Tuesday, January 29, 2008

not a day to remember......

R's 2nd term report card came home. he improved his grades in all but one class. amazing since he was already getting darn good grades.

BUT.......he completely failed community service. why? because he forgot to write a one paragraph reflection on what he was doing and how he liked it. dh and I are so very angry with him. not only because he didn't pay attention well enough to notice but also because he has known for 2 weeks and said he forgot to tell us. here I was happily reviewing all his improved grades and then I get hit with the F.

now.....not to excuse his behaviour, but he missed writing one paragraph yet managed to do 150% of the required service hours. why a F? why not a C or a D for missing a part?

6 comments:

Angie @ Many Little Blessings said...

What the heck? While I am all for kids needing to be responsible for assignments, etc., I think it's not right to get an F just because he didn't write one paragraph. What in the world are they thinking???

It's like when I was furious (didn't post about it) that Jack got a D in spelling in the first 9 weeks. He got between 85 - 100% on all of the spelling tests, but then missed points on a sentence they have to write afterwards, mostly because of missing capital letters and punctuation. As far as I was concerned, that fell under language arts, not spelling. It made me furious that he was almost failing spelling when he was often getting 100% on the actual spelling words. Augh -- apparently it still irritates me.

scrapper al said...

Wow, an F seems pretty harsh. But I'll bet R won't forget again. And kudos to him for the improved grades and doing more than the minimum hours.

Hatter J said...

Ughh... as a teacher, I definitely would have called the parent first or given the student a reminder. My kids carry planners that they have to write EVERYTHING in. Maybe you could discuss it with his teacher. Maybe it was a miscommunication, or a case where he really wasn't owning up to his responsibility. If I had been that teacher, a copy of the syllabus would have been sent home so that a parent could sign it-especially if that one assignment was worth so much of the grade.

In defense of the previous poster and the question about language arts and spelling grades: we really like to enforce grammar mistakes as a collective whole (at least in middle school teams-I can't vouch for anyone else). I teach social studies, but I still deduct points if the kids can't form a sentence correctly, or insert capital letters where needed. Since language arts isn't primarily what I teach, I don't deduct THAT much for the mistakes, but I do deduct enough to remind them that just because they are in a different class does not mean that they can neglect the rules.

Lynne's Somewhat Invented Life said...

You know what? Sometimes people just don't use good judgement. I think this is one of those times. I hope you will let him know it's just a grade and next time to listen more carefully. I have one child who STILL doesn't listen. She's 19. Sigh. It takes some of us a loooong time. Me included.

Moriah Bettencourt said...

OMG that sucks! It sounds like he was so close!

Angie @ Many Little Blessings said...

hatter j -- I should have been more specific in my posting. My child with that got the D in spelling is only in 1st grade. They were only just learning about things like sentences having a capital in the beginning and a punctuation at the end. If he was older to where that would be expected to know that, I would be better with it. Also, if the spelling was in with the language arts grades on the report card, I also wouldn't have minded. But, since they were/are just learning about sentence structure and the spelling grade is in a total separate part of the report card, I still feel okay being irritated about it.

But -- agreed -- I would have no problem with an older student getting points deducted for those types of things.