Shoe Dropped

The shoe dropped this week. I'm not sure if it's the first shoe or the other one. I hope it's the other one.

When we decided to move Universe Man back to the same school as his siblings this year, we didn't expect it to be smooth sailing. I think the phrase was "bumpy transition." He attended Wonderful School for kindergarten, and to call it a disaster might not be much of an overstatement. He didn't go back, though Mr. Personality had done really well in the preschool, so we left him there.

Eventually, after some exciting (in the not good way) times the beginning of the next year, we found Fabulous School, a very, very alternative and very, very fantastic school that was just what Universe Man needed. It was a fantastic home for him for four years, but we knew that he would eventually need to become comfortable in a more traditional school setting, and after some long conversations with the administration at Wonderful School and some school visits, he decided he was ready to give it a whirl. After five years and two kids with us, the school had a better understanding of SuperM Kids than they did that first year, and we all felt that we could make it work.

School doesn't start until after Labor Day here, and with the way the holidays fell this year, in a certain sense the school year is just now getting underway. I've run into a couple of Universe Man's teachers at school and checked in with them informally, and things seemed to be going quite well, although I knew that he was really unhappy in Other Class. The teacher is new to the school, so I figured that I'd give her some time to get her feet under her before I said anything.

All that's sort of the backstory.

Turns out I didn't get to say anything. Or maybe that's need to say anything.

Apparently Monday was a really bad day in Other Class and Universe Man used his fingernail to scratch a disrespectful sentence about his teacher into his desk. Wonderful School thought he'd used a pair of scissors to do it, and of course, it turns out that he had no idea a fingernail could do any damage at all. Fingernails of steel.

When he was asked Tuesday morning if he'd done it, he answered honestly. Universe Man is very honest, so much so that when I get different stories from the boys I almost always believe Universe Man no matter how outrageous his story is. It's usually the truth.

So I got a call. I'd been waiting for the call, and am still pretty shocked that we made it over a month without one.

I heard what had happened, and we talked about what to do. We decided that community service in the school would be appropriate, because we didn't want the consequences to be punitivie. And I told the principal that Universe Man had been telling me about his difficulties in Other Class and that I had been hoping that the situation would improve.

Evidently they knew that there were some difficulties too, but no one knew quite how bad it was. I can't imagine how frustrated I would be trying to pay attention and learn in a class taught almost entirely in a language I didn't speak. The school was aware that Universe Man's language skills were way behind grade level for Wonderful School, and he seems to be doing fine in the language class itself, but he hasn't been able to understand enough of what was going on in Other Class to even tell me what they were studying.

Within hours, the school had reached a decision. Universe Man isn't attending Other Class anymore. Instead, during Other Class he's doing community service and independent study with his favorite teacher for some as-yet-undetermined period of time that could be the rest of the year I suppose.

Did I mention that this is a Wonderful School?