On whining mothers, groveling coaches and the Christian-Charity D-

Well, the camp is quiet now. All of the campers have been picked up by their parents or their guardians. Finals have been scored, grades have been turned in, and we are outta here! Most of us have cleaned out our rooms and have packed up our personal property to take home for the summer. I’m glad the year is over.

The final month is always the most difficult. It is like a three-ring circus that has gone terribly awry. The seniors start melting around mid-April. The little snowflakes (some of them) actually start worrying about their finals grades at the beginning of May. And oy, the kvetching, the kvetching . . .

As Bush’s third term towards educational ‘reform’ gathers steam, we in the profession constantly are hammered with the term ‘accountability’ by parents and ‘experts’ not in the profession. That is, until it hits their own backyard. During the end of the semester, I was visited by many who asked for a waiver for their special little interest.

I had a crying Mother asking why her little loser cherub’s grade was so low and why I was preventing him from graduating. Somehow it was all my fault that he did absolutely nothing in class expect make ceramic pipes and bongs on the rare days that he actually did show up for class.

And then there was the groveling coach, coming into my room, begging to raise the score of his little knuckle-dragging Neanderthal star athlete so he could play on next year’s football team.

And then there are the Special Ed kids! What to do with them. Most managed to just take up space the entire year. Being outside their protective environment of the special ed classroom, they floundered. Not being able to understand what was expected of them, they just flailed around, hoping somebody else would do the work for them. It’s like trying to teach rocks. If you fail them, even though they deserve it, you are the bad guy. They just need more “scaffolding” or their “learning modalities” weren't accessed properly, or some other buzzword-infected rationale is used.

Little Christine is sitting at 27% of the work completed for the year. She did almost nothing. Her test scores were abysmal. All of the projects that she actually did complete were pathetic and sad. She took up space. But I don’t want to be the bad guy. I end up giving them the Christian-Charity D-, everybody is happy, and I can get the hell out of Dodge!

OH YEAH, HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!