a sucky thread about sucky stupid school that sucks

does he have friends at school? school does kinda suck but having friends makes it easier.

He does have friends at school, but his closest friends are people he knows from the neighborhood who he's not in class with or are in different grades. Also, from what I understand, there's some kind of conflict between the kids he knows from his classes and the neighborhood kids. I kinda went through a similar thing in elementary schol, where I was kinda a total outcast in my grade but when I went home I hung out with kids in the grade above me who were legimately "cool kids".

He sounds really profoundly unhappy there from your description. I think if a similar thing was happening to my child at that age (esp. after two years) I would start looking for alternatives (co-ops, alternative public schools, god forbid even private school if tuition was affordable) but admittedly I live in a city where such things are readily available.

found out yesterday we "won" the public school lottery for our daughter (ie we got our first choice) so uh well I hope she likes it...

i'm of the opinion that most schools do suck in a lot of ways, but like Alex said i think i wd be exploring alternatives if there are any.

really sorry your kid's having such a hard time, i hope he grows thru the experience.

i hated school a lot a lot a lot when i was that age until 12th grade. in high school it became kind of ok because i made a game out of getting awesome grades (to the point that it was bad for my mental health and i might have had OCD, like i would start my homework over if i had to erase something) but it was socially pretty painful. i don't know how i turned out ok. i would tell my teacher in 5th grade every day "i hate school." i was a little shithead. i think school sucks for kids a lot more than it did for me even 10-20 years ago though. i know of no solution to this and still wish my parents had let me drop out when i was 10. the point is i turned out just awesome, and i'm a lawyer. the other point is i still feel scarred by it.

i do worry about schools for our kid. the public high schools in l.a. are shitty, the junior highs are no great shakes either. we live by a good elementary school! anyway if you're someone in l.a. who can afford a nice house you can afford to send your kid to private schools the whole time and they're better off, and that's sort of the unfortunate truth of the matter. not that public schools are uniformly bad. but i think the lack of pay for teachers is a big issue there. i have a friend who is a private school teacher and she probably makes 70k. the best teachers in a lot of cases go where the money is and the environment is better.

"found out yesterday we "won" the public school lottery for our daughter (ie we got our first choice) so uh well I hope she likes it..."

I think the good public elementary schools are actually pretty good so I would think she probably will.

in SF that is.

I kinda think that if you don't hate school as a kid there's probably something wrong with you... between the regimentation and the forced exposure to your (inevitably) shitty peer group there's bound to be something you find unpleasant. Learning to deal with those things is what school is really about imho.

if you don't hate school as a kid there's probably something wrong with you

I'm not a parent but I think there's hating and then there's hating imo? like when I was 12-13 I talked every day with my friend about how much we hated school, how stupid everything was, etc, but when she said she was changing school because she hated ours so much I was like "wait, what? really?!"

(she was much happier at the new place btw)

anyway learning to deal with things you think are a chore and not as good as playing video games is a useful life skill (which I don't have), but learning to deal with things that actively make you trudge home with your head hung low every day and spend all your free time dreading... eh, I think that one can wait until a later age if there's any chance something could be done about it. maybe it's all an over-dramatic charade but 2 years seems a long time to keep that up for.

"I kinda think that if you don't hate school as a kid there's probably something wrong with you..."

Uh at 7-8 I don't think most kids hate school that much. I also think there is a difference between boredom and a desire for freedom from the confines of a desk and what how's life is describing his son's reaction to be which strikes me as something much more profoundly unhappy.

On weekends, he starts complaining as early as Saturday afternoon that "the weekend is almost over" because he dreads going back to school so much.

Still does this, even this past weekend which led into the last week of school: half days, field day, assemblies, etc. Thank god we've got another year in the bag, I guess.