Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Parent-Teacher Conference: BYO Cookies

By Bob Wire, 11-12-08

	There I am, in the middle of the back row. A snappy dresser from early on, but this is the year that I quit growing.

Lots of parents were hustling in and out of John Colter Elementary as we turned onto a side street to find a parking spot. Barb and I walked toward the brick school, eager to meet with Mrs. A, Speaker’s fifth grade teacher. I was curious to see how the school Speaker compared to the home Speaker.

We walked into the classroom and I looked around. No cookies, no juice. This was going to be a long fifteen minutes.

“Have a seat,” said Mrs. A with a cheerful smile. “We’ve got lots to talk about!” Barb and I perched on the small chairs that make me feel like a 5’7” giant. I leaned forward, hands clasped together to show my attention. From this angle I could see the counter at the end of the room, near the sink. No cookies there either.

“Well, Speaker has been doing great in science, great in math, and we’re in the middle of our unit in social studies. Here’s the rubric that explains the grading system, and here are a couple of papers she’s written.” She slid the pages across the table, and I sat back, thinking, unit? Unit of what? Whole blood? Rubric? I thought they came in cube form. The terminology I’ve been hearing from the kids and their teachers since they entered kindergarten has me wondering if I ever really attended school, or was it all just a vivid nightmare. I have to admit that I did wet the bed as a child. From the hallway.

“And you can see that she’s very proficient in her reading…” Mrs. A began.

“Yeah, she gets that from Barb,” I said, cutting her off. “Barb’s reading at an eighth grade level.” My laughter was cut off by the pain of Barb’s heel on my instep, which I interpreted as “no sex for a month.”

“Anyway, Speaker seems to have great comprehension, and is brimming with really unique ideas.”

Yeah, I thought, like the time she thought it would be a good idea to build a fort out of empty gin bottles in the front yard. There must have been six kids inside that thing. Just when I thought the neighbors couldn’t think any less of me.

“…so when she finished a chapter and has a grip on the schema of the story, she needs to use her metacognition to draw out the inferences in the writing.”

I looked at Barb. She was looking at Mrs. A and nodding, with the slightest furrow in her brow. I know that look. She gets that look when I’m trying to explain how a 12AY7 tube will have a lower gain factor in my Fender amp than a 12AX7, allowing me to overdrive the preamp with less volume.

Barb may have them fooled, but the teachers at John Colter Elementary learned long ago that I’m not just Old School, I’m Pre School. I thought schema was the stuff that pours out of a trout when you slice its belly open. And metacognition, he was one of those Transformers, right? Optimus Prime’s right-hand man? The guy who folds up into a garbage truck?

There are some things I do understand, though, like how Speaker burned up ten minutes of a fifteen-minute reading period trying to find a comfortable position under her desk. Or what’s going through her mind when she brings home a Christmas illustration featuring a detailed painting of our family gathered around the tree, and Rusty has an arrow in his neck. Sometimes they don’t get along so well.

“Here are the scores from last year’s MontCAS testing,” said Mrs. A, showing us a sheet crammed with gobbledygook. Barb and I stared at it like it was written in Cantonese and we were hungry tourists.

“Um, where’s her score?” I asked.

“Right here. Three hundred points out of a possible three hundred.”

Oh. She aced it. Right on! The MontCAS test, as I understand it, is the fifth grade version of the SAT’s. That is, if high school teachers suspended their normal curriculum around mid-January and relentlessly prepped the kids for a mid-April multiple-choice exam. I know it’s a test that measures competency (on whose part, the teachers or students, I’m not sure). Surely there’s some funding strings attached to the results, because every spring the students of JCE have the fear of God put into them about doing well on this test. It’s treated like a Super Bowl that’s played once every ten years.  And my girl nailed it.

So we left the meeting puffed up with the pride of our little girl’s scholastic progress and accomplishments. The schema of her elementary career thus far is that of an imaginative young sprite, who is learning to focus, to complete her assignments, and to follow instructions, while not losing that free spirit and fanciful spark that makes her light up a room. At least that’s what my metacognition tells me.

“Well, she seems to be doing pretty well,” said Barb, oozing satisfaction. “What do you think?”

“Do we have any cookies?”

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