Right before the Thanksgiving break, the New York City schools held parent teacher conferences. Over the years, I have looked on parent teacher conferences with a tad bit of trepidation. I certainly never expect to hear anything but positive things which I do. That said, no one is perfect and everyone and I mean everyone even the smartest kid in the class has development areas to work on. So it always interesting to hear what that’s going to be.
As before every parent teacher conference , I always ask my daughter the same question.
“What do you think your teacher is going to tell me about your performance when we meet?”
Usually I get the “I don’t know, I talk too much, I am perfect,” ah, so snarky so young, right.
Not this time. My daughter started blabbering and tearing up. “I don’t understand what am I supposed to write, it doesn’t make sense, I am so confused.”
in my mind, I am thinking “WTF” is this crazy reaction and what is she talking about. I look over the homework every day so what she could not be understanding.
“I don’t understand, what are you talking about?”
She runs off and bring this blue journal. And let me say that thing did not look remotely familiar or should I say, I never opened it up as I thought she was doing the homework every day.
So I opened it up and I seriously got a knot in my stomach because as I flipped through eight weeks of reading assignment, yes, “eight,” count them “eight” marked in bright purple (why purple, I guess I should be happy it wasn’t scary red), INCOMPLETE on every page.
My daughter was supposed to be writing about the books she was reading every week. And she was reading the books as I could see that she had written down the book titles as she was supposed to do. She just wasn’t writing her comments about the book.
As I was thumbing through the book, a light bulb went off, I remembered something I had filed away “Reading prompts” that the teacher had sent home in the backpack amongst all gazillion notes. The document provide tips on what the kids could write in their journal. I never put the two together because I did not even know about the reading journal.
All I kept thinking was, the teacher must think I am one of those uninvolved parents. Yikes!! I just kept thinking eight weeks, why didn’t she send a note saying “hey, did you know about the homework?”
Back to my daughter who felt it was her fault, granted she might have mentioned it which I don’t know we she didn’t since asks me about her math homework. In fact, it was my fault for being so clueless.
So of course at the parent teacher conference, I had to start with an apology and “hey, you should feel free to send an email reminding me about the homework, if it happens again.”
And by the way, it was a good report card.
Awe.. I feel bad for your little girl.. you too … I know what it is like when you think you have all bases covered with your child’s homework only to find out there is something that you have missed.. I too feel guilty as if I let my child down.. 🙁