Reply to Just Completed Disastrous Freshman Year

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a MS student and have to do what is described above.  He also gets angry and resists.  Tough!  Here's what I would do.  Over the summer, you sit down and outline your school management plan.  You explain that if he is unwilling to let you supervise/show you his actual work, he will loose his phone and/or you will not take him to his sports practice.  Explain that your goal is not to punish him but to help him learn to manage these things on his own.  You'll re-evaluate how much supervision is required each quarter. [/quote]

Interventionist PP here, this is us exactly. Our kid HATES the oversight too. And he is prone to misrepresenting where things stand at times. He just knows he has no choice in the matter and any BS will be caught. We would take away all electronics if that was necessary to get him to go along with this. And we've told him that it will stop as soon as he has all As and never misses a homework assignment.

Our being consistent on this is a big thing - he knows his dad is watching the portal like a hawk so he can't get away with blowing things off. He's also realized that stupid things can have a big impact on a grade: missing one homework isn't a big deal, except in a class w/only 2 HW assignments that quarter, which means his quarter grade for the class was brought down by a D on HW.

Another suggestion - take a look at the grading rubric whenever possible. That way if we review something he's getting ready to submit, we can remind him of the criteria (e.g., cite 3 sources on an essay.)

Finally it's been a learning curve figuring out how best to keep him on track. We tried different things in middle school when we realized he was not doing well; we even tried zero oversight for one quarter, to see if he might step up to the plate on his own. The weekly meetings and watching the parent portal seems to have worked, especially because he feels good about having done well this year (let me be clear here, I don't mean off the charts well, but very respectable overall.)

I gotta say, this doesn't come naturally to me. I was good at school and I'm the "easy" parent and I hate having to police my kid's academic work. But I figure this is the hard part of being a responsible parent. My younger kid won't need any of this intervention because he's naturally driven and competitive. But he's needed intensive parenting at other times and will probably be a nightmare for other reasons as a teenager. So I count my blessings that my 15yo "only" needs us to be his task masters about school work!

Coaches or tutors are also a great idea. Our DS struggles with math and has had a math tutor for years, even when the math wasn't beyond our competence - he just learned better when it was coming from someone else. And ther[/quote]

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