The Meeting

You guys, thanks so much for your prayers and support.

Some backstory: Mrs. Rutabaga has been at this school for as long as we've had kids there. I don't view her as incompetent. I think she's kind of rigid. I think she doesn't know exactly what to do with kids who are moving faster than usual. I think she's not a person I'd want to meet for coffee and chitchat. I'm not going to try to get her fired based on what happened Tuesday.

When our oldest son was in fifth grade, she taught his math class. He spent most of the time out in the hall, working ahead on his own. This is the teacher who stonewalled us when we asked if she had any ideas about how we could prepare him at home for the junior high math placement test. She said, "No one from this school has ever placed out of sixth grade math and I can't help you." She wasn't ugly about it; it just hadn't occurred to her that he would be the first one (apparently? hard for me to believe that's really true) to nail that test. He's taking calculus as a sophomore now, but I can't say she helped him get there.

She was in the meeting today; her students were in art class. I forgot to take my beta blocker beforehand, and so my heart was stuttering in angry bursts as I told her how baffling I found her reaction, how poorly her emphasis on answering (inane) reading comprehension questions meshed with my own long-term goals for Joe, how concerned I was about Joe's recurring Sunday night malaise and increasing stomachaches. I am desperately bad at conflict, you guys, so I am pleased that I was able to say, in a level voice, that my son had been consistently bored and miserable in her class and that things needed to change.

We learned some useful things in the meeting: there have been licensing issues, now resolved, with the math software that let Joe work ahead painlessly last year. He's been getting sucked into the antics of a group of troublemaking boys, which explains some of the teacher's background frustration.

After the teacher left the principal said, "You don't seem to feel at peace about the situation," and I said, "No, I do not. I am not at all convinced that their relationship can recover at this point." We talked about switching him into the other fifth grade class. The principal is open to the idea but is somewhat reluctant to do so. This year Mrs. Rutabaga is teaching math and language arts to the faster-moving kids from both classes, so it's far from a perfect solution. For a few different reasons, the principal said she'd prefer to switch him after Christmas break if the problems continue -- not yank him right away. Part of me wonders if I should have pulled a flounce at that point: "No, you will move him TODAY or we will take him OUT of your school." I'm not really a flouncer, though, and she made it very clear that she's willing to work with us.

The principal pulled Joe into her office shortly after we left. She told him that no one -- at school or at home -- wants him to be bored and unhappy. She told him that it will be fine for him to work ahead as long as he demonstrates mastery of the basic material first. On a recent math pre-test, not realizing that it could be his ticket to working independently on interesting stuff, he tore through the front and skipped the back. Elwood and I agree that it's important for him to be diligent. It's that same old thing with math education, though, one of the very things that spurred me to homeschool: when are you measuring and fostering competence, and when are you drilling your students into counterproductive boredom?

So. The short-term plan is for him to run with the happy math software and to have ready access to books that interest him. Mrs. Rutabaga is not going to send him out in the hallway to trudge through pages of reading comprehension questions as punishment for his initiative and interest. The gifted program has just started up, and he will have access to his current gifted project in the classroom as well. If things do not improve rapidly, we'll let the principal know and we can try switching classes. I do think she has his best interests at heart -- she sent me an email about their meeting that said, "He is a fabulous kid!"

If that doesn't help, putting him in our parish school would be the next strategy. We've talked about homeschooling, but Joe agrees that he would be lonely if it were just the two of us -- he is the most social of all the boys. Still, it could be an option if we needed it to be. I'll keep you posted. Thanks again for your prayers and good wishes.