Yesterday we had the first parent teacher conferences of the school year and as I mentioned earlier, I was really nervous. The reason I was nervous was because we had to get Gavin’s teachers to understand what they were dealing with.

I knew that wasn’t going to be easy and so I wasn’t looking forward to having to try and convince them as to what we were dealing with. 

We met with Gavin’s teachers first…

He has 4 different teachers and all were present.  After hearing what his teachers had to say about how he was doing, I began explaining what we were concerned about and why.

Some of the teachers were very receptive and had in fact, been picking up on this behavior and addressing it.  Gavin never mentioned that to us, but that’s not a real shocker.

What really upset me was the how some of his teachers reacted.  As I would explain what he was doing, they would look at each other as though I was completely out of my mind.  They weren’t even trying to hide it.  It was painfully obvious that my words were falling on deaf ears. 

So make things even worse, after I finished trying to get them to understand, his teacher wanted to demonstrate how amazing Gavin was and how wrong I was by digging out a paper that Gavin had written.

This paper was about why he admired me so much. 

It was a touching paper and I’ll share it when I get it but it doesn’t change anything.

It honestly felt like his teacher was trying to make me feel guilty for all of the things I was saying about Gavin.  I wasn’t bad mouthing Gavin, I was simply trying to make her aware of his behaviors, so we could all be on the same page and help Gavin to succeed.

Those of you with RAD kids are probably familiar with people not believing you about your child unless they witness the behavior first hand and even then it’s explained away.

At the end of the day, I don’t think much was accomplished and I was personally offended by the condescending attitude of one of his teachers. 

Having said that, Gavin is extremely charming and charismatic.
He can very easily disarm most people and win them over, making it very difficult to get everyone on the same page.  In reality, I don’t blame the teacher because I was the same way in the beginning.  Lizze was telling me all the things Gavin was doing and I honestly didn’t believe her because Gavin took great care to never let me witness his actions.

This is classic splitting.

We did manage to get a better understanding of the homework issues, so we can now address that. 

I’m just really frustrated that this is so complicated and all we want is for everyone to be on the same page. 

It needs to also be said, that Gavin’s grades are pretty good though.  His teachers love him and he gets along with the other kids in his class, for the most part.  That’s definitely a good thing and we made sure to express our pride to Gavin though out the day.

On the positive side, Elliott and Emmett are doing extremely well in class.  While they each have things that need some work, they are well ahead of the rest of the class, especially Elliott, who’s reading at about a 5th grade level. 

All three of the boys are loved by their teachers and fellow students.

That’s so awesome. 

I still couldn’t help but walk away with a sour taste in my mouth because we weren’t able to accomplish what we wanted to because we couldn’t get everyone on the same, at least as far as Gavin was concerned.

We’re going to have to see how this all plays out. 

This site is managed almost exclusively from my Samsung Galaxy Note 3. Please forgive any typos as auto-correct HATES me. 😉

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