Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Lack of Focus

Aargh! I just have to get this off my chest . . . .

So DS8 just got his report card from the end of third grade today and it was filled with "needs to focus" and "can do more but only does the minimum required" and yet more "needs to focus." The only area where he got good comments (although, admittedly, there were some areas with no comments) was in math, in which he is subject accelerated and got the highest marks possible. I've mentioned in passing to the teacher that it's hard for my DS to focus all day because he's easily capable of all the work without focusing, and she agreed with me! And, she knows that DS reads for a couple of hours at a time at home almost every night in books a couple years above grade level, so she knows he is perfectly able to focus when not surrounded by a bunch of unruly classmates. And the classroom is a bit unruly and I've repeatedly seen in person how quickly he finishes his work and how much time he wastes waiting for everyone else to do theirs. So why can't she hold off on the negative comments and just chalk it up to the fact that she didn't do a good job keeping him challenged?

And, thinking ahead, what am I supposed to do about next year? I and others have seen how he focuses when he's in a group but with challenging work (e.g., Sunday school, where he's with 5th-8th graders)? He's even finding the math acceleration to be too easy again, but he's grade-skipped already and we just can't see grade-skipping him again eventhough most of his friends are a year ahead of him in school (but at a private school) and everyone already thinks he's redshirted. I guess I'm just going to have to wait until the fall and have a pre-emptive please-challenge-my-child-or-he-won't-pay-attention talk with his new teacher. Fortunately and unfortunately I'm friends with his teacher for next year. We have a private school option, but to keep him from having to repeat 4th grade math we'd have to gradeskip him into a class of a ton of redshirted kids because the private school does not differentiate or subject accelerate.

Anyway, aargh!

Thanks, cricket. It's just frustrating to have it on his report card. I really feel like we've gotten all the accommodations that we're going to from his school and that we can't yet move him to the private school because the situation wouldn't be any better, and I don't know how to go about getting him to fake paying attention. Nor am I sure he should *have* to fake his attention, since he's not disrupting anything or anyone while he's not paying attention. But I see all the things we worried about happening: he doesn't think of school as a place to learn things, he doesn't think of a teacher as someone who teaches him things, he has no clue what hard work looks like in an academic setting, and he has no natural desire to make anything other than math harder for himself than he has to. We try to put him in situations like sports and music where he does have to learn new things and practice, but it just doesn't help him during the 7 hours of school each day.

My dd's said "Have a nice summer" lol...did not even touch what she did well or what she did not. Not sure which is worse....

Mine does too. But our darling 4th grade teacher actually really worked on this with him, telling him what she thought *his* best work would look like and encouraging him to get there. He has been developing some sense of pride in his product, some of the time.

I'm going to miss that teacher terribly.

DeeDee

My DS got something like that on his report card at the end of the year last year. It said something like "even though X is gifted and talented, he has to learn that he has to follow the rules just like everyone else." The teacher never even spoke with us during the 1/2 year he was in the class about any behavior issue and we were a large presence at the school. Plus it was a mid year skip so he was the youngest in the class.

I wrote the teacher a scathing email something along the lines of she needed to learn (even though she was not gifted and talented) to engage her students and that it was her responsibility to teach kids "the rules" and that maybe if she used some other behavior system other than public humiliation he would have "learned" something in her class.

Then . . . I sent the email to my husband.

This is exactly what Wolf managed to earn a nice lecture on needing to do yesterday! Argh...

Love it!!!

My elementary school report cards were full of praise, and also negative comments about being too talkative, disruptive, etc. I told my DD about them, and that I don't expect anything different from her, because I know what she's going through. When they give her 30 minutes to complete an assignment that takes her 5 minutes, I don't expect her to be a zombie.

I didn't really care if my teachers felt the need to discipline me, because I got far worse at home. DD's a teacher pleaser, though, so I worry for her.

We have one of those! It wasn't on his report card, but that doesn't mean it's not true. I despair sometimes at the thought that he still doesn't know how to be a part of his class and how to work hard and study properly. But it's getting better, at least the being a part of class, and hopefully he'll be able to be in a real math class next year and that will help too.

I have my old report cards, and there were definitely some comments about being capable of better work and not completing assignments ( I believe that one said "oops" and my mother commented back, "what means 'oops'?" )

I once got a report card that said, in total, "Spring has sprung and Lizzie is dizzy." I don't sweat report card comments any more.