Problem Statement

I’m using this blog to organize my thoughts and document the progress in this process with my son.  I have defined my concern as  “How do I encourage my son to decrease the number of zeros he gets on schoolwork?”

Why I’m concerned is more complicated.  I am concerned because he is not taking responsibility, he is establishing patterns that are self-defeating, he is making decisions that will limit his choices in the future, and his confidence in being successful in school is low.

When he was young a counselor told me to remember that I couldn’t control or change his father’s behavior; I could only change how I reacted and what I said and did.  That idea keeps coming to me while I read about the Action Research process.  My goal is to change my own practice and not concentrate on his behavior. 

So the next step is figure out what I value.  I value responsibility, honesty, learning, and independence.  So that leads me to ask if I am showing those values when I deal with him.  Am I being responsible? Am I being honest to myself and him? How is that affecting my practice with him?

Changes

So, what is different this semester? I took the advice from the book and made some small changes in our daily routine and my expectations of my son. First, I’m trying to be a “totally positive parent”. It is described as a combination of Mr. Rogers and Columbo. Very calmly talk with your child, but keep asking questions. So how is that going for me? It’s tough! After a lot of years of trying to get information from my son he knows exactly which buttons to push to get me to explode. I am working very hard on calmly discussing problems with him and clearly stating what I expect.

So what does a day after work sound like at my house now? Before I start on my homework, I sit down with my son after supper and we go through his whole day, class by class. I keep a notepad and ask him six questions about each class. 1. What he studied that day 2. Any homework assignments 3. Grades that were handed back 4. Any zeros he got that day 5. Upcoming tests 6. Long term projects. I take notes and ask questions to keep him moving through his day. During the week I look at the parent portal and see if he told me the truth. The first week didn’t go so well.

So what happened when I found out he had been lying about homework? At the end of the first week, Friday night, and after I gave him another chance to tell the truth, I handed him print outs of his classes with the zeros circled. I then told him the new rule in our house. As an adult when you have something to do and you put it off, it doesn’t magically disappear. With homework when he decided he didn’t want to do it and then didn’t hand it in it just magically disappeared – he didn’t have to do it. That has changed. That weekend even though he couldn’t hand in any of the assignments, he completed all of the assignments and gave them to me. That’s the new rule – all work will be done. No excuses. So he sat at the kitchen table from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm (I gave him a lunch break) he sat and complained and did work he had refused to do the first time.

How is it going now? The last time I checked he was passing all of his classes and in some classes he even had grades higher than a D. The other changes I’ve noticed are more subtle. He loves to write and is taking Creative Writing. He has a wonderfully quirky teacher who seems to understand him (he’s actually getting a 97% in the class) So after he is done with his homework, for fun he writes short stories. The newest development is that he is starting to share his writing with me. He has a wonderfully fluid style that I love to listen to. His understanding and use of the rhythm of language has always amazed me. Sometimes when he tells me about his day he forgets that he isn’t suppose to be excited and becomes fairly animated and laughs about some of the crazy things that happened at school. Lately he shares more than I am ready to hear, but I guess that is a good thing because he is actually talking to me.

He registered for his fall classes today and was very excited about taking psychology. His biology teacher semi-forced him into a honors chemistry class, and he accidentally signed up for an honors math class. His math teacher told him he was capable of doing the work and signed the paper. He was a little miffed with himself for not noticing the level of the class before he signed up. Overall for his senior year it is a pretty heavy load.

I think we’ve made progress but we have a way to go. The first 6 week period ends on Friday so I will see how he is doing. But I still have no idea why he sabotages himself and I don’t know if he understands how some of his little decisions have big consequences.

More Information

My background is in Education, specifically Special Education. I have always been fascinated with how people learn, why some people sail through the public school system and then as adults struggle, why some people excel and what can be done to help people improve how they learn. I taught Special Ed for about 5 years and then worked with a behavioral optometrist working with children and adults with learning disabilities, head injuries and visual problems. I was also able to address my problems with daily headaches and finally get relief which changed how I approached my own learning.

When I taught middle school Special Ed, I had students who were mainstreamed and consistently failed or barely passed those classes. They all had problems of doing homework and then not handing in the homework, refusing to do homework, lying about assignments, and having an inaccurate idea of how they were doing in their classes. I would work with them on assignments and watch the students put their work in their backpacks so they could give it to the teacher the next day. Most of the time those assignments were never given to their classroom teacher. After checking with the classroom teacher the students still assured me that they had given the assignment to the teacher. After questioning the student they continued to stick with their story and got angry or made excuses about why they hadn’t handed in their assignment. Every couple of weeks I would have the students clean out their backpacks and lockers and it always amazed me how much partly finished and completely finished assignments (never graded) were stuffed into those portable black holes.

I would talk to the parents who were either very frustrated and didn’t have any answers or were just not interested. We set up contracts, agreements, sign off sheets and a lot of other strategies that didn’t seem to work. I brought in the district psychologist for suggestions, support or some kind of answer and we just didn’t make progress. During all of the strategies I kept thinking that somehow the student had to take responsibility, but didn’t know how to force the issue.

When my son was in elementary school I started seeing the same patterns that I had seen in my Special Education students. The only difference was that he usually scored in the top of his class in the CSAPS, in the 90th percentile in standardized tests (especially math) and when he was in a bind he pulled the highest scores on tests and assignments. So again I was trying contracts, agreements, talking to teachers regularly, and kept asking the teachers for ideas or answers. I was told he was an enigma and that teachers who had taught for close to 30 years had never really had a student like him before. I felt that my son was dodging responsibility, sliding through and letting everyone else worry about him.

So what has changed?

A little background

I thought a little background information would be helpful before I describe what techniques I’m trying with my underachieving son. My son has had some incredible teachers and some teachers that shouldn’t have been in a classroom. He has always pushed limits and definitely marches to the beat of a drummer that no one else even hears or imagines. When he was younger with the help of the teachers his grades were fairly good, but mosly because of the efforts of his teachers and me and his stepdad.

When he got in trouble at school for not doing work, not turning in assignments, or just pushing the limits we grounded him, took away video games, took away tv priviledges, and at one point took everything out of his room except clothes and a bed. We’ve yelled, bribed, begged, tried to reason with him and hoped that he would somehow magically change.

He was open enrolled and then enrolled in a charter school, with me driving him to school every morning and his stepdad picking him up in the afternoon. This past fall we enrolled him in his home school. We finally decided that everyone else was more interested in his education than he was, so it was time for him to take some responsibility.

He passed all of his classes the fall semester, but just because he got high A’s on his finals. That brought his overall grades up enough so he had D’s. He was fairly confident that he would pass his classes because as he says, “I test well.”

Starting this semester I let him try things his way for the first 3-4 weeks. I have access to his grades in most of his classes through the parent portal, so I kept checking on him. At the start of week 4 I printed out the reports from his classes and started planning what techniques I would use to start with. (for a quick summary of the techniques suggested in the book and what we are trying, check back!)

Debra

Another semester

I took a break from blogging during my time off between semesters. I finished reading the book on motivating underachieving students I mentioned in a previous post Bright Minds Poor Grades: Understanding and motivating your underachieving child. My son has started his second semester of his junior year after just barely passing all of his classes last semester. He has already started getting zeros and at this point is not passing at least two classes. I have decided to try the methods in the book and will follow his progress during the rest of this semester in this blog. I am also playing with the idea of using the experiment with this method in one of my graduate classes doing an Action Research Project. I would appreciate any input or support – we are going to need it!