I do agree with school issues staying at school, but I do feel it is important especially with difficult children to keep the lines of communication open. If you are determined to continue hands off, it doesn't mean not being told about problems. It's another area where I think you need to sort out with the teacher, what you will do, what you want to know and what you are not going to do. And vice versa.
Another connected issue - I found that my boys needed a lot more understanding when it came to personal organisation - they missed a lot of assignments (especially difficult child 1) because the teachers had unrealistic (ie normal) expectations. We had established an agreement that assignments for difficult child 1 were to be given to him on a full-sized sheet labelled with the subject, date, date due and topic clearly set out. If it was written on the board, the teacher had agreed to supervise difficult child 1 in writing it in his diary.
But despite the agreement the standards began to slip. He lost all marks for one assignment, I remember, because he totally forgot he had to do it. It never made it to his diary, his pocket where he put all papers given to him had no record of it and when I finally asked the teacher (and other students) I was told the teacher hadn't actually announced it, she had just stood at the door and handed the students a slip of paper (she had made five from each page and torn them into strips to hand out) which had the details. difficult child 1 would not have known and with his faulty memory, he would have wondered why he was holding a slip of paper, and put it in the next bin without thinking.
Not all the discipline or failing in the world could teach difficult child 1 to manage his time and assignments better. He just couldn't do it. He's a lot better now, needs far less help than I ever thought possible, but the problems we had were due to teachers not abiding by previously arranged agreements aimed at supporting the special needs in this case.
When difficult child 1 went to college, they had no problems providing that support. It was only in high school that we had these problems!
Some kids do need more support to be able to comply. And yes, some kids will try to use their disability as a way out, a handy excuse. But we found, if we could get the teachers to use the same system and to double-check, we had a high compliance rate with difficult child 1. When a teacher refused to comply, or didn't want to be bothered, we had failures. And for a teacher to say, "Oh, I didn't have time to print a whole sheet for each student; I didn't have time to announce it; I didn't have time to watch him and make sure he understood he'd just been given an assignment," and then penalise HIM for HIS lack of organisation - I felt that was a bit rich.
When you have a kid whose personal organisation is much worse than his peers, you DO need some understanding from the teachers, PLUS you need a sort of 'belts and braces' approach to information about assignments. Despite our "school issues stay at school" policy, we DID help as far as getting information about work needing to be done. We did no nagging, we would help if asked. And with assignments, we also found "study buddies" helped a lot. We set up a few of difficult child 1's friends to remind him (and us) when there was an assignment set. We put reminders on the computer calendar and helped difficult child 1 break up the tasks into manageable parts.
We did try to get the teachers to pass copies of assignments to us also, but this failed. They WERE supposed to let his aide know, but they couldn't even do that. It was made more difficult for the teachers because they were getting conflicting instructions - the aide was one of the teachers also, she would demand copies of assignments from her co-workers, but the vice principal was also making it clear that difficult child 1 had to learn to fend for himself (despite the IEP, despite the aide funding).
It sounds to me as if C's teacher is willing to communicate with you - this is very good. At this age kids sometimes try to make it all go away by pretending problems don't exist. You may need to keep C's nose to the grindstone for a bit, to make him realise that trying to ignore the problem only makes it bigger and harder to handle.
And erasing an assignment once you've already written it in - personally, I'd be setting another assignment of my own, on top of the one the teacher set. But I'm a meanie...
The child needs to know that he WILL be caught, if he tries to be dishonest about set work.
Something we tried to set up (only teachers refused to post a copy of the assignment home, for difficult child 1) - we asked for a copy to come home and told difficult child 1 that if HE told us about the assignment before the mail brought our copy, then he won; if we got news of it first, we'd dock his pocket money.
These days we'd use reward rather than punishment - if he told us first, we'd give him a small reward. But as I said, in our case it failed because the school told its staff to not post copies home to us. (And you guys have a system where copies are supposed to be posted home, to ALL kids, not just the difficult children).
It's a crazy world sometimes.
Marg
