My oldest son, we'll call him Mr. B, left the city school system and transfered to a private school this year. He's spent pretty much his entire school career in either SCS or MCS schools and we have been greatly disappointed by both systems. So even though I am a single mom I enrolled him in private school to give him a chance at college because last year, his sophomore year they were teaching the 8 parts of speech, something those kids should have learned when they were in elementary school. Something Mr. B already knew, because he did learn it in elementary school.
Anyway, Mr. B is a brilliant kid, but like most struggles with living up to his potential and obviously if his English class is learning about parts of speech and he reads on a college level, he is never going to reach his potential because there is no need to excel when you think you already know every thing.
So the past 7 days have been a wake up call for him. He was surprised that very first day of school he had homework. He's also struggled with using technology to do said homework. He's got one teacher that told him to return his book because "History books only tell lies." and his Spanish book is all in Spanish.
Mr. B's always had trouble with organization and last night I opened his Science folder only to find Math and English work in it. When I asked him why, he said because those classes are before Science. Still not following his thinking I asked some more questions and finally asked him if he thought that putting the Math and English papers in their corresponding folders made more sense. He said, "Gee mom you're messing with my organization." I said, "Organization? Don't you mean lack there of?" After a good roll of Mr. B's eyes, I pulled the other subjects out of the folder and had him put the other papers in the correct place.
Yesterday I found a paper that he was adamant that I sign immediately so that he could return it to his teacher the next day. That was a week ago Thursday and when I asked him why it was still at home, he says to me "The teacher never asked for it." My reply was, "Well that still doesn't explain why it never left the house."
He's also managed to lose his Math book and two note taking spirals already. Luckily the teacher found them but for two days he was taking notes on loose leaf paper and yes that's how they ended up in his Science folder. I did give him props for at least keeping up with the paper, but now that the spirals have been found organization should now commence.
Over all he's done pretty well and has risen to the challenge. He has great teachers and a great staff that have jumped in and helped him better acclimate to the school. No more elementary school work at this high school.
I am glad to know there are schools that push kids to their potential. City and county schools just push them through.Even with failing grades, they get promoted to the next grade. I have seen this first hand.
ReplyDeleteWe have certainly seen that, somehow Mr. B was able to get to 6th grade and couldn't even add or subtract, let alone multiply. We brought him home for 6 months and he learned in 6 weeks all the math that he had missed since 3rd grade. They had blamed Mr. B's learning disability on his math issues when really it was the school's issue. He also was "diagnosed" with a reading disability and really all it was, was lack of interesting things to read. Like I said in the post, he reads at a college level. 8 years ago they told me that they doubted he would even graduate on time because of his "disabilities".
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