Dare to Dream

I got a phone call from my 13-year-old's teacher today; it seems that Thing 1 didn't do so well on a math review test, and the teacher is "a little concerned about her achieving her academic goals for the year". Not to worry, I told her, Thing 1 has no academic goals for the year, thereby making them very easy to achieve. She is 13, I wanted to say, if she's anything like I was at that age, her goals for the year include a attracting some 13-year-old male attention and the acquisition of some bitchin' shoes. (It turns out she barely passed the test because she forgot her multiplication tables. How do you do that???And, it would appear, she couldn't be bothered to actually figure them out, either.)

Sadly, Thing 1 comes from a long tradition of wallowing in lethargy; if this family had a motto, it would be "That'll Do". (Which is an improvement over our previous motto, which was "I'll Get Up In A Minute". Our coat-of-arms could be a couch, a remote and a bag of chips.) Compound that with a smattering of intellectual curiosity and a way with words, and you've got yourself a passing grade with a minimum of effort. It always worked for me! (If I had an Indian name it would be "The Little Engine That Could, But Just Didn't Feel Like It".)

Both her father and I could provide multiple report cards with variations on "does not work to potential", ranging from the irate to the weary to the downright puzzled. (One of my husband's teachers from high school wrote "would do much better if he handed things in". You could just tell that she wanted to add "damn it!" at the end.) My brother actually got one report card from high school which read "come to class some time, I'd like to meet you". For all that, none of us ever failed a class, and actually did pretty well for the most part. I guess we could pull out what was required when we really needed to.

I can remember a teacher begging me to try harder, and I honestly had no idea what he was talking about....did he mean for me to read the notes over twice before a test? Was I supposed to draw flow-charts and diagrams to outline my essays? Should I have made my handwriting more twirly? What? Now I can see that he probably meant "try to explain yourself a little better" and "don't count every single word in an essay and stop writing when you've reached the goal". (I think I actually took our a few words, once, so that I didn't have to end in the middle of a sentence.)

So, I'll go have a chat with the teacher and tell her not to worry; Thing 1 will do just fine when she has a goal she can really get behind.....just wait until you see her shoes on the day of a dance.