Toggle navigation
Toggle navigation
Home
DCUM Forums
Nanny Forums
Events
About DCUM
Advertising
Search
Recent Topics
Hottest Topics
FAQs and Guidelines
Privacy Policy
Your current identity is: Anonymous
Login
Preview
Subject:
Forum Index
»
Schools and Education General Discussion
Reply to "My School's DL is Awful and I'm Angry"
Subject:
Emoticons
More smilies
Text Color:
Default
Dark Red
Red
Orange
Brown
Yellow
Green
Olive
Cyan
Blue
Dark Blue
Violet
White
Black
Font:
Very Small
Small
Normal
Big
Giant
Close Marks
[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DS's school is the worst. It's 4 hours a day of the teacher reading aloud from a slide show, then several hours of homework. All the assignments are multi-step projects that take several weeks to finish and have no clear instructions. DS is in 6th grade. He is miserable and depressed. He is refusing even to log in to class and throws a fit whenever my husband or I try to get him to do some of the homework. My husband says my son is lazy and gets angry at me for not somehow fixing this situation, and I get angry back, and we are completely stressed and unhappy. The school could not care less. There is no understanding or "grace" on their end. My son is now failing everything. He was a very good student before DL. He is enrolled in some outschool classes and does very well in those, because there is an actual person teaching and not just a slide show and a bunch of Google decks. He will work with strangers online, but will do nothing at all with me or his father. I sometimes can get a tutor to help him get his work done for the school. But I can't get enough outschool tutors often enough to get enough done that he won't be failing. I wish I could just find a daily online tutor - any high school kid with a good personality would do - to go through the Google classroom with him and help him get some of the assignments done. But I can't find that. Any suggestions for something like that? Commiseration welcome, but please I don't need snarky comments or insults right now. [/quote] OP, I have been in exactly your position with my son when he was in 6th grade during non-pandemic times. Our efforts to discipline, punish, shame, reward, entice, schedule, structure, unstructure, or motivate our son into being a decent student wound up almost costing me my marriage and my son his life, as all our efforts sent him into a severe depression it took him a year to recover from. I understand how you feel. You are absolutely on the right path in your plans to get someone outside of your household to work with your son. That is what you need. I would see if you can find a college or even high school student with time to spend time with him each day. Can you try college job boards or Wyzant? In your situation, would you consider pulling him out of public school and homeschooling? That might take some of the pressure off in terms of his family grades. Again, you will need outside resources to keep in on track, but at least you would have more control over the schedule. Other suggestions: 1) A counselor for your son to talk through his feelings. When my son went through this, he was feeling hurt, anxious, hopeless, and emotionally shut down. I honestly believed at that point that the only thing he derived any pleasure from was watching him suffer. He is likely too immature and not self-aware enough to sort through what he is feeling. An outsider will help. 2) Remember, even if he fails sixth grade, no grade is more important that his mental health or yours. This was something our therapist said to me and it helped me to manage my own catastrophizing. A bad year in sixth grade is not going to ruin his life. You will get through this, but you don't want to continue on this unhealthy path. 3) You all need physical activity. It is essential. If you choose to homeschool, it might give you more time to work physical activity into the day to increase his energy and keep him from getting frustrated. In our case, we ultimately switched our son to a private school that had more unstructured time during the day, including longer recess and PE every day. That made a world of difference. 4) No matter how bad it seems, believe that this will pass. The pressure the correct an unhealthy situation feels unbearable, but you need to make sure your son knows that you love and support him. The more you and your husband fight about your son and call him lazy, the more dysfunctional your entire household will be. 5) There are some books I read that helped me get through this, including He's not Lazy: Empowering Your Son to Believe in Himself and Boys Adrift. You didn't say if your son has ADHD, but it sounds like he could use help with executive function issues. In addition, you didn't mention screen time or video games, but that was a huge part of our son's problems. There are some good books on that issue too (Glow Kids) is one. You can look on Amazon for some suggestions. I don't have easy answers for you, but I hope that you can find some ways to address these issues. I've been there, and I completely understand where you are coming from. Sixth grade is a hard age, and some of these problems will improve as your son matures. You will get through this . . . believe. [/quote]
Options
Disable HTML in this message
Disable BB Code in this message
Disable smilies in this message
Review message
Search
Recent Topics
Hottest Topics