Dear fellow professional
I feel that it is only right that I write to you so that you know what kind of behaviour to expect from me over the coming year as parent of one of your new pupils. That way we both know where we stand.
Notes home from school
Over the course of the year you are going to send home a rainforest full of paperwork in the form of letters and notifications. Some will be important, most will not. You can expect that the unimportant letters will be filed in the metal, bin bag lined filing cabinet also known as File Number 13.
You can also expect that I will lose the majority of the more important letters and you will have no option but to write a stern note in my daughter’s home school book. Which I will not read.
Sponsorship
Similarly, there will doubtless be a gazillion forms, leaflets and notifications that will attempt to fleece a great deal of cash out of me throughout the year. For example, I will be required to pressgang my entire family and friends in order to gain numerous donations for sponsorship for random activities that my child will have to do at school. These will be for a great deal of charities that I have never heard of before.
I will probably humour the first of these, mainly for fear of showing my kid up when they are the only one in class whose Mum hasn’t bothered. Pretty soon however I will be burning these forms in the fire chanting, “Stop fleecing me and my kids, you crazy bastards!”.
Seriously though, two sponsorship forms in a week?? You’re flipping kidding me!
Working Parents
Throughout my child’s school life you will arrange appointments and events which take no account of the fact that 60% of the parents of your charges hold down full time jobs. You will be totally inflexible despite the fact that many of you are working parents yourselves. Be warned that the bad will, stress and guilt that this inflexibility will engender, will render me incapable of helping out at school discos which are scheduled to start ten minutes before most working parents set foot in their homes after a hard day’s work anyway.
Advertising through my child
Please also be warned that I will not tolerate another mother’s feeble attempts at advertising their home businesses through flyer-ing the pupils. I am failing to see the educational link between nursery and someone’s sub-Tupperware Party type enterprise promotional material. Please make sure that my daughter does not come home with such trash. What’s next, are our kids going to be wearing uniforms with Asda logos emblazoned on them honouring some sponsorship deal?
Emotional commercial blackmail
I appreciate that schools need to make extra cash at certain points but please do not take my daughter to a book fair and write me a note 4 weeks before Christmas telling me that Junior Misssy “has expressed an interest in the following books”. Do you not realise that Junior Missy is now expecting, nay demanding said books. And not for Christmas neither. NOW! Do you not know anything about four year olds?
School dress up
And on a final note. What the blazes was the deal with two dressing up days within two weeks? Don’t you know that I wont read the notes warning me about them and will have a child standing in front of me at 8.30am screaming, “Mum it’s dress up day today, you need to make me a costume NOW!”
Other than that, totally loving your work,
Misssy M
November 20, 2007. crap mum, nonsense, parenting, ranting, schools, therapy. .
