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    Joined: Jun 2016
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    sanne Offline OP
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    DS10 has a skeleton 504 in place, with intention to revise it as needed after acceleration.

    He will be going to 6th grade "STELM" after Thanksgiving break, which is beginning of the second trimester. His english clas will be replaced with the STELM class, which is project based curriculum extension. Units are topics like robotics, cryptography. All the students are in the top 10th percentile. The school believes it will help him generate volume of writing and develop some EF skills.

    He will be put in 7th grade math and science.

    I accepted the offer saying "we don't know what is going to work, so we have to try something!". i don't want to push for academic match and have DS10 floundering from lack of executive functioning. I think that situation would limit my future power as an advocate for him.

    I have expectation of a stepped acceleration. If he can keep up with organizational skills and improve his keyboarding, then I'll push for single subject accleration in math.

    He did surprisingly poorly on the ACT Aspire. No word on the ACT scores, but the few things I've heard sound bad. He didn't use his time well and didn't finish one test. He gave up on another because he wanted to go home and filled in random answers.

    I think his school performance will improve once he gets out of his current classroom. He's putting all his attention into social status, since he is the biggest fish in the pond right now. He's loving it, of course, but it's not beneficial for him long term.


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    sanne Offline OP
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    DS10 started middle school 6th/7th grade this past Monday. He has had nausea (anxiety?) in the mornings and has been chewing his lip raw. He hasn't done that since 1st grade went so badly.

    I am picking him up from school, having him go through each class mentally, fill out his planner/assignment notebook, go through his locker and backpack so he takes home what he needs to. (In 5th grade, he was lying to his teacher that he was bringing his homework home, and then coming home and lying to me that he'd forgotten it.)

    He is struggling with the conflict between "knowing" material as a passing familiarity and mastering defined learning targets. He says his science class is hard. They're on mitosis and meiosis. Maybe it would have been easier if he had spent his 30 minutes of homework reading the material rather than flipping through the textbook skimming anything that looked exciting.

    He has a minimum 5,000 word short story project in one class. He's already lying to me about what his teacher expects. I've been emailing the teacher, she is letting me know exactly what she tells him. <3 She wants him to write 300 words per day. Hah! Took him 2 hours to write 75 words yesterday. I suspect this assignment will end catastrophically.

    I'm just now starting to figure out all the crap he pulled in 5th grade. Lying about packing his lunch, taking school lunch (without paying for it or having money in his lunch account). Oh my! The elementary school coddled him badly - it was a chief complaint of mine back in 4K! they don't let students experience natural consequences. Thankfully middle/high school is different. First thing I did was freeze his lunch account. Miraculously (sarcasm), he is "remembering" to pack his lunches. Of course! Stuff like this makes me think his ADHD is an elaborate scam or scapegoat for behaving badly. I'm thankful I have his neuropsych reports before and after ADHD medication to ground me.

    He is getting behind on homework already in 3 days. He spent 4 hours on homework yesterday. Looked like 30 minutes doodling rather than doing his math homework. He didn't finish several assignments, didn't practice trumpet, didn't clean his room or put his dirty clothes in the hamper, and didn't take a shower. Yuck! He went to bed an hour late and then kept himself up even later singing and talking to himself.

    I am completely exhausted. This homework supervision thing is more exhausting than homeschooling him. And picking him up after school to check his locker and papers takes a huge chunk out of my day, leaving me getting up earlier and getting sleep deprived. I'm not a happy momma. frown

    What can I do to make this better?

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    Val Offline
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    Maybe you need to let him fail.

    This may sound harsh, but we as humans often need to learn a lesson the hard way. Now is a good time to fail because his grades won't count for college. And even if they do, sometimes a person still needs to fail.

    IMO, there isn't much that an adult can do to convince a child that s/he needs to work or work hard. This motivation has to come from within, and in some people, it can only come after experiencing what the alternative is like.


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    My daughter went through a phase where she was like this, when she started middle school. It started off ok but then spiraled downhill once the work ramped up. It was awful. Luckily she has an IEP and the school was willing and able to help micromanage her. On a certain level i'm sure she cared that she was failing (one class in particular) becasue she wasn't doing the work, but on the other hand she didn't care at all. For her, failing wasn't really a consequence, other than the fact that she didn't like people mad at her. But it was easier to have people mad than to figure out how to focus and get things done. If it wasn't for her school services, and being able to get things done in the special ed room with supervision (vs. unmedicated at home), it would have been a disaster. You have to find a balance between accommodating and consequences. I don't think the consequence should be failing if for the kid, it just gets them off the hook. If given a choice between doing something hard and getting an F, some kids are going to choose the F. They just don't care that much. So then what. They learn they got an F and life goes on, onto the next F? They don't learn anything other than they can avoid work and get away with it. A better way to do things may be to find a good motivator, like if he can maintain A's or B's for a couple weeks or months, he gets something he really wants. And then he will also learn that if he works hard he can do it and get some satisfaction from a job well done.

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    Okay, so if we're setting aside the hypothesis that ADHD is the culprit...

    I had a somewhat similar experience with a gifted foster child who was falling behind and in danger of being retained in the third grade. She refused to do her reading assignments due to learned helplessness (she was told she was dyslexic) and because she'd been able to manipulate her way out of doing them before, through various strategies of being charming, crying, etc.

