Raise Your Glass
At the start of summer we received my son’s school report. End of Year 4 in the primary school, he’s ten years old. His marks per subject were pretty much what we had expected – very strong academically, just getting by in activities. But the overall commentary the teacher had written came as something of a shock. He was described as something of a sociopath (my word, not the teacher's) – "needed to be more tactful, uncooperative, a loner". We thought this might have been mentioned during the school year, at parent teacher meetings, in notes home to us, but it hadn’t. I know my son pretty well. He’s a chip off the old block. Very attentive to detail, studious but impatient, strong with figures and language but reacts badly to criticism, mediocre at sports, not too interested in investing energy in friendships. A bit of a lone ranger. Well, as they say here in Ireland, he didn’t lick it off the stones. He and I, we may well both be somewhere on a behavioural spect...