Things haven't gone smoothly for Zeno this week at school.   Following the success of flexi-schooling last year, when he made a lot of progress in most subects despite only going to school part-time, Zeno was supposed to be trying a slightly more extended timetable this term - three full days and one half day as opposed to one full day and three half days last year.   He's coped okay so far although he refused to go in on a couple of days and was genuinely sick one day too.  

Now that he's a teenager his body clock has changed a bit, and he's more of a night owl.  Getting him up at 7am-ish is an ordeal for both of us, although it seems to be getting easier (I hope those aren't famous last words).   Monday is his day off so his week at school began on Tuesday, and it should have been a positive day as he had a history lesson (the only one of the week) and the topic was the first world war, one of his passionate interests.

Unfortunately he got into an argument with the history teacher about the fact that he uses a pen, not a pencil, which means his mistakes can't be just rubbed out with an eraser and presents a conundrum when he has written his answers in the wrong boxes.   When he told me about this exchange, just hearing about the fact that he was writing sentences made my heart give a little leap, he hates doing handwriting and it's a source of worry to me how he would manage to compose and write long answers - never mind essays - in his future exams.    So it sounded like progress to me.   But the history teacher told him he should be using a pencil and brooked no arguments, although to be fair the one argument he doesn't seem to have thought of bringing forward was the plain fact that he uses a pen on the advice of the Occupational Therapist and has special permission never to use a pencil even in art, the noise and the feel of it makes him crazy.    So the lesson was derailed and it had a knock-on effect on the rest of his day at school.    His daily report page from school simply stated that he had been disruptive and argumentative during the lesson which is very annoying.    Thank God Zein is a bit more communicative now, a couple of years ago I wouldn't even have got his side of the story without extensive questioning and forensic analysis of his answers.

So that was Tuesday.   On the Wednesday there was a theatre trip in the afternoon.   Zeno was initially enthusiastic but on the actual morning of the show he said he didn't want to go and took a bit of persuading.   They were due back at school quite late, after 6pm, so the school bus couldn't bring them home and they had to be collected from school.    So I was sitting in the school lobby waiting for them to arrive back, chatting pleasantly with another mum, when the door swung open and a familiar voice shouted "good riddance to all you horrible lot, I never want to go anywhere with you again" and my heart sank.   At first it wasn't clear who he was angry at, as he walked past me shouting "if you're thinking of asking for my forgiveness you can forget it!" but the angry rejoinder "actually you owe me a big apology" came from one of his teachers who was following close behind.  

I got her version of the story there and then - at the end of the performance, as they were leaving the theatre, Zeno had apparently delved in some rubbish and picked up some chocolate and eaten it.   When she told him off about it he became verbally aggressive and continued in that vein throughout the journey home on the tube.    The teacher misinterpreted my "is that it?" as being my response to Zeno's overreaction but it was the teacher's overreaction that dismayed me.   That was even before I had Zeno's version, which was slightly different in that it involved the same teacher's discarded box of chocolates which still had one unwrapped sweet in the box and which he thought he would have, as a reward perhaps for picking up her rubbish from under the seat in front of hers and taking it to the bin.   She shouted at him, unfairly he thought, and that kind of thing always puts him out of sorts.    And once Zeno is out of sorts he stays out of sorts for at least a few hours, and unless you handle him with care he will express himself loudly and at length no matter where you are with words aimed to shock and wound.    One of the things he told me he had said was his wish that the teacher would somehow find herself on the train tracks just before the train arrived.    Of course I told him - this was on the bus home - that that was a terrible thing to say and it accounted for the poor woman's agitation when she had been speaking to me.

I sent an email to the head saying I was disappointed that relatively minor things were escalating to the point where Zeno was still seething several hours after getting home, and he replied that he agreed.

Zeno stayed home on Thursday but on Friday he set off in the school bus in the morning with instructions to apologise the the teacher for upsetting her with the horrible things he had said.   And when he came home I checked that he had done so (knowing that he wouldn't do so unless he saw the reason why), and was glad to hear that the teacher had also apologised for shouting, so it turned into a positive lesson for Zeno in resolving conflict.   I was also relieved to hear that his threat to advise her to take an anger management course hadn't been carried out, and that he'd given up his idea to propose a motion at the next school council meeting to have her sacked.