You Are Failing Statistics?
Three days before the end of the third quarter, I checked Shane’s grades. Since Shane is usually way ahead of the game, and he doesn’t need any help from me to remember to do his work, I hadn’t looked at his grades in months.
When I tried to sign in, I had to download and acknowledge the obligatory “interim report” page. This is a report that comes in halfway through the quarter, every quarter, and I always have to acknowledge that I’ve seen it, even when it is a list of Shane’s A’s and B’s in every subject.
But this time … it wasn’t. Shane’s interim report included C’s in two classes, and a failing grade in Statistics.
Failing? SHANE?!?
I quickly looked at his grades for the quarter: A’s in Digital Art and P.E. B’s in almost everything else. And Shane was still failing Statistics, three days before the end of the quarter.
Shane is taking Honors Statistics this year, in preparation for college-level (AP) Statistics next year. Even though he got an A last semester, maybe this wasn’t the class for him after all.
“SHANE!” I roared, loud enough to get his attention on the other side of the house and in spite of his noise-canceling headphones.
He appeared immediately.
“What is this?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “You are failing Statistics?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I have five missing assignments. But every time I try to do the assignments, I can’t figure them out. And I emailed the teacher like two weeks ago, and she never got back to me. I am going to talk to her after class tomorrow.”
Three days before the end of the quarter. This made me a bit queasy, since Dylan had lived like this for six years.
“Okay,” I said.
The next day, Shane came downstairs at lunchtime and said, “I’m meeting with my Statistics teacher after school today.”
“Do you need me to drive you to the school?” I asked. They’d recently started a hybrid learning model, and there are now people at his school.
“No,” he said. “I’m doing it from here.”
My thoughts festered as I drove home from the library that day. What if Shane can’t handle AP Statistics next year? I planned to email his teacher – something I rarely did for Shane, since he is a great self-advocate.
But I came home from the library and Shane was sitting on the stairs, talking to his math teacher.
“Just please ask her,” I said, “if you should take AP Statistics next year or Quantitative Literacy.” Shane did not want to take Calculus, so these were his only two math options.
Shane asked.
His math teacher responded as loudly and clearly as she could, so that I could hear her answer: “Absolutely positively take AP Statistics! Definitely. And if you don’t take AP Statistics, I will hunt you down and drag you into the counselor until you change your schedule so I can get you back into the class.”
A few minutes later, Shane got off the Zoom and said he’d finished three of the five of his missing assignments, and that he now understood how to do the other two. A few days later, Shane’s grade had gone from a 36% to something like 87%.
I think Shane is going to do fine in AP Statistics.