Don't Quit Your Day Job

School has started, with the attendant joys of back-to-school shopping (love me some school supplies) and French onion soup (this year's requested menu by the student in question).

I can't believe The Child is a junior. No, really. She almost wasn't. The end of last year required no small amount of hard, hard work to keep her from flunking out. She pulled that off and went to summer school besides. Only, it turns out, not as much summer school as she needed. That was, on one level, my fault. With all the stuff surrounding Suzanne's death I confused some registration dates. But, as I mentioned to The Child when she attempted to ream me out for this lapse, if she hadn't flunked Algebra we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. There were meetings and emails and no small amount of worry before she got the go ahead to register. She's making up Algebra in an extra class.

Here's the thing about The Child. She's smart. Plenty smart. She's just not an academician. She really could care less about things, unless she cares about them. (Civil War? Shakespeare? Bring it. Math? Not so much). And her strategy last year, the one that got her into trouble, was to work really hard on big projects and ignore all the little ones. What's 5 points here and there when you get 60 out of 50 on a 10 page paper, right? Wrong. Zeros, she's learned, add up.

She's also come to understand that while she may have every intention of being an actor, she's still going to have to graduate high school, go to college and have some options in life other than "Do you want fries with that?"

Last night, in a rather impressive display of intention, she sat down with me to review every single one of the syllabuses (syllabi?) for her classes. And then she talked about how excited she was about the subject matter ahead and her strategy for staying on top of her work and not letting things slide like she did last year. It was almost as if she finally got it.

Proof will be in the pudding, of course. Let's see what her attitude is like once the work actually begins. But at least she has the right attitude going into this, the sense that she can do this and that good grades are actually something of which she is capable.

Wish us luck. Meanwhile, I'm meeting Chouchou tonight for Bloody Mary dinner, our since-Rainey-went-back-to-work compromise on the traditional Bloody Mary Monday.