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.