So one of the many things that came home with Dutch this week was a blank report card basically showing what she is expected to learn during the year. She is one of the older kids in the class, she has had three years of high-quality preschool, and she has over-educated parents and an extended family that values education. So she can pretty much do all of the kindergarten stuff already, and could pick up the rest in a few days of one-on-one tutoring. So here's my concern, which is totally an upper-middle-class helicopter mommy concern: she's going to spend the year being really successful at everything they ask her to do. She's not going to learn about overcoming difficulties - she's going to learn that she gets approval by being good at stuff, not by getting better at stuff. I really want her to have a chance to be bad at something academic, and get better at it through work. I know she'll get a lot better at things like reading and writing over the year, but because she's already starting ahead of most of her classmates, she's just always going to be one of the best at doing most things.
So... I want her to have something to be bad at, and to be supported as she uses her mistakes to learn. I'm trying to figure out how to ask the teacher about this. "Excuse me? I know you have 29 kids in your class, and you have to get all of them to hit these standardized benchmarks, and you don't have enough time or resources to do even that, and you definitely don't get paid anywhere near enough, but hey, could you please figure out a way to also help my child learn to be happy and embrace challenges and not be a perfectionist, please?"
Anyway. As I was told by somebody to whom I expressed this concern, Dutch will have plenty of failures and challenges in school, in various forms.
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