DS is using the planner school provided, and it's pretty good, I think. His use of it is markedly different from what DD does with hers--he jots down just enough to be confusing, in chicken scratch. The reason I was interested in the linked planner is that it appears to have actual lessons included, and I wondered if the lessons might help him.
I did discover last night that he thinks the planner is for ME, not him. We have a lot of work to do in his making the connection between schoolwork cause and effect (grades). He is perfectly content with the bare minimum but he can't afford to do that. I'm trying to explain to him that he needs to do his best and bank points on "easy" stuff so that if he has problems, he has some room to make mistakes. For him, though, the easy stuff is taking tests and the rest of it (keeping current, organizing assignments) is very difficult.
In all my thinking about the planning/organizing--I was making what appears to have been a huge assumption: that DS would be happier and more successful if he knew what was going on and felt competent.
It turns out he couldn't care less. We had a revealing talk and he basically said he doesn't enjoy a single class except band and graphic design. He's doing well in his classes right now (mostly bc I'm hovering) and he's happy enough about that but not terribly concerned. This is OT for this thread, but I have no idea how to help him engage. It doesn't make sense to me that he doesn't enjoy learning--he has his own projects going at home all the time. They are all creative projects, though.
Basically, I have DS enrolled in a very stressful (especially high demand on EF) academic program that he does not enjoy but is willing to endure for the sake of having intellectual peers. Ugh.
