Think you're having a tough day? Try being a kindergartner. No. Really. Kindergartners are the latest victims of stress. So much stress, in fact, that a school in Germany has now set up spa services for their kindergarten classes.

Just picture it: Kids getting massages. Kids getting pedicures. Kids getting ... now wait just a gosh darn minute here. I want to be a kindergartner!

One of the things no one ever tells you about becoming a parent is just how hard the transitions will be. The first time I dropped my 2-year-old at her half day of daycare (one day a week!), I sat in the car sobbing. But it isn't just the first time, either.

I cry when my kids go back to school after spring and summer break. I cry when they sleep in big boy/girl beds and learn to hold their spoons. This stuff is hard for moms (and dads) no matter what. But kindergarten? Whoa Nellie! No one ever tells you how hard that will be.

Articles like this one about the new pressure in kindergarten suggesting that childhood is becoming truncated and kindergarten is no longer fun don't really help either. I want my baby to stay a baby! And I am not alone.

Think you're having a bad day? Go ahead. Whine about it. Or take a page out of the book of 7-year-old Annie Clark. The first grader was born without hands, but she just won an award for her fabulous handwriting.

Yes, you read that right. While you've been moaning about how your 6-year-old didn't bother to clean the toothpaste out of the sink this morning, Annie Clark has been kicking penmanship booty with her forearms!

No, my son didn't hijack my computer and write that headline, it's true, according to researchers. A new study says that, with the exception of the last couple of years of high school, homework provides few, if any, benefits to students; it may even impede their learning.

So all of that time I spend trying to coerce my second grader to sit down and complete his assignments, and all the breath I expend trying to explain why homework is so important to his future is all a big waste? Yes, say Australian researchers who included 10,000 children in their study. They concluded that children could be better served spending that homework time doing something else more beneficial. They even went so far as to say that only students in senior high should do homework.

At the risk of sounding like one of those "I walked to school in the snow with no shoes" sermons we've all heard from our grandparents at one time or another, I'm completely aghast at a story out of Oklahoma in which parents are outraged because their precious babies are being made to attend class with no air conditioning. In MARCH.

According to KOCO, some parents in Oklahoma City are complaining that the school district won't turn on the A/C until April 15. Yes, temperatures have been unseasonably high this year, but not that high. It's been in the high 70s there, but you'd think the kids were being baked based on the reactions of some parents.

With some of the outdated references I've seen on the papers that show up in my kid's backpack (seriously, my first grader didn't know what a chalkboard was!), I wasn't surprised to hear there are plans to update tests in the New York City schools. But I was surprised to hear the directions the schools' politically correct planners gave the testmakers.

No dinosaurs. No birthdays. No Halloween. No terrorism. No slavery. No divorce. And none of dozens more words on assessment tests for English, math, social studies, and science.

Funny. I thought they were trying to educate kids? And they can't talk about dinosaurs? Or terrorism? Or slavery? I learned all of those words in school ... how about you?

I'm going to go out on a limb here folks. I don't think there is a parent out there who wakes their 8-year-old up, slips a lunchbag in their backpack, and sends them out the door in the morning thinking "Hooray! Today is the day my kid sees two other third graders having oral sex in their classroom!" So. Wrong. And apparently so true.

A teacher has been fired after administrators say that exact horror happened under a table in a classroom at the Tallulah Elementary School in Louisiana's Madison Parish. And I can't help but think of all the OTHER little kids who are sharing a third grade classroom with two kids who engage in oral sex.

How's this for backwards: Which type of institution would you expect to allow the use of corporal punishment, prisons or public schools? If you guessed prisons, well, I have good news and bad news for you ... the good news is, you're probably a perfectly sane and logical human being.

The bad news is, you're wrong.

That's right, spanking in public schools is still allowed in -- get this -- 19 states. 19! 19 states in this here United States of America!

And it's a very lucky thing for me that I don't happen to live in any of those states, because if some teacher beat one of my kids with a wooden paddle -- parental consent is not generally required, by the way -- well, that would be a very bad day. Very bad things would happen. And I would not feel the least bit guilty about those very bad things.