Thanks Aunt Anita — I really appreciate your kind words 🙂 I’m doing ok…I’ve had a horrible year with Noah’s new school, the math teacher has not been treating Noah fairly (and as you know, my father was also very good at math!!)

So just a few days ago, I had my son take the ISEE test, which is an exam for students who want to go to top private schools, it’s an incredibly difficult and competitive exam.

And sure enough, Noah scored 9-9-9-5, and 9 is the highest score a student can receive, only the top 4% in the country receive that score.

(Two math sections, Reading Comprehension, and the 5 was in Verbal.)

It’s truly a phenomenal score — nothing short of spectacular.

But his math teacher, who believes Noah is only an ‘average’ math student and refused to put him in advanced math, didn’t even congratulate Noah.

Noah is so sweet, he thought the school was going to apologize to him when they learned, and I just shook my head and warned him most people don’t have the humility to do something like that…

And sure enough, no one at the school has even apologized to Noah.

I wish Uncle Bobby was here…when Noah was 4 years old, he told me Noah was truly a gifted child ‘much smarter than either you or I, Tara’.

But today, on the anniversary of my father’s death, I did get a very nice letter of recommendation from the place where Noah has been doing math tutoring (since the school refuses to teach him!) and they also tutored him intensely for the ISEE exam– it was a nice letter and made me happy.

As frustrating as this situation has been, there have been a number of good things that has come out of all of this–all the kids are *buzzing* at school about Noah’s scores — since a lot of kids are applying to private schools, they know about this test (and have taken it). They know what these scores mean.

Noah was very happy after school today, he was just glowing…I think he felt good to be vindicated 🙂

(Noah isn’t really applying to private schools (we can’t afford it obviously :), but it was a nice way to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt his math teacher was wrong to be treating him the way he’s been all year–)

And that alone made taking the test definitely worth it 🙂

We’ve also had a lot of good conversations about what to do when you’re being mistreated or misunderstood, how to approach it, etc — how abuse of power works, what to do about it, etc —

I think things will work out at the high school ok now, because the kids think Noah is a rockstar now, and that will carry him through high school.

How are you doing? One of these days we must visit! I shut my FB account down so I could get some writing done–I get too distracted on there, lol. But I just re-opened for people really special to me who may want to get in touch with me (people like you :), but I probably won’t be on it too much 🙂

Thank you for thinking of me today. I think I’ve been more upset about this math situation than Noah, who is very happy at the school. Maybe it just makes me so upset because I know Noah inherited his math talents from my father.

I hope you’re doing well.

Love,
Tara

On Jan 24, 2017, at 3:05 PM, anita wrote: