As Perfect As I Need To Be

Colin was the one kid in Advanced Kindergarten last year who didn’t actually test into the class.  (As a side note, the fact that he did just fine in this class despite not having confirmed his aptitude, is a bit of a testament to the value — or lack thereof — of such testing at this young age.  Either that, or my son is an unconfirmed genius.)  I’d like to say that I chose not to have Colin tested, but as it played out, I actually had no idea that the testing was happening, until it was too late.

I did, however, have friends who opted to test their children, and some reported, after having attended the informational meetings with other parents of Advanced Kindergarten hopefuls, that they didn’t actually want their kids to be in a class with the kids of those kind of parents. Stepfordton has a very highly educated parental base to begin with, parents who waited to start a family until they were at a place financially, professionally, personally, where they could devote a lot of attention to the business of raising exceptional children.  So that’s where we start out.  You dial it up a notch when you’re dealing with the parents of Advanced Kindergartners.

So maybe it’s no surprise that many of the parents of Colin’s classmates had their children tested earlier this year to see if they could get into the gifted charter school about 8 miles away.  Seven of his classmates — out of a class of twenty — were accepted.  Quite a feat.

Here’s where my own sense of inadequacy kicks in.  Once again, I didn’t know that the testing would happen.  Even if I had known, I’m about 98% sure I wouldn’t have dragged Colin downtown to get tested anyway, but I do feel like Slacker Mom Of The Year every time I hear about some educational opportunity for my kids that they miss out on due entirely to my own ineptitude.

One of the moms I spoke with today had not only had her child tested for the gifted charter school, but then had followed up with an academic assessment by a third party to better understand her child’s particular style of learning and processing new information when he didn’t score high enough on the initial test.  And she hired a tutor to help keep up with his academic process over the summer.

I, on the other hand, had signed Colin up for exactly one extra-curricular activity this summer — going to Camp Invention, where, as near as I can tell, he spent a week disassembling an old DVD player we had sitting around the garage, and then reassembling back into a new “invention” for chopping up food.  We spent a lot of time at the swimming pool, saw some fun movies, went on a couple hikes, and even read some books together, but other than that, pffft – nada.