THE STUDENT BECOMES THE TEACHER

On Tuesday, the kids' first day of school, which was a half day, Kayla met her friends for pizza after school so I didn't get to see her until after lunch.
After I picked her and her friends up at the pizza place I didn't get to see her until supper time because some of her friends came home with her and she just couldn't fit me in. Because after they spent a few hours here they walked to the park to watch the boys...I mean the boys' baseball team play.

Anyway, when she finally found time to talk to me about her day she told me that she was not on the roster for any of her classes except one, even though she had followed her schedule very carefully. We both figured this issue would be corrected by the next day and all would be well. Kayla was not worried about it; so I didn't worry.

On Wednesday (yesterday) she came home and said that the office had a completely different schedule on file for her than the one she had been given at registration and she had followed the wrong schedule for nearly two days.

There were tears. There were threats of quitting school. There were promises to complain vehemently to the office over their lack of organization.

Until Kayla calmed me down.

Not really, about my own tears and threats. I learned many years ago to gauge my child's reaction to a potentially upsetting situation and stage my response accordingly. I mean, if they aren't bothered by something, generally speaking, why should I be?

When she first told me about the confusion, I thought "Well, that's just great! What a way to start your first week of high school." But she was laughing about the whole thing. She was laughing as she told me she missed Spanish all together and went to World Geography twice because when the counselor finally gave her the "right" schedule he told her to follow it for the rest of the day. So she ended up returning to some classes and missing some. And she very nonchalantly told me how she just said "oh, my schedule was messed up so I'm in THIS class now" to the teachers. And that was that. She handled this potentially upsetting situation as though it were nothing. She handled it as something she could laugh about. She kept telling us, her parents, "It's no big deal guys" when we kept asking "But it's worked out now, right? You feel comfortable with everything, right?" WE were the ones who were ready to make it a catastrophe. She was the one who was ready to deal with it as the minor glitch that it was. We weren't going to go in and fight her battle for her, but we were prepared to tell her how to fight it. Turns out, she didn't see it as a battle to be fought. She saw it as a funny story that just made her week more interesting.

And that is when I realized that she's going to be fine in high school. She's going to be just fine.