The Po Show

Under Pressure

Poor Tessa was so anxious this week, worrying about small group enrichment. On Friday (today), they were supposed to write a character study of a character from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She had chosen Titania (big surprise there! :p), and she was frantic that she was not going to be able to complete the assignment during the time period. I tried to help her prepare; we discussed the play and Titania's role (but you know, you never really know much about her, other than she's beautiful and haughty and her jerkface husband makes her fall in love with a man with the head of a donkey because she won't obey him). She was still in tears yesterday afternoon. They had done a "sloppy copy" rough draft last Friday, and did not have small group enrichment again this week (it's four days a "cycle," and with Election Day being a holiday, the next day of class did not fall till today). She obsessed the entire time, that her sloppy copy had not been complete, that she is too slow in writing, that there was no way she could write the whole character study in the 50 minutes of class.

Part of her problem here is that she is a really slow writer. She's amazingly creative, and her structure is very good, but the actual physical writing takes her forever. I think part of it is that she has some attentional difficulties and has trouble staying on task; part is that she has some of the same processing issues Matthew has and it's hard for her to spell and plan her writing. And part of it is that she's eight years old and just hasn't reached the developmental level necessary to write paragraphs quickly.

Anyway, I emailed her enrichment teacher this morning, letting her know that Tessa had been really anxious about the exercise and that she had some difficulties with writing. I asked her if she could just tell Tessa to do her best (because me telling her that obviously wasn't making much headway). She wrote back and very nicely said that she would reassure Tessa, and that she was a wonderfully bright and vivacious child who always tried her very best.

When I picked Tessa up at school, I asked her how enrichment had gone. "Well," she replied, "in a bizarre twist, we now have two days to complete it!" She was beaming, and skipped down to the car as I laughed hysterically at her uniquely-Tessa phrasing.

But I'm sad that at eight years old, she's already so hard on herself, so worried about performing well. I really don't think I've done anything to plant this anxiety, but hey, she is my daughter. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, when squeezed from the inside.