7th Grade

When I think back on 7th grade, I don't remember much except that I think I had a really big crush on Greg Hardy. I know, though, that I wouldn't want to go back. Katya started the 7th grade this year. She was very nervous about it - so much so that we took her a couple of days before it started and walked around the school so that she would know where her classes were. I color-coded a school map by period so that she would know know how to go from class to class. When I asked her how her first day of school was she replied, "bad" although she couldn't give me any particular reasons why it was bad. Since then she hasn't really complained about it and actually seems to like school - or at least she gets up in the morning, puts her clothes on, usually brushes her hair and tells me she has brushed her teeth (I have my doubts about that one, though!). She went two days last week without being late to any classes - a tribute to the fact that she has finally learned how to navigate around the school. And then they switched her classes all around! They moved her into a special English class for kids that need help with reading and I had them move her out of Orchestra and into a Math lab and pretty much all her classes changed around. I wasn't sure how she would react but she did OK. I just heard one complaint about how she wishes that she could still have the same English teacher to which I explained that her old English teacher doesn't teach the special reading class and that the reading class will really help her out (I sure hope that it helps her out!).

About a week ago Alex gets this phone call from Katya who states that "she wants to go to a different school". He was on his way home and told her they could talk about it when he got home. We were both anticipating the worst - that some kid tripped her in the hall, that she had a fight with someone or that someone made fun of her. It turns out that her reason for wanting to change schools was that her friend that is a boy tried to hold her hand. Oh brother! Alex and both gave her the same advice - that she needed to tell him that she didn't like him as anything more than a friend since he was probably still going on the premise that she did "like" him since that is what she told him during the summer. She did go over his house to have this conversation a day or so later but I am not really sure how that went. My niece happened to be there and piecing the story together I can come up with that the boy's mother somehow got involved in the conversation and that in the end the boy was OK. Drama queen!

Yesterday Katya calls me at 11:30. The students are allowed to use their cell phones during lunch and so I will sometime get calls about whether or not she can have ice cream and sometimes I will get calls that seem to have no point to them at all. This call started with, "Mom, my pencil broke." (Although thinking back I remember I had to somehow drag this out of her since I was very confused about what she was saying and somehow was able to understand she was talking about her pencil when she mentioned the word "lead"). My reply was, "Can't you use another pencil?". "No - I don't have one," she says. I know for a fact that along with all the other school crap we bought at the beginning of the year that there were many pencils included. "Where are your pencils? We bought you pencils at the beginning of the year". "At home," she says. Of course! Where else would they be? "I think you need to borrow a pencil from someone and then when you get home put all the pencils we bought you into your bag!" It actually really made me laugh because it was very silly that she thought that I would leave work, drive a half an hour to her school, give her a pencil and then drive back to work. Seriously?