Parent-teacher conference

Isaac attends the four-year-old program at his co-operative preschool, where we had our annual parent-teacher conference this morning. A year ago Isaac was in the three-year-old program at the same school, and after last year's conference I wondered if I should blog about it, or if Isaac was at the age where he deserved privacy. In the end, I decided it was still okay for me to write about his teacher's evaluation of him.

So should I write about today's conference?

Isaac has a different teacher this year, one just beginning her career rather than one with 20 years' experience. And while I felt that the evaluation given by last year's teacher was accurate and insightful, and therefore demonstrated her understanding and appreciation of Isaac, I was dissatisfied with this year's evaluation.

I need to do some more thinking before I am able to fully understand my dissatisfaction, but I thought I would share a few of the issues. Isaac, like all the four-year-olds in his class, recently had a one-on-one "assessment" with his teacher. Using toys, activities, and conversation, the teacher determines the student's understanding of colors, numbers, basic mathematical concepts, the alphabet, phonics, and so forth.

Isaac apparently did well in the "cognitive" area of the assessment. He knew his colors, shapes, capital letters, single-digit numbers, rhymes, and so forth. When asked how high he could count, he said, "I can count very high, but I'm only going to count to 15."

During our conference, the teacher told us about the thoroughness Isaac had demonstrated during the math portion of the assessment. For arithmetic they played with two piles of small plastic bears, and she asked Isaac which pile had more bears. He could count each pile in turn, remember the numbers, and then compare the two numbers and determine which was larger. But when the number of bears was identical -- when the two piles were the same -- Isaac grew suspicious. He counted each pile three times to be sure he wasn't being tricked!

He demonstrated similar persistence when his "sequencing" ability was being assessed. To determine whether Isaac could identify and duplicate a repeating pattern, the teacher set out bears of different colors. When she set out a green and a yellow bear, Isaac repeated the sequence accurately: he put out a green bear and a yellow bear. Then he put out another green bear and another yellow bear. And then another green bear and another yellow bear. He continued the sequence until he ran out of yellow bears.

He likes to be accurate and he likes to be thorough -- just like his parents!

So far, so good. But later in the conference, when the teacher was running down a list of traits, she told us she had put a "W" next to "Completes a task before moving to the next," indicating that it was a skill Isaac "was still working on." I was surprised to hear this. Usually Isaac has a good attention span, and he doesn't flit lightly from one activity to the next.

When we asked the teacher about it, however, she said that when Isaac is working at an activity table and a group of children join him, he often leaves the table before finishing his project. Even if, for example, he had been happily using the magnetic construction toys to create a vehicle, he stops before he is done. However, his teacher continued, he does sometimes give his work-in-progress to her, asking her to set it aside; when the activity table becomes less crowded, he gets it back from her and returns to his work.

And does this sound like a child who doesn't complete tasks?! It sounds remarkably persistent to me. And just as important, it sounds like a child who knows his own character, and knows he prefers to do his creative work in an uncrowded and uncompetitive situation. The child set out bears until he ran out of yellow ones; he obviously doesn't like to leave a task incomplete.

I wish I had made this connection at the time, so I could have said something during the conference, but I was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information that was being given to me, and I didn't fully process all of it until later. Like I said, I was dissatisfied with the teacher's evaluation, and I spent the entire conference feeling slightly off-kilter.

There are four teachers at Isaac's school, each with their own "circle group" of about eight kids, and even prior to this conference Craig and I have often discussed whether it would be worth the awkwardness to ask to switch teachers. Isaac's teacher is a kind and caring woman, and he likes her, but of all the teachers her circle time seems the least fun and the least participatory, perhaps due to her inexperience. Despite these doubts, we left Isaac with her because she seemed like a good fit for him.

This conference, however, has made me doubt this opinion. There are only 12 weeks left of school. Is it worth the weirdness to switch teachers?