Reports cards came out last week, and no surprise, M.’s was all over the map. Outstanding in art, music, science and speaking. Holding her own in 6th grade math with a B and “satisfactory’s.”
But language arts. Ah, language arts. This should be her strength area, the girl with the 99th percentile reading comprehension score according to the MAP-R. Here, and for usage/grammar/etc., her report card shows a “C.” And bringing up the rear, yet another “D” in spelling. What gives?
Her teacher commented pointedly about her organization issues (“She usually doesn’t have papers needed for class and turns in work late.”) and asked us to help her organize her binder. (I do look in her binder. There are no crumpled papers all over the place. It looks organized to me….and remember, she has no LD!) The teacher also said that M. needs to improve her written responses, which are currently “simplistic” and which haven’t even met the 5th grade standard this quarter. What gives? Indeed.
Yet this is the kid who was elected to be the school vice president and who at a student government association meeting a few weeks ago came up with, in my humble and possibly biased opinion, a very clever idea. While discussing the SGA’s annual canned food drive, she suggested that to make it more exciting for kids they should turn it into a contest…tie it to the Super Bowl…and call it the “Souper Bowl. Ta-da! Kids would bring in cans and put them in a pile for either the Giants or the Patriots. The team with the most cans would be the winner.
This is the kid who is writing song lyrics with her friend and looking for microphones on the Internet. Who little kids absolutely adore. Who is evolving a funky, hip style.
So what’s the point of this? Well, I guess it’s to illustrate how a kid can have weakness and strengths. Strengths and talents that don’t necessarily show up on a report card. That, and the wildcard of puberty. M. is 11 but bursting like a ripe grape. Seems like I’m buying her new clothes and shoes every month. That’s got to be distracting.
M. took her report card pretty hard. I think deep down she’s realizing that going to the magnet, where most likely some of her best friends will end up, isn’t going to happen. She’s not happy doing poorly. Tearfully she told me that she just can’t work for this teacher. That she piles on too much work. That she nags her and whines at her. What I’m hearing is a kids who is a mix of overwhelmed and on strike. I guess it’s time once more to contact the counselor and the teacher, to see if we can tease out exactly where the breakdown is happening: Is it getting started? Getting the thoughts from mind to keyboard/paper? Et cetera.
M. asked once more, tearfully, to homeschool, which must seem like a sweet life, and once more I told her I don’t want to. Ideally her sister wouldn’t be homeschooling either . If I could be reasonably assured that both of them would get off the big yellow school bus smiling and content with having learned some new things that day I would be a happy woman. Unfortunately with her sister that hasn’t been the case. In M.’s case, my highly social girl, I just think that the benefits of school outweigh the negatives right now… and more importantly, homeschooling would require a lot of actually teaching/monitoring by me that I frankly don’t have to do with her sister. Any shred of me-ness, let alone the fiction that I could continue to work even part-time as I do, let alone take on the full-time job that has long been my dream, would disappear. But it’s a bitter pill for her, I know, and generates a lot of resentment. Resentment on top of years of resentment over all the energy and drama that has surrounded her sister. Resentment at feeling so different from the rest of her brainiac family. Resentment towards school.
There are no easy answers to this situation. However I think I know enough by now not to say never–even to the possibility of homeschooling her some time in the future should the acute need arise.
Reading this is suddenly almost like reading about my son, who is 10 and in 4th grade. Except he’s not crafty or particularly creative, unless you count a wicked sense of humor! It just seems too much of school is made up of “busy-work”, pointless stuff that even I have a hard time defending. The binders, the reading logs – my son just got in trouble for not filling out his reading log. And here I thought the most important thing was that he was reading! Maybe not so much, seems he’d be better off making entries into this stupid log that has to be dragged out of a binder the size of Manhattan and then put back *exactly* as it was before. Can you feel my frustration? And then I wonder why my son doesn’t want to go to school anymore? And I can’t homeschool, either, and he doesn’t want me to homeschool him – the horror!
I feel you, really. Probably more than I ever have in the past because we are starting to hit these walls and are struggling….