"I'm saving all my cooperation for tomorrow."
Nice try, kid, but you're going to school and you're going to get ready NOW.
Alex doesn't like school. He thinks we have no regard for his happiness because we insist he continue second grade. We negotiated in the first term when he was refusing to go to school all the time and told him he could have two days off school every term without us hassling him about it if he promised to go to school the other days. Needless to say he never makes it past the first week of each term before his two days are "spent". He stayed home today.
We've tried incentives (aka bribing), giving restrictions (losing his DS for a month won't even get him to go when he's made up his mind), giving him a "day of work" (6.5 hours of hard labor), lecturing (does that ever work?), yelling (which only hurts his feelings), reminding him it's short day (still 4 and a half hours of torture!), telling him what exciting things are going on at school that day (that one never works) and teaching about how important it is that he be there (he's not buying that one, either). He simply doesn't care what the consequence, it is not as bad as going to school. He has even offered to be our personal slave all day long rather than go to school.
In second term he had 13 tardies, which would seem like a real problem to most parents, but not to me. To me that means that 13 times he begged not to go but ultimately relented! He was only absent 4 days this term, one of which was because he was sick. BUT, nearly every school day we have to work really hard to get him there.
I feel sorry for him. I can't imagine hating school, knowing I have at least 10 more years of it ahead of me. So if you see my little Alex at the school, flash him a smile and give him an encouraging word because he'd rather be anywhere but there.
P.S. We love his school teacher and don't feel that his not wanting to go to school has anything directly to do with her.
5 comments:
so sad...poor little guy..and poor mom!!
We had a year w/Kase like that...and he had a great teacher etc...we ended up getting a phone list of everyone in his class and arranged lots of playdates w/various kids that didn't live right by us...it really helped for Kase...he started to want to go to school to see some of his friends that had come to his house....and it's funny because it was 2nd grade for Kase too....I think Kind. is fun...1st grade is soo new/all day etc...and then 2nd comes and it's like...ok, seriously? I have to do this every day??
Poor guy! He is so cute...I loved the comment about saving up his cooperation. Classic.
So sad! I feel so bad he's hating it. :( You're such a good mom to see it (the tardies) that way! That's exactly how you need to do it! Just keep being on his side, you never know who or what at school is making him feel like they're all against him there.
Listening to Alex complain about having to go to school yesterday (which may or may not have been a typical day) I heard him express exactly the same complaint that I always had about going to school. Essentially, he said: "I already know the stuff they're talking about and I'm bored out of my mind!"
I'm sure I didn't automatically already know all the lesson materials and I'm sure Alex doesn't either. I imagine he's having the same kind of trouble I did. He only needs it to be explained to him once and he thoroughly gets it. He absorbs the new concepts so quickly that he doesn't even recognize that they are new concepts, he just perceives them to be logical extensions of things he learned previously . . . many of which he may have already figured out on his own during a previous discussion or he learned them outside of school.
Since traditional schools have to teach at the pace of the slowest students, he will ALWAYS be bored. I was able to deal with some of this boredom by reading books that were not directly related to the subject under discussion AFTER I did whatever assignment the teacher had given in class. Of course, reading good books always increases your knowledge and that usually resulted in more boredom later on when a teacher would be discussing something I had read about months or years ago while waiting for a class to go on to something new that I didn't already know.
Also, it takes an exceptional teacher who has a good sense of his/her own self esteem to let someone read in their class while they are talking about something that the student is supposed to be listening to. Eventually my teachers learned that they didn't need to take any time explaining the subjects to me as an individual. They came to trust that I would ace all of their tests, whether or not it looked like I was paying attention to them in class or not.
As time goes on, and Alex gets into higher grades he will find that a lot more of the material the teacher is teaching is NOT new to him and he will find himself paying more and more attention and not becoming so bored.
The biggest danger in all of this is that Alex may be able to go throughout his entire elementary school years never having to do any homework to thoroughly understand the lessons in the lower grades and he will not learn to discipline himself to do homework, thinking he doesn't need it. Then, when he gets to Jr. High, where every concept is NOT discussed in school and where he has to do homework in order to fully grasp the concepts (math, for instance) he won't know how to discipline himself to do homework and suddenly he'll find himself NOT understanding the stuff that the other students do understand and he will fall farther and farther behind. That's what happened to me. It took me a long time to figure out how to do homework when both me and my parents were used to me not doing homework because I didn't have to do it to understand the lessons in elementary school. That's a danger that has to be watched for early, even if you have to give him some homework that is outside the normal school work to keep him challenged during these early years.
I am reading, "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax. It talks about the five factors driving the growing epidemic of unmotivated boys and underachieving young men, one of which is changes at school. The others include video games, medications for ADHD, endocrine disruptors, and the revenge of the forsaken gods. Definitely worth reading!
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