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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP back again. Sorry I didn't see how many responses until just now. Just to be clear, I'm not blaming the teacher at all, and I fully appreciate that my husband's fuming is the bigger issue here. I also recognize that my son is primarily responsible: he assured us in the last few days that several major assignments had been turned in when in fact they hadn't. My husband reached out to the teacher who pointed this out. Which was part of the reason for the fury.

The teacher had some family issues which meant that a sub was covering for a good chunk of the term. Grades were MIA. It's not ideal but stuff like this will happen. In the end it's the kid's responsibility.

I'm pretty upset about my husband's reaction. He's a first generation immigrant, came from real poverty, and education is a BFD. His explanation is that there are essentially 6 semesters that will matter for GPA when applying to college (freshman, sophmore, junior yrs) and he pointed out that DS did worse overall in the second term than in the first. Everyone was calmer last night and there were reasonable discussions about how to manage the workload better going forward.

We confiscated DS's tablet, since YouTube watching is a much bigger problem for him than gaming. We haven't found that an all-out ban is effective but screen time is going to be much more restrictive moving forward. I don't think this is ADHD or a LD; every teacher we've ever pressed on this question is confident that it's just a question of effort on his part. He's the only teenager I've ever met who's genuinely comfortable with himself and I think he needs motivation more than medicine.

Thanks for all the advice. I'm really not a nutjob myself fwiw - he's a great kid and I know he'll do good in this world, but that doesn't mean I won't intervene when he's screwing up.[/quote]

I think this provides even more explanation for dh's tirade.  I once contacted a teacher about something assuming my ds's story was correct (assignments turned in, etc) only to have the teacher (politely) inform me that ds's version was not correct.  Not only was I furious at ds for a) not being responsible about turning in work, and b) lying to me about turning in work, but c) I was then humiliated about hearing it from the teacher.

Without viewing it, it's hard to say dh's behavior was appropriate.  But to me, it's entirely within the boundaries of understandable.  And hopefully it motivates DS to stay more on top of things in the future.

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