I talked in front of a group of folks in February and tried to convince them not to be accidental assholes. It took me less than 2 months to become one myself.
Last night, Victoria brought home some classwork that she had completed; some of it needed to be corrected and brought back to her teacher. They were math papers – double digit addition and subtraction. Christine had already looked over the papers earlier in the evening while I was cleaning the garage; now she was at a tri-training event and I was looking things over. “What did your mother say about these?” I asked.
“She told me that I needed to start dong better or there would be consequences,” she said.
“Well, she is a lot kinder than I am,” I replied, “because I am taking your dessert from you now. That is your consequence – no more dessert until you bring home work that is representative of what you are capable of. That means that you need to take your time and do good work, because I know that you can. You earn dessert in this house, and right now you aren’t earning it. Are we on the same page?”
We were.
She was upset. She wasn’t sobbing, but her nose was running and she was tearful. I certainly don’t like her to be upset, but I also don’t like her not putting forth a strong effort in school.
Of course, you are probably already thinking something, something that took me a moment longer to consider.
You see, she is a smart kid. I don’t know how smart, but her grades easily land her in the upper 25% for her class. The problem is that I am accustomed to her parenting her brother, who is easily in the top 5%. EVERYTHING has come to him without any difficulty, and neither Christine or I have ever spent a moment spent helping him learn any school materials at home in the last 7 years. Seriously. Not one – he is his father’s son … so it hadn’t occurred to me until it was a minute too late.
“Victoria?” I asked, preparing to ask a question and hoping for a specific reply I feared I wouldn’t receive.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“When you finish your classwork at school, how much free time do you have before your classmates are done with their work?”
“I don’t. We finish at the same time.”
Fuck. I had told her that she had to take her time. To not rush or hurry through her work. Many of the mistakes that she made were pretty simple after all. I had assumed that she was just trying to get her work done quickly – which may have been the case, but (if she were) it wasn’t so that she could have free-time in the class.
I began to quiz her on simple math facts. She replied quickly to addition facts with a sum less than 10, a little slower if the sum exceeded 10 (unless it was 6+6, 7+7, 8+8, 9+9 … they had memorized those earlier in the year). Subtraction was even slower … painfully slow. Her facts that started with a number less than 10 were okay. Her facts that started with a number higher than 10 were rough. It took her over 20-30 secs to answer correctly on a few occasions.
I was able to save-face a little – she got all but one question right. She DOES know how to answer the questions correctly. I was disappointed, however, to discover how hard she had to work to get the answers to basic math facts.
Of course, I wasn’t disappointed in her – I was disappointed in myself. Her grades have been good; I was disappointed that I didn’t know that she was having some problems (it also would have helped had the teacher not sent home 2 week’s worth of work at once). I was disappointed that I hadn’t considered all that might be possible before jumping to conclusions.
I’m not yet sure what it all means for her. It certainly means that we’ll be practicing math facts at home so that they come readily to her – Austin never needed to and neither did I in my youth, but I remember other kids practicing on flashcards when I was a younger. It might mean that she’ll be one of the slower kids in her class with math, maybe not. It might mean that she needs to exercise a little more patience and that (while she can get the answer right with a little perseverance) she can’t just guess a “close enough” answer when the going gets tough. It might be an early indication that math isn’t going to be her thing. It also might just mean that she is like nearly all her classmates, just not like her brother.
I don’t know.
[goes online to find math-facts website with printable work-sheets]