“Age Appropriate”? Where’s “Wise beyond his years”?

We hard our first parent-teacher conference a couple of Fridays ago.  It was going to be our first professional, unbiased opinion of Sal.  It wasn’t going to be pretty.

We’ve surrounded ourselves with people that flatter Sal.  It’s just what happens.  He’s a fortunate, sheltered, kid.

So anyway, we get the review and it’s warm, but not gushing.  He’s doing fine, but not excellent.  He’s working on the first family of letters in the alphabet and he’s got 4 or 5 items out of 30 that he’s “progressing” on. The rest he’s “Age Appropriate” in.  He’s got zero “Inappropriate” items.

They say he likes to talk in class and is well behaved about it. He always raises his hand, is always eager to speak, even when he doesn’t know the answer. (No comment on where he gets that from.)

And that was that.

Except there was a little tension in the air.  Catherine’s rarely competitive, but she had the fires burning that day.  Talk about her son like that?  How dare they!

I think my more lax attitude stems from the fact that she puts so much more energy into teaching Sal than I do. I can read a book, but I can’t read it over and over like she does with him.  And when we have a day together, my go to move is Dave and Busters, not the library, like hers is.  So she’s got more invested in this kid’s first review than I do.

She probes about the first family of letters.  What does it mean that he’s only mastered up to the number seven?  Describe these “complex tasks” that he’s “progressing” on please.

And the teacher was very open and had examples of all these things and where Sal is with them.  But also aware that there might be a little research going on to game the system so that Sal would fare better next conference.  So she also mentioned that he’d be doing much better in May, and that right now, the main focus was on socialization.

I completely buy into that too. Getting a good solid foundation of social skills early on is way more important than recognizing the seven continent cut-outs.  He can learn the facts later in life easily – getting social skills – not as easily.  And it’s a positive feedback loop – the more social he is early on, the more doors open up early on, which leads to more doors later on.  Kind of like the feedback loops that dude with the sideshow Bob hair is talking about for pro athletes with birthdays around the cutoff dates for youth leagues – the young kids that have an 11 month advantage over other kids on the team, seem “better”, get more coaching, get more recognition, etc and have a higher chance of being successful.

So things seemed like they were understood – how Sal being “age appropriate” and “fine” were okay and that we should be happy that we have nothing to worry about.  But there was still some tension in the air.  “Since you advance kids when they demonstrate their abilities, and he’s just age appropriate, does that mean there’s a chance you won’t let him work on something, because he’s too young?”

She was just dancing around the real question, so after the answer (which was very reasonable – he’s busy and he could be pushed harder, but again, the point is to not burn him out at four years old) I had to ask.  “Is there any mark better than ‘age appropriate’?”

We had a chuckle that hid some nerves.  “No.  Seriously.”  There isn’t.  Someone got the idea that modesty was something these kids should be learning too.  So we’ll have to break into the school records and just compare his report card against others to see how he really stacks up.