Roanoke Visit

Today I took Colby to Roanoke to visit with his UVA doctors. They said he looked great and was growing properly. Barb said that his tyrozine level was low (that's what our body turns phenylalinine into), but she wouldn't worry about it until there were several consecutive blood tests that came back low. She assured me that it wasn't anything we were doing wrong, just that it was something to be taken care of if it comes to that. I took half a day off from school, but I ended up driving to Roanoke, seeing the doctor, going to Burlington Coat Factory and driving home before my students even packed up their stuff at school. But I got an excellent nap in :-)

Here's a little heads up on what's going on in our local news. A teacher in Roanoke County is being investigated for giving a student an "obscene" book. We were discussing this among the English teachers and I found out what was in the book - bad language, some sexual refrences and some violence. The parent objected to the book after he saw his son reading it, which was weird to the parent because the child never reads. My question for the parent - if your child who never reads was reading, shouldn't you be happy about it instead of trying to fire the teacher for giving him something interesting to read? Have you ever been to a high school? No matter how much supervision a school provides there will still be cussing in the hallways and cafeteria, bad behavior in and out of school, and violence in and out of school. Have you ever read To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Outsiders, or 1984, or The Catcher in the Rye? Those books draw the same types of objections, but we still teach them. Why not applaud the teacher for getting your child to read instead of trying to crusify her? If you wonder why this book appeals to your child maybe you should look at how you're parenting, what your child is watching on TV and what sorts of video games they're playing - not the schools, who do not condone those sorts of things, but know that they happen.