It was the same old story at the parent-teacher conference. Disorganized. Not working up to potential. Having problems with math.
It was very disappointing but I’m over it now. After all, it was decades ago when I was in junior high. My parents were concerned but I remained clueless about what my parents and teachers wanted from me until sometime in high school.
Today I found myself sitting in a parent-teacher conference hearing the exact same phrases from my older son’s teachers, proving once again that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
And here I am the organizationally challenged mom who struggled through algebra, trying to throw my son a lifeline as he sinks beneath an ocean of failed expectations at his middle school.
I finally turned around my grades when my parents hinted – threatened really- that I wouldn’t get into college. I know now that they lied. But it did succeed in scaring me into studying and when I started doing well in school it was much more satisfying than hearing that I wasn’t working up to my potential.
My son is no different than me in that respect. When he’s on a downward spiral, he feels bad about himself and he does badly. When he does well, he feels good about himself and does well.
It sounds so simple. But getting him on an upward trajectory isn’t so easy. We have to monitor his progress all the time and now I’m emailing his teachers to check up on him I discovered recently that he is apparently using his assignment book as a paper weight because he hasn’t written in it in weeks.
I had deluded myself into thinking that maybe I should let him be in charge of his work and take a step back. But it turns out you can only step back if your child is a self-starter and mine isn’t, at least not in school.
So now we’re getting him a high school tutor and he’s going for extra help after school and tonight he organized his folders and we spent a lot of time figuring out a better system. If we can help get him more organized, maybe he can go back to working independently sometime at the start of his freshman year in college.
I insisted that he sit in on the conference with his teachers because I wanted him to hear himself what they were saying about his worik. But when he came in, he looked like a deer caught in the headlights and I felt a pang of regret. I’m sure that his guidance counselor was right when he said that all R. heard was, “Blah, blah, blah.”
Having been there myself, know that when R. heard “You’re not working up to your potential,” he was as annoyed and baffled as I was. ‘What exactly does that mean anyway?’ he’s thinking.,“ and what do they want from me?”
Poor kid. I wish he had inherited something else – my red hair or my green eyes. Instead, I’ve passed on both my poor math skills and my “potential.”
Illustration from mochadad.com
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