I always dread going to a parent teacher conferences. I brace myself for them telling me time and time again that Lena is too social and prefers to chatter with her friends instead of completing her assignments. I'm all too aware that my daughter is not exactly a prized self-starter when it comes to work. Be it at school or at home, it requires an extreme amount of coaxing (and sometimes yelling) to motivate her to accomplish tasks that do not interest her. I walked into the conference last night expecting her teacher to give me the run down on tasks Lena drug out due to her constant state of verbal diarrhea.
At first I was pleasantly surprised when she assured me that was not an issue. And then the moment arrived where I felt like the trusting idiot on Survivor... BLINDSIDE! Lena may not be talking her head off, but she's also not comprehending what she reads either.As her teacher slid the results of the practice standardized test across the desk I could feel my heart racing and my mouth grow dry. Lena didn't pass. She's below average. If we don't correct this problem by the real test date, thanks to the no child left behind rule, my daughter will be repeating 5th grade.
She scored in the top percentile on math again, but you have to have two oars to row the 5th grade boat and currently she's paddling in circles. I refuse to let her be held back and while I wanted to burst into tears right there, I swallowed my heart back down and asked what I needed to do. The teacher told me that she needs to read at home and that I need to get her to think deeper about what she's reading. She can read the words just fine, but she's not retaining the information. She advised that I choose books with a ZPD of 3.5 - 5.5 and sent me on my way.
Me being me, immediately when I got home I went in search of a reading list. Catch this folks, there isn't one! The great state of Indiana uses the ZPD system, however, not a single publisher out there actually scores their books that way. Helpful, right? I did manage to find a chart for Reading Comfort Level that took the not-so-handy ZPD level and translated it into the corresponding Grade Equivalent Score. Which, by the way, is how books are actually classified for children. Armed with this new school system decoder ring, I started cross referencing the good old Scholastic Book Club only to receive the second punch in the stomach for the evening. Ultimately I discovered she has a 3rd grade reading level. That's the kind of books that fit into her recommended category. At that moment all I could think was HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY NOT CATCH THAT LAST YEAR???????
You would think that her 4th grade teacher might have mentioned something in our conferences. Hell, she could have sent a note home saying she was concerned. Something. Anything. Now she's lost an entire year that we could have been working on this issue. I knew she didn't like to read, but I didn't know she was having problems. It makes sense now. Instead of admitting she was having trouble, she just shrugged it off like she didn't enjoy it. Not that it eases the extreme amount of garbage parent that I feel like at the moment.
I know I'm not a mind reader, but I still should have known. I should have pressed harder. I should have dug deeper. I should have forced the issue a little more. Instead, I assumed because she is certainly more mathematically inclined that her lack of enthusiasm for reading was probably normal. I'm passionate about reading and writing and while I can do math... I prefer not to if I can help it. I just assumed that Lena was the same way with opposite subjects. Evidently my apple fell a little further from the tree than I thought.
As I sat with her and explained that we will need to read for at least 30 minutes every night she burst into tears. I assured her that I would be reading whatever book she is and that we would work through this together. This did not seem to console her at all. Instead she kept crying and told me that reading will take away all the time she has with me at night. "I barely get to see you, you're always at work. By the time you get home all I ever get to do is eat dinner, shower, and do my homework. Now I'll have even less time to spend with you every night!" Way to make mommy feel like a complete ass, thanks kid. Ultimately, I know it's not about spending time with me or not, it's about the fact that she equates reading with medieval torture. However, it still tugged at my heart strings and irritated the already large amount of guilt I feel because I do work. At the moment though, I can't change that fact. Believe me, I'm trying to find a job I can telecommute.
Once I finally got her to stop her tears, we started looking at what we could read together. The only books that held any interest to her at all are the Series of Unfortunate Events. She's currently working on book 4, although I'm seriously second guessing how much of the stories she's actually read and retained. I'm halfway tempted to make her go back and reread them all. James is picking up the first three of them for me from Paige so I can start reading them and catch up to where she is. If I'm going to help her, I'm going to have to roll my sleeves up and dive into the stories too. How else are we going to talk about them if I don't even know what we're talking about?Lemony Snickets... Here I come.
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