The kids’ school is issuing more frequent progress reports this year and having more parent teacher conferences, all under some quite welcome better-communication initiative.
Both of the kids’ progress reports were very good, and I met with Ruby’s teacher soon after I had spent a day in the classroom filling in for the vacationing aide, which gave me another view of things.
Ruby is, in her teacher’s words, enjoying taking on a leadership role in the classroom. She likes helping the younger kids, doing things to help the teacher, and being a voice of experience and authority. I asked if that means she’s bossy, and the teacher said no, that rarely she talks to Ruby about how to phrase something in a kinder way, but overall, she’s been fine. We talked about which kids she liked to work with and which ones sometimes stress her out, and that she is continuing in her practice of confiding in the teacher about her feelings. This is good, as it helps manage Ruby’s moods. Her teacher seems to truly like and appreciate Ruby, too, which makes me quite happy.
Ruby likes and is good at the handwriting drills, and is at or above grade level in all subjects: science, social studies, art, etc. She’s working on “golden bead multiplication” in math. She still is a bit slow at doing basic arithmetic…she understands how and generally gets the correct answers; she just can’t seem to memorize the plus and minus tables, so we’re to keep working with her on that at home.
Ruby’s reading is firmly above grade level, but the teacher and I talked a bit about Ruby’s tendency to skip words when she reads aloud. We aren’t sure whether that’s because Ruby is trying to go too fast; or if she’s reading it all but not saying it all; or if there’s, in the teacher’s words, “something else going on with the way her brain is processing things.” Ruby hasn’t grown out of the tendency to make letters and numbers backwards randomly, and spelling is also a challenging area for her. The teacher says that could all be normal, and it could also be a symptom of some larger issue, so we will work with her on those things and watch and see. By larger issue, I suppose she means mild dyslexia. Teachers aren’t allowed to diagnose problems, of course, so it's all just a big hint.
Ruby said today during her regular weekly one-on-one conference with the teacher, they talked about the reading problem. The teacher encouraged her to try things like moving her finger or the eraser end of a pencil along the text as she reads, or sliding a piece of paper down the page under each line as she goes. Ruby said they talked about how “it gets blurry when there’s a long sentence,” or “sometimes I see words double.” Her vision checked out normal about a month ago, so I don’t think the eyes are the problem.
I am not so worried about all this yet, because Ruby’s doing so well overall, but I am a little scientifically curious. I’ve always thought I had a mild dyslexic tendency myself; not the reading kind, but maybe the writing and speaking variants. I find myself writing some letters backwards or writing b when I mean d, for instance. And fairly often I am thinking one word but saying another unrelated one, especially when I’m tired or in a hurry.
I had an exhausting but interesting day in Ruby’s classroom. The class is packed this year: 25 or 26 kids, which is over the legal maximum, but all the lower elementary classrooms are overflowing this year. This is really hard on the teacher and just logistically difficult—when they sit in a circle, they don’t all fit neatly around the rug, for instance. There is also a special needs kid who joins the class half of the day. I remember special ed kids as being sort of exotic pariahs in elementary school. No one really wanted to talk to them and people were only grudgingly kind. But the kids in Ruby’s class seem to genuinely like and appreciate this kid, different as he is, and I was impressed by how kind and accepting they are. He really needs an aide of his own during that time, but he doesn’t get one, so the other kids and the teachers do their best to help him integrate and work with the others.
I got to take about half the class to the world’s most boring assembly, that was supposed to be a celebration of their participation in the summer reading program. Funerals are a thousand times more celebratory than that was, I swear. In fact, if I were I kid, I would be vowing not to read anything next summer so that I could skip that event next year. But my group of kids behaved well enough, and then we went back to class, with me delivering an impromptu lecture about the jerk who just pulled the fire alarm and what to do if there really was a fire.
Later, I checked people’s work and walked around trying to gently but firmly redirect the kids who weren’t working to their work plans and what they needed to get done that day. There was technology lab (my break time), then lunch in the really loud cafeteria, silent reading time, recess, lessons on the solar system and maps, research project time, and group reading time.
As for the other kid:
I was not happy with Carl last week when the music teacher pulled me aside to tell me how rotten my sweet boy behaved in music class. She’s not especially likable and I know a lot of kids who have issues with her, but I was so upset that MY child was being uncooperative and disrespectful. So I did my best to talk to Carl about it and explain our expectations, and he says he understands and we shall see how it goes. His class didn’t have music this week because of Yom Kippur (so I guess he missed his chance to atone?).
The progress report from Carl’s teacher was excellent. She says he is really working hard these days. Carl is doing addition and working on letter sounds and things like matching pictures to sounds. He loves the dinosaur books, “plays great with the active boys, and uses words to communicate wishes and concerns.” So I skipped the teacher conference for him for now, thinking I’ll do it next quarter just to get a more in depth view of what’s going on.
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