Confessions of a Domestic Engineer

[JustGeorge]

My house is a wreck.

A lot of this is because of the home construction. Nothing is where is should be, furniture included. I can't say how long it'll be like this, but its been like this long enough. With rooms either partially or fully out of commission, its impossible to 'put stuff away' as normal, because the 'away' spots aren't available.

What's gotten to me the most isn't dealing with kid messes in all this... I'm shocked at the degree in which the other adults(some of whom are workers) leave careless messes. Leave tools out for the kids to get, drinks all over the house for the kids to dump(or worse, drink, as one of them has a reaction to caffeine), leave debris and packaging from tasks literally all over the house. Someone(and this someone knows better) even loaded a bunch of wet paint trays/brushes/rollers into the living room. I had assumed such thing were dry and free of paint(because what dummy would leave open paint out with kids), until the youngest proudly began to roll paint onto the couch.

I am shocked to see... adults are waaaaaaaaay messier than kids. Kids come with predictable mess. Scattered toys. Spilled food. Dishes in strange places(I found a fork in the piano once). Dirty laundry. But having so many adults here has proven kid stuff is way easier to clean up after than adult stuff.

I'm not sure there's any way to get the adults to stop; perhaps I should rub their noses in it?\

Edit: Oh... and stop using my aquarium buckets for trash receptacles/construction equipment!!! If you pour something into my bucket, chances are I can't use it for the fish anymore!! They are not for your convenience, they are for my pet fish.

 

[Rival]

My house is a wreck.

A lot of this is because of the home construction. Nothing is where is should be, furniture included. I can't say how long it'll be like this, but its been like this long enough. With rooms either partially or fully out of commission, its impossible to 'put stuff away' as normal, because the 'away' spots aren't available.

What's gotten to me the most isn't dealing with kid messes in all this... I'm shocked at the degree in which the other adults(some of whom are workers) leave careless messes. Leave tools out for the kids to get, drinks all over the house for the kids to dump(or worse, drink, as one of them has a reaction to caffeine), leave debris and packaging from tasks literally all over the house. Someone(and this someone knows better) even loaded a bunch of wet paint trays/brushes/rollers into the living room. I had assumed such thing were dry and free of paint(because what dummy would leave open paint out with kids), until the youngest proudly began to roll paint onto the couch.

I am shocked to see... adults are waaaaaaaaay messier than kids. Kids come with predictable mess. Scattered toys. Spilled food. Dishes in strange places(I found a fork in the piano once). Dirty laundry. But having so many adults here has proven kid stuff is way easier to clean up after than adult stuff.

I'm not sure there's any way to get the adults to stop; perhaps I should rub their noses in it?

A lot of folks assume working at a school with young children is tiresome.

I agree, but not because of the kids.

 

[JustGeorge]

A lot of folks assume working at a school with young children is tiresome.

I agree, but not because of the kids.

I've never worked at a school, but was involved enough because of the kids' special needs.

It seems to me the bureaucracy and the 'regulations' loaded down from people that never even work with the kids prevent a lot of kids from getting what they need. (One of the reasons I homeschool now.)

 

[Rival]

I've never worked at a school, but was involved enough because of the kids' special needs.

It seems to me the bureaucracy and the 'regulations' loaded down from people that never even work with the kids prevent a lot of kids from getting what they need. (One of the reasons I homeschool now.)

I have some scare stories for you....

I knew one girl who attended that school from being a small child and she clearly could not read (she was 10/11 at this time). She once asked a a couple of teachers I was standing with how to spell 'lit' and they sent her away and told her to stop being silly. I later went to check her paper and sure enough she couldn't spell the word.

The same girl is really good at maths, a little prodigy, and I was hyped when I came to marking her maths test.
She failed.
She came in the bottom percentile of marks.
Because she couldn't read the questions.
The sad part of this is that I had been the person who was reading the questions to the dyslexic kids on this same test, and she wasn't in that group.

