My son is 21 months old this week. And last week, we had his first "parent teacher conference". This was supposed to be his second, but somehow we skirted out of the first one.
Side note: I am pretty sure that daycare thinks we are big slackers because we don't both take off work to go to every lunch celebration that they have ("It's Casimir Pulaski day, come on down and celebrate!!"), and we don't act excited enough when they give us his latest piece of artwork. So I suspect that ditching the first parent teacher conference is probably just one more notch in the special book about The Bad Parents.
At any rate, it was interesting. She opened up a huge binder of Information About Jared, with a variety of his artwork saved, pictures, and comments about his growth. First off, his main teacher does not speak English very well. And yet there's a section in the book where she comments on his language skills. Fortunately she said he was doing quite well verbally.
The book also spent some time cautioning us that "this is not a report card" but rather "a progress report" because of course "every child develops at his/her own rate". It made me wonder - when exactly is the switchover from "every child develops at his/her own rate" to "let's ensure our schools are good by testing the kids"?
I did learn something, however... she had saved some artwork from when he first joined the room at 15 months, and showed us how it was different compared to recent artwork. 6 months ago he drew a lot of dots rather than lines, whereas now he does lots of lines and random shapes. She explained that this was an example of his improved hand-eye coordination. Sounds good to me.
I love his teacher. So she can't speak English, sure (resulting in Jared calling his classmate Ben "Beh-beh" because that's what she calls him) and yet she's teaching my son new vocabulary words... but she obviously cares for him very strongly and is always on the floor actively engaged with the kids, unlike some of the other teachers. And plus, she had an entire book about him. That's pretty cool.
Sounds like his teacher has all the important qualities!
Posted by: Dawn | March 06, 2005 at 08:08 PM