Amanda’s TV program is, as last time, from Shards, by Jade Griffin and Trevor Black.
I was allowed three no-questions-asked Mental Health Days a year during elementary school by my parents. Invoke them, they call me in, I stay home for the day. Bad idea to use those all at once though. Made the rest of the year hell. XD
So, is she acting out because She’s mad at her mom? Or is it because she’s counting on her going easy on her because of her orphan issues?
Probably a little bit of both.
Plus possibly testing the boundaries. Kids do this normally, usually, and Amanda’s just doing it in some… even more dysfunctional ways.
possibly ‘Manda thinks the “Honeymoon” phase of being back with her Mom is the new normal, not the reality of Andi keeping her nose and her act clean to keep custody. Amanda needs to go to school, Andi has to keep earning enough to keep them fed and housed, and the world isn’t a permanent weekend.
I suspect Amanda’s in for a rude awakening, with boundaries against which she will be pushing. Hard.
Hope Andi’s up for pushing back.
My parents didn’t do ‘mental health days’, but if we really didn’t want to go to school, we could stay home and do chores all day, instead.
I don’t think I ever took them up on it.
I was homeschooled, and we usually still had to do at least a little bit when we were sick. Not all of it, but depending on the severity of the sickness, we usually had to at least try to do a little math, and maybe a little language arts. We were all huge readers, so the reading got done anyway, no matter how terrible we felt. (It was usually one of the few things we felt good enough to do.)
If I legit had to stay home from school, it didn’t matter how “sick” I was. I was put to work, to prevent abuses of the system. Chickenpox? I did chores around the house.
When I was diagnosed with diabetes as a child, my mom felt guilty about putting me to work around the house for having missed school.
I found more creative ways to take time off.
Note that this did not stop my parents from putting me to work when I stayed home “sick”.
Yeah… my mom was like “Oh well. Too late now. I don’t feel like taking you to school anyway, let’s play videogames.” Needless to say, my mom was not perfect mom. That being said it still happened rarely because my dad threw fits when he found out we didn’t go to school, or that our grades slipped.
We’ve got two sides of the family that have dealt with CPS issues on more than one occasion (one chronically, the other occasionally). If you have any sort of CPS involvement — and orphans definitely would, even after being reunited with biological parents — then missing school more than a certain number of days is a big red flag.
I found this out because one side of the family ended up not caring too much about getting the kids in regularly, to the point where it seemed more normal for them to skip Fridays than to show up that day.
I have a hard time having a grace attitude toward that family in more than one area — it’s something I really need to work on — but the education side of things adds up this way:
1. They don’t care about getting the kids to school regularly, unless consequences start happening.
2. They let the kids make chronically bad grades and only seem to panic when they’re getting flunking grades (as in, C’s and D’s have a neutral reaction, and a couple of B’s are beyond what’s expected).
3. One of the kids (my nephew) spends almost every weekend at our house, yet fights tooth and nail to avoid any sort of learning over here — and his mother takes his side UNTIL the aforementioned flunking.
4. My nephew’s reading skills have actually gone BACKWARDS (he’s reading lower-level books now than he was able to read a year ago, and refuses to even attempt anything higher than the books his school says are right for him).
5. And yet, bring up the fact that homeschoolers consistently test higher than public school students, and he has the temerity to tell me it’s not true — on the same logic he uses with everything else, “My aunt is wrong because she cannot possibly be right” and “I know this because I am twelve.”
I grew up on Reader’s Digest and was enjoying it when I was twelve or fourteen — and it lived up to its name far better at the time than it does today (when it looks more like a website than a collection of book excerpts). My nephew’s mom has pointed out that she finds it so difficult to make it through a regular book (due to reading skill and attention span) that she basically doesn’t read anything an adult would normally be reading (though, apparently due to the flunking, the adults have at least started reading with my nephew each evening, which is a big step up for them).
And yet she seems to have no higher aspirations of reading skill for her kids (or for other areas I could mention). That’s the part that really burns me. It’s one thing to have a poor education or other bad elements in your background, and maybe be too old or too harried to change those, but to accept them as the baseline for your kids?
At least Andi has some sense of wanting her kid to have better than she had.
Yeah. That is Really Not Good. But, all my attempts to live other people’s lives for them have failed badly 🙁 I hope there’s still time for the kids. You are setting a good example even if they’re not telling you that.
“All my attempts to live other people’s lives for them have failed badly.” That is a quote I need to have tattooed somewhere. Except that I don’t do tattoos.
Thanks for that thought, though. Ranks up there with “Someone is wrong on the internet!” as a powerful reminder that some things aren’t in my power to control, and to stop stressing over them.