This school was judged 'good' by the relevant regulatory body.

 

[JustGeorge]

I have some scare stories for you....

I knew one girl who attended that school from being a small child and she clearly could not read (she was 10/11 at this time). She once asked a a couple of teachers I was standing with how to spell 'lit' and they sent her away and told her to stop being silly. I later went to check her paper and sure enough she couldn't spell the word.

The same girl is really good at maths, a little prodigy, and I was hyped when I came to marking her maths test.
She failed.
She came in the bottom percentile of marks.
Because she couldn't read the questions.
The sad part of this is that I had been the person who had to read the questions to the dyslexic kids on this same test, and she wasn't in that group.

This school was judged 'good' by the relevant regulatory body.

I know of a similar experience...

I dated someone in my late teens/early adult years who wore glasses on and off. I was sitting with him at his house watching TV, and he kept asking me to read stuff on the screen(he wasn't wearing glasses). I eventually got irritated and asked if he wanted me to find his glasses for him. "Don't bother, I can't read." What now? He was at least 17 at the time. He had no diagnosed special needs. He claimed no teacher had ever taken the time to teach or help him, and he'd just never learned.

The scary part to me... the 'good' school he was at... gave him a diploma. No one ever caught the problem. He wasn't the best student and tended to get low marks, and I think they just wrote it off as to him lacking intellectually, never realizing it was a reading problem.

 

[Rival]

I know of a similar experience...

I dated someone in my late teens/early adult years who wore glasses on and off. I was sitting with him at his house watching TV, and he kept asking me to read stuff on the screen(he wasn't wearing glasses). I eventually got irritated and asked if he wanted me to find his glasses for him. "Don't bother, I can't read." What now? He was at least 17 at the time. He had no diagnosed special needs. He claimed no teacher had ever taken the time to teach or help him, and he'd just never learned.

The scary part to me... the 'good' school he was at... gave him a diploma. No one ever caught the problem. He wasn't the best student at tended to get low marks, and I think they just wrote it off as to him lacking intellectually, never realizing it was a reading problem.

Schools are not the best places for children, evidently.

 

[JustGeorge]

Another recent issue:

Ares is homeschooled now, (though was formerly in public schools) but receives special ed services via Zoom from an instructor. He got a new instructor this year, and she didn't know him at all. Just received a stack of papers on him. She set up a program for him based on those papers. When she had him recognizing numbers 1-10 and I had him reading 3 digits numbers, she realized something wasn't adding up. Eventually, she told me his papers have him labeled as what would be extremely disabled, when the reality was he just isn't. She said past staff have labeled him in a way in which he'll never be challenged to the level he can perform because they didn't want the inconvenience of dealing with him in a classroom setting. She said she sees it a lot. A summer instructor first noticed a problem that the last teacher had created; if he doesn't do his math of his own free will, it gets marked as he can't do it as all. She told me "I can see that he's adding through 100, but because we have to verbally keep him on task, I'm supposed to count it as he can't add at all." (She refused to do that.) She could see there was something wrong, too, but didn't know what to do about it.

My oldest is 15 now, and when he came home and did virtual due to covid... man, the quality of education he's received is rubbish. He also had the same thing done to him by educators(he also has special needs). They gave him so much help, he has to start over from square one and learn how to do things he should know how to do. And I remember fighting against the school to remove some of his aid... he literally had a staff hovering over him 24/7. When he was very young, it was a safety issue(he would wander away), but when he got older, it was just because he got better grades that way(even though he didn't earn them, the staff had held his hand through it). It was also written into his plan that he wouldn't be disciplined for most things, and this has negatively impacted his personal responsibility. I had a teacher call once and profusely apologize that his locker was a mess, he'd lost an assignment, and she'd clean it immediately. I was unable to convince her this is something he should be doing for himself(he is on the Asperger's end of the spectrum, and functions pretty well, just needs writing aids).