Parent teacher interview

We dragged our pre-teen out of bed at an ungodly hour this morning to get her to our interview with a bunch of her grade 7 teachers. I like her school a lot more after noticing that three of her teachers are saying pretty much the same thing about her that we always tell her at home with respect to her school achievements. They know her and they like her. We do too, fortunately. But then I find myself wondering whether all average middle class parents think the same things about their kids and all teachers know this, so they just sit on the little chairs behind those ugly little tables and repeat the same four sentences over and over, nodding like academic bobble-heads. Maybe there's even a manual.

As you can imagine, having these thoughts run through my head while trying to listen to a math teacher explain why our kid didn't quite seem to understand ASA and SAS and congruent triangles made it slightly necessary for me to inflict a bit of damage on my lower lip so as not to spray coffee across the table. It also didn't help that the young student teacher with luxuriously flowing chestnut hair and exceptionally tall stiletto heels was sitting at one of these little desks looking just willowy enough and chewing delicately on a pencil while reading a novel buried in her lap. Nobody wanted to talk to her (nobody knew who she was, probably) but I imagine she was carefully following an instruction to attend, hoping to get taken on staff next year. At some point, as the morass of my daughter's algebraic etchings was laid out before me, I lapsed into lascivious thought and I let it happen. Shame on me.

So now I've just gotten home from an interview that only ran 45 minutes behind schedule to find an email granting me a one year extension on my funding. Or more accurately, pointing out that I had had this option all along and had just not known about it. So now, pending answers to a few small questions of clarification, the vista of my summer is possibly entirely different. Instead of the scramble to shove into print every piece of shit data I can possibly wrap a sexy figure around, I can actually think about what I'm doing and maybe even collect a little more data so that I know what I'm talking about.

Also, it means more time for the book that ate my life. And my kids, who I'm seeing more than for a long time really do need a whole lot of my time. And a garden.

Now I'll go wander around in the rain for a bit.