Reply to 15 y.o son--smart kid; hates school

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here. Thanks for the helpful posts, including book recs and ideas about exploring what crossovers there are between individual and shared activities. The point about my needing to be more thoughtful about arranging what were once playdates but are now "hangouts" is important for me to remember, because we don't have the benefit of the unplanned neighborhood drop in.

As for having gone private, we live in DC and have cycled through blocks of time at public and then private. Public elementary was a good fit, private middle was a good fit, and I think, overall, it will be true for high school too. 
And yes--as someone mentions, we noticed a growing difference between when his older sister was at the middle school he attended and how the hard-driving (and richer) parents started to change the atmosphere. The problem has always been in DC that there's not much in between the private schools and the over-enrolled and under-staffed publics. Our friends with kids at Walls and Duke and Banneker have kids who are pretty down on school, too. The public high school we're zoned for is way too big and overwhelming for a kid like him who'd get lost in the noise, and while, yes, it would be much easier and with much less homework, that's would cause different kinds of stress in that chaotic an environment and will catch him up with increased stress in postsecondary ed. (College prof here, seeing more of this in the era of the turn-in-nothing, still get a 50% environment that affects the whole class' approach to learning. But I also see the flip side of the students who crack after so many years of academic pressure, once they're somewhat on their own, and so we've tried to be smart about the high school situation and make sure it was his choice. And the young men in college, in particular? So many of them are struggling emotionally.) It's all tough.

And no, I don't want to "drug him up" or "fix" him. To be frank, there's a long line of depression and anxiety from both sides of the family (also, migraines! Great genetics, mom and dad!), and my GP actually told me to talk frankly to both of my kids about it and be open with how and when they're feeling more down than usual. It's part of why I posed the question here, to get some outside perspective. It's a good sign to me that he and I have been talking about this together and trying to think through what might help.

I don't need him to love school or get high marks or be anyone he's not. I absolutely do not care if he gets into a "top" college or even decides not to go immediately (or never, if he finds something he loves instead). (With the way things are going in higher ed, who even knows if colleges will still exist or matter in the same way we think it does now, in three years...). I'd like for him to feel good enough about things that he could try new things and be open to learning, and maybe find his way to something that's intrinsically meaningful to him, and so I'm just trying to find ways to support him in that journey at what I know isn't the easiest developmental time of life.

Thanks again for the support here.  [/quote]

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