It sounds like you’re on the right track, astro. Just let her know your line of thinking, so she doesn’t think you’ve decided to chuck it all and give up on her…that instead, you realize that this is HER little red wagon, not yours.
A counselor once told me that when you raise kids, you have to expect and prepare for them to go through a “blackout”, just like the early astronauts did. During that blackout, there is not much you can do to get through to them…but everything you have done prior to that time is critical, and all of that comes into play in bringing them out safely on the other side.
Looking back at my own teen years, I think he was very close to the truth, and I’m trying to remember that as I watch my 15 yo approach that time.
Best wishes to you both.
~karol
Your daughter sounds exactly like me at that age, and it was depression. I found out too late to help my school career. Please consider getting counseling/testing for her.
I wish you both the best of luck.
I agree with a lot of the statements here: back off, try to find out about depression/fears about the future, let her row her own boat.
(My own sister, age 15, was a terrible GATE student and is now improving on her own with no nagging. My mom is stunned but happy. In her case, I think it’s partly growing up, a willingness to let her control herself, and the episode where she wanted to transfer to ordinary college prep classes, got her wish, and discovered that college prep wasn’t where she belonged.)
So here’s another oddball idea to throw in the ring. I spent my junior year (age 15-16) abroad as an exchange student. It was hard work, but not academically–learning the language and coping with new situations/family dynamics/etc. took most of my energy. It was quite the adventure, and I learned a lot about getting through difficult situations. I was an honors student here in the US, but not particularly at the top (and unlike many here, I pretty much enjoyed and got something of an education at my very mediocre school)–but that exchange trip got me into Cal Berkeley, where I had a ball and got decent grades, much to my own surprise. Just an idea to toss around.
There is one thing I am surprised that nobody has mentioned or questioned. You say that her grades fall in correlation with missing homeworks/assignments. What about test grades? Not that you can change the schools grading practices, but it may shed additional light on where the problem is.
I’ve noticed that schools today seem to place a much greater emphasis on homework than when I was a student. In high school, I rarely did a homework assignment that wasn’t going to count for a large percentage of the final grade. If a teacher made daily homeworks count for 10% or something like that, I might hand one in once in a rare while. I didn’t spend much time studying either. I would go to classes, ace quizzes and exams, and graduated with a 93 average. This type of work-ethic didn’t work so well when I got to college, of course. (Well, I was able to coast through the first semester, but after that it was all downhill.)
I have a 13 year old who I can see approaches school the same way I did. On standardized tests, his scores are all well over the 90th percentile, but his grades average in the low 80s and he isn’t even taking honors track classes. Even with his mother and I checking repeatedly, he misses or fails to complete assignments regularly. In classes where the homework is light or doesn’t count much, he gets grades in the 90s. His English teacher sent home a detailed progress report at one point, showing how missed homeworks caused his average to be about 70. Homeworks counted for 33% of the grade, and his exam and classwork average would have worked out to something near 90.
I have mixed feelings about this. I think the final grade should reflect whether the student learned the material or not. If exam scores average 90 I can’t see any reason why any student should recieve a 70. But my own experience shows me that it is also important for students to learn to exert some effort. The problem, as even sven and others have pointed out, is that for any student capable of effortlessly scoring 90s on exams, the assignments aren’t an effort, they’re just busy work.
Still, I am beginning to wonder if there isn’t the possibility of the involvement of some kind of learning disability/ADHD. Normally, I’m somewhat sceptical of the concept, the term seems overused and overapplied. But I think it might be worth investigating. Realistically, someone with greater skills should be able to complete their assignments in less time and with less effort, however boring it might be.
On the homework thing. It depends on what you think the purpose of school is. Are we trying to get kids who all know the multiplication tabels or are we trying to get a responsible, productive next generation?
Constant effort is what counts in life. You can’t always study for a test, most of them come with no warning and the prep you put in counts more than anything. Its not the little spikes of grandness that make you a good person, its what you strive to do every day. This is why homework, on a daily basis, is and should be important. (I’m still in college. As much as I love the classes where I show up three times and turn in a paper for level of work, I get more out of the ones where homework and daily attendance is the grade. I hate them, but I get more out of them. )
Yes, its a grind to pull out the books and work every stupid day. That’s why its called “work” not a “pastime” or “hobby”. Yea, learning a work ethic.