Henna it. Or marker:)
Or, get it printed on a T-shirt or some other item.
You’re fighting an uphill battle, to be sure! Ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and read about that. Movie stars read scripts, musicians read music and lyrics, heck even mechanics read car manuals. Find something that interests him and read it together. Lord knows I’m dying of boredom going over Taylor Lautner and Justin Beiber gossip mags with my mentally ill cousin, but she’ll read them! He should be able to handle R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series (retro!) and Marcus Emerson’s “Diary of a Sixth Grade Ninja” (brand new!) series. Tell him there are awesome stories he can’t even get to until he steps his game up and not everything comes out as a movie. I also recommend “sequential fantasy” YA series such as Percy Jackson or Artemis Fowl because they are easy reads and the action will usually get them hooked for the next book.
*points up to previous post about mother* Your nephews mother sounds like my mother was. I was lucky enough to have a stepfather who cared about my education and consistently ensured I ‘killed time’ at the library regularly while he had things to do. My mother never made it past a 4th grade reading level really and I can’t get her to pick up a book to save her life. I count my blessings that I’m in graduate school by comparison. The only thing I can say is to keep pushing it with your nephew, be ‘that aunt’ that constantly tries to educate him. Do things like play scrabble and similar games if you must. Good luck D:
Alphaghoul> Either way, I don’t like her attitude. Geez, thinks she can get away with anything? Wow. I would like to see some punishment but, well, Andi appears to be in a rush LOL.
And… Yay! More Shards! Thanks, Dave!
I was crafty about getting out of school, but went about it in a much smarter way than Amanda. For example, there was the getting out of fourth and fifth grade a week early, “Because my parents have to drive cross country to see our elderly relatives”. Later on, I just started filling out all the paperwork parents were supposed to fill out at the beginning of the year, so when I wrote my own notes to excuse my absences, the handwriting matched.
Finally in high school, I just planned really really well. I knew all the girls who took role, and made arrangements for them to never ever mark me absent. I made sure to show up on every test date, and knew someone in each of my classes to turn in the homework that was assigned. When I did attend, I made sure to be very very quiet and go unnoticed as much as I could. I was on the honor roll throughout most of high school as well (until an incident in my senior year left me in the hospital, and I was expected to not only make up six weeks of classwork and tests, but to keep up with daily homework as well).
Planning and street smarts served me well.
What on earth did you DO when you weren’t at school? And please don’t say “drugs”.
I did. But without them the infections wouldn’t have cleared up
Nothing. I read or slept or played video games.
Or worked… but technically I wasn’t even old enough for that when I did graduate. Being 16 businesses insisted I get a work permit from my school… except I had already graduated and so couldn’t.
How old were you when you graduated, then?
16.
I would have graduated even sooner, but the school wouldn’t advance me because I was too small. When I was in the sixth grade, the kids in kindergarten were bigger than me. Luckily, in Junior high, there was a boy that was even smaller than I.
Are you posting this from within a secret volcano lair of some kind?
Like.
I wish. I just learned to be clever about things, and to most importantly cover my own ass.
It’s hard to be punished for missing school when one is on the honor roll.
I do have my environmentally sealed cave with WiFi all picked out in Vietnam, though… for when I have the resources to relocate there.
Between 3rd and 6th grade, I didn’t miss a day of school, and the only day I missed of school in 7th grade was for my great-grandmother’s funeral. I didn’t have a “mental health day” until I was a senior in high school, and at that point, it was my parents insisting I stay home and rest because I was so incredibly stressed out; I was running the school’s yearbook with no faculty advisor, four assistant editors who continuously bickered, and an unsupportive yet demanding school populous will do that to a girl. That’s also why I had my first stark white hair at the age of 17. Fun times.
Interesting. Kids finding ways to outright avoid large chunks of school. Abundant confirmation that something is wrong with our school system… and yet another reason for me to be glad I was homeschooled.
My first quarter in college (for which, by the by, I was terrified, having never really been in a classroom environment, and being terrified of failure in general, but it turned out I was better equipped to take college seriously than maybe 40% of my fellow students)… well, actually the summer beforehand, I knew I’d be taking Japanese classes, so I studied hard and memorized both basic alphabets because I thought that was normal to do.
Of course, I got to class and found that it was expected that no one would do that, so our first quarter was spent turning in drill on the first alphabet. I dutifully completed it even as it bored me to death.
The second quarter, we were going to do the second alphabet. I went to the teacher the first day and said “Hey, I learned this last summer”; she tested me right then and there, then said I didn’t have to turn in the regular homework and could turn in basically anything I wanted.
