It's Midnight. I'm Taking Tomorrow Off.

I'm reading a book called A Different Kind of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto.

I'm basically a teacher at the high school. A teacher of one. I have to make lesson plans and design a curriculum for my student. I have to teach her every academic subject. We do not have a classroom teacher. They did promote one of the aides to be the teacher for the class, but she has only been at school two weeks this year due to surgery.

I've struggled to warm up to this new teacher. I realized today that a lot of that is jealousy. She gets to just be a teacher. I have to do four years of college first. She has a thirty-year-old degree in sociology. I have to choose education and study it. She isn't the low-man on the totem pole anymore. I am.

Working at the high school has been an eye-opening and exhausting experience. I have heard teachers say things about students that they should be ashamed of. I have had administration seemed shocked when I praised a student they consider a slaker. I have a student who is struggling to pass English because he can't connect with the Reader's Digest edition of Great Expectations, but he's reading a huge volume of Greek Mythology on his own time. English teachers have refused to try to help me get their students excited about writing short stories, because they don't believe their students are capable--because they aren't connecting with the Reader's Digest edition of Great Expectations.

Nick had a lunch detention on Tuesday. Because he had to pee. The kids have (I swear to you, this is what they're called) potty passes. They're supposed to carry them and give them to the teacher if they have to pee. That way the teacher doesn't have to write one out. (Or have a rubber chicken handy like my 12th grade English teacher did.) Nick never remembers to take his out of his homeroom class, which is his resource room. So he got to computer class on Monday and near the end he asked to go to the bathroom. The teacher said no, because Nick didn't have his pass.

Imagine, just for one minute, if you had to ask permission to pee. Imagine that you were told know, that you could hold it until your regular break time, now sit down and get back to work. How humiliating would that be? How demeaning? How quickly would you say, "screw you, I'll be right back?" What would you say to your spouse when you got home?

Nick left class, took a piss, came back and was ready to work. Instead of letting him, the teacher said he was going to write Nick up for insubordination. Nick got pissed off and when the bell rang thirty seconds later, pushed past another kid who was "lucky he didn't fall" (which means he didn't fall) on his way out the door. Hence the detention for "escalating violence."

Sigh. What am I supposed to do? Sit the kid down and give him a lecture about holding it if he has to go and doesn't have the prerequisite piece of paper in his pocket? Teach him how to take demeaning behavior from an adult with a smile, because he's 13? Tell him that those last ten minutes of computer class were more important than his bodily functions?

I think I'm going to home school Nick next year. I'm about 90 percent sure. I'm am so tired to trying to whittle my square-peg son to fit a round hole. I'm afraid of what I see already happening to him. He hides from learning, because his learning experiences hurt so much. He clearly isn't learning social skills in school. I'm afraid he won't ever be able to in a school setting. Three hundred kids and fifty adults is daunting for the most typical child, imagine dealing with that as an autistic kid.

He will never take someone else trying to set limitations on how often he's allowed to piss in 7 hours like a good boy.

I'm not sure I want him to.

I don't know what to do. Calling children our most precious resource sounds sort of silly. But think of it this way. I learned in my social work class that when my generation retires, there will only be 2.8 workers paying for our social security. Precious? Those kids turn into adults who will one day be running this country. We are already leaving them with an unmanageable mountain of debt and pollution. Can't we at least give them the creativity and initiative to figure out a way to fix those problems when they become theirs?

I don't want to be a smooth, oiled gear in the system churning out worker bees. I want to be a wrench in the machine. This is why I keep going back and forth between education and social work. I see so little of value in public education for so many kids.

It's funny, because I happened to give birth both to a kid who can only be dragged kicking and screaming through the school system, and one who thrives in that environment. Adrienne has somehow managed to find a way to bridge the gap between school and education (they are so not the same.) She's managed to hold on to her individuality, take everything she wants out of school and dump the rest. She's also an auditory learner. She learns best by listening to someone explain something to her and then doing it. She's naturally well-behaved.

I think I need to sleep. I almost feel high. Like I want to take on the world.

Yes. I really think I'm going to home school Nick next year. He deserves better than what he's getting. And not just because he's going to struggle hard with 80 minute classes.