Second grade woes, city assholes

I've been writing blog posts in my head but not on the computer lately. Haven't had much time to sit down and type, and the mental piles of post-it notes keep getting mixed up and covered up by new notes.

We're going to Shanghai next week to visit schools, though, so maybe things will calm down after that. Right now Aiden's under a lot of pressure to keep up with this school work (I will have more to say about that later), plus his English, since he has to test in English to enter the new school. That was harder than I anticipated. His speaking and listening ability is fine for everyday life, but his writing is poor, particularly his spelling. But on top of that he had to relearn a lot of skills in English. He does math every day, for instance, but in Korean, so we had to switch him to an English math word problem book. (The English-language workbooks are not as good quality as the Korean ones, I have to say. At least I haven't found one that I really like.) He had to learn vocab like greater than, less than, volume, mass, etc. and all the American units of measurement, as well as American money. That's a lot to cover in a short time. He also had to do a lot more writing. We ended up dropping Chinese, at least for now (he went from 3 classes + home practice everyday to one class a week currently). I decreased his schedule and he's still doing about 3 hours of homework every day. Much of that is his school homework. I will probably write more about this whole thing at some point, but in short, it's been a really stressful few months. And we're only in second grade!

Over at printculture, here's my latest post on City Assholes.