Goodbye Parade

My son is done with school.  We ended his school year with a drive-by parade for the students in the school through the campus parking lot.   Teachers lined both sides of the way, waving pom-poms, sporting posters with well-wishes, and some even in costume.

It was a sad day in a way because we have one long-standing teacher retiring that's been there since before we started.   I remember substituting with her and learning how to facilitate conflict resolution with children from her, a skill I still need work on today as it tends to grow in complexity as the children get older.

We had my son's final parent-teacher conference today with the teacher he's had for three years and assistant teacher for four years.  He is ready for Upper Elementary next year as a fourth-grader, but beware, there will be more expectations for him in his new teacher's class.   This is a good thing.

We spent most of the time remembering back over the three years and talking about how much my son has grown.   He came in unable to read or concentrate and left as a class leader with strong reading and writing skills.

His math skills are excellent, although he tends to want to do mental math and not show his work.   This is true of his sister as well.   We've spoken with her teachers over the past week or two and are hearing similar things.

There has been a lot of surveying and discussions surrounding distanced learning and how the teachers could do things better.   In my opinion, they all did a great job.   We would have been at a complete loss without them.   They all rose to the challenge and gave us what we needed, inexperienced and unskilled teachers that we were, so that we could help our children learn alone, in a room without their teacher or peers.   It was no small task.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was mad at his father today.  He decided he wasn't going to listen to his father, period, at all, until he got what he wanted.   I explained to my son what leverage was.   He said he had leverage over his father.   I told him we were more experienced at this than he was and on top of that, we had bigger leverage (I gave examples).   I told him this never went well for him when he did this and that admitting you were wrong wasn't a bad thing.   He told me, "yeah, but this time is the time I'm going to win."   I gave up at that point.   Any guesses as to ultimately who isn't going to win?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Summer starts for my daughter tomorrow.   She's very excited about being done with school, perhaps more so than my son.   She has reluctantly completed all her work for the week, getting up and doing it early so I wasn't there to give any feedback or advice.   I'll check it later to see if she did a thorough job, she might have cut corners.