Update on my son

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Some of you may remember this thread from August.

Now, for an update. It’s not good news, I’m afraid. Ivyboy will be withdrawing from all his classes and coming home. He will go back in January.

I knew something was a little hinky when he mentioned last week that he was failing a class in his major, Digital Logic, and this meant he would fail the entire semester. I thought this was a little odd, since just because you fail one class doesn’t mean you lose the A you got in another.

I called his adviser today, along the lines of, “Don’t tell Ivyboy I’m calling, but he seems to think blah blah blah, would you mind disabusing him of this notion?”

The adviser said, “There’s more going on than you know. You need to get him to tell you.”

Hmmm. Is he failing more than one class and is afraid to tell us? I told my husband, who made the decision to drive over there and get to the bottom of things. I thought we should wait until the weekend, but it turns out that would have been bad, as you will see shortly.

Ivylad gets over to the school, and while waiting for our son, gets the story out of his adviser. Ivyboy is failing all of his classes. Why? He doesn’t have any books. He didn’t have the money for them, he didn’t want to ask us for the money because he wanted to do this all by himself because he is a Big Boy Away at School. He’d assured me he had all his books…he’s been borrowing from his friends, which as I told him, is not fair to them.

Friday is the last day to withdraw. If he’d finished the semester and taken what they call Academic Forgiveness to start over, he would lose what little scholarships he got that are based on GPA. So, right now, the best thing for him is to get out, come home, and start all over in January.

We also found out that he’d told his girlfriend he’d already told us, and that we were letting him stay over there and work full time. She was mighty pissed when Ivylad told her otherwise, and I will let her deal with him on that.

I am hurting for my son, because he was having a good time at college, making friends, doing things on his own, and I am hurting because he didn’t think he could come to us with a problem. He is extremely upset, and all I can do is stand back and let him fall down. He’s not a little boy, and this isn’t a scrape I can kiss better. Hopefully he will learn that there are times to do things on your own, and times to ask for help, and a smart person knows the difference.

:frowning:

2

I’m sorry that this isn’t better news, ivylass. At least this is happening in a way that he’ll get a second chance. Hope he really learns from this and does learn that it’s OK to ask for help sometimes.

GT

3

If there’s a bright spot in this, ivylass, it’s that his situation is not unique, and lots of kids these days go through a rough period like this before they get it together and have very successful college careers. Best wishes.

4

{{{{{Ivyboy}}}}}

{{{{{ivylass}}}}}

I was like him, but I got better. Fortunately it didn’t have such bad consequences for me. I ran out of money on my meal plan a few days before the end of my second semester of college. Being too proud to ask for my parents’ (or anyone else’s) help, I lived on cheap takeout for a few days.

I have learned my lesson, and fortunately my parents still don’t know that it happened (and they’re such technophobes, I’m quite sure they’re not Dopers).

5

I did not have a successful college career. I dropped out. Though I do wish I had a degree. College wasn’t working for me.

I did not move back home. I worked my butt off, through different jobs, and now have a corner office and a good income in something that I love. I’ll probably be posting pictures of my new digs soon. It’s taken some time and work, but I’m doing what I like. Hard work can pay off.

I started with a defined major of mechanical engineering. I’m good at that sort of thing. It comes naturally. I also had an art class that I was also good at and I enjoyed. Both of my parents have degrees in art. My Mom ended up as a comptroller, and my Dad a salesman.

I was a bit conflicted.

My dear Wife has a degree in outdoor education. She is now a property appraiser.

You just never know.

When I dropped out, my Mom did not pitch a fit. She listened to my reasons and just said OK.

6

What year is he? Freshman? I had difficulties my freshman year. At least your son was trying and didn’t flunk out because of drinking or what-not. Wishing for the best {{{Ivylass}}}

7

I am in my second year of an undergraduate degree. Admittedly it IS an arts degree, but I have not bought a single text book. I simply cannot afford to buy $400 worth of books per semester. The university advises all students to buy their books, but I haven’t. The library has the current texts, my lecturers often have old editions I can borrow. There is so much available online, too and for referencing, Google Books provides all relevant bibliographical information. I understand and sympathize with the frustration of being a penniless student, but there are options.

