Overall Miss Fab is doing well and is obviously stable at the moment. However, she is digging in with both heals regarding homework. Despite getting A's in math on her report card she maintains that she does not know how to do the work. One minute she can count money and the next she has no clue. She wants us to do the work step for step for her. In the past this gag worked pretty well for her. She is very believable and as a parent your natural instinct is to help the child. Unfortunately she is clearly manipulating the help and now that we have our ducks in a row and clearly understand her level of ability it is time for her to get to work.
She is going into full on rages, ripping up the papers with her aggressive erasing technique and flat out refusing to move forward. After an hour and a half for 5 problems and a full on rage I decided that we would give her 10 minutes to get the work done or Dad would take her to school the next morning and explain to Mrs. Teacher why the paper looked the way it did and why it was still not complete. She was clearly torn. She did not like the thought of him coming to class and talking to Mrs. Teacher but she also did not want to give in and do the work. She completed one more of the math problems and it was done correctly but refused to do the last problem.
Dad took her to school the next day and asked Mrs. Teacher if Miss Fab knew how to do this work and she was confident that she did. He explained what had happened etc. The teacher said that Miss refuses to answer when she is called on sometimes and sometimes she does not complete her work. Dad explained in the past that it had been determined that was willful behavior and having to do work during recess time had encouraged her to get her work completed in a timely manner.
We have a conference scheduled with Miss Fab's teacher on Nov. 9.
Mr. Behavior Guy was not all together helpful yesterday. He seemed to talk out of both sides of his mouth saying one thing one time and another thing the next time. He started falling back on "I'm using this method and that method" regarding homework help and trying to determine which method works best. The Hubs and I were perturbed and explained numerous times that we were confident that Miss understood the work and she needed to do it. He would agree with that but his actions didn't support that. It was disheartening because this guy has been coming to our house for 2 years, once a week to work with Miss. He has seen her in a full on rage many times, he has watched the manipulation she uses and still she can convince him that she doesn't know something that she does know. What chance do with have with a teacher? None.
Ultimately the suggestion was to work the homework through with Miss on a separate piece of paper and then have her redo the work on her actual homework sheet to turn in. This way she is still having to accomplish the work independently and she can not maintain that she doesn't understand it. The consequence within the "method" is that she has to do the work twice if she isn't willing to do the work independently the first time. We are going to give it a try. If she refuses to do the work independently the second time, having the answers and the work right in front of her from the first time, then it is clearly willful and we are to stick to her not moving on to anything else until she does it. We are in for some lonnnnnnnnnnng nights.
On a positive note the weekend went pretty well. The Hubs and I took Mr. Man and Miss Fabulous camping, in a tent this past weekend. Big Sis went to Grandma's for a visit and Lil Bro got the weekend to himself with Nana.
Miss took this picture of Mom and Dad.
They fell asleep, you would have thought they were rowing!
It was a really nice experience for the kids. And Mom made it through too.
Dad was in his glory!
2 comments:
Looks like a great weekend!
Aaww...that was nice. Sometimes the little ones need that one on one, or in this case, two on two, but, you know what I mean, right? :)
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