Conference

I had Owen's parent-teacher conference yesterday. It sounds like things have improved a lot from the fall. I think the transition from one school to another, and the transition from kindergarten to first grade, was tough for him. He spent a lot of time in the fall floating around, unfocused. The teacher said now he is really working hard and getting a lot done. I think his position in the fall was, "Why should I be doing schoolwork when I could be pretending I'm a (football player, Power Ranger, firefighter, etc.)?" Now I think he's starting to get it, a bit. This spring he needs to work on memorizing the basic addition and subtraction facts (adding 0-9 plus 0-9). They are supposed to complete a sheet of all 100 combinations, randomly arranged, in 5 minutes, which only gives you 3 seconds per problem, so you have to know them all by heart and - the hard part for a 6 year old boy - be able to concentrate enough on a two-sided page of math problems for five solid minutes to write down 100 correct answers. We'll see.

Guitar and baseball are going well, though...