8

One of my college roommates did that, for that precise reason: she couldn’t afford the books on top of everything else. Ultimately she ended up dropping out for a while, then transferring to a different college where things were much cheaper.

ivylass, you know this, I’m sure: all of us had some experience where we got our asses kicked. It taught us some valuable lessons, and made us better people. Didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

When one of the people who works for me screws things up, and I’m forced to have the “you screwed it up” talk with him or her, it generally ends with me asking that person what lesson was learned. Inevitably, the lesson is come and talk to me sooner. I suspect that’s the lesson that ivyboy needs to learn – had he come to you, you might have been able to come up with solutions that hadn’t occured to him, and potentially some of those solutions may have involved something other than just ponying up the cash to bail him out.

Good luck to him – hopefully, he’ll look back on this incident as something that taught him a valuable lesson.

9

I haven’t read the linked thread, but just from the above I can think of a few possible reasons for him not asking you for help. There might be an excessive self-reliance, an inability to admit when one’s in over one’s head (even to oneself), and so on. But it’s also possible that he feels he wouldn’t get help from you, or at least not the kind of help he believes he needs; or he’d get it but along with enough baggage that he’d rather do without it. I’m not making a judgment here in way, I just wanted to bring up the possibility in case it hadn’t come up in the family discussions.

And, like some others here, I’m a successful university dropout so it’s no the end of the world! But is certainly harder these days to do well without qualifications than it used to be, I agree.

10

Bingo. I have professors who collaborate and agree not to require different texts, advise students to get dated versions, and the library stocks half of them anyway. Anything classical is probably free online anyway. Science texts are the worst; they’re out of date within two years, every time.

11

Depends on the text when it comes to the sciences. The basics generally never change, or don’t change enough to really justify all the new editions the publishers come out with. In the more advanced texts, however, there can be enough changes to justify the latest text. For instance, I have two different editions of a spectroscopy textbook (I bought one in undergrad and one in graduate school.) But the latest version has a ton about 2D NMR that wasn’t in the earlier edition and that was partially due to the fact that when the earlier edition was written 2D NMR wasn’t as big as it is now with the latest NMR technology and better computers. I bought the latest edition of March instead of the previous edition (the professor didn’t really care) because it had the most recent literature references. But the freaking treadmill intro books are on is nothing but a big racket.

12

I can sort of afford my books this semester, but what is way cheaper is going to the bookstore, doing my homework, and leaving. They even have nice study areas!

13

I’m trying to think positively about this, but I’m afraid what this will do to my son. He takes things very hard, and he will consider this a catastrophe instead of a setback that is not necessarily fatal. I’m not sure he can shake it off and start anew come January.

Yes, he has a counselor. I’ve left a message requesting an appointment. Ivyboy was supposed to start a part-time job on campus today. Instead, he and his father will spend the day withdrawing from his classes and packing up his room.

And yes, I’m blaming myself. Somehow, we failed in preparing him for this.

14

He knew you are always there for him for help and support, and he’s not a kid anymore, so I dont think it’s fair to blame yourself.

15

No, dear. This is part of the growing up process. He could have come to you for help and chose not to do so.* The operative word here is “chose”. He made a decision, which turned out not to be such a good one. Hopefully, he has learned from this - not just to ask his parents when he needs help, but to ask when he needs help in any situation. There might come a situation down the road when he is working and has a task/assignment he doesn’t quite understand. If he has not learned to ask for help when he needs it it could get ugly.

Asking for help when you need it is not wrong or weak. Asking for help all the time and not doing anything for yourself is not what I am talking about.

Do not keep kicking yourself about this. It is not good for you, and it is not helping your son. He made a bad decision. Do not take the responsibility for it away from him; he needs to learn from it.

*This is assuming you didn’t send him to college with instructions never to call you for money under any circumstances. If that was the case, please ignore the rest of my post.

