An Uneasy Truce

This is an update on my previous post!  Many thanks to many of you that responded online and especially all the emails offline! I so appreciate all your support. Some of your very personal “been there and done that” stories were quite encouraging as we start to sort through this.

I had a series of follow-up meetings with the teacher.  My basic message to her was very much along the lines of my previous post.   We have also agreed to continue to talk frequently. She was surprisingly open and willing to talk through some of my concerns.

There is a fundamental disconnect in how the teacher and I have been interpreting the idea of the “whole child” which is one of the core concepts the school is driven by.  My understand of this approach (and what we talked at length to the head of the school before we enrolled) was that they would look at my child as an individual and develop a plan tailored to his needs.  The teacher descriptions seemed to point to a “well-rounded” child.  Woody is definitely not “well-rounded” in his development.  Quite the opposite, his development at this very moment is very skewed — very advanced in many dimensions and likely below the norm in many others.

What the teacher has agreed to do is to rearrange the room so that the kids that she feels are “advanced in Math” sit together.  She is then going to give them different worksheets to work on.  She seemed very opposed to the idea of testing Woody to see what level he is at and then giving him worksheets that challenge him.  I am just not sure why.  I know this means a little more work for her but won’t it really help her in the long run?  How do you differentiate if you don’t know what the child knows?  I am not sure what these “advanced worksheets” would look like.

Most importantly, I asked Woody how he was feeling about school.  He responded that he is really liking it.  Most of the stuff he loves about school though is outside of core academics.  He now has one really good friend there, he loves recess now because they build forts and castles together. He also absolutely loves his piano teacher who seems to get him like none of the other teachers do!  His only peeve with school at the moment is with the boring “baby Math” and his old enemy, P.E.!  If he is my son, P.E. will likely be the bane of his existence all through school

I am scheduled to have coffee with another mom who faced something similar with her son who is in middle-school at the same school that Woody and Buzz go to.  According to a common friend, this mom managed to work something out with the school that she is happy with.  I am very curious to learn more about how she did this and maybe I can replicate this.

Right now, Woody and Buzz seem settled in and really happy – which is the most important thing.  Our worry though is longer term, will they grow complacent and a bit lazy in their attitude towards learning?  At some point, when you keep hammering a square peg into a round hole, the wood will either splinter and conform or will just break apart.

There is no perfect solution at the moment.  And in the meantime an uneasy truce prevails.