Today is hard.

[mereilin]

Every day that is wet and dreary seems a little bit worse than it otherwise might, but today has been particularly difficult. I had to pull my son home from a school activity he really wanted to participate in because his grades continue to tank. Now he's failing all five core classes, and he even dropped from his A+ in band to an A-. Small stuff there, but telling. Anything that required actual effort outside of the classroom did not get done.

When I got to the school to pick him up he had shut off his phone and disappeared. Since it's been pouring all day I figured he didn't leave the school building, but it's a big school and I could hear him starting to fall apart when I hung up with him. He did come when a teacher paged him, though, and came home sullen but without too much drama.

He's working on algebra now. There are two weeks of school left for him to salvage passing grades for the term. I've told him flat out I want him to repeat the grade if he can't do it -- not to punish him particularly, but because once he hits grade 9 that stuff stays on his transcript. If he hasn't got the hang of how to be a good student by the end of grade 8, I don't have much hope for his getting into a decent college.

The pity of it is that he's ridiculously bright. It's killing me to see him fail, but until he owns it nothing will change.

Comments

[htnatch.livejournal.com]

Still, you are doing the right things.

[mereilin.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid it's too little, too late. :(

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

In my case, I had good to okay grades until I got depressed in Uni and failed everything. Gradeschool was so terrible it really felt like no point - you learn nothing useful and the speed of the classes was amazingly slow (in high school, we learnt in a year and a half what i then re-learnt in three months in university). It was always that the speed was so slow, you forgot what you were supposed to have been learning when it came time to the test.

Then we also had homework and so on practically every day that was just the same thing over and over, the teachers didn't like us, the other kids were brats... I remember one time, we had a substitute teacher and were watching a film for a few days, and our teacher had said "this is just filler, you won't be tested or anything on the film". My eyes are really bad so I couldn't see what was on the tv anyway. So I was reading during it, and I got in trouble (even after explaining to the sub what the teacher had said) and had to write apology letters and stuff after our actual teacher returned, even though there were other kids who were throwing paper balls at each other and whispering etc. and my reading wasn't disturbing anyone...

I think you shouldn't be too strict on grades, since this is how I did things (I graduated high school in 2009, a year early than I was supposed to since my last year was entirely taken at a community college and the credits just transferred over):

- You graduate high school and go to a community college (which has no grade requirement as long as you graduated - you can even start taking courses before high school graduation at a lot of them, like I started at age 16).

- No need to take the SATs or ACTs because once you have something like 10 courses in the community college finished, they bypass the SAT/ACT stuff for you and don't care at all about your grades from high school either. They instead look at your actual Uni course grades that you already have. Those 10 or so courses are covered when getting an AA (or similar degree), which is the first half of getting a BA.

- Once you have the AA you can transfer to another, more expensive, six-year or eight-year etc. Uni no problem. In my case, the local community college was about a fourth of the cost as the local University, and the education is/was the same. Although what I did was go to Uni abroad after I got my AA since it was tons cheaper (and my AA wasn't even needed, I could have done it directly after high school - they only cared that I had graduated and didn't care about my grades. But my dad made me get an AA for no reason first).

Now that I'm abroad, they always want proof you've graduated high school (scan of your high school certificate), possibly a high school transcript (although what for I don't know, they don't base your entering on that unless you don't have any Uni classes already) and copies of any grades from any other Universities. Then, depending on the University / country, they want proof you know their language as well, which can come from course credits you took in America (like having taken 3 Japanese language classes) or an exam you took here in the country (like the JLPT).

Anyway, I've seen a lot of kids get really stressed out about grades. If you think even further, after you've graduated and found yourself a job, do they look at your high school or Uni grades when they want to hire you? Or just if you have a degree at all and previous work experience? I wouldn't know about that.

When I was in high school and junior high (and Uni too) I took some summer intensive courses. They were always either three months or a month, where the stuff you were learning would have otherwise been taught in a year or semester. My grades were always higher in those because they move so fast you can't possibly forget what you already studied, and there are no unserious people there who mess up the class time. Anyway, it's the challenge that always mattered for me.

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

I have a few friends who have done / are doing online school for high school, you get the material for the semester and can finish it as slow/fast as you want (online). I think that's a really great idea, if you can plug through the whole Algebra course in a month when it should take you six months for example, you remember it all better and you feel relieved since it's over with... and proud of yourself too. It's a lot easier to review with if there is an end-of-semester exam too.

The challenge there is just, can you be so strict with yourself and give yourself personal deadlines? But since you're a parent you could give them their own special deadlines haha. I also have done that kind of thing, for a government course for learning Swedish.

Edit: I think the worst thing about gradeschool is just that you're forced to study so many things you don't like, over and over. For example, we learnt about "American history" but never the history of any other countries (or even geography of Canada...), and even then they left out tons and tons in our history. We never learnt about WWII or the great depression, we didn't learn about the Cold War or Vietnam War. We learnt about how people came from England, but not about how they actually had women's rights and stuff for a time until this other group took over... we learnt the history of our own state, but never the fact that Russians and French were there before the English, or about the tons of Nordic immigrants who came at one point (so much so that there were little "Nordic towns")...

And then there is so much useful stuff I never learnt that I should have. How to get blood stains out of fabric, how you pay bills, how do banks actually work, how do the large food coorporations work (ex. what is corn starch and aspartane and why is it in the food), cooking... The most useful time school was to me was in elementary school, where I learnt how to write in cursive, type properly on the computer, roman numerals and telling analog time, how to write checks and use coupons/vouchers, basic math and "common sense facts" (ex. names of planets).

Then after that, it feels like everything actually useful that I learnt was from the internet, in books that I read in my free time, or just through living (ex. learning how to do a job). Except for how osmosis works, I learnt that in junior high and it felt really useful. : P

The biggest thing is that I wish I had known about self-study when I was a kid. My dad wouldn't buy me language textbooks or anything like that, and I didn't realize you could learn stuff online or that the library had textbooks. I had been taught that "self-teaching gets you nowhere and only a paid course with a teacher will work" but that's totally wrong.

I also wish I had known the true costs of things - I had no clue how much it took to fly on a plane to Japan and rent a hotel there, for example. Or how much people in various jobs get. My parents refused to talk about their finances or how much money they make. So I wasted all my money thinking it was so insanely expensive I'd never be able to afford a trip, when it actually isn't like that (if you know how to live cheaply). I also wasn't allowed to order stuff from the internet, when I could have gotten some really useful stuff haha.