My sympathies.
SP2263 and Idlewild describe our experiences with our older son.
Our older kid was/is bright and would get A’s in his AP class and be flunking another. Husband and I were tearing our hair out. The kid couldn’t/wouldn’t manage his time and study habits. He hated, deplored and detested everyone hanging over him, telling him what to do.
What bienville says here…
There’s gotta be a moment when you realize “Holy crap! My whole entire life is waiting for me just around the corner! I’ve going to have to do stuff to make it work!”…our kid finally figured out.
He really wanted to go off to university.
He squeaked through high school and went off to college, where he was pretty much accountable only to himself. He’s had straight A’s ever since, will be graduating in May.
They do grow out of it.
All we can do is be there, be firm yet kind, and try to listen, though they don’t always feel all that conversational.
I a, not a therapist…however…she sounds like a case of Clinical Depression.
Depressed kids are just blue…they have a medical problem.
Depressed kids don’t seem sad, just really, really quiet.
Her tiredness & lack of focus tends to back this up.
As someone who as not so long ago a teenager…
Two things come to mind. I sure as heck don’t know if she’s depressed from what you’ve written, but at every level of schooling I’ve had, my grades drastically dropped only when I was having personal problems.
Second, and this one is sort of tough, it’s often easy to not work when you know there are backups, when you know mom and dad will make you work. Has she gotten a BAD final grade in any class yet? If she used to care about her grades, I bet seeing one of those would snap her right back into her old habits. The flipside is that it sucks to have to let it go that far.
Have you tried asking her what’s up?
I was kind of like this as a teenager. Grades 9 through 12, I took no notes in class, did no homework, got something like a 65% average. In grade 13 (the one that matters for university) I guess I figured it was time to get serious, got a 93% average. In retrospect, I’m sure that my parents pulled their hair out for years worrying.
I hated homework.
I found most homework was busy-work – parroting answers from the chapter back to the questions at the end of the chapter.
I thrived most under my trig and calculus teacher - same guy for two years - whose policy was brilliant: if you got an ‘A’ on the most recent test, you were not required to turn in your homework. His theory, which worked well for me, was that if you understood the work sufficiently to get an ‘A’, then there was really no need for the homework; if you did not, there was.
Now, with my eyes on a scholarship prize, I didn’t fall into the “I won’t turn it in if it’s boring” trap, but I could have, very easily…
No-one else in this thread has said it since, but I agree with garfield226. You sound rather on the overprotective and controlling side to me: especially the cinema thing, and the knowing all her friend’s parents. It sounds like she’s rebelling in the only way she can.
There is something that, in her opinion, is of far more importance than schoolwork, and which has drawn her attention from it. One possibility is that (all or some of) her teachers are about as motivational as yesterday’s soggy cereal. While I was a competent parrot in high school history classes, I only found out that I liked history and enjoyed reading it in college, because my high school history teachers were Dr. Dryasdust and Ms. Soporific.
However, whatever it is, it’s likely that she would “rather die than tell Mo-ther about it.” This can include taunting by classmates, feeling left out of a clique of popular students, a sense of anomie, having “fallen in love with” (i.e., developed a crush on) someone else, whether or not that someone else reciprocates. And if that someone else is not precisely socially acceptable, i.e., older, younger, different race or ethnic background, same sex, etc., that’s all the more reason to keep that a deep dark secret. In addition to all the above, it may be that some particular interest that is not a standard academic one has captivated her interest to the point that academics cannot compete.
One strategy that sometimes works well is to recruit a family friend midway in age between parent and teen, someone the teen can feel comfortable confiding in, and then trust that person to mediate the problem, with the understanding that s/he doesn’t break her confidences by relaying them to you unless they’re sufficiently critical that parental intervention is required. An older friend that she can open up to about what’s really on her mind may be all that’s needed, if said friend is willing to guide her to deal with school concerns as well as help with life problems.
It’s possible that she’s not been doing her homework for years, and skated up until this point, when it finally matters. I never did homework–Not in high school, college, or graduate school. When only tests counted, I got As. When busywork was required, I would end up with a C or D for the semester. When I learned that the piece of paper mattered more than the grades behind it, I just got worse.
My mom still finds my failing progress reports from those days tucked into old clothes, and rolls her eyes. 
I think we’ve given you enough success stories so you don’t have to sell her. Don’t you want your little girl to grow up to be Bricker or Polycarp?
The best way to get her to do her homework is to monitor her assignments (maybe with arrangement with the teachers, so you know what the assignments are) and check them when she’s completed them each night. You may not want to invest all of that time in watching her do her homework, but she probably doesn’t want to, either. If you let her slide, she’ll slide. Like SP2263 and others have said, it just may be who she is.
