Back to School Is Like a Volleyball Aimed at Your Head

School is starting in just over a week for my kids, and I'm thinking a lot right now about beach volleyball.

Every Olympics, I seem to develop a fascination with a particular sport. The last Winter Olympics it was curling, which I still don't understand the point of but find strangly captivating nonetheless. This Summer Olympics just past, it was beach volleyball. I was up off my couch, jumping and screaming, as Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor dove for shots and then sprang back up faster than a gymnast off a bad dismount. I got so into it that at one point, my son had to come out of his bedroom and admonish me to be quiet so he could sleep.

And now the Olympics is over, and I'm looking ahead into the upcoming school year, with my son starting high school and my daughter starting her junior year, and I know what's coming. What's coming is the educational equivalent of a beach volleyball game. I can see those hard balls screaming toward my head. Schedule problems. Homework. Bullies. Anxiety. Behavior problems. Mismanagement. IEPs. Testing.

I've got to dive after them. Do my best to hit them perfectly. Set them up for others to handle. Hit the ground, spit out sand, pop right up again.

It's relentless and overwhelming. The stakes are high. The other side is constantly looking for signs of weakness to take advantage of. You barely celebrate one victory when somebody is spiking a new challenge right at you. This is my life, September to June. Yours, too, maybe?

On the one hand, we have to do all this without fanfare. A little cheering from the crowd would be nice, now and then, wouldn't it? A coach to talk strategy with when someone trash-talks our kid in the lunchroom or misserves an accommodation. Bob Costas ready to ask us the details of a particularly well-argued teacher conference.

On the other hand, we don't have to wear bikinis, so that's something.

I would kind of like one of those big gobs of black tape to put on my shoulder, though. Might make me look a little tougher at the next IEP meeting.

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