I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. The teacher continues to be lovely and there were no unpleasant shocks at the meeting, but it was an awful lot like going to the GP! In and out in ten minutes, stay focused, no time to chat, the next parent waiting outside the door.
Like everyone at school, Mrs B sized up Small Fry, enquired about her age (three), and assumed she'd be joining her sister at the school next year. I said no, her sister had got a lot out of home education and I expected she would as well.
Mrs B said The Kid had been quiet at first but had regained her confidence very quickly. She had friends, smiled a lot, was helpful and worked hard.
She showed me a bit of The Kid's handwriting, saying how much it had improved with practice since she started school. "It's still painfully slow," she said, "but she'll get better." Painful for whom, I wondered - for my daughter or for the teacher? She praised The Kid's imagination and expression and I said yes, I'd always encouraged her to get her ideas out in any way she could because I didn't want fears over handwriting or spelling to prevent her expressing herself. I don't think Mrs B and I are quite "on the same page" about that: she seems ambivalent about my daughter typing some of her longer essays on the computer.
We moved rapidly on to maths, where The Kid has said that she's on a similar level to most others in the class. Apparently many of them complain of the tedium of the work, though at home she tells me she gets a certain satisfaction from doing repetitive tasks which require only diligence, and little thought. To my great surprise, arithmetic is her favourite subject. I think it may be no bad thing that my daughter finally is being made to absorb the multiplication tables, but I do wonder whether it will really stick. Can her classmates really be as bad at it as she is - considering she has only recently even tried to learn the times tables, whereas presumably they have been working on them off and on at school for years and still don't know them? I mention a few fun maths ideas which my daughter has enjoyed doing at home, which do not rely on computational skills. Mrs B feels that such topics are best held out as a reward for those who have mastered the boring stuff.
I wonder whether most of these kids will ever get that reward, and whether they will still be in a fit state to appreciate it when they do. If football-mad children were only allowed to do drills, never being allowed to play an actual game until they'd attained advanced skills, would many of them stick with football? Arithmetic is useful, but few people feel a passion for it. Perhaps this is why so many people dislike maths?
When the teacher said that perhaps next year my daughter would be doing more exciting maths at school, the time seemed right to mention that she may not be around then. No one at the school has ever asked why she'd left home education behind in order to start school, and so we've neither of us told them that this is a trial period for her - or for school, I should say. But everyone has been very welcoming to both of us and I have no wish to drop a bombshell on the last day of term.
She took the news well, but advised me to encourage The Kid to stay on. Going to secondary is such a big change for children, she said, they really need to be well prepared. In her opinion, my daughter needed social experience at primary school in order to move up to secondary with confidence. I pointed out that she was a very confident child who was used to being with other children and had settled into primary school with ease, so why would she not do likewise at secondary? And that if primary was so different to secondary then why would five more terms at a small village primary school be a good preparation for a big secondary school? Our time was up, and off I went, only later realising that I had failed to say that I doubted she would spend much (if any) time at secondary school anyway!
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