I'm sitting here laughing at myself after I've just looked at my son's progress report.
He has a wonderful teacher this year, who actually sends our progress reports the new fashioned way, by email. So, for all the technologically addicted parents out there, including me, this is a little bit of heaven in a rural county where we can still remember when dial-up was king.
I digress.
I'm laughing not because my son's progress report is dismally bad, in fact it's very good. I'm laughing at my response to it.
He received an A- in Spelling, a subject in which he aces all the tests. Unlike his poor mother who did not have the benefits of learning to read phonetically, has to spell check everything and still is able to find a least a couple of typos in every piece of work she writes.
In a lot of households an A - would be a pretty decent grade. In mine? Oh no, my email to his teacher began, "I'm concerned that he's getting such a low grade in Spelling."
Now, I never would have thought I would be one of those parents that thinks an A - is a low grade. I've always fancied myself as one of those parents who is very encouraging to her child, who would look at a B+ as an achievement, but reality is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, and, I realize that I am not one of those wonderfully wonderful parents at all.
I have to accept that I am that other type of parent. You know the ones. They insist that their children are super bright and need to be challenged more. They ask the teacher to give their child more work to practice on those pesky Math and Language problems not too mention Spelling. In short they are insufferable.
The other day, my son came home very upset with me. The night before had been Back to School Night. I had told the teacher that I was concerned that he wasn't getting enough homework. I then asked what I could do to help him become more proficient in Language which, besides Spelling, is his short suit. We had a good discussion and I left it at that. I didn't see anything in that conversation that would lead to my son's reaction the next day.
"Mom," he said to me. "Could you not talk to the teacher anymore, we all had to work more today because of you."
Because of me? I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I had said the night before that would lead to such a horrible learning experience in class the next day. In fact, I hadn't even come away with much in the way of concrete advice from his teacher except that eventually there would be more homework and she would think about it.
"What do you mean?' I asked innocently.
"She told us you told her that we should diagram our Bible verses for language because of you."
"Was it just you or everybody?' I asked.
"Everybody," he said.
"She told the whole class that?"
"Yes," was his sullen answer.
Now, I remember actually asking his teacher if I could come up with some biblically based way of learning language but I don't remember actually saying anything about diagramming their Bible verse in that way. But, come to think of it, if that's what his teacher came up with, I thought it was a great idea.
"Well, that's not exactly what I said, but it's a great idea,” I said.
He just looked at me and that's another reason why I'm laughing, not only am I one of those insufferable parents who expect more from their children, but, I'm also one of those parents who think being friends with their children is bunk until they reach the age of 30. This is okay because he's not going to be happy when he finds out I'm looking for more work in Spelling too.
