Mediocre? Is that possible?

I had Scooter's parent-teacher conference last week. Guess what? She's an average 3rd grader. I can't believe it. Color me shocked (and I'll admit - a bit disappointed). This mama didn't raise no dummy.

Don't get me wrong, she's doing well in school, and she's starting to come out of her shell and make some new friends (other than the ones she had from the last 4 weeks of school last year). But she's not in the top reading group, her writing is "developing", and she's about to be average at math. What's up?! She's in the top math group, but come on! She should be tops in everything. Isn't that what the tiger mom in me is dying for?

At the end of 1st grade, Scooter took the CAT (california assessment test) for K-2. She scored a perfect score. That's right. She got every question on that test correct. At the end of 1st grade, she had a beginning of 4th grade reading level. At the end of 1st grade, she was clearly an advanced student. She spent a school year at her dad's.

At the end of 2nd grade, she took a reading placement test w/ her 2nd grade teacher in Beaverton. She was the highest reader in her class (fluency and comprehension). Her writing was lack luster - as in, it was stuck in 1st grade. Her teacher was shocked - how could such a good reader be such a poor writer? I promised we'd work on it over the summer. I arranged for one of her friends to be a pen pal with Scooter. Scooter wrote exactly 1 letter. I asked her cousins to write, so Scooter could write back. 3 cousins wrote. Scooter wrote nobody back. She was told she couldn't go to summer camp with her cousins, and when the court order finally forced them to let her go, she did not even have a swimming suit. Such was her summer.

So when she was tested again at the beginning of 3rd grade, imagine my surprise when she tested at a mid-third grade reading level. Just enough to NOT make it into the highest reading group. The ex is blaming me and my choice in books. Really. Newbury and Caldecott and other literary award winning books are not challenging enough for her. He'd prefer she read fan fiction. yeah. Because as long as the book has more than 150 words, it must be good. Apparently, Charlotte's Web (a book which set the standard for children's fiction) isn't good enough for her because it doesn't have enough pages. At least they did make a movie out of it. I guess it has that going for it (in his eyes). I guess the book I'm currently reading is crap because it has less than 300 pages - I am, after all, 27 years older than Scooter. Shouldn't I be reading only books of greater than 700 pages? What?!

I'll hop off that horse for now. Just know that from the day we went to conferences forward, poor little Scooter has been writing more, doing more math online, and reading more. That girl will be in the top 10% of her class if it kills us both.