Truancy for Jesus

We received a paper letter in the actual mail from our boys’ high school a while back. You just know that’s never good…

Turns out it was a truancy notice. Hmm… truancy sounds like something that happens in other families, not ours…

Apparently, the school was under the impression that our sophomore, Son Number Three, was being chronically late to class. They also listed a day that he was late to school, but it was the day of his DMV permit test. That was on purpose, because you know damned well you don’t schedule the last appointment of the day at the DMV, you schedule the first one.

I found out after further reading that the school was very concerned about his chronic truancy, and that we, his parents, could even be subject to prosecution and jail time if his truancy continued.

Now, wait just a minute, here. I’m not the one skipping class! (Anymore.)

This letter was out of the blue for us, and when I saw who it was “from” I got a little suspicious. It was signed by one of the school’s vice principals that I know and really like. They are a very cool, normal, reasonable human.

It was at that point that I realized the letter was just an automated part of a school district bureaucracy trying to manage a one-size-fits-all approach to everything. And I get it, to some extent. Things need to be fair in the eyes of the law, etc., etc., but I had to laugh. Son Number Three is many things, but a scofflaw is not one of them.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I questioned him about being chronically late to class. And when he denied it, I believed him. I know what you’re thinking – classic parent with their head in the sand, but again, if you know Son Number Three, you know. It’s entirely possible – even probable – that when they call roll he’s being so loud goofing off with his friends that he doesn’t hear his name, but I’m positive he’s there.

What really made his mom and I laugh about the automated truancy notice was his grades. This week’s column was in no way intended to be a “humble brag” or anything of the sort, but the fact is Son Number Three is killing it in school. Always has.

Needless to say, when we read the letter, we just kinda laughed and tossed it in the trash. Maybe the automated truancy detection system could add in a limiting factor for GPA, if for no other reason than to save on paper and mailing costs.

Anyway, assuming they haven’t made that software change yet, I expect to get another letter soon. I just clicked submit on the online absence reporting form for today through Friday. Number Three is on his way to Mexico today as part of our church’s advance team that gets the camp set up for the high school Mexicali mission trip over spring break.

There are educations, and then there are educations. A whole bunch of kids are about to get to be a huge blessing on someone else’s life, and simultaneously receive a Ph.D. in how lucky they are to be living in the USA. If the school district will not forgive Son Number Three’s chronic truancy, I’m confident Jesus will.

And speaking of missing school, our high school senior, Son Number Two, is about to be truant for two full days WITH his physics teacher AND the very same vice principal who was forced to send the letter to us by the school district bureaucracy. They’re going to Europe over spring break and missing the Friday before and the Tuesday after to see more sights.

I’m not sure what the school district is going to do with that situation, but I think I have a solid case for dismissal if I’m brought up on charges.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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COVID-19 Shutdown Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 33

Forced Homeschool Parent Log – Day 33

Hope was lost on Day 4. Now all that we have is the endless grind.

Today is our last day of what the school district laughingly referred to as “spring break.” In the before-time, spring break was scheduled to be only one week. We had dreams of travel and adventure. Those dreams are now but a distant and crushed memory of what once was. Just darkness ahead now. The darkness of remote learning.

After my exceedingly polite letter to them asking for the elimination of spring break this year due to the extenuating circumstances, the school district actually extended our new worthless, trapped, virus-ridden “spring break” an extra three days. A cruel, possibly vindictive joke that only forced us to come up with three more days of spring break home school courses until the distance learning begins again tomorrow.

We covered lawn maintenance, car maintenance, pool maintenance, irrigation system maintenance, bicycle maintenance, vacuum cleaner maintenance, coffee maker maintenance, electric wine opener maintenance, garage paint can collection maintenance, shower drain maintenance, and today, toenail maintenance.

The curriculum for my Appreciation for the Cinematic Arts of the ‘80s & ‘90s class was derailed by an academic mutiny, led mostly by my wife. I think I lost her trust at Uncle Buck and, amazingly, failed to regain it with Crocodile Dundee I and II. Whatever. It’s not like anything matters anymore.

The mutineers have decided that we will instead watch every single Marvel Avengers movie (approximately three hundred of them) in timeline order. We are halfway through and, consequently, our couch has developed an impenetrable layer of popcorn residue that is either serving as a protective barrier against wear and tear, or slowly destroying the cushions underneath us. Time will tell.

