From an A to an F on one assignment

TerryJ2

Well-Known Member
difficult child had a relatively complicated Spanish assignment over 2 mo's ago and totally blew it off. I met with-the Spanish teacher and she showed me what it was. It was a poem starting with "Yo soy" and shaped like a diamond. The student was supposed to come up with-basic statements like "I am athletic, I am funny" in Spanish and make the line breaks correspond with-a diamond shape.
Even though it was late, I had difficult child do it.
He brought it home and the teacher wrote "F. Would have been an A. 10 weeks late."
I'm not sure he even cares. Arrrgh.
 

TerryJ2

Well-Known Member
P.S. He always tells me he's done the assignment in class. I emailed that teacher several times and didn't get a response for 2 wks. Finally called and that worked. Plus, we finally met in person. Now I know how to get a hold of her!
 

Josie

Active Member
I don't think my daughter would care, either, but she does care about her overall grade. We have told her if she gets all A's every quarter, there is a $ bonus. The only reason she would get less than an A is if she misses too much work. A single B and no bonus so she makes sure she does enough to get at least an A- in everything.

Would your difficult child care if you gave him a "bonus" for good grades or no missing assignments, do you think? His bonus could even be more computer time if that would work better than money.

Good for you for getting him to do the work even when it didn't count! I'm not sure I could get my daughter to do that and I consider her to be mostly a easy child.
 

DammitJanet

Well-Known Member
Hope...If I had known then what I know now, I think I would have paid Cory for school work and school behaviors. As I have learned about him as an adult, he is very money oriented. He will work hard for the almighty dollar. Even if it hurts him badly. I have no idea why it never occurred to me to do that with him. I did say I would pay X amount for grades on report cards but those were too long in the future. I think I should have broken it down to less money but weekly or even daily payouts. Maybe a 5 buck a week payout for a good week since I really didnt do allowances anyway.
 

TerryJ2

Well-Known Member
I took away the TV cord, which difficult child can also use for games, and will not give it back to him until he can prove he can get his grades up. I've got a conference with-his math teacher tonight.
He actually did two homework pps last night on his own!
 

susiestar

Roll With It
I am of 2 minds on this. I fully support the teacher giving him an F because it was so late. As long as she has a policy that papers lose so many points for every day late, that wouldn't bug me. Esp as hard as your difficult child works to get out of homework.

The other is YAY!!! HE DID IT!!! By doing it whatever he was supposed to learn was at least completed. He got the knowlege and displayed his knowledge by doing a good job on the assignment. Grades are not everything in the long run.

What would I actually DO about this? Do what I can to keep on top of him so he gets the work done. At one point Wiz had to study or do homework for X amt of time or do work that I assigned to him. he got rewards for doing it and for getting good grades. What I did about this F would depend on how other things are going iwth him.
 

Josie

Active Member
All 3 of the schools that our kids have attended have online reporting. I get a report every week with the grades for each class and I can click on it to see individual grades by assignment.

Are you sure your school doesn't have something similar? That way you could monitor it every week and know if there was missing work or not.

I was against paying for grades since I thought they should just do the work they were supposed to do. Then, A had lots of missing assignments one year and ended up with a bad grade. I would have preferred to take away her privileges until she complied with doing her hw, but she is a (mostly former) difficult child with the ODD diagnosis. We were afraid she would go to battle over this just to show us that we couldn't make her do it. Since we really just want her to do her work, we tried to make her want to do it with our incentive plan. I justified it in my mind by thinking that husband gets a bonus if he and his company do well.

For her, it worked, but I could see how it might not work for kids with different issues.
 

TerryJ2

Well-Known Member
Hope, yes, they do have online assignments ... but he'll get around it by saying he already did it in class. I'll usually tell him that's not good enough and he has to do it at home so I can see it. Of course, he tells the teacher he left it at home.Not all of the teachers are good about posting every day, either. I am learning which ones are on top of things. :)Plus, my computer had issues for quite a while and I had to use my husband's computer at work! The thing with-my difficult child is that you have to yank him up by the throat and he'll shape up. He'll be fine for a while, and then slide back again.He was doing some serious backsliding. Now he knows this is the last grading period for the year and I hope he can keep it all together.
 

Josie

Active Member
It sounds like your reporting is different. I am not looking at what she is supposed to do. I am looking at grades. If something is missing, it is a 0. Sometimes, it is that the grade hasn't been entered yet, but it should be entered by the next week.

I get a weekly report and really just look at her average in the class. If the average is lower than I think it should be, I look at the individual grades to see why.

If they have something like this, you could monitor weekly and not have to worry about whether it is done in class or at home.

All of the schools we have been to have this ability. Two were private and one was public. Since you are fairly new at that school, maybe they do too and you just don't know it. It might make it easier so you wouldn't have to be involved every day trying to figure out if he has done what he should.
 

AnnieO

Shooting from the Hip
Hope, we have this ability as well... But the teachers don't update it, or are sporadic, so we never really know what's the truth. I mean, when the kid is showing 25 MISSED IN-CLASS assignments, but there are test scores interspersed in there, so there's a quarter average of 22%... Then you email the teacher and they did all the assignments... Um.
 

AnnieO

Shooting from the Hip
It could be mine, too - but we prefer to talk directly to the teacher. (In the case I cited, she actually HAD turned in all the assignments, and had a 51% in the class. STILL failing...)
 
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