Some days, the best and worst of parenting swirls together
in one giant feel and I think, “This. This is the real thing.”
Our kids’ school noticeably increases the expectations of
the students each year. Work that got rewarded in second grade because “I can see
you understand and I can see you’re trying” does not fly in third grade. Little
A, who needs to test every limit to make sure he knows right where it is, has
been finding that out.
We warned him about sloppy handwriting, we showed him
strategies for checking his work, we stressed the importance of reading
carefully…. Then his Friday folder came home last week. His giant stack of
worksheets (parents of elementary school kids, you know what I’m talking
about!) had a full range of grades, a rainbow of scores ranging from red to
purple. They ran the COMPLETE gamut of possible number grades.
There’s no doubt he can do it. The missing factor?
Motivation. He wants to “do homework in school” so he can come home and play;
he sees no need to do homework to the new, higher standard. Whatever he brings
home, he does over (and over!) until he gets it right. So he’s learned that
doing it right the first time is faster. It’s those “I did it at school” papers
that have fallen largely into the purple end of the spectrum.
Luckily, supporting him as he does some of his homework has
shown me that he’s a big picture guy. He may be slow to memorize certain
spelling words, but if I explain that “destructive” has the same root as
“construct” then he remembers to use the “ruct” in the middle.
It took me a weekend of despair and a sleepless night Monday
night, but I woke up Tuesday—at five o’clock—with a plan. I got out of bed an
hour early to set up our lesson. I pulled up two chairs at my desk and his
grades on my laptop. Then I wrote out a chart with ten rows of ten boxes and
got some game markers. I was all set.
After breakfast, I invited him to a meeting. After one
complaint—“It’s about homework, isn’t it?”—he settled in. He absorbed the
information SO quickly that I’m eternally grateful I had it ready to go! He
helped me set up the game pieces to represent 100s, then helped me slide them
over to show what happens to an average when a few low grades sneak in. He got
it!
With only the slightest hint from me, he figured out what
happens to his yearly grades if one marking period is low and three are high vs
the opposite. And with only the slightest hint from me, he remembered that
he’ll have more choices in the future (robotics or rocket design school!) if he
has good yearly grades.
Newly motivated, we went to check his homework one more
time. And then, because God, fate, or the universe decided to shower us with
good fortune, he went over his science one more time and—all by
himself—realized he’d left three questions blank. I had the privilege of saying,
“Awesome! You just went from at-best-a-70 to maybe a 100 and all by checking!”
I sent him off to school, happy as a clam, and then I
collapsed with my coffee for five minutes before starting work. After all the
stress, all of the head-desking, all of the late night “how do I walk the line
between stressing him out and showing him what’s important?” thoughts, I hit
it. I offered the right lesson, the right way, at the right time.
Best of all, he took the ball and ran with it. In all my
various experiences of teaching, that’s the moment—the rare and precious
moment—that makes it all worthwhile. When someone takes something I show them
and goes with it. As a parent, I've learned to savor these moments.
He’s heading far beyond my reach. I’m so proud of him! And exhausted. And elated. And drained. And hopeful. And anxious. And
proud.
No comments:
Post a Comment