Meals have devolved into a standard routine of serve-yourself brunch, snack at random, and usually cereal for dinner, with dessert popcorn during the nightly Marvel movies. At first, we were ashamed of what we’ve become. Now we embrace it.

If the boys start to annoy us too much now, we’ve taken to keeping them in the game room by getting “high COVID readings” on my new “COVID meter” (one of our old Blackberry phones). We tell them there’s a viral outbreak in the kitchen or the family room, or wherever, and I put on my welding helmet and Latex dish gloves, hold a can of Lysol, and tell them to shelter in place until I have disinfected the stricken room. Then my wife and I have a few drinks on the patio before we give them the all-clear.

In an effort to limit our store trips, we have been attempting to eat as much as possible from our pantry and our freezers. We have a large chest freezer in the garage that slowly filled up to the top with frozen delicacies over the years. We are more than halfway down into the frozen cavern now, and ice axes have been deployed. Any attempt to retrieve food at this point looks like an arctic expedition.

Tonight, we are having a Stouffer’s Party Size Macaroni & Cheese that no one can remember purchasing, paired with some Van de Kamp’s Crunchy Fish Sticks that would have expired in 2009 had they not been completely encased in ice all these years.  

Or cereal.

Stay strong, people!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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An Open Letter to the School District

Dear folks in charge of the decision making down at the School District,

It has come to my attention that you are still planning to have “spring break” next week. I am writing to ask that you seriously reconsider that plan, because frankly, it’s stupid.

Spring break is meant to be a time of joy – a time to “break away” from the harsh rigors of school and the grueling six whole weeks of continuous study we’ve had to endure since ski week in February.

That would be great and all, if we could leave the house, but there’s a little viral wrench in the works this year. I know you know about it, because you guys send me six or seven emails a day expressly telling me that you are aware of the situation, you are proud of how you’re handling it, and you care deeply about my family’s health and safety.

Well, Mr. and Mrs. School District, I’m not a hundred percent sure that last part is correct. Do you really care?

You see, the governor has told us that we’re not allowed to go anywhere or do anything. I’m not sure if you school district big wigs got special travel dispensation, but the rest of us are supposed to remain locked inside our houses for the foreseeable future, which most certainly includes your so-called “spring break” next week.

Even if we could leave the house and go somewhere, all the places we were planning to go have closed. Exactly what are we supposed to do with our children on this “spring break” of yours? Take them to the grocery store? Nope. I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed under state law anymore.

Field trip to the Chevron? “Hey, kids, let’s go get gas! Stay in the car, though. Maybe if you’re good we’ll go through the car wash.”

I don’t think so, and these scenarios are what make me skeptical about your claim that you care about the health and safety of my family. Health includes mental health, and the only thing keeping our mental health even remotely intact right now is the existence of some sort of school schedule for our three boys.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that homeschooling is going well. It’s not. It’s not even going remotely well. But at the very least, their online schoolwork is an activity they’re required to accomplish during the day. That means they stay busy for at least part of the day, and more importantly, out of our hair and off of each other. Some days it may only be for fifteen or twenty minutes, but it’s something.

And if you cared at all about their safety, you’d definitely cancel this whole spring break nonsense. Have you people even ever seen two testosterone-y teenage boys and their crazy twelve-year-old brother caged up inside a house with nothing to do? If not, have you ever seen footage of a prison riot? Same thing.

We, as their parents, genuinely fear for their safety, because if they don’t kill each other, my wife and I might just finish the job. Possibly as early as day two. They are that annoying.

And please don’t suggest to me that we should let them play more video games. Screen time is not the answer if you are truly concerned about their health. Screen time is the answer if we’re looking to have them rapidly oscillate between lobotomized drooling and hyperactive insanity, but that’s not exactly the picture of mental health now, is it?

And don’t try to give me any nonsense about the hard-working teachers needing a break. My wife is one of those hard-working teachers, and she is not looking for a break from her students – she’s looking for a break from her own kids. Spring “break” will be the exact opposite of that.

A vast majority of our district teachers are in the same boat. They have kids, too. It’s not an excessive burden on them to teach through what would have been the break. They are all helping keep each other’s kids busy during the day. It’s a circle of life kinda deal.

