Oh my god, you guys!! My daughter came home from school with the BEST story to tell me today.
“So my friends Dad is a teacher at our school and he was wandering around the staff rooms and he found something that was so awesome he had to tell me about it straight away. He came running up and he was all ‘OMG LISTEN’ and he told me about this cork board in the PE teachers area, it has a bunch of stupid excuse notes and it has Every. Single. One. That I handed into the sport teachers. The mutant squid cyborgs and the time dinosaurs ate my sport uniform, everything PLUS a two page letter from my teacher to the head teacher about how I shouldn’t be able to get away with this and how I should make up for the lessons missed.”’
The thing is, I think that physical health is important. But I don’t think that it is important to make children spend hours running around the perimeter of the school in the mud and rain in winter. That’s just stupid. Especially when yoga, indoor cricket, hot chocolate and common sense exist. So I write notes letting my children get out of cross country running when the weather is wet and slushy. And out of competitive sports that they don’t give a damn about. Which is most of them. Except Mario Kart. Mario Kart is a sport, right? Poorly spelled notes like this:
Rebekah is excused from PE today due to a particularly vicious & fashion impaired heard of wild dinosaurs attacking the house & stealing her PE uniform, her running shoes & a pot plant. This has caused her untold amounts of stress and physical imparement. She now, quite curiously, has been able to smell nothing but sauerkraut since the incident. As such, no PE for her on Wed 27/2.
And this:
All hail the dark overlords.
Rebekah, in accordance with the wishes of our Evil Cyborg Squid Zombie masters is unable and unwilling to participate in Cross Country Running today so as not to anger the ECSZ overlords.
Only indoor sports may be done.
And eating braaaaaiiiins……
Brains mmmmmmm…..
Braaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiins……..
Now I was quite proud of these notes and had written many like them in the past for genuine absenteeism and sport related apathy when the children were at other schools, and it had amused the teachers and excused the children. Not so much with this school. The 2 page letter writing whimsy police sports teacher prompted the head of the department to call me to tell me that I was weird. Not at all offensive. And by not at all, I mean TOTALLY. He went on to tell me that PE was the most important lesson that they have. To which I politely disagreed that running around in a circle would further my daughter’s chances of getting into NIDA as she plans to do, especially as she was making straight A’s in her other classes and I also politely (read firmly but respectfully) informed him that I was her mother and I was comfortable with my decision to excuse her from running around in the rain. To which he quite abruptly informed me that as her mother I had no right to have a say in her education. Cue me hanging up after informing him of the importance of my role in her life and education. And cue a less dinosaur studded letter to the principle to complain about his rudeness.
The next note was every bit as weird.
This was back in 2013. And I haven’t had cause to write too many zombie notes in the past year. On the odd occasion I have filled in medical consent forms and added chocolate as a recommended medication/incentive for laziness or wondered in writing if not being able to find things when looking for them was a medical condition. But all in all, Jurassic housebreakers and undead overlords have been kept to a minimum. (Also, my spell check doesn’t think undead is a word. It is. It knows this now.) And these notes are still on display in the teacher’s lounge nearly a year and a half after I wrote them.
So the take home message from all of this is:
- Teachers need something to break the boredom, besides putting vodka in the water cooler. Because I’d become a teacher if they had vodka coolers. I’d be the most drunk fun teacher there if there was a vodka cooler. Also, I’d invite the students I didn’t like into the staff room and give them a drink of ‘water’ from the cooler and then BAM!! I’d have them expelled for drinking on campus.
- It was worth it. Mwahahahahaha
- There is a shrine to me. This is undeniable proof that I may be a deity of some kind. But not the kind of deity that anyone should trust their soul to willingly. I can’t be trusted with souls. I’d probably lose them in a game of strip poker with a heavily muscled and slightly oiled Demi God. Like Helios, Kevin Sorbo or Chris Hemsworth. Or Ryan Reynolds. And yes, I know Ryan isn’t a real Demi God like Helios, Kevin or Chris, but c’mon – its Ryan Reynolds guys. I’d totally gamble your souls to try and see him up close and personal without his shirt.
