Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Motivation to do boring work.

My daughter 9, third grade, gets a pre-test on 15 words on Monday. She gets them all right and gets 5 bonus word. She alphabetizes them, writes them in sentences and get a worksheet through-out the week. Takes the Friday test and gets them all right again. She has such a hard time motivating herself to do this homework. Yesterday, she did her page of alphebitizing as a mirror image. The teacher will have to hold the page to a mirror to correct it. I thought this would be a good thing to bring to my meeting with principal about skipping 4th grade math, as she it shows that she is seeking harder work. Yes? Or does it show she is causing trouble? Either way, it shows she needs SOMETHING! RIGHT?

Also, she was given a square with 65 squares filled in. She was supposed to write a fraction that represented the picture (something she could do in Kinder). So she wrote 60/100 and next to her answer she wrote 13/20. The teacher marked it wrong because 13/20 does not represent the picture. My daughter is trying to show that she is ready for harder work...Yes?

So..stinking hard to watch your child suffer like that.

So she has to do worksheets and tests even on the 15 words she got right on the pretest? I would ask for her to be exempted from that.

The mirror image thing sounds like somethng my DD would do. Last year (first grade) she taught herself cursive to make her assignments more interesting. Then she started developing her own "alternate" "fancier" cursive, which showed up on spelling tests....


You mean that she wrote 65/100, not 60/100, right?

I can so relate - I have no magic answer - will be interested to see what others write. I thought that if I sat and had a real heart to heat with the teacher and guidance team explaining my concerns and worries that it would help - it didn't help anything other than with getting the same answer over and over - we don't differentiate, we don't accelerate, we don't pre-test....we are already crunched for money and time and you can't expect us to make exceptions for one student in class - even though he has an IEP!!!

When we tried public school for First Grade DS was doing math/reading several grade levels ahead but the teacher was dead set determined to make him do repetitive worksheets like all the other kids in the class of color the animal that starts with the letter D, circle in the correct number of balls that shows the answer to 4+2. He was bored out of his mind and he is a very head strong kid so he began to refuse to do his work. The teacher then pulled the card that she can't move him onto harder work if he is refusing to do the easy work. I tried to ask for her to do a pre-test but she said it was too much work and not fair to the other students (HUH???) and that they don't do that in their school. So my son was miserable - when he would refuse to do his work, she would send him out of the room (again - huh?) and then one day she decided she would "show him" by sending him out of the classroom with 2 sets of sheets front and back with 50 math problems on each side - so a total of 200 math problems. He completed all of them and got every single one correct and sat bored out of his mind in an empty room for 2 hours. We left to homeschool after pounding our head on the wall a few times :-)

yes! 65/100! lol

AND she did the mirror image thing in cursive as well. She has just gotten the "go ahead" to do some work in cursive, even though it was part of her first grade work and was required in 2nd grade...

Belle. I asked to have her do something else during cursive instruction and got "she needs to prove to us that she knows OUR way of writing cursive!" lol as if....

But in general, I want my daughter to learn good study habits. I don't want her to get the idea that just because she knows something already, she doesn't have to do it. In the long run, she will have to do stuff she already knows how to a million times and if she doesn't prove that she can do it, she will never be offered harder work. unfortunately.

So, I have her plug away at the words she already knows. Sometimes she makes sentences that are Harry Potter themed. Or she makes sentences that are pages long. Or she makes the rhyme or she tries to see how many words she can fit that start with the same letter as the spelling words. This at least makes the assignment less boring. I Do wonder what will happen when the teacher sees the mirror image..lol

Another story.
DD finished her math class work really early. After giving her everything they had, the teacher climbed up to a locked cabinet to get something for her to work on.

It was decimal work. The class was not taught how to do the work in class. So, DD hid her text under her desk and looked decimals up in the index. She went to the page, read it and did all the problems right.

I asked her if the teachers knew that she had to look up how to do it. She said "NO! I hid my book. If they thought I didn't know how to do it, the would take it away!"

I don't really need to say how wrong that it..right?

gosh each of these stories made me smile and made my heart quite sad too.

Why on earth do we need to help them find the motivation for the boring work they must suffer through over and over and over again.

It's heartbreaking hey.

It's so nice that even though I feel like I'm the only one who "gets it" around here, there are others who get it. On-line, but they DO exist!