With the laundry and room-cleaning examples, your kid is lying out her ass. She’s making excuses for herself, and she knows damn well she didn’t do those things. That’s where you may be in denial, if you’re buying that crap. I don’t think she’s rebeling, but if her homework time is the only time she gets to herself without her parents around, she’s finding better things to do.
I did this sort of thing in freshman year of high school with my advanced English class. I was very very behind on assignments and my teacher gave me a week to get everything done or I would flunk.
So my mother sat me on the couch with all of my homework and told me I would stay there until I was done. No science fiction books, no stereo, no phone! Thing is, I didn’t not want to do my homework. I didn’t care about doing it or not doing it, and I’m still not sure why.
After an initial, “Aw, mom!” I did all of my homework, and did it well.
Now whenever I find myself procrastinating or not wanting to do something, I try the same strategy, and it works. If you can’t move or talk to your friends or read a book, homework looks a lot more desireable. You might try that with the biology stuff.
LifeOnWry I just want to say that it sounds like you are honestly doing a pretty good job raising your daughter. I’m really glad you are so involved in her education.
I wasn’t a very self-motivated kid, and was cynical about grades. Since nobody pushed/inspired me to excel, I got mediocre grades in High School. I think with a little nudging your daughter will be fine.
Are you really sure the work isn’t too hard for her? Being in three Honors classes might be more than she can handle, particularly with the transition to high school. I was in the “gifted” program in elementary and junior high school, but had a lot of trouble with algebra and science once I got to high school (and didn’t really enjoy science again until college).
Is it possible that she’s surprised herself at the difficulty she’s encountered, and is withdrawing as a result? And becoming depressed (excessive sleepiness) now, because she’s failing and at a loss?
Maybe it would help to reduce her workload a bit, so that she’s in the Honors class that interests her most and taking regular classes in the other subjects. They say nothing creates success like succeeding - maybe she needs to do well and build her confidence up before tackling a rigorous courseload.
It might also help if she could talk more openly to an intermediary, like an aunt or cousin. Just exploring her feelings, without aiming towards a “fix” for this problem, might help.
Is she getting A’s on all her tests? If she’s not, homework is NOT busywork, and she needs to be doing it. Make that clear to her. I get parents who tell me that their kids “can’t do homework, just see it as busywork”–and those kids are never the ones that are making A’s on everything else.
I wouldn’t let her make up the biology assignments, even is the teacher is willing to accept them. There’s no point in doing them now, the tests they would have helped her with are already over. All they are now is work for the sake of work. Like it or not, you (and her teacher) are sending a message that she might as well put stuff off, she will have a chance to make it up/do it later. And it isn’t any harder to do later.
Make it clear that she will NOT be going to summer school. If she fails a class, she’ll have to take it all over agin next year with a bunch of freshmen.
Lastly, and you aren’t going to want to hear this, take a long look at her schedule and decide if she really needs to be in all honors classes: we have a huge problem at my school with parents who assume that their child should be in all honors classes. I don’t know about your school, but our honors program is brutal–it’s meant to be. We have really high success rates on AP exams because we really, really challenge the kids. However, the downside ot that is that each of our AP and pre-AP courses has a substantial homework load: at least 3 hours/week each and, for AP classes, often quite a bit more. This means that if you are in Honors English, Math, History, Science, and a Foreign Language, you’ve got 15-25 hours of homework a week, on top of the 35 hours you spend in school. For a bright, motivated kid who enjoys school, enjoys reading and writing and math, that’s reasonable. But those kids are really rare. So take a long look at what her total homework assignments for the week are, and assume that they will increase by 20% each year for the next couple years. Consider letting her move ot regular-track classes in one subject. We’ve seen some kids who were simply overwhelmed really improve when the workload no longer seemed so preposterously impossible that there was no point in even fucking trying.
Her name was Deana. 
I just wanted to say this is a fascinating thread and I am following it with interest, because I think my daughter and I have much the same situation, although my kid’s a little younger. Good luck, LifeOnWry!
Going thru the same stuff right now with an offspring (no, not elfbabe!).
As a good friend of mine, who’s a board-certified Developmental and Behavioral Pediatric specialist said, “you can rule out the drug use and the depression and the excessive parental controlling and all that stuff on these kids, and you still find that this behavior is pretty typical. At this age, lots of kids just lose their minds. Most get them back later”.
When I see 15-25 hours of homework a week, what I see is teachers who are too lazy to teach the subject in the classroom and simply dump tons of homework on the kids and hope they teach themselves. In every single class that my kids took where the teacher taught the subject properly, they had maybe one hour’s homework a week (not counting projects like papers that needed to be researched). In the rest of the classes, the teachers did NOT teach the subject in the classroom and the kids got a minimum of an hour’s homework per class per night. Flamin’ ridiculous.
