15 Months

Kindergarten.  Most directly; public school kindergarten.

Let me preface this semi-rant by saying ... he loves it.  I am so grateful to God that he met a friend that is like him; they are sweet-natured, oldest siblings of three.  They love dinosaurs and Wild Kratts and science.  They have both decided that they want to be geologists when they grow up.  G, of course, will still learn to fly helicopters because you need a copter to lift the really big rocks so you can study them.  Dear friend joined our soccer team and his family is helping us coach.  They are - hopefully - beginning a very long friendship.  Their family is so sweet.

He is learning.  His reading is just exploding.  He has a great vocabulary of sight words and he's doing so much better about sounding words out.  He's learning some of the tricky phonics.  Magic e's and we're working on the finer points of the crazy English language.

He's gotten almost full checks on his report card (it's mastered skill / developing skill).  So take everything I'm about to say through that prism.  He is doing great.  No social issues.  No learning issues.  No issues.  Smiley faces every day.  No notes.  No comments.

But that's the thing.  I hear nothing.  NOTHING.  I have known that you have to be your childs own advocate but what if your child is doing just a-ohkay and doesn't really need an advocate but you're just kind of wondering like what small thing could you do to help him reach exceptional?  I know we're a nation obsessed with exceptional ... my house is probably the most obsessed with exceptional.  We know their potential.  They have it in them to be exceptional.  Not in all areas.  But in some.  Like art?  Yeah probably not my left-brained kids jam.  It's actually quite hilarious.  I love his heart and his effort.

But I don't hear anything about him from his teacher.  Who has been teaching over a decade and is really good at teaching kids to read.  She is a good teacher.  Probably even a great teacher.

But touchy feely she is not.

I'm going from a loving, caring, huggy, touchy-feeling pre-k where the name of the game is love and fun to public school where it's quite different.

And all that to say - his school, this school district, is miles, gazillions of miles, removed from the crappy schools I went to.  This school district is amazing.  The teachers are great and want to be there.  The school has identity and helps the kids feel included and belong.  They have fun activities and hands on learning.  Their unit this month was rocks and dirt.  He's been studying "desert sand" he brought back from ABQ.  Before that they did pumpkins and trees.  There is a lot of hands on learning going on and it's wonderful.  Math, art, PE, Music, are done once or twice a week.  It's a blessed place.

But I just don't know what's actually happening.  I know - I can read this back and read between the lines what the big problem is - that my lack of control is at the center of what's frustrating me.  I don't know what he did at 1:15PM yesterday.  I know he didn't eat snack.  I know he said he ran out of time.  Just like he says every day.  This is a huge problem for me in multiple ways.

So this all arises;  Tuesday is guided reading day.  He gets new books.  It's always, always, always a bad day.  And I forgot or didn't put it together and by 7pm we still hadn't done our reading and G had had soccer and we'd gotten home from ABQ the day before and it was a disaster.  DISASTER.  I yelled.  He cried.  Lew yelled.  They all cried (dad does not yell - they were totally shocked).  Lew and I had words.  I'm worried his reading isn't where it should be relative to the kids in his class (there are some real readers).  We decide we don't know enough about the process.  Because the book G brought home had words like "encyclopedia" "Tundra" "quail."  So new vocabulary and for early readers it's all about showing them how to read words they've at least heard once.

So.  Lew emailed and we set up a conference with the teacher.  Where is he on the spectrum?  What do we need to be doing?  His report card said math is developing?  Why is that?  Because he always aces the math part of the home work?  Writing is where I see struggle.  So what's up with that?

I don't want to get to April and be shocked by the report card.

So.  Public school.  Here's what I'm learning.  Advocating for your child doesn't look like I thought it did.  I have to be "that mom."  I want to be cool and laid back mom that trusts.  But you just can't be that way.  You have to facilitate the conversation because the school isn't going to.  They are going to let your child be middle to lowest in the class and be okay with that.  The school isn't about making everyone exceptional.  They are about making everyone hit the same average.  And this is at a top tier school system!  I can't imagine what others deal with.

The prek school ... they tell me constantly how wonderful David is.  I know they are trained to do this.  But I know they mean it too.  David is such a sweet, sweet boy and loves school and his teacher so very much.  And even at ski school last weekend ... both the kids teachers told me ... these are such great, sweet kids.

I just thought ... knowing that G is so good and eager ... that his teacher would see that in him too.  That she would love him and we would gush over him together and I'd be all happy and cloud-9y.  But that's just not how it is.  She has 18 other kids.  9 other boys.  9 other girls.  I know she cares about them all.  Trying to learn and navigate all of this successfully is a process.