“You probably need to take the Boy: he’s getting fussy about it,” said K as we were making plans for the busy day ahead. Who would take the Boy to his summer reading academy and who would take Papa to meet with the estate liquidator? Originally, I was going to do the former, but K’s comment made me realize she was right.
The program, developed by Clemson University, has bounced around conversations with various mothers, and it comes highly recommended. E’s not a bad reader, we thought, but he’s still a developing reader: there’s always room for improvement.
The Boy had his own opinion about it. He did not want to go. “I’m a terrible reader!” he lamented during the drive over to the university center. “I read so slowly. And A, he’s reading XYZ” (can’t remember the book, but I’m reading it to the Boy now) “all by himself!”
“You don’t need to compare yourself to A; just compare yourself to E.”
“But there’s no other E. How can I compare myself to E when I’m the only E I know?” He’s at the age that I’m not quite sure whether he’s joking or not. Sometimes I get it wrong, and he gets mildly frustrated that I didn’t catch on and play along.
We got to the university center and found probably a dozen kids waiting with a parent or two. He nestled into me as we stood there, which is common when he’s in an unfamiliar situation, and I was beginning to worry anew about how it would be when I tried to leave. After all, it was a nearly-two-hour course, and I didn’t want to sit there with him when I had so many other things to do. But those worries were for naught: he settled into the classroom easily, and when the teacher dismissed the parents after the various, expected preliminaries, he was completely calm when I walked over to him, hugged him, and said, “Have fun.”
I knew what he was thinking: “I won’t have fun! I don’t like reading!” We’d had this conversation in the car, too.
“I think that’s just because you’re not so confident about your reading.”
“Maybe,” he conceded.
“This class is designed to help you build your confidence by giving you new tricks for reading,” I explained.
So when I went to hug him goodbye, I was expecting a bit of panic, a bit of frustration, a bit of reluctance that just wasn’t there, which made it all the easier to leave and do the various chores around Nana’s and Papa’s place (at what point do I stop call it “Nana’s and Papa’s place” and just “Papa’s place?” Probably never, because it will always be “Nana’s and Papa’s place”) like replacing a couple of broken door knobs and sundry repairs to get it ready for selling.
I got back to the class with five minutes to spare, just as the teacher began making final announcements: “And I would like to the parents of K, W, R, and E before you leave, please.” The short version: she’d done preliminary testing on everyone today and felt that our kids would be better served in the rising-third-grader class.
As we walked out, I asked E, “She was taking quickly; did you understand everything?”
“Yes.”
When we got back to Nana’s and Papa’s, E burst in and told K immediately.
The Boy so often suffers from his lack of confidence in some things. He realizes he’s just not as fast as many of his friends; in soccer, he sees that he doesn’t play nearly as well as some of his teammates; and reading — well, he’s never felt great about that.
Maybe now, he does.