With all due respect, even sven, I believe that’s a lot of generalized nonsense. I was a smart kid and graduated with A’s. Most of my friends were smart kids who got A’s. In fact, I’d say the smart kids who applied themselves and got A’s outnumbered the smart kids who dropped out about twenty to one.
It is simply not true, not true, NOT true that the smart kids get bored and can’t succeed academically because it’s all so beneath them. I was a smart kid who seemed to be able to get his essays done and tests studied for and got into a good school. I don’t recall being driven to acts of violence because I felt I was surrounded by inferior subhumans. I didn’t think it was “absurd,” though like anyone with a sense of humour I can see absurdity in the little things. I did not choose to fail rather than put up with the BS. I can name three dozens people just like me, too; are we not smart enough or something? In my experience, the person who says “this is so beneath me, I can’t learn from this” is usually a) a lot less smart than they think they are and b) is missing a lot they COULD be learning.
This isn’t to say I know what’s best for astro’s kid, or that some kids don’t need an alternative learning environment. For the odd kid dropping out might be useful, especially if they’re in a terrible school. But I’d say that in 49 cases out of fifty the kid who’s goofing off is NOT goofing off because they’re Powder-like supergeniuses who can’t get along with the troglodytes; they are, like most kids, undisciplined and ignorant, and need to be properly motivated to get their asses in gear.
The very first thing that popped into my mind upon reading the OP was “OMG - that’s ME!” You’ve described my adolescent years almost exactly, including the shared custody part. I echo Elvis’s thought - have her checked for Attention Deficit Disorder. (Note please that ADD and ADHD are not the same thing, and that girls with ADD are frequently thought to be space cadets.)
I would also recommend a pow-wow with your ex, and with your daughter’s teachers. You guys are all going to have to be on the same page with her. Consistency is a MUST with teenagers, and it’s the hardest thing to accomplish. I have no solutions for you, but perhaps if she realizes EVERYONE is onto her and no one is going to let her get away with wasting her brains, she’ll settle in. You might even tell her that until she has proven that her judgement is reliable in terms of schoolwork, it will be necessary to make decisions for her, and you have decided that while she may think it’s OK to slack off, you know better, and until she realizes it’s not OK, you will continue to monitor her.
Please understand this is MHO only, what I wish had been done by my own parents, and what seems to be working fine so far for my own preteen. I hope whatever choice you make is one you feel comfortable with and that it works out for you and for your daughter. Good luck!
As another former underachiever, I’m going to say try not to worry about it too much; it’s almost impossible to force her to do well. If she really is intelligent she will probably grow out of this and get her shit together eventually. And unless her grades are REALLY bad getting into college shouldn’t be that big a deal unless you’re looking for something extremely prestigious, I think schools know how to spot somebody who’s just bored with high school. Anyway, I got a 2.0 in high school and things are working out for me.
Yeah, I agree with you, RickJay. I just graduated HS this year, and have done really well. I consider myself one of the more intelligent ones. even sven, no offense intended, but your attitude does seem to be one of rationalization- saying it doesn’t matter how badly you do because you know you’re smart. It just comes off as kind of in your face. I don’t know, I’ve encountered this point of view a lot on this board. Maybe I’m completely off base and you went to a high school that was just so horrible that it justifies this attitude, but it just feels terribly condesending, that’s all.
Speaking as a former smart kid ( and the mother of one going into 7th grade), while it certainly true than smart kids can succeed academically, even sven had a bit of a point (leaving out the arrogance). I’ve had a longstanding probelm (back to at least 2nd grade) with my son doing his homework. I’ve noticed a pattern- he does essays, reports and projects fine. The problems are with the page of math problems or English or social studies questions.He quite simply doesn’t see the point of doing what are essentially meant to be practice questions when he doesn’t need the practice, and resents that his final grade will be lowered because he didn’t do homework that’s not graded, only checked for completion. I can’t give him any reason to do this homework except that not doing it will lower his grade, because in truth, I don’t see a reason why his failure to do what is, for him, busywork should lower his grade. But lower them it has, from what would have been an A based on graded assignments to a C because of the undone homework.I didn’t see a reason why it should lower my grades when I was a kid, and I was very happy when I got to the point in my education where only graded assignments counted toward my grade.
An acquaintance of mine has written a book called They Can But They Don’t. It addresses, very insightfully, some issues surrrounding brilliant kids that don’t have much interest in completing routine schoolwork. The author is Dr. Jerome Bruns, and I recommend it highly.
