IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:Parents' knack of concentrating on the lowest mark achieved by high-flying children, writes ADAM BROPHY.
PARENT-TEACHER meeting. She’s in first class so I’m an old hand at this. Still, this is the first time there’s a proper report card. The categories are marked one to five, with five being great, one being muck.
They’re in Irish so the múinteoir has to translate, but I don’t follow too well because I’ve scanned to the only three on the board and am trying to figure out what it’s for. The rest are fives and fours so they don’t matter; what the hell is a three doing there? I hate myself for this.
It seems to be for attitude. This does not compute. She’s not a bad ass, and how could she excel at everything and then get stung for attitude.
I have a fleeting image of her as Cool Hand Luke, or one of the bright kids in that dodgy mid-1990s Michelle Pfeiffer movie Dangerous Minds. I watched that, there are two hours I’ll never have back.
Maybe she’s Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, using dandruff for snow in her paintings. Still, dandruff snow is creative, and you can’t penalise a girl for making the most of her resources.
I’m getting ready to fight her corner when I realise I’ve misread the column – her three is for oral Irish. Apparently her attitude is exemplary, she’s a dream to teach. I’m a little disappointed, the rebel fantasy had been growing legs.
And oral Irish? After coming into a Gaelscoil from a regular scoil? Come on, after one term she’s hardly going to be rabble rousing with fiery Gaelic passion. The fact that she has a clue as to what’s going on in class astounds me, and her being able to make herself understood when she does open her mouth is a wonder.
The teacher knows this and agrees. The three is dismissed in my head, I’m chuffed.
It’s my going straight to the three that bothers me. It’s my caring about her scores at all that bothers me. She’s seven; whether she aces her four plus tables or not isn’t going to preclude her from a scholarship to Trinity. She could be kicking her can all over the place and she’d still ace first class.
She could snooze til she’s 12 and, with a bit of application, cruise into college a few years later. So why the concern about the three?
They started giving me report cards when I changed school at around third class. School was easy until then. But suddenly, these scores became important.
Fortunately the scores were okay, for a long time they were better than okay. And getting these scores seemed a byproduct of turning up and just doing enough. Some time in secondary school just doing enough stopped being enough and a level of application was demanded.
Application? Nah, that didn’t go down well. In fact “just doing enough” served me in every which way. It just about got me into college, just got me through, just about survived my 20s, just squeaked me a job, just kept me in it, and just stopped me from going totally off my head with the stress from just about getting away with it all the time.
It was only back in education in my 30s that I discovered giving a little bit more effort was required to gain any real benefit. Not only that, but the kids pointed out that just paying enough attention to them is not regarded as satisfactory parenting. They require a modicum of effort, a soupcon of indulgence. Demanding little animals they are.
So, the three in itself was not the firestarter. Its presence in her life, and mine, was. Her first assessment was a breeze, as I’m sure the next cartload will be.
She may become accustomed to a proprietorial sense of ease at attaining such complimentary marks. Until along comes the first big ask, the first one that says, “well now, what have you got to say for yourself?” And this first big ask, in whatever form it takes, should really be the first ask of all because the ones that go before are indulgences, to parents and to kids.
It’s nice to get that report, to be told your kid’s doing great. But I knew that already. Just as if the report, for whatever reason, had not been particularly hot I’d like to think I would have known well in advance.
Because she’s not theirs yet, she’s still ours, even though the crossover is happening slowly, just as it should. And if there were grades for being a kid she’d score five every time, five because she puts her heart into it and always does more than enough.