Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School Finally today was the last day of finals.

It was a rough last quarter of the school year. I am so glad it's over although grades are NOT where we want them to be and thus all his classes are going to be dropped from the honors for next year. There is a psychological aspect to this, when he started doing badly in a few classes his moral went down and it affected everything. Math & Science will still be accelerated but not honors. I don't feel I can fight it because while many of his finals are TOP A's, it just doesn't compensate for say.. NOT turning in most of the lab reports over the past 3 months. In Social Studies he did get an A on on the big project and an A on the final but it doesn't pull your grade up enough when you only get a 50% on homework/seatwork. The good thing was ALL the writing from the past quarter of school has been A's. He can write well, he just has to have something to say.

Just had a talk with him that all is not lost as it's freshman year. And many colleges don't really look at freshman grades. But next year the grades MUST be A's or he will be locked out of classes he will want Junior year.

I have testing scheduled for next week and I am anxious to see what it will show. Psychologist told me yesterday that I am probably going to have to give him more scaffolding that I expected to at this age. Still helping him plan his homework schedule, teach him study techniques, break larger projects down. We also talked about alternative options for school for Junior year.

It's just so disappointing. This kid has SO much potential.

I give an F to any grading system that includes things like this. What are these schools thinking? Ridiculous!

The school should be recognizing the ability, and THEY should also be scaffolding. Those As mean something, and so do the low homework grades: high ability, missing skills.

Working on it. First step is to get this testing done, so we can better explain to others what is going on.

What 22b said!

If mastery of the subject is demonstrated in the exams then that is all that should be needed.

I can understand the school taking a dim view of non-completed lab reports but that is it.

Sometimes I think that the high weighting on the final grade given to fluffy project work is only there because the teachers can grade it themselves (and therefore award full marks) and thus avoid being exposed as bad teachers by poor final exam/state testing results.

In the community for which my DW teaches (always within the top 100 PHS in the country) there is an ongoing parent rebellion against too much busywork style homework like projects. Having read some of the posts here I am beginning to understand why.

Bluemagic, your post is almost identical to the one I've been debating putting up here.

DS ended his freshman year in a grade abyss. His freshman and sophomore honors classes do not have "busywork"; the assignments have clear purpose. He just didn't do them or turn them in. I can't fault the teachers on their grading at all. I am very grateful to the teachers who contacted me to get final work in and make final presentations. I'm grateful to the ones who let him take the brunt of his own actions, including failing to show up for one-on-one conferences, yet also angry that they didn't contact me.

When grades arrived, the faculty was already gone for the summer. I have sent emails to all of them, hoping they will check email over the summer. (I did have a conversation with one before he left) Mainly I want to plan a management system with and for DS, and me, for next year. I told DS last year I wasn't going to be checking the online grade book, but I did remind him to check himself. That is one thing that will change.

He is registered for two APs next year. While I fully expect the school to keep him in honors classes, the APs are another story. I don't know what they will do with that. He has the summer materials, and will start work on them when he gets home from camp. If they give us grief about it, I hope his showing commitment already will help.

Bluemagic, do you have plans for managing and keeping up with the homework status?

Haven't figured that out yet.

Because he was in honors this year for most of his classes there wasn't a lot of busy work. The big problem with that was the outlines & notebooks in S.S. and the second semester Spanish teacher who gave no tests till the final. Science labs aren't busy work. A lot of work that wasn't turned in was not because he didn't know it was due, but rather he has had this mental block all spring and couldn't seem to output even short paragraphs of writing like the conclusion of lab report. In addition I think the teacher told the kids (and my son missed it) that labs were always due some set time after the lab, and my son missed this memo.

I'm not sure of my plan yet. It's just sinking in that he has zero chance of honors science, or math. Because of his writing grades, S.S. and English honors were off the table a while ago. School has already promised me that the counselor will hand pick his teachers. Next week we are testing him to see if he has a processing problem, or it's just some sort of writing anxiety. After we know more it will be easier to form a plan.

AP Classes aren't really in the picture till Junior year. The only AP class that he could take next year is AP US History, and I do not want him in that class because while he would love the in class discussion that class is a mountain of work the way it is taught at our H.S. It is simply not worth the amount of stress involved. It's the math & science I am most frustrated about.

bluemagic and Notherben, I do think that the take-away message with kids like ours (mine is one, too) is that they DO need more scaffolding with skills that other children tend to learn and take to heart when they are in early middle school.

