I just don't know

Parents were invited into the classrooms this week to review the kids' work.  Today we looked through Secundo's workbooks, trying to make sense of what we saw there.  Not fragmented and aimless as his older brother's had been yesterday, but disturbing in many ways.  In one of the clearer exercises, he had to give examples of occurrences that would be chance, possible, likely or impossible.  His impossible example was that a giant bomb could be small.  Is this a deliberate undermining of the activity from a boy who is obsessed with weapons, or is the only way that he could grasp the point through his own private world of imaginary violence?

An example of something unlikely was having a knife pushed into him.  This was shocking to see. I asked him straight away if this had to do with an accident that had happened at home a few days earlier and was relieved that he said yes; at least I could relate this to something real.  I was in the kitchen, Primo was kneeling on the ground getting something from my bag, his father was standing next to him doing something else.  Our extremely demanding cat chose that moment to jump onto a bench upon which was a chopping board and a small sharp knife, not a place where I often prepare food, but it was a busy, crowded place on this day. The cat knocked the knife off so that it lodged tip-down into the floor inches away from Primo.  Both parents cried out as we saw it happen of course, but quickly switched to reassurance mode.  I thought Primo might carry it with him; I hadn't expected Secundo to, I admit, but there is was in front of me.  Should I have anticipated that more clearly?  Does he really feel so vulnerable in the world?  Or is this some kind of healthy processing of a moment of fright that I shouldn't really worry about?

What on earth am I doing?

We turned with relief to one long story he'd written.  It was a kind of sci-fi narrative that drew heavily on computer games.  From a cursory introduction, it quickly became a series of violent and destructive acts overlapping with each other, each attempting to be more extreme than the last.  There were few complete sentences, so the frenetic need (as I saw it) for relentless destruction tumbled out in fragmented thoughts and phrases, one not completed before the next spilled over it ...

The session finished with a performance.  He started having a physical fight with a boy who pushed into line next to him.  I could see he'd been wronged, but oh dear.  For the performance, I watched with a smile; he met my eyes, hesitated, then continued a little self-consciously but clearly proud, maintaining eye contact for most of the song.  This is not the first time he's done this, but I took it as a good sign, especially the recovery from the altercation he'd just had.  I remember acutely kinder concerts where he not only refused to participate, but became really agitated and disruptive whenever there were performances.  I felt like he was doing something today that much younger kids do, basking in his parents' attention.  It was that moment of hesitation, where I could see he was choosing between his old mode of deliberately messing things up, and being part of the activity, the way it was meant to be, that really reassured me.

I spend a lot of time clinging to advances like this.  There are others too; improved behaviour with other children, admitting to positive emotions (he used to feel compelled to say everything was terrible and nothing made him happy), and more. But I don't know how to weigh them up against the rest.

And Primo.  Yesterday we looked through his maths book; there was a statistical exercise.  The last question asked what method he used to calculate the results.  He wrote that he just guessed random numbers until he found one that fit.  I get the impression that that's how he gets by at school in general. He adores his friends, models himself on them, benefits from observing what they do and when.  He lives for breaktimes. He never talks about classwork.  After the devastating year I had with last year's teachers, I have not even tried to enage his current teacher.  He's flying blind, and so am I.

I can't shake the feeling of failure today.  At home, we feel like we've been successful parents if we can get through a weekend without a huge fight, successfully limit computer time, and manage some modest social interaction or catch up on an overdue task.  Walking into the classroom is a miserable reality check.