Stapling

I have a lot of pet-peeves. When talking to others I tend to focus on these instead of the great things in my life. I have a lot of great things in my life. One of those is that for 2 days this week I got 7 ½ hours uninterrupted sleep. Children learning to sleep is great! That being said, I am going to focus on a pet-peeve of mine for this blog. The other blogs that I have written for today are not as whining and lame. Speaking of, I tend to write all my blogs on the week-ends because most of the time I have more time. So sorry I don't spread it out and have new ones every day like some of you.

The school that Jaxon goes to here in South Jordan is a year-round school. That means that he goes to school for 9 weeks and is off school for 3 weeks. That is the basic schedule. I can handle that. It is not my choice, but over-all I can deal with it. We wanted to live here so we could have lots of kids our kids’ age. This is the kind of school they have in the area so that was our choice.

Then you get to the details of A B C or D track. They basically split the school into 4 parts and assign you a schedule. AB and C start on July 25th. A goes for 9 weeks, B goes for 6 weeks, C goes for 3 weeks. When C gets off then D starts. It’s a big cycle. They do this so only ¾ of the students are in school at the same time. This is supposed to help with reducing class sizes and stuff. A and D tracks have their 3 weeks off right next to the mandatory 3 weeks off in July so it is a pretty decent summer break. But if you have a track that goes up to June 30th and one that starts July 25th you have only three weeks.

OK, so that is the back ground that you probably all knew already. Here is the start of my complaining. Every year we have to re-register for our choice of track. We don't get to have a track and stay on that track. We turn our paperwork in the end of March and hear back at the beginning of May what track we have. Have you ever made plans for a summer vacation? Or even a family reunion? These things are made in February or March and if you don’t have reservations you are out of luck. Can't they do this any sooner? January would be good for me! So with the system this school has, you can not make any plans because you just don’t know when your kids will be out of school. We have to vacation in July when everyone else in the entire state has to go. Or if you are brave and make plans, you have to take your kids out of school if they don’t get the right track.

OK, so that is still not that big of a deal- whatever, I just have to deal with it. Then you have to think of all of your kid’s friends and car-pools. If your kid has a different track then the neighbors, you have 3 weeks of “I have no one to play with”. The point of living in a place with lots of kids was so that they could play with each other! Also if you get in one of the weird tracks then you drive both directions every day. Still not that big of a deal. But when you put all of these minor annoyances together they really give me a head ache. This time of year is bad.

Next year my neighbor across the street and my next door neighbor and I have decided to car pool. We all have boys and they tend to play together the most. This means that we need to get the same track. You have no idea of the hours spent trying to figure out the best way to do this. A lot of the kids in our neighborhood had a certain teacher on A track (we don’t want her). We wouldn't mind A track and it is possible to get the other teacher, but there is no way to request a teacher. We have also heard that there is a terrible teacher on B track so we want to avoid B at all costs. So we have to put down our choices in order of our first to last choice. So we put down D- C- A- B. We all put the same and then hope we all got the same choice. Now the other element was whether or not to staple. If we staple, then we will for sure be placed in the same track. But we will for sure not get our top choice because it is one of the requested tracks.

So to make a long and boring story come to an end- we stapled. We hope we will get C because we don’t want A or B. But our fear is that we will get B because we stapled.

What a waste of my time to spend so much time thinking about such a lame thing. But your kid's happiness for a year is based upon what class he is placed in. So I have to do it. I thought about waiting on posting this blog until we get the results, but I thought I would just post it and update you later.