The real problem is that at that point, note-taking and an assignment book seem so incredibly useless and redundant to kids with high cognitive ability. I really saw that with my DD. Honestly, she was able to ACE AP US History without taking any notes. I left it alone, quite frankly, because with the virtual school, the assessments were all that mattered, more or less, and she was acing those handily using her idiosyncratic method. Whatever works, yk?

She did the exact same thing with geometry when she was in 8th grade, incidentally-- she overestimated her recall, tanked the first exam in the second semester (due to her procrastination, frankly) and then realized that it was weighted SO heavily that there was no way to earn an A in the class... and then she stopped TRYING. She resists doing enough practice in math for the material to truly STICK, and then struggles on assessments sometimes when she gets in over her head. It's maddening to watch.

I was pulling my hair out over that class for the rest of the year. It was awful.

On the other hand, she needed the supports of me being on top of when things were due, and helping her to put them on a calendar that she checked on each day, etc. I had to spot check her notebooks in every class to make sure that she was taking adequate notes. I did that until she was a senior in high school.

My friends who have a pair of children (HG+) did this with their older son-- the one that we claim is my DD's Sith twin, btw...
until he was into his second semester in college. He was just YOUNG. Their younger child is still in secondary, and they are also doing it with him, though he's less "difficult" this way than my DD or their older son.

All kids seem to need about two to three years of demand/load on some executive function-related academic skills, and until they get that, they NEED scaffolding.

It is a real bummer to me that schools don't understand that GT kids usually don't GET "load" placed on those things until high school. We ran into that ourselves; the school interpreted any concern on our part as "well then clearly she doesn't belong in ____ class/grade." To which I countered-- yeah-- but it's not the MATERIAL that is the problem. It's the work-output and expectations of independence/study skills.

DD still needed the same supports that middle schoolers get in abundance, and so did her Sith Twin. I'm realizing that many HG kids seem to. It's that delayed executive development that comes as part of the package deal. We have every expectation that we'll be hounding her not to leave assignments to the last dying minute NEXT year (her first in college) as well. {sigh}


{hugs}

My advice? INSIST that you be given complete transparency on any electronic messages, assignment websites, etc. I hold all of our DD's passwords, and I use them to check on this stuff. Regularly. It's the only way that I can casually ask after things that I know to be on the horizon, and for which I'm seeing no effort or attention at all on her part. It's not perfect, but it's better than it would be otherwise. I leave her alone about stuff that she DOES seem to be doing, and it is getting better over time.

All of that to note that this seems to be somewhat norrmal for HG kids, and that there IS hope.

Having one DS as a HS Soph. and one as a college Soph. right now, I've got really mixed feeling on grading practices and how to best guide GT kids through HS.

While I agree that often HS grading practices are unfair, illogical, and often don't reflect well the students actual understanding of the material......I also have to shrug my shoulders and ask, "Do you think it's going to be better in college?"

Trust me, I've had the same thoughts as all of you when it comes to my boys and their grades in HS. I've been severely frustrated with group projects in particular (I swear, I just felt steam coming off of everyone who just read that about group project grades) I often have been literally pulling at my hair when it comes to HS teachers and their inconsistent and illogical grading practices, however, college professors are as bad if not worse with absolutely zero expectations of compliance to a grading standard or common practice. Worse yet, the majority of college professors have had little or no credit hours in actual educational practice.

We can go all commando on HS grading as parents, however, if we do then we need to push the point just as much with college educators, otherwise, we might just be better off having HS education be just as inconsistent and discombobulated in grading, at least they'll be accustomed to it.

Perhaps as parents of HS students, the best thing we can do when it comes to helping our kiddos is to help them start each class on the right foot by teaching them to ask some key questions about each class and that teacher:
1. How is this class graded? (Weighted grades, behavior, homework, etc.)
2. What is the teaching style of the teacher?
3. How much of the class grade is based on behavior?
4. How is extra credit earned if there is any available?
5. How firm are deadlines? (is late work discounted or simply not taken?)
6. How important are notes? Are they allowed to be used during tests?
7. When is the teacher available outside of class?
8. Is there a class syllabus available?
9. Will feedback be given on homework or is it graded on completion? (Believe it or not, some teachers still do this )
10. Are rubrics available for assignments?
11. What are this teacher's pet peeves?

As much as I HATE to say it, knowing how the game is played is the first part of doing well in it, knowing how any system works is the first step. When your child goes to college, they'll quickly learn for example that the website "Rate my professor" is one they should frequent and can save them serious grief.

YES.

EXACTLY the kind of scaffolding I'm talking about.