- Rick
Inspired by RickJay’s post, I’m gonna go off on a tangent. When writers build stories about the way the world is for kids, a bunch of them buy into the myth of the brilliant child, whose school life consists of (i) being corrupted by adults who are dumber than he is in his pure, unsocialized state and (ii) being scorned by the other kids who are dumber than he is and who torment him when they can because they are jealous of his intellectual firepower. It’s easy for a lot of us to identify with this type of character: we do value intelligence, we were smarter than a lot of our classmates and some of our dumb classmates did, inexcusably, bully and pick on us.
It’s still not a true myth; it’s a lazy writer’s prop that doesn’t recognize the value of hard work, failure and more hard work. It sells short the actual (not non-existent) talent of the majority of kids.
When I get closest to self-honesty, I know that my talents as a child were not enough to make me a superhero. I couldn’t reprogram a computer before someone taught me how. I couldn’t intuit trigonometry. I wasn’t socially aware enough to figure out the power structure of the teachers and principals in my shcools. (I’m thinking now of Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow) Those of us who may be tempted to claim we really could should do some soul-searching–no one gets smart all alone. Schools are not always the right place for smart kids but, as RickJay says, smart kids can learn in schools, and really great kids figure out how to get smart in a lot of different ways, in school and out.
Sorry for the highjack, astro. No statement in this post is intended to impugn any other poster in this thread. It is intended as a critique of an annoying literary convention.
I never quite got this either, until a teacher explained it to a group at a conference. She asked “How many people here need to use historical facts and dates in their day-to-day lives?” No hands went up. “How many people need to know the difference between an adverb and an adjective for work purposes?” A few hands went up. “How many people use geography on a regular basis?” A sprinkling of hands. “Algebra?” Another small number of hands went up.
“OK,” she went on, “how many people in this room must, to earn a paycheck, be able to work independently, complete tasks on a deadline, do repetitive, mundane chores without supervision, know how to follow step-by-step instructions, and must do seemingly pointless short-term tasks to reach a long-term goal?” Every hand in the room went up.
“THAT is the purpose of homework,” she said.
I was a former “smart kid” who managed to get away with doing little or no homework. The teachers loved me - I was big on class participation, tests and quizzes. They let the homework slide. I thought it was for lesser mortals. Then I hit college and found I had absolutely no study skills at all. What I was able to breaze through in the lower grades didn’t prepare me for professors who sketched out the information and expected you to pursue it on your own time. She may need some tutoring in learning how to study, and again, it’s called homework because it’s work, not fun like surfing the net or chatting with your friends. I had no work ethic - I didn’t know how to apply myself.
StG
That may be some of the purposes of some types of homework, but to be honest, I didn’t say I thought that homework never had a purpose. What I don’t understand is why not doing a nightly page of math problems (which aren’t graded, every answer wrong counts the same as every answer correct) should lower the grade of a child who scores in the 90’s on every test, especially since doing the homework every night won’t raise the grade of a child who tests in the 70’s to a B . Sure, I want him to do his homework, but only because I know it will affect his grade- not because I think he gets anything of value from it that he isn’t learning in other ways, or because the teacher gets any real information about whether he understands the subject or not from it, as she does from the graded reports, projects, and essays that he does not resist doing. He could randomly write answers to the math problems and still get credit for doing the homework. (and he has done just that)
In that case, there’s something wrong with the teacher. Although it could possibly be a testing situation, albeit a rather sneaky and underhanded one: maybe she’s trying to see who thinks they are above the system. Regardless, I still think the kid should do his homework, to the best of his ability, and I think letting him know YOU think he should be above the piddly work is irresponsible of you. This is just MHO, but there it is.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t think he’s above the work, nor do I let him know that I think it’s pointless. I simply cannot think of a good reason (other than because it will lower his grade) why he should do it, nor can I think of a reason why not doing it should lower his grade. It doesn’t help him master a concept he already knows, nor does it give the teacher any information about what he knows.
Imagine this conversation :
Him : I don’t need to do my math homework. I already know how to x
Me : Yes, you do. Otherwise, you’ll lose points (and this is where the smartness causes a problem. Because if he didn’t in fact already know how to do x, I could give a more reasonable answer, such as “You need practice in order to do well on the test”)
Him: But why should I lose points? I know the work {said with all the sense of injustice that an 11 year old can manage)
What do I answer here? Why should the lack of homework lower his grade in a subject ? I haven’t got an answer. Do you? You say he should do it, but for what reason? An arbitrary reason like “that’s the rule” might work for some kids (it did for me- I always did my homework) but it won’t solve my problem.
