the house thus reducing the amount of time the Dad and I have to juggle the coverage of sick kids. 3.) Cuts down on trips to the pharmacy. However, this does not mean it cuts down on the number of meds purchase, just the number of trips to buy meds. If only they could agree on one type of fever reducer. (La Nina likes grape, the Magster is a fan of bubble gum flavors.)

Dual illnesses also sort of complicates the whole getting up in the middle of the night. Let's say you are up with one and check the other one and discover the sleeper is burning up with a fever. Do you wake up the sleeper to take their temperature? I did, and then had an energetic Magster awake for an hour and a half from 3am to 4:30am. Bad move. I should have known better with that child. Never wake a sleeping Magster. I learned that lesson in China, what was I thinking?

Then, there's also the whole thermometer dilemma. I swipe it on one kid, I swipe it on the next kid. It's 3 in the morning. By the time I'm done with the second kid, I can't remember what it said for the first kid and she's already back to sleep. Do I go back and swipe again and risk a bitter angry La Nina or just console myself that it was over 101? I chose just go with assumption she had a pretty high fever and skip retaking her temperature. I already had the spunky Magster wide awake, no need to add to the middle of the night party.

If this whole thing follows the same path as the kids that were sick last week, someone will have strep (my money's on La Nina) hopefully not both of them. Both will run fevers for 4 days. We're on day 2-3. So, the kids will be back in school by Thursday or Friday. And hopefully, I'll figure out how to manage the midnight nursing duties a little more efficiently.

The Rest of the Story

I’m sure there are many people reading this and worried about what I’m going to write. My blog post on the grant at my school raised a few eyebrows and tonight I’m going to write, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story.

Last Friday, the principal and district officials were generous enough with their time to meet with me regarding my concerns on the grant. Given we were never going to agree on the intent of the grant, I asked them questions about the process used to select how the grant would be used and how exactly the implementation would be executed.

Everyone I met with concurred that no alternatives to a “pilot” smart classroom were considered. At one point, someone said that no alternatives were offered, but none were solicited. The grant’s dispensation strategy was never reviewed with staff or parents in a discussion format before it was decided and therefore, no one knew alternatives could be offered. No one can say why this is the best alternative for our school. No one can say why dividing the grant 60% into one class and 40% to the rest of the school is the optimal spend split. Essentially, this decision has no strategy behind it.

The Smart Classroom has been dubbed a “pilot”. This means it’s the administration’s intent to roll this out to every classroom at our school. According to district officials, “pilots” need a champion and it would be too difficult to train multiple staff members on the use of this equipment in a shared environment. Therefore, it needs to be in a single classroom with a single champion.

I’ve run a couple of pilots in my day, and the power user scenario is often helpful. But I’ve also run pilots with multiple users and found this information very valuable. If the technology is too difficult to use for the average user, adoption rates are very low. Best to discover an adoption problem during a pilot phase rather than during implementation phase in my experience. Besides if the plan is to roll this out to all classrooms, shouldn’t as many teachers as possible use it to help support the roll out efforts?

“Pilots” in the business world are often used to prove an assumption. We can save so many dollars by making a change or we can make more money by doing it that way. You need to have before data and after data to prove these assumptions, and you need to be able to demonstrate something worked before budget is allotted for full implementation. At least this is my experience with pilots. When I asked about the “pilot” process in education, the answers were vague. The key educational benefit: interactivity, capturing kids at teachable moments. Applications? The technology could be used to assist in science lessons. Examples of lessons: no examples could be offered. There was a timeline, but no real methodology behind measuring success and no one supervising results outside of the grant recipient.

The next round of funding was another question mark for me. Corporations were one answer. We live in a wealthy suburb with schools that rank in the top 10% of the state (www.schooldigger.com). To implement smart classrooms in one school of 28 classrooms it would take about $420K. If a corporation had that much money to spend, do people honestly think they’d spend it in a district like ours? In my experience, corporations want to see big results for the dollars they spend. District like ours do not allow for big results. We’re already successful. The other answer I heard was the PTA. Our PTA is a dedicated group of individuals who do amazing things for our school, but even a city-wide fundraising campaign only raised $355K for ALL elementary schools last year. To assume a parent group can raise $400K is unfair to those dedicated parents that pour their heart and souls into our school community day in and day out.

Finally, no money was set aside to maintain this system or buy replacement parts. The school will be handing hand held devices to 6 year olds and expecting them not to break those devices. I have two very mellow daughters, and things get broken. I can’t imagine any hand-held devices will last long in a classroom setting with young kids. So, things are going to be broken and there will be no budget to replace them. That means the teacher will be hitting up parents or the PTA for money to maintain this pilot or it will become an expensive piece of classroom furniture within the next 18 months.

I’m a big fan of technology in the classroom. And I might be a big fan of Smart Technology at our school had this project been thought through. However, I can not support a project that is exclusionary with very little strategy behind it. In this case, the use of this grant is a big mistake. And sadly, no one in my meetings last week was willing to admit it or do anything to help correct it. And that’s the rest of the story.

Give that woman a raise

We now return to our regular, dull editorial content. My detour into political blogging has now ended but I reserve the right to return to it at any time.

With the Dad's current condition hiring a nanny became critical to our ability to function as a family. I found a woman who fits well with our family and has become my right arm in making things happen and getting kids where they need to be. She's been with us for a couple of months now. Apparently, the honeymoon is over, because the other night the girls started complaining about her. Being a fair and open-minded parents, the Dad and I asked them for their complaints. Here's the list or a very fair representation of them:

1.) From both of them: She makes us do our homework right after we finish our snacks and she checks it. If it isn't right, she makes us do it again.

2.) From the Magster: She only lets me have 2 cookies after school. After that I have to eat fruit or cheese or something healthy.

3.) From La Nina: She gets mad at me if I take too long after school. She says it's rude to make her and Maggie wait for me.

4.) From both of them: She won't let us play with our DS's until we're done with our homework and have put away all our stuff.

This is where they stopped, because the Dad and I were laughing so hard we were crying. She makes them do their homework, she makes them eat healthy snacks and she forces La Nina to be considerate of others. Oh yeah, she's really awful. NOT! Sounds like we hired ourselves a good nanny and the kids are just going to have to cope.