I second what SP2263 said - this has to become your daughter’s problem, not yours. My second went through the under acheiving, “forgetting” assignmnets stage in 8th and 9th grade.
It improved as soon as I backed off and made it know that this was HER life she was toying with. She always said she wanted to go to a good college, and when it was pointed out that C’s in core subjects were going to prevent that, she straightened out.
I’d suggest trying an incentive program - letting her earn agreed upon privliges or goodies if she turns in her homework and maintians good grades. Sometimes the carrot will work better than the stick.
I have to say, me too. Some people just don’t want to achieve, even though they can… I did TERRIBLY in secondary school, which was when I was about 15 or so. Never handed in my work, did borderline on my tests etc. But at the O levels, I got 6As.
Same for my JC, I was even forced to drop one of my subjects because I was doing so poorly… but I managed to get 3As at the end of it.
I know it’s no help, but I generally buckled down and did the work when I had to. But I would second the visit to the counsellor, though. I had a very good teacher in JC which pushed me to see what I could achieve if I stretched myself, and what would happen if I didn’t.
Maybe a visit to a college that she would like to go to, but can’t if she continues to blow off her work?
Let me be the first to say it: let her fall through the cracks! Just lock up your valuables before she starts stealing from you to buy crack.
I’m only half joking. I was in the same lot as your daughter - school just didn’t mesh with me - and I’ve turned out better than most of my peers. (You can’t compete with the children of a well-off, overbearing Asian mother.) She may fall through the cracks, but if you’re lucky, when she’s been spit out of the system she’ll be able to 1) see the importance of the system and 2) understand it well enough to exploit it.
Just don’t forget that the system is there to solve a social problem, and that there are other solutions out there. Some even yield better results. I - and many others here! - are living proof.
Ha! Don’t think it hasn’t crossed my mind. Fortunately for her, she’s bigger than I am.
I’m not sure where people are getting the excessive tiredness idea, but I do know that’s a sign of depression. She doesn’t seem to be excessively tired, but like most teenagers, she’ll sleep 'til noon on weekends if we let her. Then again, so would I. I don’t see any signs of depression, just rebellion. She’s really not sullen or withdrawn, except when it comes to the homework.
The biggest personal problem I can think of right now is that her friend Chris’s parents are getting divorced and Chris is moving across the country to live with his dad. She has brought this up, and since I know it’s bugging her, I have tried to be pretty patient where that’s concerned. But again, there’s a perspective problem for her. She hasn’t SEEN Chris since October, when he took her to the homecoming dance (before the current boyfriend was in the picture) and she doesn’t talk on the phone to him, doesn’t go to the same school as him and has expressed absolutely NO desire to get online and chat with him. Her guidance counselor suggested that she may see herself in a counselor role among her friends, and I get that, but if that’s the case, I would think she’d be jonesing to talk to him. So I have no idea.
Manda JO - no, she is not acing her quizzes and tests, but her scores aren’t failures, either. She averages (in almost all subjects) B to C+ on tests - acceptable scores, in my opinion. It IS the homework that’s pulling her grades down.
I honestly do not think the classes are too hard for her. As I said, she had a glitch in algebra, but the teacher explained the process to both of us, and I could SEE the light click on in her eyes (she was messing up in the area of order of processes - adding when she should have been multiplying.) When questioned, she’s perfectly forthcoming about classwork - she has told me what is being discussed in class, what she’s reading in English, etc. Her honors classes are English and biology. She’s in regular math (although there are two math classes “lower” than hers, this is not considered an honors class), Spanish I, and PE, and her chorus class is one of the “elite” choirs (but she’s getting A’s in choir.)
BUT - I think you may be right about NOT letting her make up the work. I hadn’t thought about the concept that we might be setting her up to think it would be OK to skip work because she can make it up later. I told her last night that she had to get the missing work in biology made up this week, as the grading period ends on Friday. I think now I will leave it in her hands - wincing all the while, because I KNOW she’s not going to get it all done - and let her live with the F. The final quarter starts on Monday, so what if I gave her a “pep talk” over the weekend about putting this behind her and just buckling down for the final quarter?
And to everyone - good to know I’m not alone in this! My mom always said there was nothing wrong with her kids that turning 21 wouldn’t cure, and she was right. I’d just like my daughter to get there without having to start over educationally.
Her social life sounds more like what’s normal for a ten or eleven year-old, rather than 15. BY age 15, most kids simply have a curfew on weekend nights, rather than supervised trips to the movies. It doesn’t sound like she’s having much FUN.
Maybe if personal responsibility was a larger part of her socal life it would carry over into grades. Or maybe not, but the only thing you’ve mentioned that was unusual about her life is the lack of personal time and freedom.
Good luck to you and your daughter.