If you don't live around here, you might not have heard that Seattle Public Schools is suing most of social media - here's the Reuters story on it. My experience interfacing with this behemoth has largely been somewhere in a linear path from "unpleasant" to "useless." It forced me to become a much better parent, so to that extent their Darwinian process has offered some fruit.
They have a term for what my child is - "twice-exceptional." I'd say this is typical of the kind of language the education system uses to manufacture good consumers of their product. What (2E) means is that they're "gifted" students, but also have a diagnosis or some kind - for example, it's Aspergers/ADHD around here. There wasn't anything particular about the classes they offered; what it meant in practice was that they were taking classes two grades higher, except they were prone to dysregulation and the social contexts were made up of people even less likely to be peers in any other sense. There were a number of interventions that were supposed to happen and didn't. The modern inclination is to make some genuflections about the system, attempt to soften the language, but I have to be able to describe my life as a participant in my own life. If they don't want this sort of thing written they can just suck less.
In order to actually secure the services my child is legally entitled to, the services the Individualized Education Plan they wrote enshrines, I had to become a grizzled, dystopian warlord. They turned me into "that parent." Because she is a good person, Brenna tried for years to navigate the system as though it's actual purpose was its stated purpose. I could never figure out what its actual purpose was, but after being gaslit about what they were doing for years it was so deleterious to her mental health that I couldn't expose her to that hideous mechanism anymore and remain moral. I got better at, um, "advocating" for my eldest just as they were building the skills to advocate for themselves. We spent Quarantine establishing best practices without the added weight of the social demands and now they're killing it. I'm looking forward to the time of life when these launch years just fall into the atmosphere and burn away.
They're always sending me little newsletters about what good people they are. I started replying. If you think I'm caliente on here, you'd love that shit; it's some of my best work.
(CW)TB out.
