Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Ack-- what to do with my apathetic 13yo??

anxiety, perfectionism, crash, fake apathy... just all a bunch of emotional parachutes so that failure is under complete personal emotional control... need a new parachute other than a sloppy apathetic defeatist approach.

brainstorm... other controls...
1) mine was speed with lots of rules like never double-checking work, can't write down my math, some were actually helpful like a five or ten second rule on language questions, then move onto the next one.
I never did practice tests, but maybe focusing on speed and losing big time for dumb mistakes to self-challenge is an approach?

2) I think OCD type thoughts can be ways of asserting controls and externalizing ownership. She could ritualize her work area to have everything just so; then if something goes wrong it isn't a capability issue it is the fault of a ritual failure.

3) Along those lines, having lucky things

4) Alter test pattern... do even numbers first... etc.

5) since ymmv, some other emotional parachute that makes sense for her

Only advice I've ever given to anyone taking a standardized test was to have a half cup of coffee before the test.

First, take a step back and look at the scores needed for a Letter of Commendation and for NMF for your state. If she was 15 points off of NMF for a high scoring West Coast state - let's say that is CA - then she would clearly be commended. CA NMF cutoff in 2013 was 221, commended was above 202. If she has maxed out on CR and W, then the M does not need to be so great to get commended (80 CR, 80 W, then only need a 43 M to get a 203).

I had the opposite problem with my eldest - she is a slacker. My middle one, in 9th grade this year, is the perfectionist. It will be interesting to see her PSAT score (will take in 9th, 10th, 11th), though she did fairly well on the SAT when she took it for CTY as a 7th grader.

I could not motivate my eldest, now a 12th grader, to study for the PSAT. She did study a bit (mainly CR) for the SAT, and received a score that would have been NM Commended had she scored that on the PSAT.

I think it may just be the teenager thing. We seem to fight this battle with anything that might help her get into certain colleges.

We seem to get better results when we give her some space and don't discuss things too much. View the PSAT as practice, and she'll take the SATs later this school year. Sign her up for the ACT as well, even though you live on a coast, so the ACT is not the popular test. Mine wasn't happy when I signed her up for ACTs, but she did like her score and it could only help her. And don't forget the SAT subject tests. Have her plan her test schedule - or for my slacker, I signed her up for the various tests and just dropped her off there on test day.

Good luck. These tests will be over at end of junior year, then on to college applications...

From my perspective, there was no time or energy left for test anxiety in that situation. Anxiety, for some people, is what your brain does when it's not busy enough with other stuff.

I second the suggestion for some anxiety-reduction counseling. My DD has been like an entirely different kid after just a couple of sessions.

Just an update here-- though I wasn't sure if should put this in the small victories thread or here...

I forced the little Princess to look through the DRILLS in the Princeton Review book yesterday afternoon, showed her how to set up one type of problem with dimensional analysis methods (rather than the clunky, memorize-the-table-so-that-you-don't-need-to-understand-the-math method advocated... and really, GGA to THAT... )...

and had her take the mock exam prepared by College Board and included with registration... and she SMOKED that thing. SMOKED it. She was well into NMS range on that practice test (triple 9's and a 98th on math), and she'll almost certainly perform better with the adrenaline of tomorrow.

Now she's happy and confident. She thinks that she can "beat" that score tomorrow morning. And because she and her bestie (HG, age-typical 11th grader who took it on Wednesday) are rather competitive, including some good-natured gender-based teasing, she's now playing for bragging rights in a game of 'you show me yours' later on. LOL.

Whatever works. I'm just glad that she's feeling better about the whole thing and is motivated to give it her ALL. Take that, you perfectionism MONSTER.

Great! How does she think it went yesterday?

She thinks (but is reluctant to say to anyone but us) that she probably scored north of 225. Maybe a perfect score if she didn't make any calculation errors, but we all know that isn't terribly likely since DD is rather prone to them. But she'll be in the 72-74 range on each section, probably, and from the sounds of things, quite likely near perfect in both reading and writing sections.

She was done in under an hour and a half, too, which blew the proctor away (she was testing individually because of her accommodations). So that was one major bonus. I sat in the hall and played angry birds so that the proctor could grab me immediately if needed.

DD said that the proctor's eyes bugged when she finished the first reading section in about nine minutes.

My only worry is that I've heard from two or three other people that this year's PSAT seemed "very easy" which is exactly what DD thought, too, relative to practice tests. So this year's scores could skew very very high, which would make the impact of that 220+ score a lot less than she'd like. On the other hand, her bestie took it on Wednesday and didn't say anything about it being "easy" on Thursday night when they were on the phone.

She was playing for bragging rights, though, after that slam dunk of the practice test. She wants to beat the pants off of the other likely contender for valedictorian (also a PG kid, nearly the same age as DD), and her bestie (age-typical 11th grader, male HG) who teases her about being both younger and female.

I then took her shopping as a reward. She got a bunch of halloween costume stuff. Oh, not for halloween. For Cosplay... which is a side-effect of the gaming lifestyle. LOL. My only challenge now is to prevent her from wearing the warm-weather costume to an outdoor table game today. LOL.

My line of thinking is the same as jack'smom, It appears to me the problem here is anxiety and fear of not getting what is "expected" of her, either in her own mind or how she perceives what her family expects of her. So how do you calm anxiety over expectations? Change the expectation. I don't mean dumb down the expectation but put it in terms that are reasonable and helpful.....go back to the phrase we've all come to know and appreciate, "Praise the effort, not the result." Emphasis that indeed her best effort is expected, whatever the result that best effort yields you'll be proud of and so should she.

Balance is such a simple word for a VERY hard concept: helping a child be proud of their accomplishments while still teaching them that they are separate from their accomplishments. I see a lot of professor kids in my practice (usually both parents are PhDs or MDs), so the kids are quite bright AND have grown up in a culture where educational success is a life-source.

My goal is to help them continue to feel great about their successes (usually academic) but learn to maintain a stable sense of self when accomplishments fall short (usually in their eyes only). If they only rely on external validation of their self-worth, then they will inevitably feel like a failure (at one point or another).