Reply to How to motivate 6th grader who is disinterested in school and careless about his assignments?

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[quote=Anonymous]My son is in 6th grade and has been struggling since the beginning of the year with the middle school curriculum. We met with his teachers in the first quarter and helped get him on track; they didn't see any deeper issue besides effort and (to a lesser extent) handwriting. He's done even worse this second quarter: a C in both science and English - the subjects that (based on his reading ability and interests) he should do best in.

We are meeting with his teachers again next week, but based on comments from the lead teacher and from what we observe, his main issue seems to be effort. He routinely turns in assignments with screamingly obvious mistakes: no capitalization or punctuation, missing words and incomplete sentences. With his homework, we try to review and make him correct it - but he does the same sort of thing all the time in classwork. The lead teacher is clearly frustrated with him; she said she'd worked with him repeatedly on assignments and he kept turning in completely substandard work. I hoped it might be handwriting but apparently most of his in-class work is done on computer.

We talk to him daily about his school work - we check Edline nonstop. We've tried threats and bribes, probably neither with sufficient strength or consistency. We talk about the importance of college and having opportunities in life. I tell him all the time if he were an 11yo in Pakistan he'd be working 12 hours a day in a carpet factory. None of this seems to make an impact. He's in a smaller MCPS school with great teachers; next year he will be in a much bigger MCPS middle school so we've got to get a handle on this now.

He's basically a very sweet kid, pretty nerdy and not athletic, but has a small group of good friends. He cares at some level - he will cry at times when we talk about his bad grades - but he doesn't seem to care enough to do his work properly. He has very strong interests in certain areas (in the past it was always science and nature; now it's become Star Wars and Legos). He is a great reader, his reading scores went off the charts a few years ago and he reads a ton.

So DCUM - any advice? Should we do the Bethesda thing and get him an educational psych workup? Tutors? Stricter discipline? Private school would be very hard to swing but if there were a school that does well with kids like this, we'd figure a way to make it happen.[/quote]

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