When Hormones Hit

It has often been said that teaching middle school is like dealing with hormones on feet. And, when it comes down to it, seventh grade is usually when it hits and hits hard. I remember telling Mr. Social Studies last year (his first year teaching after 26 years in the military) that all the good kids will get hormones for Christmas and get nuts and the bad kids will outgrow it at Christmas and turn out okay. The second week of January he assured me that I was right on the money.

Well..Faraway Girl has apparently been hit with the Hormone Hammer. Remember her? She's my very special ed kid who's mother is VERY INVOLVED, and who drives us all crazy with her constant emails. She has, if nothing else, turned her daughter into a trained parrot who can memorize test questions given a study guide, but can't begin to tell you what any of that means. Faraway Girl gets home from school and Mom sits her down and they do nothing but study and do school work, fix dinner, eat, and do more school work until time for bed. Actually, we all think mom is doing most of the work because Faraway Girl has such awful processing problems that there's times she lucky to spell her name correctly. Her daughter, who spends most of my class with the most distant look in her eyes, twirling her hair and maybe, if we're lucky, opening her book on her own, has learned that people will do things for her.

Mr. Social Studies and I were commenting several months ago that one of these days Faraway Girl is going to have it up to HERE with sitting at home all night doing more school work, and tell mom to take a flying leap. And chances are that will happen as soon as she discovers boys and socializing with her girlfriends. Her sixth grade teachers suspected the same thing but thought it probably wouldn't happen until high school.

It has happened this month. There was an IEP review meeting for Faraway Girl (which Mrs. Fish fogot to invite any of us to and you can bet that's one meeting we would have remembered) and Mrs. Faraway didn't come. Her husband, who rarely says anything in any meeting we've been to with him, came instead. He insisted that his wife was all stressed out about school, that their daughter was a terror at home, refusing to work, wouldn't obey mother, blah, blah, blah, blah....and they didn't know what to do. Apparently they're going to put her in a homework tutoring program so she can sit there for two hours and someone else can see if she'll attempt to do any work on her own.

Good luck.

Faraway Girl has discovered boys.