^ What she said. My princess is not having a lot of fun learning the lessons that most of her peers learned before the stakes were so high. For whatever that is worth, I mean.
I remind my DD that most of her classmates had to learn how to wrestle with understanding, and to work HARD at learning concepts, etc. when they were in algebra.
She clearly doesn't believe me-- she's AGHAST that anyone could find it that hard.
Calculus, though-- yeah, she's hit a wall. It has nothing to do with her ability or her foundation (which is probably better than most of her classmates)-- she simply doesn't know what to do in order to help herself. Like Val's oldest, she is learning what to do to help herself. She just is so new to doing that, it's as though her efforts are scattershot or even random. It's grossly inefficient, I'll say that for it. She also tends to resent guidance-- though sometimes we insist if we can SEE (knowing her, knowing the problem, knowing the options) that she needs to try something specific that she's unlikely to do voluntarily.
God help us if we had allowed this to transpire when she was 18yo and 2K miles away, though-- there's no way that she'd have made the transition. That might be personality-dependent.
This is key--
confronting the fact that one (suddenly) has to WORK for understanding is a serious challenge to one's worth and identity when it has never, EVER happened to you before.
It is very difficult to adopt or maintain a growth mindset when one has simply never had any data to support it.
Honestly, it's been a problem for her to GET the help that she needs outside of coming to us, too-- there is an assumption that she's having them on, see, when she says that she doesn't know how to study for a test, or use homework as a learning tool.
We had good reasons for not accelerating beyond what we chose for DD, but we're now reaping the dubious rewards of those choices and their imperfections.
Chores and other mandated activities should be for teaching "doing what isn't stimulating but is necessary for everyone's well-being" rather than school or academic (non-essential, basically) activities should.
School should be about supporting the development of a growth mindset. So what should parents do when it is clear that it isn't, and that nobody much gives a darn as long as our kids perform like top-notch Show Ponies?
I have no idea.
