Adventures in Homeschooling Day 3

Matt and Gwen passing out oatmeal chocolate
chip cookies for our teachers.

Today was fairly low key.  Gwen and I are managing the start of a head cold so most of the day was devoted to movies and books.  We watched a great National Geographic Special on volcanos that Gwen (and I) thought was awesome.  We finally watched Secretariat; nice flick.  Matt got up early and made cookies for the teachers.  We brought the cookies to them around noon.  They were very grateful, as many told us that they weren't going to have time to get lunch due to them having to be elsewhere (for negotiations or meetings).  It felt good to get out there and talk to them.  To tell them to keep it up.

I've been rather consumed with the negotiations, or lack there of (http://weteachtacoma.org/2011/09/15/tacoma-teachers-offer-new-proposal-school-board-offers-nothing/).  Since we don't have cable I haven't been watching the news, only reading it from internet sources.  I'm really feeling for my neighborhood teachers.  It's an often thankless, frustrating, emotionally draining job that rarely gets the respect that it deserves.    I've read the complaint over and over that both sides are putting the children in the middle.  The children are in the middle, of course they are.  It's their classroom, their teacher, their education; anyway you slice it- the kids are in the middle.  The kids have to be in the middle, otherwise it's not about the kids!  UGH!

All of the drama with the "us and them" union vs. district garbage just has my stomach in knots waiting for my own union contract to expire in December.  All of us nurses are well aware of the battle that is coming; looming like a thunder cloud waiting to clap.  Last contract was hard enough; we spent months without a contract because the negotiations weren't going anywhere.  The thing I keep repeating to myself is that I am SO grateful that my contract negotiations are, for the most part, hidden away from the media.  We nurses usually don halos, in the eyes of the public.  But if our employers were allowed to ridicule our intentions to the media the way the school district does, it would get really ugly really fast.  It's all rather depressing.