ABQmom, I have one like yours. A high school junior now, she is reluctantly focusing on grades/pleasing teachers now. Mostly because she has realized if she wants to go to college with the smarter kids, it is a requirement. But she is NOT a people pleaser by nature. She would much rather dig into the things she likes in depth (biology, bugs, Shakespeare, Poe, Quiz Bowl studying), and to heck with whatever the teacher wants her to do at the moment. She is forever calculating whether she REALLY has to do that homework assignment tonight, or whether she can just pull it together in the car on the way to school the next morning.
She is planning to go in and see her HS principal next week to see if she can do something other than take the one 11th grade (no honors, no AP) English course for next semester. But I doubt she got an A this quarter in English (A-/B+ is more likely, grades are not out yet), so I worry that they may say no because she did not grab every point so far. She is very annoyed at the slow pace, superficial analysis, and middle-school like assignments this semester. But she also lost a draft of a paper (peer reviewed) that was part of an assignment and got an F, and was late turning in her grammar workbook a few times. Enough to drag the grade down. It would be a lot easier to get the school to let her try something different if she had gotten a solid A.
