Skip to main content

Teacher Conference - Fake it Til you Feel It

Teacher Conference
Fake it 'Til you Feel it

It started with mid-year school reports. One of my children’s Discussion Guides describes ‘a capable and confident class member’ who completes class work with speed, reads and performs math at the top of the national standards graph, whose writing lands squarely in the middle of the gray shaded box.

The other report shows a child reading near the bottom of the standards; writing below the standard and performing math well below the national standard. This child, according to the teacher, ‘often needs to be encouraged to contribute.’

If you know anything about my kids, you might think the first report is Fiona’s and the second is Finley’s. Nope. 

For the first time, my first-born - my compliant, book-loving daughter, is pegged as struggling student. 

Finley, however, is excelling in his Year Three class, although his teacher says he needs to pay closer attention to instructions and listen, instead of figuring he already knows what to do.

Part of the reason I’m gobsmacked (a popular term in New Zealand which means utterly astonished) by the school reports is they explode assumptions about my kids. I knew Fiona needed help with math; what I didn’t know is she’s also lagging in reading and writing. Knock me over with a blade of seagrass.

Finley’s loud, confident and, well, loud. But maybe there’s truth in his seven-year-old boy treatise that goes, ‘Mom, I already KNOW that!’ Confidence. Finn’s chock full, like an impudent bean bag.

Fiona, at age nine, shows moxie at home and in social situations. She kicks the ball on the soccer pitch (field) instead of twirling her hair; she’s already led her Girl Guide patrol during one of her first meetings (she’d recently moved up from Brownies); and last Sunday, Fiona read two lines of scripture at church. In front of about sixty people. Into a microphone.

“Fiona,” I asked, “Why is it you can stand in front of the church and speak up, but you can’t do it in class?”   

Fiona replied, “Most people in church are old. They can’t hear me unless I speak up.”

Fi’s teacher, Mrs. Styles, tells me, “Fiona’s like a closed book in here. She’s a fish out of water. She reads so quietly in her small group, the other students can barely hear her. And she doesn’t want to ask for help.”

I ask the teacher whether I need to consider holding Fiona back a year. I’m half-expecting, hoping, she’ll say, “No, that won’t be necessary.” 

Instead, she answers, “It’s a possibility. It could be she’s intimidated by the Year Five/Six class [Fi is in a composite class with around 30 students]. She still has a chance to turn it around.”

I emerge from the meeting, head swimming in battle fatigue. This conference has been so different from others. Fiona’s teachers had previously told me what a pleasure she was; how she followed instructions and was becoming a competent reader and writer (if not mathematician). It’s as if the teacher had said, “Fiona hasn’t bathed and she smells bad. And she picks on other kids.” I feel equally gut-kicked.

Wheels on the Mother Guilt Machine start grinding: It’s my fault for taking Fiona out of school five months to travel when she was six; my fault for not continuing flash card drills to learn times tables; my fault for not knowing this sooner…

I discharge my anxieties to Pete as if dumping a bucket of dirty mop water down the drain – I must sluice it quickly, or its dirt and stagnation will permeate the house. I recount Fiona’s failure to thrive in Room 16; convey the confidence void that threatens to pull my little girl into a scholastic implosion. And then, I speak the words I don’t want to Fiona to hear, “I may have to hold her back a year.”

I had sent Fiona to clean her room during my monologue. With her door open, she likely hears every word. By the time I get to her, Fiona is huddled under her bed, crying. Finley and I coax her out.

“Fiona, honey, it’s okay,” I tell her.

Fiona cries, “I don’t wanna be held back in school!”

I try to reassure her that won’t happen – if she starts speaking up in class, learns her math times tables and asks questions. I hug her and tell her we’ll work together. 

In my head, though, I’m thinking staying in primary school an extra year is not a bad option. It’s better than an extra year in intermediate. Fiona is one of the youngest kids in her class. 

And something else bothers her; something I learn after asking why she doesn’t use her voice in Room 16.

Fiona says, “I’m the smallest one in my class!”

“That has nothing to do with the size of your brain,” I tell her.

I hold my sweet girl, dry her tears and say it’ll be okay. I tell her every day before school, I’ll kiss her palm, like the story we got before she started kindergarten called The Kissing Hand. In it, the mama raccoon kisses her son, Chester’s, hand, so whenever he feels lonely, all he has to do is press his hand to his cheek to feel his mother’s warmth.

