Mrs. Meanie

Tomorrow I'll meet with my son's teacher for a school-wide conference day. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. After several years of nurturing teachers who saw potential in my boy, he is now faced with one who seems to favor an "old school" approach. At the start, I tried to look past her stern expression, glasses resting on her nose, and this was in addition to her reputation for scaring children. "I kind of think she doesn't like me," he revealed to me the other day. And I could tell by the tone of her report card comments that this might be true. Instead of letting him read the report, I told him that his teacher had a lot of good ideas for how he can improve. "Does your teacher ever talk to you in class about these ideas?" I asked him as I started in with her most pressing concerns. "Mom, she's not the not the kind of teacher to talk to one student at a time." Last year, he filled spiral notebooks at school and home with his own stories, comics, and comments; he called himself a writer. This year he was welcomed into her writing community by red marks across the pages he turned in, evaluated almost entirely on conventions instead of craft.

I know he didn't meet her expectations at the start of third grade, and I don't dispute any of the recommendations she has for him. We've worked at home, and thank god he goes along with my requests to make corrections, rewrite, try again. He wants to do well in school, and he thinks he's improving. The question is, does she?