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

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[quote=Anonymous]Thanks everyone for your thoughtful posts. There's a lot here to chew on. I don't think we're too hard on him (one of my friends just described me as overly indulgent toward my kids!) If his worst grade was math, we'd understand - he really has struggled there and we had a tutor for 3.5 years until she told us she was too busy just before the holidays. He had somehow made it through K-2 without learning any basic math facts, but now seems to be on a better path.

Now the lousiest grades he gets are in the subjects where he never had any previous issues. And they are lousy: the C in English is a gift from his teacher, who worked with him repeatedly to move the grade from 41 (mid-December) to a 58 (at the holidays) to now 71. The other C is the exact opposite: he had a solid B in science but did badly on a couple of quizzes. He could have redone them - the school allows 2 per quarter and we begged him to do it - but he just never got around to it (in part because he was spending so much time redoing English assignments.)

Getting Ds on quizzes in English and science just mystifies us. We know he is capable of basic punctuation. Or capitalizing someone's name. He can sit and read a 500 page book overnight; he's got a terrific vocabulary for a kid his age. He loves science so much that a previous teacher nicknamed him the science kid. But he has always hated school, and he wants nothing more than to be done with anything school-related (even the occasional project that interests him) as quickly as possible.

I need to think about the inattentive ADHD possibility. I have a brother who is almost certainly inattentive ADHD; we just cleaned out our parents' house and all his report cards talked about his failure to pay attention. Even today in his 40s he routinely drifts off mid-conversation (he's happy and successful though, so that's good.) My son doesn't seem much like that at all. The errors he's making on his assignments are, to me, like his inability to pick up his clothes every day after changing: just an unwillingness to make the extra effort.

I don't know if his self-esteem is suffering. He's a pretty chill kid - not very competitive. Mostly that's a good thing for a middle schooler, but sometimes I wish he was like his yougner brother who comes home from 1st grade desperate to work on his reading because he thinks he is in the lowest reading group. I don't think my older son *wants* to make these mistakes, but so far we just haven't figured out the right way to motivate him. I'm going to try the index card tip; we're now mandating that he writes a paragraph a day that we will edit with him so that he can see and begin to learn from his mistakes. But I'm not confident this is enough.
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