“I’ll call you Fearless Fiona,” I say.

“But I’m not,” says Fi.

“Fake it ‘til you feel it,” I tell her. “It’s worked for me for a very long time, and it can work for you, too.”

 I tell Fiona about the first time I reported live for the news – I thought the top of my head would blow off. It didn’t.  She too, can fake confidence until and unless self-assurance arrives.

We discuss the teacher reports at the dinner table that night. Pete tells Fiona he, too, was the smallest in his class when he arrived in New Zealand from Scotland. He was eight-years-old.

Pete says, “I couldn’t understand a word the teachers said.”

Fiona says, “Petey and I have something else in common. I can’t say it – I’m gonna write it.”

Fi carefully pens a sentence on the back of Pete’s business card. It says, ‘Both of our dads died.’

Gobsmacked again. I want to cry. I so hunger for my kids’ happiness and success, I want to bulldoze a path to joy and mathematical genius. And while I don’t want to use the fact they lost their father as an excuse for failure, I also don’t want to ignore their loss.

The next morning, I kiss Fiona’s hand while reciting her new mantra, “Fearless Fiona: Fake it ‘til you feel it.’

Two days later, I see Fiona’s teacher at the school gate.  

She says, “I don’t know what you told Fiona, but she’s really making an effort to speak up in class. In fact, I made her ‘Student of the Day’ today.”

I beam. And look for other ways to boost Fiona’s courage. I’m enrolling her in drama classes (against her protestations) next term; the flash cards and computer math games will be an ongoing ritual in our home. For now, the mantra stays:

Fake it ‘til you feel it.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Murder House

Murder House (MUH-dah House) The deed is done              “I don’t wanna go to the dentist. It’s gonna hurt,” says Fiona. I can hardly deny my eight-year-old the truth, but I can tiptoe around it.             “They’re going to rub medicine on your gums to numb them,” I tell her. “And they can put your tooth to sleep with a needle.”             Fiona gasps, “I don’t want a needle! No!” Oops. I shouldn’t have used the “n” word. Fiona starts her high-pitched screeching if she thinks a needle exists in the next room. When I got the kids immunized in preparation for dragging them round-the-world, Fiona cried as the nurse swabbed her upper arm with iodine. You would’ve thought someone was whacking off her limb with a rusty saw, yet the needle lay feet from Fiona’s body. New Zealand is not the place for dental work for a squeamish, sobbing little girl. I learned after bringing Fiona to a dental clinic during the Christmas school vacation (otherwise known as summer holidays) that sch

Ten Years On

Ten Years On Our ten-year wedding anniversary, Dec 3, 2009 Scattering ashes in Michigan, August, 2010 January 23, 2010 is a date I'm afraid to remember and scared I'll forget. It's the day Sean died. I wanted to write about the weirdness of marking ten years since Sean’s death, but it’s almost too big a task. It’s like straining to hear what my kids are asking from the other room while the kettle is boiling in front of me; like trying to figure out how to build a bookshelf when the instructions are cryptic pictograms.  How to talk about a decade of living, loving, grieving? It’s like a trip to the moon and back ten times and also like a walk to the corner store. It has been a long odyssey and a quick jaunt. What no one can tell you about the years stretching between death and this-new-normal-kinda-life is how your perspective will change. What once seemed important now seems trivial, and the person you were back then is different from

The Affair

The Affair Ohope Beach, NZ I had an affair last week. I’m not ashamed to tell you, either. It was sweet and sad. It made me laugh, cry, sigh and dance in my chair to James Brown and Rupert Holmes. My Kiwi PAHT-nah, Pete, even facilitated the tryst, though neither of us knew what to expect beforehand. Pete watched the kids while I was gone for five nights. Five whole nights.  No kids. No TV. No partner.  I enjoyed a dalliance with my late husband, Sean (though I should write instead, ‘dead husband,’ because Sean hated being late). It happened in a wood-paneled house across the street from the ocean, in Ohope Beach, New Zealand. I attended a writer’s retreat to work on the memoir. I revised six sections totaling more than 40,000 words. In the course of revising- subtracting old text and adding entries from letters Sean had written me when we first started dating, plus journal entries he wrote around the time Fiona was born - I fell in love again. With Sean’s openn