more about why i hate school, and how i'm apparently all about censorship on the elementary school level

Hello blog friends.

Today I am sick with nervousness over my meeting tomorrow at school. As you may recall, last week Miss A brought home a library book I found appalling. She goes to a school that includes preschool through 4th grade, so the oldest kids served by the library are 10 (or have the approximate mental age of 10).

Below, please find some fine selections from "The Very Scary Almanac" by Eric Elfman. If you are a sensitive person you might want to skip this post.

So anyway. What caught my eye about this book was that a blurb on the back cover touted it as "a trivia treat for the occult-minded." Because I grew up in a church where having a fecal occult blood screening meant they were testing your poop for the presence of demons, I started flipping though the book.

Most of it was stuff about Godzilla and Bigfoot, zombies and vampires, ghosts, superstitions, etc. There was some benign stuff about witchcraft, then it went into the torture devices and methods used on accused witches -- thumbscrews, eyegougers, cutting off fingers and hands, cutting out the tongue, etc. Before I had kids I was not bothered by reading about this kind of stuff but since having kids, I find it deeply upsetting and I started to feel ill.

So I flipped through some more, and found the section on "Horrible Humans." Nice detailed description of how to kill someone via impalement Vlad the Impaler-style. Cute side note about how one time he had these guys' turbans nailed to their heads since they hadn't removed them when they encountered him. Great tidbit about some guy in Wisconsin in the 1980s, who made belts and lampshades from human skin. Then some info on Jack the Ripper and the ax murders of Lizzie Borden's father and step-mother. It's all presented in this lighthearted way.

On Monday, I called the school to tell the librarian about it. I assumed no one had ever read the book all the way through. The school secretary said the librarian was out. She took my info and said the librarian would call me back Tuesday.

No one called on Tuesday, or on Wednesday morning, so I called Wednesday afternoon. The secretary was surprised the librarian hadn't called me back, and transferred my call to the library.

Apparently calling the library is WAY the wrong move. I said why I was calling, that I wanted to talk about this book. The librarian was way flustered and said she was between classes. I asked if she'd like to call me back. She said yes, but sounded angry, and then started in about how she couldn't possibly call me back until next week because she had THIRTEEN classes -- THIRTEEN! -- on Thursday and she's at a different school Friday and anyway I need to send the book back before she can talk to me.

I asked if I could just bring the book in and talk to her then. She was increasingly angry-sounding or agitated as the conversation went on. She started in about her 13 classes again, and I said, "I'm only calling because I left a message on Monday and they said you'd call me back Tuesday."

She said, "Well, I wouldn't even have GOTTEN the message until Tuesday MORNING!" But it was Wednesday afternoon... A simple, "I'm sorry, I've been so busy and I'm just getting caught up!" would have been fine.

I hadn't even expected this conversation to be confrontational. I actually expected the response to be something like, "Oh dear! Thank you for telling me!"

She continued getting super-bitchy and finally ended with scheduling a meeting with me for tomorrow morning at 8:30. Because I am 6, I cried off and on all day because she was so nasty and these are the people I'm sending my kids off to every day and I was just trying to look out for my kids and other kids but she's acting like I'm a giant pain in the ass for even calling... bleh. And I posted about it on Facebook, but I didn't even share my true feelings about the librarian because of course it's a public forum. But I guess one of my acquaintances who helps in the library shared how upset I was, because I got a call from the principal Friday night saying the librarian had asked her to be involved in our meeting. So I decided to involve Jason in our meeting too. And she also said there's a two page form I need to have filled out before our meeting.

Apparently the librarian was out the previous week because her dad died, which is awful and explains why she was such a bitch. So I felt bad for being upset with her for a minute, until my friend reminded me that I shouldn't need to know what's going on in her personal life in order to have a very simple phone call. And she could have taken me up on my offer to just call me back and discuss it at a better time.

Almost any involvement I have with the office staff makes me feel like I'm intruding, or like I'm inconveniencing them. The classroom teachers aren't like that, and the other specials teachers I've met aren't like that, but this librarian definitely made me feel like I was incredibly rude for intruding on her day with my phone call. I deal with the school's MANY requests to join fundraisers and fill out the same 20 pages of forms each year for each kid even though nothing has changed, but if I have a concern about their actual business -- my kids' education -- they (not classroom teachers) act like I'm out of my mind for bothering them.