Parent teacher conferences were this week for the three little boys at our K-8 school. Last year I was conveniently out of town for these conferences so my husband had to go it alone. Which sucked for him. This year it felt like he might have been threatening me when he said “You better f’ing go this year or I am leaving you.” I’m not sure.
I personally think that if your kids have a 3.6 GPA or higher you should not be required to go to conferences.
It should be a national law.
I thought up this law after our first two mostly passed high school. Those two don’t count on the Siwinski GPA average. They were the test kids. An experiment to prove that being a helicopter parent (hovering over them while they do their homework, to the point of learning Spanish and re-learning Geometry and memorizing Robert Frost poems) doesn’t improve your child’s grades if they TOO are not engaged in the process. 2nd born actually called his mid-quarter math grade a ‘healthy F’ his senior year. Both are now doing fine. Going to college. Paying their way. Mostly getting it done. So whatever. I could have saved myself a lot of effort. But I do love Robert Frost. So there is that.
My daughter, whom we have rarely every helped with homework, would literally have an aneurism if she had a Healthy F. I had to talk her off a cliff when she got a B. In P.E.
For the record Maria, I got a really healthy F in P.E. in the 8th grade for non-participation. It was the P.E. uniforms. They showed sweat and made me look fat. I was chubby and sweaty back then. You could not pay me enough money to be a teenager again .Its way funner being chubby and sweaty in your forties.
Maria did get kicked out of choir in the 8th grade for talking. And she had to write a lot of apology notes to the school librarian. For talking. Now that I think about it, she talks a lot. But her GPA has always been good.
Daniel and David, the next in line, I’m not sure what grade they are in, have pretty much just breezed through school. Both are very competitive so thank goodness this first quarter they had the exact same (very good) GPA. It stopped a lot of heckling, which can be annoying. These are two more children we have rarely helped with homework. The only constructive thing their teachers had to say about them is that they both talk a lot. Weird. Do you see a trend? Those two never stop talking.
So when Mitchel came home with a sucky report card, this quarter, the first year that he was given a GPA instead of checks/plus/minuses or 1s, 2s, 3s we knew that both of us were for sure going to need to be at his conference. For moral support. And so that we wouldn’t be able to blame the other one for what ever bad stuff the teacher said about him.
This test score pretty much summed up the conference:
In case you can’t read that it says minus one for talking. I don’t remember actually signing this. He got in trouble in the third grade for forging Grant’s signature, so it MIGHT be a forgery. I should maybe be setting aside a little each month for bail money. But I probably signed it.
Both Grant and I just kind of nodded at each other and knowingly said “Ahhh. Yeah. He does that at home too. A lot. We will work on this.”
Mitchel has pretty much been banned from talking until he gets his grades up. Talking is clearly a distraction for him. And our helicopter is in the shop.
peaceof8 