Over the rest of my two years of study, I never completed a regular homework assignment. I translated manga, wrote stories and poetry, and I can’t even remember what all else. I soared ahead of the material presented and it was awesome.
Not that I have that great a command of the language now, after over a decade without using it much, but it was my first taste of being able to bargain my way out of schooling by getting ahead of the material, and the sheer Spade-style fun of having broken out of the system. If at some point I actually had kids that actually had to be in the public school system, I’d certainly see if this sort of trick would work in that system as well.
…I don’t expect it would, but I’m curious. Everything I’ve heard from the kids in my life (nieces and nephews, and some online) is that trying to step outside the system is PUNISHED, and if not punished then actively discouraged. Even to the point where my nephew is trying to persuade me that he “shouldn’t” be reading any books not specifically on his reading list. As if reading practice spent in other books (of similar reading level) somehow doesn’t transfer. Yargh.
Depends largely on whether the policies that led to No Child Left Behind are still in practice, as “teaching to the test” is something current teachers loathe.
I was once, literally, sent to the principal’s office for being too advanced in math. It was second grade, and I had learned about negative numbers before they were officially taught to us. When we were given math problems like “3 – 8”, we were supposed to answer “0”, not “-5”. When I refused to do it the way I was told, I got sent to the office and my parents were called. Mom’s response was, “You’re punishing her for getting the answer right?” She basically shamed them into letting me use negative numbers a year early.
I was also disciplined for using cursive writing before it was taught to my peers, although that might have been because it’s slightly harder to read than printing.
I’ve heard of people who took their children out of public school because their child had independently learned cursive writing during 1st grade and was told that she was not allowed to use it in school. Not only that, her parents were told to not allow her to use it at home either because “no child that age is ready for that.” They called it the c*** that it was, and pulled her out of school.
Glad your parents didn’t back down either. 🙂
Actually, this was even more stupid than that – I was classified as “learning delayed but gifted”, since I was ahead of my peer group in some fields but behind them in others. So, for part of every day (or maybe it was every other day; this was years ago and I don’t have perfect recall) I was taken out of the classroom for tutoring.
Mom was annoyed because the school was punishing me for being smart. She was angry because my school taught me how to use negative numbers and cursive writing. I just apparently wasn’t supposed to do it in front of my classmates. (Not that I was told that in advance, or ever given an explanation as to why …) Anyway, I’m glad I had her as an advocate.
Oh, man. Poor kid. That’s child abuse. I was a very quiet, biddable girl at school, but if one thing could ever have pushed me into open defiance, it would be telling me I wasn’t supposed to read… well, just about any material I could get my hands on. The phone book, if I couldn’t find anything else. Seriously, there are stories hidden in the Yellow Pages.
Yeah, the yellow pages, the plot is thin,… But it has a cast of thousands!!
What’s neat is that within the cast there’s a lot of people who are related… and if you get multiple additions you can try to puzzle out why certain characters went missing.
Excuse me… what is a ‘Mental Health Day’? Never heard of it…
Based on the comic, taking a parent-approved day off of school, rather than stabbing everyone in the eyes with scissors, because you can no longer contain your rage/boredom/aggression.
Never heard of it myself, before, but I know that when bullying was at its worst in 7th-8th grade, my mom sometimes let me stay at home sick (I was so stressed so badly that I actually started to get fevers out of nowhere, sometimes they developed into a cold or worse, but once I made the deal with mom that occasionally she would let me stay in bed the whole day, the most obvious stress symptoms went away). I guess those would count as “mental health day”s.
That’s when you take the day off from work, because you are fried or going through some crazy stress at home. There’s no such thing (officially) as a “Mental Health Day” so most people simply call in sick to get the day off.
Best definition of a “mental health day” I ever saw came from a Sally Forth comic. I don’t have enough time to look for it in the online archive, but I can transcribe it (to the best of my memory) as follows:
1st panel:
Hilary (Sally’s daughter, who at this point, is about the same age as Selkie and Amanda): Where’s Mom?
Ted: She’s taking a mental health day.
2nd panel:
Hilary: Mom’s cracking up?
Ted: She’s not cracking up. She just needs some time to sit and think about whatever she wants to think about.
3rd panel:
Hilary: That sounds like goofing off.
Ted: Lazy people goof off. Hard-working people take mental health days.
This is known as “testing boundaries”. It’s where kids keep doing more and more until their parents slap them down.
“Ooooohhhhh. So I CAN’T build a fire in the living room sofa and barbecue the dog? Good to know.”
I don’t see this as “acting out”. This is perfectly normal child behavior.
Glad to see that Andi is actually being a mom here.
And yes, Amanda is being normal here. Not every kid is a saint or a brat.
