epilepsy dad

Tag: school

  • Someone Who’d Been Asked

    Someone Who’d Been Asked

    The summer was ending and he wasn’t looking forward to going back to school. The summer is never long enough.

    A few weeks before the first day, the principal called. She asked if my son would be willing to talk to some prospective upper school students. He’d been a leader last year, she said. The school had a program. The older students called themselves ambassadors. She thought of him.

    I told him she’d reached out. I told him what she said.

    “Really?”

    He sat up a little taller. His chest puffed out just slightly. I told him I thought so too.

    The family ended up not needing him that day. He was still going back to school, still to the same hallways and the same people, but now as someone who’d been asked.

    Every year, the week before classes start, the school holds a welcome back gathering. We go every year. I stand in the hallway and talk to his teachers, the ones who’ve known him for the last few years. I think they’re a big reason for his progress. They cared about him and I’ve never doubted that.

    This year there was news. The school had added eleventh grade, which meant a dedicated upper school floor and dedicated upper school teachers for the first time. He’d be moving up. I hadn’t fully realized what that meant until that night. The teachers I’d been talking to for years would be one floor down. Not gone, but different. I was going to miss them.

    One of the new upper school teachers was someone he’d had before. There was also a teacher we hadn’t met, and we met them that night. And his teachers introduced us to a new student and their parents, someone transferring in and nervous about starting somewhere unfamiliar. We talked about things my son liked about the school, how long he’d been there, what made it feel like the right place. We told them he’d help them get settled.

    When school started, I checked in every few days. He said he was helping. He was.

    A week or so in, I walked into his room and he was on the phone. I asked who it was. The new student, he said. They were on speaker, so I said hello.

    They said my son had made them feel very welcome. They said I was raising a nice boy and a good person.

    He was sitting right there.

    I left the room. They were still on the phone.

  • The Execution Layer

    The Execution Layer

    I was sitting in an AI users group meeting at work recently. We went around the room and people described what they had been using the tools for. It wasn’t a technical crowd. These were people with domain knowledge and good instincts who had previously been blocked by a specific kind of gap. The gap between knowing what they needed and being able to build it themselves.

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  • Whatever Comes After

    Whatever Comes After

    I sat at a table in the gym at my son’s school. At the other tables, there were a dog groomer, a police detective, someone from the state park maintenance crew, an archaeologist, and other community members. We were there for career day.

    My topic was AI.

    (more…)
  • Learning to Separate Grades and Self-Worth

    Learning to Separate Grades and Self-Worth

    I love my son’s school. I’m grateful every day for what they’ve done for him. He’s had many of the same teachers for years, and this is the first year the school expanded to 10th grade. My son is part of that first cohort, which made our first 10th-grade parent–teacher conference feel like a milestone.

    When his homeroom teacher started talking, something tightened in my chest—because she wasn’t talking about grades at all. She was talking about him.

    I don’t remember my mom going to conferences when I was growing up. What I do remember is bringing home my report card, as if I were handing over a verdict. Straight As weren’t celebrated—they were expected. Anything less felt like disappointment and shame, from both the people around me and myself. The focus was always on performance.

    That pressure fed my perfectionism. At school, and then at work, it felt like I was constantly being graded—on every email, every meeting, every interaction. It wasn’t about getting better; it was about avoiding failure. Anything less than perfect wasn’t “something to improve next time.” It was proof that I wasn’t enough.

    My son’s school feels like the opposite of that. They use grades to track progress, but grades aren’t the focus. He is.

    And with the right support, he’s thriving. He’s doing math. Writing paragraphs. Learning skills we weren’t sure he’d ever be able to do until we found this place—this environment that encourages him, believes in him, and helps him believe in himself. He feels capable.

    His new homeroom teacher told me how he encourages other students. How he volunteers to show them they can do it. How he asks thoughtful, timely questions on their community field trips. She said he feels like a leader.

    Hearing that felt like healing something in me I didn’t even know was still hurting.

    My son is proud when he gets good grades, but he’s just as proud when he gives his best effort, even if the grade isn’t perfect. He sees value in trying. I never learned that. I tied my worth to my performance. Anything less than perfect felt like failure. And letting myself be proud felt like giving up on perfection.

    Watching him, I’m learning—slowly—to separate my performance from my identity. To recognize that being imperfect doesn’t make me a failure. That I can be a good, caring person even when I make mistakes. That disappointment doesn’t have to become a shame spiral reinforced by old messages from my childhood.

    My son is learning what I didn’t learn until adulthood: that effort matters, growth matters, and who you are is more than any grade. And I’m learning it, too, because of him.

  • Fine.

    Fine.

    On days when I work from home, I like to pick my son up from school. I sit in the line of cars slowly making their way to the exit and wait for the teacher to send him out.

    As he walks toward the car, he looks exhausted most days. School asks more of him each year—more performance, more endurance, more emotional regulation, and more social navigation.

    He throws his backpack into the back of the car and plops down in the front passenger seat.

    “Hi, pal. How was school?” I ask.

    “Fine.”

    That’s it.

    Fine. One word. One syllable. Full stop.

    “Well, what did you do in…” and I’ll rotate through his subjects.

    Sometimes I get a short answer, but most of the time he says he doesn’t remember.

    As a parent, it’s frustrating. I can see that he’s tired, but I don’t want him to think that—by not asking how his day went—I don’t care. I genuinely want to know how his day was, what he did, and what he learned. I’m curious about his experiences and want to understand more about what he does and how he sees the world.

    Additionally, my son struggles with his memory, so I feel pressure to ask the question right away—for a chance to hear any details before they fade. If I don’t get an answer, it feels like I’ve lost the opportunity to connect with him. It becomes an unmet need when his answer feels like it shuts the door.

    But that’s my need.

    His need, after working so hard all day just to get through it, is not to engage in that moment.

    I recently read an article about how school is harder for kids today, and something clicked.

    It may seem simple, but a genuine answer to the “how was school today” question requires considerable effort and decision making to synthesize information from a busy day.

    When my son gets in the car, he’s not just carrying books in his backpack. He’s carrying the weight of every demand he had to meet. He’s carrying the exhaustion from seizure-disrupted sleep. He’s carrying the side effects of his medication. He’s used up every bit of energy just to make it through the day.

    “Fine” isn’t a brush-off. It’s an exhausted plea for peace.

    The article offered a simple but powerful suggestion:

    Consider the purpose. Ask yourself whether you want to gather information or simply connect with your child.

    As much as it feels urgent to gather information about his day—as a way to connect—it often does the opposite. It leaves me frustrated and leaves him more drained, trying to process my question, reach into his memory, and find the right words. Instead of connecting, in those moments, we drift farther apart.

    My goal, always, is to connect with him.

    I want him to know I’m happy to see him. I want him to know that I feel lucky to be able to pick him up. I want him to know that I see him. I want him to know that I appreciate how hard he worked to make it through the day and that I hope he’s proud of himself, because I am.

    Instead of starting with a question that requires him to do more work, maybe I will start with a statement. Maybe one of those.

    Or maybe I’ll just tell him how lucky I am to be his dad.