Nothing says “Good Morning!” like emergency laundry and carpet cleaning at 4 am. This is especially exciting when there was already emergency laundry from a different child at midnight. Kiki and Patches have both been quarantined for stomach flu. I suspect that Kiki will not be pleased to learn that stomach flu still does not excuse her from the pile of homework which she has to complete and turn in by tomorrow. I’ve been doing failure analysis to figure out how we got into this situation with Kiki.
My fault: I was aware that Kiki was claiming far less homework than she should have had. I did not dig to find out what was going on. I get weekly grade reports mailed to me, for the last month I’ve been busy and filing them to look at “later.”
The teacher’s fault: She is weak on follow through. She frequently creates assignments which fall by the wayside and never actually come due. This means that if Kiki doesn’t hear about an assignment she’s learned that she may not have to do it at all. Several times the teacher has instituted consequences for late work. The consequences are enforced for awhile, but then the teacher gets distracted and forgets about them. This also affects me. When regular notes don’t come home, I have no idea whether it is because Kiki didn’t bring it to me or because the teacher neglected to make one.
Kiki’s fault: She assumes that if she hasn’t heard about an assignment, that it isn’t due yet. It does not occur to her that overdue assignments no longer get mentioned. She doesn’t lie about homework, but often “forgets” to bring things home. She inflates the importance of assignments she likes and deflates the importance of ones that she doesn’t. Notes from school frequently go missing. Completed homework will sit in Kiki’s backpack and she doesn’t turn it in.
So the analysis shows me where the gaps are, but doesn’t tell me who should step up to fill it. I could do it, but I’ve been trying to step out of the student/teacher loop. Kiki needs to manage teachers and assignments without my constant intervention.
Failure Analysis
Emergency Laundry… yeah, been there, done that, got the dirty tee-shirt to prove it.
Failure Analysis…
this tells you where the gaps in the current process is, and if you wanted to just fix the current process, each of you would need to step up and take your part. If you want to fix the PROBLEM, you may have to come up with a new process though. This new process may (or may not) involve you more, the teacher more, or Kiki more, but it would need to change the existing process.
First some assumptions… you can’t change the teacher, you have little to no control over her, and it sounds like she is trying within the bounds of her abilities. She is just, as you said, weak on followthrough. I doubt that you can make that part better.
You can’t take over Kiki’s responsibilities for the getting it done, not on;y do you probably not have the time or energy, it will definitly not be good for her in the long run.
Thet leaves Kiki. I don’t know the answer to getting her to get things done, but let me throw out a couple of thoughts…
If she doesn’t lie about it, how about something like a daily homework log. put together a page that she has to fill out each day summarizing what was required, and what was done. Make it simple, something like a section for each subject with a box to write the requirements in, a small box for due date, and a box for percentage completed. Each day she fills in the form and sign’s it on the bottom. That puts her in the position of having to acknoledge what is due each day, along with how much she got done. If she doesn’t put somehting in there, she is essentially lying to you directly, and you said she generally doesn’t do that. It may also help her with the organization/time management skills needed to keep track of things.
Alternativly, if you have some basic idea of what homework is comeing home, do something like vouchers for completed homework. you have a drawer with vouchers for each subject with homework (and possibly some subjects may have extra vouchers if there is often multiple homework items). Each time she completes a homework item and shows it to you, you provide a voucher to her. At the end of the week (month?) you should have an empty drawer, If not, either it provides you a hint to query the teacher on the status of her homework, or you require Kiki to justify the lack of homework for that subject (again, this would rely on her not outright lying to you)
Another thing that one of my friends did (not totally sure I agree with it, but it’s a thought). He set a time for his kids to do homework (3:30-5:30) every school day. During this time they were not allowed to do anything else but school work. If they did not have homework to do, he found things for them to do instead, like researching something or writing him a reschearch paper. Generally his work was harder than the schools assignments. So, his kids learned that they might as well do their assinged homework during this time. there was nothing else to look forward to, and if they “skipped” the assigned work, then the work he cam up with was probably better educationally anyway. The part that I was not as sure about was that, IF they had more than two hours of work to do, he gave them a pass on it. They did not have to do it and he would go to the school and explain to the teachers that he told the kids they were excused. He believed in homework, but did not believe that it should take more than two hours per night (assuming that they actually worked on it EVERY night and diddn’t put off all weeks homework until thursday night.) He said he did not have to do this more than a couple of times anyway as the kids in almost every case either got the work done in time, or got into the project, whatever it was enough that they did not mind putting more than two hours into it.
I don’t know if any of this helps or not, but figgured I would dump my thoughts. (they are worth exactly as much as you have paid for them)
Dan
Failure Analysis
Emergency Laundry… yeah, been there, done that, got the dirty tee-shirt to prove it.
Failure Analysis…
this tells you where the gaps in the current process is, and if you wanted to just fix the current process, each of you would need to step up and take your part. If you want to fix the PROBLEM, you may have to come up with a new process though. This new process may (or may not) involve you more, the teacher more, or Kiki more, but it would need to change the existing process.
First some assumptions… you can’t change the teacher, you have little to no control over her, and it sounds like she is trying within the bounds of her abilities. She is just, as you said, weak on followthrough. I doubt that you can make that part better.
You can’t take over Kiki’s responsibilities for the getting it done, not on;y do you probably not have the time or energy, it will definitly not be good for her in the long run.
Thet leaves Kiki. I don’t know the answer to getting her to get things done, but let me throw out a couple of thoughts…
If she doesn’t lie about it, how about something like a daily homework log. put together a page that she has to fill out each day summarizing what was required, and what was done. Make it simple, something like a section for each subject with a box to write the requirements in, a small box for due date, and a box for percentage completed. Each day she fills in the form and sign’s it on the bottom. That puts her in the position of having to acknoledge what is due each day, along with how much she got done. If she doesn’t put somehting in there, she is essentially lying to you directly, and you said she generally doesn’t do that. It may also help her with the organization/time management skills needed to keep track of things.
Alternativly, if you have some basic idea of what homework is comeing home, do something like vouchers for completed homework. you have a drawer with vouchers for each subject with homework (and possibly some subjects may have extra vouchers if there is often multiple homework items). Each time she completes a homework item and shows it to you, you provide a voucher to her. At the end of the week (month?) you should have an empty drawer, If not, either it provides you a hint to query the teacher on the status of her homework, or you require Kiki to justify the lack of homework for that subject (again, this would rely on her not outright lying to you)
Another thing that one of my friends did (not totally sure I agree with it, but it’s a thought). He set a time for his kids to do homework (3:30-5:30) every school day. During this time they were not allowed to do anything else but school work. If they did not have homework to do, he found things for them to do instead, like researching something or writing him a reschearch paper. Generally his work was harder than the schools assignments. So, his kids learned that they might as well do their assinged homework during this time. there was nothing else to look forward to, and if they “skipped” the assigned work, then the work he cam up with was probably better educationally anyway. The part that I was not as sure about was that, IF they had more than two hours of work to do, he gave them a pass on it. They did not have to do it and he would go to the school and explain to the teachers that he told the kids they were excused. He believed in homework, but did not believe that it should take more than two hours per night (assuming that they actually worked on it EVERY night and diddn’t put off all weeks homework until thursday night.) He said he did not have to do this more than a couple of times anyway as the kids in almost every case either got the work done in time, or got into the project, whatever it was enough that they did not mind putting more than two hours into it.
I don’t know if any of this helps or not, but figgured I would dump my thoughts. (they are worth exactly as much as you have paid for them)
Dan