Yes! As a mom, I’m actually torn on whether Andi should allow it or not. On one hand, Amanda really did go through a crazy weekend and it might be good for both of them to take an extra day off to process. On the other hand, it’s really a bad precedent to set—especially as they are just establishing household rules. Also, by the time they get to the school Amanda will have missed nearly half the day and the commute will make Andi even more late for work—versus either calling in sick or taking Amanda with her. I kind of have a sense we’re going to see Andi bring Amanda to work giving the first two strips of this story.
I wouldn’t allow it, because it’s a bad message to a child that when things go topsy turvey you can just hide and everything will be fine. But at the same time, I wouldn’t get all that angry. She’s had a rough weekend and it’s understandable she’d want time away. So no, she doesn’t get her way, but she also doesn’t get yelled at in my eyes.
Obviously the right thing to do would have been to discuss it beforehand and ask if she can stay home rather than this.
I think Amanda might ACTUALLY not know she’s not allowed to do that. Whatever her adoptive home exact rules were, she’s probably not going to expect to have to follow them now, and in the orphanage they definitely did not have access to the staff’s alarm clocks.
She most probably did know what she was doing by turning off the alarm clock, she just didn’t have the badness severity scale for it calibrated.
(Like, I was also never allowed to steal small bits of ingredients when cooking right into my mouth, especially not raw meat, yet I’m an adult and I still do this. Not a big deal)
And I never had a system for mental health days, but there were a couple of times when my parents allowed me to miss school, one time for a whole week, because I was messed up (once because of bullying, that one time for a friend betraying me)
I think she’s playing off technicalities.
She doesn’t know the actual rules of this new household. But she probably has a pretty good idea that it’s not okay to just turn off the alarm, let Mom sleep in, and skip school. She just decided to test boundaries, like others are saying, and to have plausible deniability while doing so.
Amanda may be a lot of things, but she’s not stupid. She pays attention to details and can figure things out, and make connections between similar elements in different environments — like most humans of regular IQ.
I pretended to be sick a bit in middle and high school…but in retrospect? I wish I had learned to copy my parents’ handwriting and played hooky a couple times a year instead. Would have been more interesting. Does that make me a terrible person to say? 🙂
So, did anybody else notice Andi totally parkour over the back of the couch?
Before there was a French name for that, we just called it “running around”. 😛
Only the French could turn running away into a martial art.
Heh 🙂
Of all the French cowardice jokes I’ve ever heard, I think I found precisely one of them to be funny. It’s from SFDebris, when he reviewed the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation:
“And then… well, I hate to stereotype, so I’ll just present you with the facts. At exactly 18 minutes and 45 seconds into the pilot, the French captain says: ‘Commander, signal the following in all languages and on all frequencies: We surrender.’ Make of it what you will.”
Benjamin, yours has just been added to that short list 🙂
Yes! Isn’t it supposed to be an inflatable couch? If so, that’s all the more impressive!
Amanda, you’re in elementary school; you get two “mental health days” every damn week. >.>
Plus almost three months of them during the summer. (I’m 56 years old, and I still miss summer vacations.)
The thirtieth year my Father worked for his employer, he achieved three weeks of vacation from the company, which was average back then. When I was in Germany we started at a company with 6 weeks vacation, but you had to complete 30 days employment with the Firm to get it, though.
I really like andi’s hair in this. Also my mom let me take mental health days if I needed them (usually 3-4 per year) plus I always got to skip pep rallies because my mom thought they were a waste of time when I could be home doing things I enjoy (I’m a big reader plus she always got to skip them too so I guess it’s a tradition).
I never even thought of the concept of mental health days until I was starting college and I heard about it online, but it sounds like a good idea for my future kids. They’re gonna have even more to study than I did when the time comes. As for now, I am sometimes tempted to have a day to decompress, but I also like those days where the teachers give those who simply show up extra credit when a bunch of people aren’t there because they know there’s no quiz or attendance being taken that day.
I like them especially for anyone below college level, because younger kids are forced to sit still & pay attention for 6+ hours a day which is not natural for them at all… and high schoolers have so much stress & crap going on in their lives, they -need- them just to stay sane. That’s not to say I don’t approve of post-HS mental health days but for me (I have severe ADD) all of my classes are usually only 1 1/2 hour long with 2 or 3 a day (and also usually very important, I’m a bio major). So being that I have all weekend (fri sat sun) plus half of all days free (after class is over), and usually one day in the middle where I dont have any class at all (i plan it that way), I don’t usually take mental health days unless there’s an emergency. The stuff in college that you miss with my kind of major is stuff you really need someone to explain to you thoroughly. For other classes (non science & math) I can see it being easier to catch up on (& therefor easier to skip).