Today's Progress

In a way, the way things have worked out with the school is kind of liberating. We now know to expect nothing useful from them, so we don't have concern ourselves with trying to bring about a useful outcome. I slept better than I had in a while last night and I woke up feeling motivated to get things done. We enrolled our guy in a two day video game design class, got all the information about a tutoring program (Sylvan) that he might like, rented a car so that we can take him around to these various places, got info on kids activities at the local community center and actually took our guy to a "Boys Night Out" at this same community center. Now that I see it written down, that really is a lot for one day.

The Boys Night Out worked really well. There are usually about 8 boys from nine to twelve years old there, but for some reason there was only one other kid. This one other kid was of the type who likes to stand still and list a lot of information about video games. They had a nice quiet time and exchanged phone numbers at the end. Our guy was pretty reluctant about the phone number thing, because the idea that he might have to have someone over was pretty intimidating, and he did make some complaints to me. Fortunately, his play mate didn't seem to notice his worries. I'm not going to push the play date thing, but one can always hope. Unfortunately, it will be another month until the next Boys Night Out.

This kid also turned out to go to a funky alternative school. I looked it up on the web and it does seem interesting. We hadn't been aware that there were alternative schools in this city. That's kind of refreshing too. I don't know that our guy would do best in an alternative school -- in fact, I could see the lack of structure being extremely difficult -- but just to be reminded that the closed minded folks around the corner are not the only version of education is somehow relaxing.