Posted by Elodie on November 03 2009 at 10:34:52:
This is hard to write, not because it is painful or whatever, but just because the totality & complexity of it is hard to boil down to a few paragraphs.
I have a 10-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter. Everything with her is fine and A-OK, so that´s good, because if not for her, I would think it was all my fault, see?
So, I just have a really hard time getting my son to do his schoolwork, is what it boils down to. He dawdles and he defies and he teases and disobeys. It has ever been like this, but as the quality of the work for which I am asking has increased in scope, the dawdling becomes more of an issue and we (as a family) run out of time.
What was helpful last year (4th grade), I realized in the spring, was for me to put everything down on a monthly calendar page, every day, with at least a week´s lead time and to give it to him. I had always sketched out our time and my goals in a broad way for myself, but giving it to him made him less fisty about [whatever]. This year I decided I would do that again, but it is too hard to make daily lesson plans from a curriculum that is more unschooly + day-to-day reflective, and I have the two students on the books this year, so I bought a curriculum. It is from Oak Meadow, so it´s kind of nutsy-grainsy & exploratory and unit-based in a way that was familiar to him/us so, good.
Every "lesson" in the book should take about a week and I sketch it out to be about a week with some overlap/transition, so that he might be finishing up some extra-reading about [whatever] while heading into the new chapter about [whatever], but I cleave pretty closely to the book´s expectations. They are not hard, they are perfectly developmentally appropriate and in line with what I would like him to get on in a year. (We did keep Singapore Math)
Anyhow, I´m sorry, I don´t mean to be so process-talk boring. The thing is he gets a month at once on the page and then he proceeds to blow it off and waste time until he has five days or three weeks or whatever all piled up and he has missed out on some event he wanted to attend (because it goes without saying that extras are about meeting minimum expectations) and then he knuckles down and gets in all done by working tirelessly for a weekend. He could (and can, and has) blown through his daily work in 90 minutes on more than one occasion when he has been properly-motivated (by what, I do not know), but the rest of the time, it is a struggle of wills (with whom, I am not sure). So it isn´t as if I am asking too much from him or wanting him to do too much. Content-wise I ask for less than what he is capable, which is still above grade-level, so I´m pretty relaxed about that.
Anyhow, I am not sure why I am writing all this down here. I guess I would just like to give him a shot that would make him wake up willing to see how freaking easy it is and if he would just do the work, our lives could be an endless garden of delight. I don´t know why he has to make it so unpleasant -- it hurts my feelings, and it wastes my daughter´s time/life when she is so "good" and attentive to her schoolwork. I mean, he just blew off Halloween, which is not a small consequence, because during the hours we allot for school work (3-4 of them each day), he sat around like a stone for the 2 weeks prior. A spit-bubble-blowing, juvenile delinquent stone. I will not lie: it hurts my feelings and a lot of what I have had to do this year is not react to it and just be really impartial and neutral when I refuse the videogaming or the bicycling with pals or whatever as patently unearned, instead of being a raving lunatic who delights is removing everything as a punishment, which is maybe how I feel a teensy bit on the inside. I am not proud.
I guess I am writing this all down because I know a lot of you ladies have older sons who I presume are capable citizens and maybe you will have some nice and/or helpful things to say. I mean, it´s possible that the Halloween thing delivered a message that he had not absorbed bodily before, because, I mean, we have been his parents his whole life. And ever it has been that we do not fold. If we say x is the consequence of y, it always happens. So, I do not know what to do, and I am of course worried that he will grow up to be a serial killer. IF this weren´t a testing year, I would just let him grown mold between his ears and anyhow. I don´t know. I think the other thing that frustrates me is that if he were blowing off his schoolwork to do something interesting, I would be more accepting of it, like if he were building something important out of paper, or whatever. I went to school with a boy who was always building things, always, and would also during class make the most fascinating things out of the foil paper from gum wrappers inside his desk where the teacher could not see & I was always v impressed by his elan.
Ok, that is all, I guess, sorry it is so long. If you are judging me, please don´t bother to share it, I hope this never happens to you, thanks.