Our first Parent/Teacher Conference
Posted by Doug Fri, 14 Nov 2003 20:04:00 GMT
I don’t think we had any official Parent/Teacher confernces in pre-school. Maybe. This was the first one for “real” school. Good news and bad news. First, he’s litterally the most academically advanced kid in the class. He does his “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic” better than anyone else in his class. Second, the teacher thinks he’s well liked by the other kids. Josh gets along well with the other kids and doesn’t have any trouble playing with any of them that she’s noticed. The “bad news” is nothing surprising. He doesn’t concentrate very well and rarely finishes his work. He doesn’t listen to all of the directions the teacher gives and doesn’t follow through with them. Of course, this is no different than what we see at home. In his defense, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” All of that pretty much describes me as well. While we’re airing our dirty laundry, Carla can certainly be scatter brained from time to time too. The moral of the story is that he’s a product of his environment. More good news is that even these problem areas are fairly typical for this age. He’ll need to be better next year; but, this year he can be learning this stuff as he goes. Of course, if Carla and I can teach him in a year to finish his work quickly and follow instructions I’ll call my job as a parent done. One of the things his teacher mentioned was giving him lists of instructions in threes. Something like, “do this, then do that, and then do this last thing.” He does well on the first two but doesn’t get the third. She made a good suggestion on how to help him get things done quickly. For tasks he doesn’t want to do, she suggested letting him know what types of things he could when he gets done. That’s something like “eat your vegetables and then you can have dessert.” In summary, his teacher seems like a very sweet lady who cares about her students. She seemed sensitive to Joshua’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses. She gave us some focused information on what we can do to help Josh better. I’d like to say I’m proud of my son. I’m not just proud of him because he’s smart (although I am). I’m really proud of him because he seems to be good at playing with other children. Personally, I’d much rather him be nice than smart. Being smart is important; but being nice is more important.
