Mighty Mouse? No. Mighty Mom.

After a conversation I had today with my mom, I have to say that she's amazing for more than just her ability to reabsorb her own bodily fluids.  Few people may recognize that she's also an educational superhero.  A former kindergarten teacher, Mom has been volunteering for a special education reading program for elementary school kids.  That's cool enough, but she's also been unsatisfied with the way the school system tends to give many of these students the shaft.  Many of them are there just because they did bad on some IQ or reading test that they probably weren't even trying on, and then they got thrown into this reading program and lose touch with everyone and keep getting behind.  Nobody, be they the teachers, teachers aids, or principle, is checking up on these students to see if they should actually stay in the program.  Mom says she's the only one who knows the level they are on and recognizes that some of them shouldn't even be there, and she's trying to communicate this to people who have never contacted her to see how these students are doing.  Anyway there are a lot of other little things that are happening that she's not satisfied with, so she's been compiling information for awhile and gathering an army of parents and other people in the system to change things.  She's doing all of this just because it's important to her, and although she says she wouldn't mind getting paid for the work she's putting in, her primary goal is to make sure these kids get the education they deserve.  She did something similar when she quit teaching and decided to write a bunch of letters to a bunch of influential people pointing out how, among several other things, all these new adopted reading programs that are being implemented are just trying to put all kids in the same box, which gives the slow kids and the fast kids the shaft.  They are designed to relieve the teacher of the responsibility of actually catering to their students needs, which means the teacher doesn't actually have to know what he/she is doing.  The program does all the work.  One size fits all.  Lame.

So Mom has been on a personal crusade to change the subpar Madison School District and save the world, which I think is pretty cool for someone who could spend all that free time she has getting her nails done and gossiping with the gals.  She's also been doing home repairs, studying religious and biological theory, and watching the Ken Burns Civil War Documentary.

Mom's rad.

Speaking of which, nobody says it like Mr. T...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_rBidCkJxo