    The second part was easy enough to resolve - we simply let her sit at the dining room table and not participate in any of the rest of the family's activities until her work was done, consistently and non-negotiably. But left on her own, she'd simply fidget for hours, try various ways to get attention, and just plain rage. Because that was never going to resolve the very real tears and howls of frustration that were coming from her learned helplessness, which was the reason she avoided doing the assignments in the first place.

    To make a long story short, I sat down with her to do the reading assignments together, quickly discovered that dyslexia had nothing to do with it - she was attempting to read via whole-word recognition, and all she required was a crash course in phonics. So I read along with her, wrote out mistaken words on a white board, drew lines through the syllable breaks, and guided her through vowel sounds. As would be expected with a gifted child, she made rapid progress. We celebrated her triumphs together, and that sense of learned helplessness began evaporating under rays of confidence.

    So the formula for success in this case were:

    1) Consistent enforcement.
    2) Investigation of source of perceived inability.
    3) Scaffolding and building of skills and confidence.

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    sanne Offline OP
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    @Dude, I appreciate your response. I think I'll need to find a similar balance since my son does have obvious lagging skills. I'm okay with him failing, but heck, a B would devestate him. LOL! My little perfectionist! shocked He hasn't taken a test or gotten any graded papers back yet, but he is already very motivated by grades.

    Regarding the 300 words per day writing assignment, I pointed out that would take about 9 hours (per day). He had a little indignant tantrum and boy did his pencil fly after that! He wrote out about 300 words in a half hour. He is writing again tonight, getting close to 300. I'm delighted because his success or lack of will be based more on his writing ability than on his behavior.

    I got a login for the schools' parent portal. I LOVE THIS THING. We had a family meeting over his 3 days of data. He was late to a class, and went to the wrong classroom for resource one day. Excused absences, but boy, accountability is leaving an impression upon him!

    He attempted to sort out his homework and supplies by himself after school and had it done before I arrived. His solution today was "I have a test in every class". (Not true), so bring everything home. Not the most efficient solution, but I noticed he tried.

    We had a conversation about his taking school lunch issue in elementary school, since the parent portal listed all the changes to his account. He tried saying he "forgot", he tried saying he was being "lazy", he tried whining "I don't know". These are his ADHD excuses. I rejected those excuses and he confesses to eating school lunch to try to fit in. I'm not sure that's completely true since he started the year with a group of friends that all brought lunches. Perhaps some friendships changed. We are working on a restitution punishment. His lunch account was wrongly marked as free/reduced price. We calculated the amount that came from that and he'll have to earn it and give that amount to a charity that benefits children in our town. So far the only option he has for earning it is selling his fancy-pants backpack. That's heavy-hitting for a kid who is turning to possessions for a sense of self-worth.

    He is struggling with wanting to use objects (including hot lunch, excessively large adulty scissors, and an oversized neon backpack) as status symbols. I suppose this is a normal human thing, but joining a new social group seems to be an ideal time to nip it.

    He has a new crush. Girl is same age - also grade-skipped but a few years ago. She's out of his league, she's just got "it". He says adorably earnestly that he wants to be good enough for this girl. YES! For motivation!

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    sanne Offline OP
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    How long do you think I should wait before asking for single subject acceleration in math? He's doing fine in his classes, but math is easy. No studying required. Very little homework, just a couple minutes. He has a bunch of easy classes - social studies, band, gym, and math.

    Social studies is easy, but it's new material so I think it's appropriate placement still.

    He has been playing his instrument for 3 years and he's playing with students who have only had their instruments for 3 months. He has had the same teacher for thoose 3 years - the middle school band director also teaches for the virtual charter school my son attended. So I'm thinking this will be an easy class for now and next year he can do solo/ensemble for a challenge.

    Do I wait until more grades come in? Do I ask for it for third trimester? Or wait for next year? Can anyone help me navigate this?

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    Without knowing the particulars of what he's studying in what his particular school calls 7th-grade math, I suggest that the best course of action on the math front is to do nothing.

    1) Based on the previous history, it looks like your DS has plenty to deal with on the executive function front. He could very well benefit from using this year as a personal growth year, with executive function as his focus, because harder material is not far ahead.

    2) This is 7th grade, not 2nd. The material is more difficult to fill in when gaps occur. And the further into the school year he gets, the more material he would have missed in the new class.

    My DD12 experienced 7th grade math last year through a cross-country move, nearly halfway through the school year, to a new school with a very ineffective teacher. Then she began 8th grade in yet another new school, only to be transferred once more three weeks later. While her experience wouldn't be as significant as skipping an entire year, it did leave her behind the curve in 8th grade math (all other subjects are fine). And while her executive function is excellent, she is investing the time after school with a really great teacher who is committed to helping DD excel, and DD's grades are plenty acceptable as a result, my DD does share your DS's trait of perfectionism. DD's get-it-done attitude does get frequently interrupted by howls of self-doubt. I'm constantly having to counter-message, because "I'm bad at math" is not a successful identity trait for a future robotics engineer.

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    sanne Offline OP
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    The class seems to be standard 7th grade math since Common Core. It's pre-algebra just touching what was the beginning of Algebra 1 when I was in high school. I reviewed the learning targets and noticed the first unit of the year contains material DS10 hasn't been taught. I may ask his teacher if he's willing to teach this material to DS10 during Resource.

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    sanne Offline OP
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    I decided to ask for continuous progress acceleration in math without changing classrooms.

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