( BTW I can’t blame the teacher for not correcting the homework each day - correcting a page of math for 4 classes of 30 students plus the homework for the other subjects that she teaches her homeroom would add an awful lot to her day. And I don’t blame her for assigning it, because, certainly there are others in the class that do need the practice. I don’t even blame her for lowering the mark, because that’s not her choice )
Hmmm. Better and better.
Humble Servant, your post wasn’t a hijack. There’s a critical difference between what schools want, what parents want, and an individual’s struggle to become a part of society. Every child wants to do well. How our schools fail is that often intelligent children who can advertise themselves, or children who can persist in the face of being ungifted, get attention. Teachers, only human, applaud children who are obvious successes. But others get indifferent support. Every child must come to terms with power structures, but what schools have classes which directly address that?
LifeOnWry, your lecturer, eager to find her next gig, supplied an obvious example that was bound to win approval. But her argument is specious. Activities require understanding of a larger context. That context is critical for an individual to understand the purpose of day-to-day activity. Claiming that step-by-step instructions is central to daily life is a crowd pleaser, but irrelevant. Walking, eating, and breathing are important, and could be improved, yet homework, per se, doesn’t enhance them.
Yet her point that what’s being taught could be more on target is worthwhile. The problem is that our society has gone a long way beyond the stage where being able to duplicate semi-intelligent, repetitive skills is enough. There’s a difference between rote learning, disciplining the mind, and being able to cope with the specifics of ever-changing technology, politics, and science.
Oh, God…This thread evokes a lot of painful memories for me. Count me as the classic “what’s wrong with this kid” kid. I don’t have any more answers than anyone else, but I can give it to you from the kid’s perspective and maybe get this off my chest.
When I was very young, I was “profoundly gifted”. I could read at a college level before I turned three. Elementary school was a pretty happy time for me, just read something occasionally and spell something occasionally and be left alone to do my thing most of the rest of the time. In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t a good thing, since I never really had to work at anything at a young age. My second grade teacher once took my mother aside and told her to take me out of the school I was in, find some place better suited for me, move if we had to. My mother thought she was being elitist.
Then in junior high, I started failing classes after a lifetime of A’s. Some of it, perhaps a lot of it, was just a stubborn refusal to ever do busy work. Not all of it, though. Maybe I just never developed any discipline. Maybe I was just a snotty kid who thought he was too smart to have to do what everyone else did. Truth is, I didn’t know why I was constantly failing classes, and I still don’t.
That was nothing compared to high school. I failed virtually every class. I had no discipline and was increasingly angrier at the whole thing. In computer math, for example, I spent an entire semester hacking into the math program (in BASIC) to draw a large penis when you booted it up. I made a 7 in the class. That teacher understandably couldn’t stand me, but the more compassionate faculty treated my mother to the once every six weeks head shaking conference of “Tsk, tsk. What are we going to do about Britt?”
My standardized test scores may have been off the charts since I could walk, but in high school I graduated last. Not bottom quarter, last. Last Place. I didn’t know why and still don’t.
I can’t weigh in on either side of the “blame the kid/blame the system” debate, if there is one; I honestly don’t know. All I can say is being intelligent, confused and pissed off was a sad and lonely way to be, and I felt that way for a long time. Stand by your kid and take heart, though, astro; I eventually came to love academia and my story got much, much happier. 
partly_warmer - I’m not so sure that her argument was specious as much as it was rather broad - perhaps an oversimplification, but not one without merit. I agree that we could do a great deal more in teaching children to think critically, and that rote busywork doesn’t help there. But, as a general life-lesson, it stands as a valid point. We don’t always have the luxury of being able to work for ourselves in our chosen fields - most of us are not The Boss, we work for someone else, and that someone else’s goals may be unclear to us, but that does not negate the necessity of being able to help achieve them.
Now, I disagree with doreen only in this point - the homework is required by the teacher, therefore it behooves the child to do it, period. As I said, this is MHO, and I think the parent should back the teacher on this one (until such time as the parent can smack the teacher in the head with a mackeral and ask her what kind of nutball she is to assign work that isn’t even going to be graded.)