The stay-at-home dad: When ‘approaching’ meets an angry fifth grader

My 10-year-old daughter ripped open a can of whoop-sass at her recent parent-teacher conference.

My daughter takes her grades seriously, even though, to me anyway, it seems impossible to get worked up over a “non-letter” grade system that consists of generalized phrases like “meeting,” “approaching” and “exceeding” expectations.

For the most part, all my kids fall squarely in the “meeting expectations” level, and it seems like most other kids do as well, at least according to my very lazy research on the topic. I think the system works fine, as the grades don’t really matter so long as a child develops the appropriate skills and acquires the knowledge needed to advance through education.

My wife and I don’t stress about grades with our kids, in part because both of us had personal experiences growing up in which we took such things way too seriously. We both had parents that deployed a “do your best” attitude, and while that advice seems innocuous on the surface, it can encourage an aggressive mindset for kids who tend to measure their own worth based on academic performance.

In short, my wife and I were “overachievers” when it came to grades, pushing ourselves through unnecessary stress just to make sure we garnered those coveted As.

Despite a more “learn for understanding” approach with our kids, my oldest daughter struggles with criticism and feedback about her school performance, specifically in the area of writing. She has a very specific and confident voice, something that can’t really be taught and should be an asset for her should she choose to explore storytelling going forward.

Having a strong voice, however, doesn’t mean you can just do whatever you want when it comes to grammar, punctuation and formatting, especially when a teacher asks for specific attributes in a given assignment.

This is all setup to say my daughter flipped a lid at the sight of her report card this week. Every category listed MM, or “meeting expectations,” except for one — Narrative storytelling. The “approaching” mark stirred a volcanic reaction from this generally sweet-natured child.

Her: “How could I have ‘meeting expectations’ last session and ‘approaching’ this session? My stories are better and have a bunch of conflict and (teacher name redacted) doesn’t know what he’s talking about!”

In her initial rage, she said some other things about her teacher I’m not going to repeat in this space. Oof, all I can say is her teacher now understands how I feel whenever I ask her to empty the dishwasher.

My wife and I looked at a few of her graded writing samples, and, in short, I can totally understand both sides of this debate. On one hand, my daughter’s creativity shines in her writing. On the other hand, she needs to work on better organizing her ideas.

We tried to share our opinion with her about it, and, NOPE, she wasn’t having any of it. So we expected to see some fireworks come parent-teacher-conference time, and our daughter didn’t hold back when it came time for her to share her opinion.

Her: “You say the story didn’t have conflict, but that story was a personal narrative about our vacation, and it was a great vacation and there wasn’t any of that kind of conflict, but you wanted us to write a true story.”

Sidenote: That vacation had plenty of conflict. I specifically remember saying, “That’s it! We’re canceling the rest of this vacation!” on more than one occasion.

Her rant continued: “And you said I need to work on my transitions, but look at this story — Here’s a transition. And here’s another transition. And oop, look, another transition! This is full of transitions!”

And more: “You didn’t even grade my last story I turned in, so how can you say I’m approaching expectations when you’re not even looking at the most recent work?!”

Look, I know this reads a bit harsh in written form, so I’ll remind you that she’s 10, has a squeaky nervous voice and refused to make eye contact with her teacher for the entire rant.

In the end, I’m proud that she felt confident enough to defend herself. However, she didn’t love that the feedback from her teacher sounded an awful lot like what Mom and Dad also said about her writing. She needed better transitions. She needed to take the time to fix simple punctuation and formatting mistakes. She needed to dig a little deeper on describing conflict.

Most importantly — she needed a lesson on taking feedback. She needed to learn that she had an opportunity to improve and that the “approaching” grade was a way to open a dialogue about how she could harness her creativity and become a better writer.

Honestly, I don’t know if any of the adults got through to her at that parent-teacher conference. It’s probably going to take many more conversations about the difference between learning and academic performance. I’d like to think we didn’t raise her to focus so much on achievement, but perhaps a little bit of genetics played a role when it comes to stressing about grades.

I don’t know. I didn’t study science in college. More importantly, how were the transitions in this column?

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.