e-mail letter to my 6th grade son's teacher

I wrote this last month to my son's teacher, and thought blog readers might find it interesting. You will note that this letter was dated March 29th, two days before Terri Schiavo died.

Subject: Chris' project(s)
Bcc: to Grandma (and now to blogosphere)
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:59:14 -0700

Mr. <Language Arts Teacher>,

I want to let you know that Christopher is having alot of trouble working on his Lowry Trilogy project. We know that another iteration of it was due a couple of weeks ago, and yet where he used to be animated in his ideas in getting papers done, he now has ground to a dead halt, where he just sits and stares at it, and nothing comes out. He had told me in the struggle to complete the last round, that in order to get through reading Lois Lowry's books, he had to make himself go numb. I think now it has reached the point, particularly with the horrible current events in the news, that wallowing in Lois Lowry's euthanasia as children's entertainment is just more than this 11 year old boy can handle.

I am kind of at a loss as to how to help him. I believe he can do the work, and that it is only the subject matter that is causing the problem. Being a boy, I think he doesn't like to admit just how sensitive he is. But he is no dummie. He sees how all this is playing out in the real world.

I hope that you might have some suggestions, or at least patience. I think where Chris was going with it was to have a couple of the characters somehow re-educating' the villages involved and saving the day. But now he knows in the real world, that some folks just prefer not to understand, or are even cruel just for the sake of being cruel, and that's hard to process.

Suzanne (last name & phone number)