16

I failed the 2nd semester of my freshman year in college. Every single course. I did it again in the 2nd semester of my junior year. Two springs later, it happened one more time. I spent seven years total earning my Bachelor’s degree, but by golly I earned it!

I never once asked for help from my parents. In fact, it rather blindsided them, each time, with no warning (“Everything is fine, mom, really!”). I wanted to fail on my own, and recover on my own. Eventually, they agreed to do it my way (I didn’t give them much of a choice, to be honest), though I’m positive it agonized them to see me struggle, and I’m sure it was difficult for them to understand and not blame themselves. I wasn’t a complete fool though – although I wouldn’t let them intervene to prevent failure, I never refused the help they offered in picking up again afterwards. I think that was the key.

It looks like you are offering your son the support that he needs at this point. If he can look at this as a life lesson and grow from it, then it’ll probably be the most valuable thing he’ll ever learn in college. I know it was for me. Best wishes to both you and him – the growing pains do continue through adulthood, after all.

17

You might want to pass on some advice I once received: “The measure of a man isn’t the trouble he gets into, but how he conducts himself once there.”

18

We did make it clear, after paying for private school, that he was on his own for college. He arranged for loans and scholarships, but we did front him some money until his big loan came through. We also paid for some of his dorm stuff. I asked repeatedly at the beginning of the semester if he’d gotten his books, and he said it was all taken care of. I’d assumed he’d used some of his smaller loan money the school arranged.

He said that he knew we didn’t have the money. His father has told him that he does not know our finances, and while $100 may seem like a lot of money to him, we can better afford it than he can. And certainly, it would have been a small price to pay, given how things turned out.

19

I’m in this stage of parenting myself, and honestly this is MUCH harder than when my guys were little.

Case in point, my older son (26) has been married a year and it’s looking like he won’t make it to the second anniversary. Without going into details (because they really don’t matter here), being there for him without taking sides and without telling him what to do is hard. I listen to his pain, and then need to find someone else to tell about my pain over seeing him so hurt, and also the guilt I feel over my shortcomings as a mother that probably contributed to this.

This part of parenting really isn’t what I thought it would be–I sort of figured they were launched and on their own so my role was pretty much done. Wrong. I’m learning that my guys still need their mommy, just in a different way than when they had bike wrecks or someone was mean to them at school.

All in all, my goal is to offer unconditional love, perspective if it’s asked for, and a safe place to vent or cry or whatever for my son.

Ivylass, it sounds like you are doing all of those things for your boy too. Make sure you have someone to vent to outside your family–IMO it will help keep you sane.

20

Ivylass, I flunked out after the first semester of my sophomore year, after barely squeaking through freshman year.

It didn’t feel like the end of the world; it was the end of the world. It was a catastrophic failure. Having screwed up in school so badly, I was now worthless as a person. And the absolute worst part was needing to tell my parents, who had done so much for me. Then the worst part was going home to face them, and staying there, because I had no place else to be.

My parents, I suppose, did the only things they knew how to do. They let me come home. They reassured me that they still loved me and that I was not worthless. They told me that I was not the first undergrad to make big, stupid mistakes (hell, it took my father nine years to get his undergrad degree). They listened to me when I wanted to talk and let me curl up to lick my wounds when I didn’t.

It turns out that taking that unplanned year off was the best thing I could have done. It handed me an opportunity to get real-world experience and do some things I’d wanted to do since high school. More importantly it forced me to confront some issues I had, and grow up about pretending those things didn’t exist. Was being put into that situation fun? Absolutely not; it was terrible. Is it, in the long run, a good thing it happened? Yes.

I’m now back at school, doing much better than I ever had been my freshman year. Obviously I don’t know more than you’ve said about your son’s situation, but I’m willing to bet that there is some good to be found somewhere in it.

And if he doesn’t feel ready to go back in January? There’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. Again, to reference my father - he failed too many classes at the end of his freshman year, spent five years doing whatever he did. Then he went back to school, graduated, and went on to get two masters degrees. Many years later, he’s got a good job, nice house, family, the whole deal.

I’m sure you’ll all get through this. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get there.