Achievement test results

We got two envelopes in the mail on Saturday from Seton Testing Services. The results were back!

I felt kind of nervous as I opened one envelope, my husband the other. Whatever their scores were, there was no chance of placing the blame on the inadequacies of the public school system. All blame was going to fall on me, their teacher.

The scoring for the CAT survey test is arranged in stanines: scores of 1, 2, and 3 are considered below average. Scores that fall in stanines 4, 5, and 6 are average; 7, 8, and 9 are all above average.

Both of the girls scored roughly the same, but I'm not saying which did what because they both sneak onto the computer to read my blog and find out what I'm writing about them (Hi, Meelyn! Hi, Aisling! Mommy outsmarted you again! Ha ha!)

My husband and I were relieved to note that the majority of both girls' scores fell in the 5, 6, and 7 range. There were a couple of 8's and a couple of 4's and overall, they reflected exactly what I had predicted from observing the girls throughout the school year. They are on the high end of average overall.

As a mother -- especially a homeschooling mother -- my natural inclination is to lie like a rug and boastfully say that Meelyn and Aisling are so rocky smart that they scored in the tenth stanine and that the cherubim and seraphim had to grade their exams because their electronic score sheets were so hot, they melted the grade scanner at Seton. That's typical of motherhood.

But the reality is that not everyone's kids are brilliant. That can be a difficult thing for a mom's pride to deal with, especially in homeschooling where some of the kids are being taught at home because public school was too slow and boring and their minds were being wasted by suffering through lessons in simple subtraction when they were ready for algebra.

I suspect that most homeschooling families are just like us: completely and totally average. It's not something that moms talk about too much because naturally, there's a certain delicacy of feeling that leads a mom to underplay the fact that her eighth grader speaks three languages fluently and is now busy tackling Japanese. It's not uncommon to first find out about this kind of thing when the student in question gets offers of full-ride academic scholarships from several universities.

A weight has been lifted off my shoulders, though, in the knowledge that we don't have any first, second, or third stanine scores due to my lack of proficiency in teaching math. I feel like I can relax for now, and then later on in July, start planning all the cool stuff we'll be taking on next year.

I'm thinking Latin.