Dear School Administrators: Your Curriculum Sucks. My Kid Is Fine

Dancin’ Machine from sippican cottage on Vimeo.

A certain video hosting outfit erased, without notification, a video of my kid dancing because some venal grasping grabby entertainment company wants to beat pennies from children for every lick on Hollywood’s fecal lollipop, Fair Use under DMCA for mashups and spoofing be damned. So I’m (up)loaded for bear.

That coincided nicely with my son’s kindergarten administrators telling us that he’s: “unable to express ideas in front of a group, unable to selectively listen for sounds, follow multi-step directions,” and our supreme favorite: “unable to to complete assigned tasks in allotted time.”

I don’t have time to bring the little feller’s 522 piece Lego set suggested for 8-12 year olds and stand there while he assembles an entire Beach House, with absolutely no help, using nothing but a 72 page exploded diagram pamphlet. He does it faster than I could do it, but it takes a little while and we’re all too busy for that, and I’m not sure 72 pages qualifies as multi-step, because I’m a dolt. Likewise, I don’t have a video of our boy fearlessly performing a Smashmouth song in front of an audience of 250 or so at Lake Winnepesaukee when he was just four years old, because, of course, I was busy on stage performing with him at the time. I doubt that qualifies for selectively listening for sounds anyway, as the drummer kept coming in early and the boy ignored him.

A pretty girl sent me a picture of it, though:

You can tell he’s not an adult because adults never hold the microphone correctly like he is doing in the picture. Save your wisecracks; I know he’s cute and I look like hell. But cut me some slack, I had a temperature of 104 degrees the night before, as I was suffering from Lyme Disease just then but it was still undiagnosed. I looked like hell but the show went off on time, because I was hired to perform there and we take completing assigned tasks in the allotted time fairly seriously at our house. That assigned task was a four-and-a-half hour drive from our house, but somehow we managed.

The school administrator that summoned us to discuss my boy’s “inability to complete assigned tasks in the allotted time” came in, plopped a slovenly 8″ thick, undifferentiated and dogeared pile of foolscap paper on the table, and was sipping from a franchise restaurant disposable hot coffee container unavailable in the town I live in. And although the meeting was held at their school, had been postponed twice already, and she has a secretary, she was a full twenty-five minutes late.

My boy has never missed the bus.

So you’re “a group.” How’d my little boy do expressing himself in that video?

PS: I’m emailing this to the school administrator right now. Should I email her my earlier entry where I exposed another of our school system’s teachers masquerading as a teenager on the Internet? No, that would be cruel.