Are You Self-Disciplined and Motivated?
After all the hoops through which I jumped to get him into the class, Dylan dropped his online summer class.
He was registered on the first day of registration by an overzealous mom who’d heard that it was tough to get your first choice of dates if we didn’t register early. Not only did I register on the first day, but I hand-delivered the registration at 10 a.m., with my check, so that there’d be no chance of it getting lost in the mail.
(Yes, you would think online registration would be available in 2016. But this is the public school system.)
Anyway, Dylan (and his class) got a note from his teacher, who explained the requirements for the class. Dylan would be required to do about an hour’s worth of work per day, and comment on the online discussion at least twice a week.
Unfortunately, Dylan was going to camp in the middle of the class, and there was no access to online anything at camp. So even if he were able to work ahead – which was the plan – he would have been unable to keep up with the required online discussion.
When I went back to the class schedule to see if we could find a more appropriate time for him to take the class, every single section was full. There were two dozen sections – lasting all summer long – and they were all full.
While I was online though, I found a section called, “Is Online Learning For Me?”
The sub-headings were:
Are you self-disciplined and motivated?
Are you able to set aside time each week to complete your online assignments?
Do you have good communication and writing skills?
Are you comfortable with computers?
I hadn’t seen this section before. If I had, perhaps I could have saved myself a lot of time and aggravation. Dylan is quite good with computers. But the rest of these questions were rather daunting. His computer skill seemed suddenly insufficient.
“Dylan, why don’t you just take this class in 11th grade?” I said.
It is required for graduation, so he has to take it sometime. And we could get our money back for the online class, so it was like getting $300 for NOT doing something.
“That sounds good,” he said.
And while he texted his friends and played the piano, I went through the laborious project of undoing all that I had already done.