Running son goes back to school. Also, college daughter.

It's been a quiet day around here. Running son, who would ordinarily wake up around now or so (early to mid afternoon), perhaps having run in the morning and perhaps not, got up to go to school today.

School gets more and more prescriptive, I note. A few years ago, they started sending out "Mandatory Attendance" notices as part of the registration packet. The gist of this is to let you know, as the slacker parent you no doubt are, that your kids are required, by God, to go to school, and that by signing the notice, you acknowledge that if you let your kid stay home because he's exhausted or only sort of sick, or whatever, that you are thereby evidenced to be a slacker parent who doesn't understand that kids are REQUIRED to be in school! This year, they've started a new punitive attendance policy, whereby kids who miss school have to pay for the privilege of making up the classes they missed. I should protest this ridiculous practice, but I am mainly hoping to outlast it, as running son is a senior.

He went early to talk to a counselor this morning. New rules: you can't just show up early to talk to your counselor! No! you must take your chances with the first-come, first-served after school policy for talking to the counselor. Now, I'm the last person to criticize public school employees, seriously, but come on, what are the counselors doing before school? Organizing files? investigating criminals? curing cancer?

Running son has issues with credit to work out. He spent some time in the public schools of Georgia, the upshot of which is that the Utah schools feel he should make up a semester of 9th grade English. We all swear we had this worked out once, but a counselor who was apparently having a really, really bad day (serious obstacles in the curing cancer before school endeavor, probably) said that our previous solution would not work. This means that we have to go over the heads of the counselors. Luckily, running son's dad knows all the principals in the whole state of Utah, basically, so he'll broker the deal.

Whatever. It will all work out, but I'm struck over and over how many ways school gets in the way. Even a kid who feels the summer has flown by and he's done nothing but run, sleep, and work at the movie theater gets a little excited at the beginning of school. He'll manage to jump through these hoops, and probably pretty gracefully. There are probably plenty of kids who won't. [note the previous citation of a civic dimension to a personal issue--does this improve my ethos?]

College daughter's first day of classes up in Logan was today. She's been working up there for a week and a half, clearly glad to be on her own again after a summer at home. The thing is, we all miss her around here. Cheers to the sophomore year.