And the teachers in our district who don’t have kids at home need to keep working just as much, but for a different reason. They’ve had to quickly ramp up to online teaching the past few weeks, and they’re as stressed out as the rest of their colleagues. Normally, a break would do them a world of good, if they were actually able to travel. However, if you make them stay home with nothing to do, they are just going to develop severe drinking problems.

Restaurants are allowed to deliver alcohol now! That’s not good. These teachers are trapped inside like the rest of us, and the fact that they still have to go to work each day, albeit in their pajamas, is the only thing keeping them from slipping off the edge. If you take away the responsibility of needing to be coherent during the day, it’s going to be a nine A.M. margarita-fueled disaster zone.

So, I beg you, for the good of all mankind in our district, please stop the inevitable spring break madness before it even begins. You can even take full credit for the great idea of “pushing on with valuable learning during these unprecedented times to maintain fluid educational continuity,” or however you want to word it to make yourselves sound amazing. You guys are good at that.

Just please, please don’t make me have to buy a monthly pass at the Chevron drive-thru car wash for field trips. I fear we’ll scrub off the Suburban’s entire top coat of paint just trying to keep our sanity next week without a school schedule.

Yours in educational excellence through continued partnership,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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Spring Broke

It’s spring break this week for our three boys, which means they are not in school and their teachers are off somewhere getting drunk.

It’s also spring break this week for my wife, who is a high school teacher, which means she’s with us all week. And she’s getting drunk.

Since everyone else in the family is on break, that means I am too, so we decided – possibly while drunk – that we should go to Disneyland.

We logged onto the Disneyland website to buy tickets, chose five two-day park passes, added them to the cart, then opened a new browser tab and logged onto our bank’s website and applied for a second mortgage.

After that, we applied for six or seven new credit cards to get the total ticket price to fit in underneath our credit limits, and we were in business. We hit the checkout button and printed out our tickets to the happiest place on earth.

Then we logged onto a popular travel website and searched for hotel suites near the park that could sleep five. After reviewing our options, we logged back onto our bank’s website and applied for a third mortgage. Once that got approved, we booked our hotel and we were all set.

Two days ago, we headed out on the road for the long drive south. As it turns out, our Suburban will not make it all the way to Anaheim on one tank of gas, so after applying for a new Chevron Loyalty Program credit card, we filled up on gasoline and snacks a few times and made it to our surprisingly small hotel “suite.”

We woke up early and sent two of the boys down to the complimentary continental breakfast with an empty suitcase and very specific instructions. After a hearty meal in our room, we headed for the front gate lines.

Once inside the park, we were alerted to the handy new feature of being able to spend additional money on our pre-purchased tickets by purchasing an add-on called a “MaxPass.” As luck would have it, we needed a separate MaxPass for each person in our group. The MaxPass allows you to get the FastPass, which will in turn allow you to get on the ride you thought you were already allowed to get on when you bought the actual ticket to get into the park.

Apparently, nowadays at Disneyland, if you don’t have a FastPass, you are more than welcome to stand in front of the attractions and watch people go in and out, while Goofy consoles you with a gentle hug, but if you actually want to ride anything, you’ll need to pony up some more money for the MaxPass.

We went ahead and filled out a quick application for a Disney credit card, and then got the MaxPasses purchased.

After a fun-filled morning of waiting for our FastPass time window to occur, and riding that one ride, it was lunch time. We had exhausted the remaining supply of hotel bagels and powdered eggs during our morning wait, so we headed over to the buffet to see what else we could afford.

After surveying the menu, and realizing that many of our new credit cards were being systematically deactivated, we opted to splurge and get a banana to share between the five of us, and topped it off with some of the flavored ice cubes sitting on the drink dispenser drain grate under the soda nozzles. Then we headed out to wait for our next FastPass time window to arrive.

While my wife and kids waited patiently for ride number two, I caught the monorail back to the parking lot and sold the Suburban in an all-cash deal to a fast-talking gentleman named Stevie (for what turned out, unfortunately, to be well under blue book value), in order to have a remote chance of financing day two at the park.

I made it back in time to hear all about the second ride, and catch the amazing fireworks show, which, surprisingly, was no extra charge.

Day Two has been just as magical, and even started with another surprise realization that the MaxPasses are only good for one day. What fun!

Anyway, we are having the time of our lives here in line, and it would just be amazing if one of you could plan to pick us up at the main park entrance right after the fireworks show tonight.

And please bring food and water. Thanks a million.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!