Settle down, children...

So the Boys and I are shortly to attend what their school optimistically calls 'settling in conferences'. For any British readers out there, or for anyone else who has not come across this term before, it refers to a 20 minute session where parent(s), child and teacher sit down and discuss progress during the 4 week-old school year to-date, chat about any issues that might have reared their ugly heads, and agree on goals for the next 9 months or so.

What?

I'm sorry, but - What?

I guess what are really talking about is a parent / teacher evening with the child in attendance. Which seems to me rather besides the point. I mean, what teacher would be able to speak frankly about a child with them sitting next to the parent? In fact, what parent would want them to? I mean, maybe, perhaps, this would be a useful exercise if the Boys were a few years older, but at 4 and 7 I'm not convinced that this is anything other than window-dressing of the 'look how much we care about your child' kind.

However, I'm going with a (partly) open mind, as is Boy #1. I'm sure his settling in conference will be fine. Boy #2, on the other hand, has decided to treat this occasion with his usual devil-may-care attitude. For some reason the reception class (that's PreK, if you live across the pond) were provided with a questionnaire for their parents to fill out for them. This consisted of two key questions: Q1: What am I good at? and Q2: What do I want to learn this year? Each was accompanied by a box for the child to draw a picture that might illustrate their answer.

Well, we tried, we really did. But my younger son - never a sheep - flatly refused to follow instructions on the pictures and instead drew his favourite form of transport in each box, using feather-light pencil strokes that are almost invisible to the naked eye (I wonder if his teacher has CSI-style enhancement techniques available to her for use in such cases?). And when it came to actually answering Q1, he decided the only thing he was good at was 'playing'. I doctored this slightly and added 'making friends' (both things, I'm sure you'll agree, are key to a 4 year-old's success, and which - in my considered opinion - he actually is good at).

Q2, on the other hand... Well, you try getting a testosterone-charged PreKindergartner to tell you what they want to learn at school this year. Short of shining a light in his eyes and contravening the Geneva Convention, there was no way I was going to get any answer other than 'But I don't want to learn anything, mummy! I just want to play!' So I did what all of us creative-types would do in that situation; I changed the question.

Out went; 'What do you want to learn at school this year?', and in came 'What do you want to learn... this year?' Funnily enough, that yielded results. Once mandatory attendance at school was no longer part of the equation, Boy #2 showed his true colours and admitted his real ambition.

And I wrote it down. (Well, why not? They did ask...)

What remains to be seen is how his teacher deals with the answer. Oh, and what I wrote down was: 'This year, I want to learn to drive a motorboat, and ride a quad bike.'

At the very least we'll find out if she has a sense of humour or not, I suppose...

Note: In Boy #2's defence, these ambitions are not as far-fetched as they might seem. We're living the expat life and things that might be an impossibility living in central London seem to happen disconcertingly often out here. For example, 3 weekends ago he was on the water next to the driver of a motorboat (who was, in his considered opinion, not making half as good a job of piloting it as he - Boy #2 - would have done), and 3 older children in our compound do have quad-bikes and frequently offer him rides. (He's only managed to take them up on it the once, when my back was turned - but that's a story for another post).