It’s Exactly the Same Thing That Happened Last Year.
During the third week of school, I checked Dylan’s grades, just on a whim. He still had four A’s and one B. The ‘B’ was in Piano 2 – his only music class, and the one in which he is most gifted.
I didn’t even wonder why. I knew.
But I looked anyway. And sure enough, he was missing his very first assignment in Piano. The first assignment? To sign a piece of paper saying that you’ve read the requirements for the class. And get your parent to sign it, too.
I saw this piece of paper sitting on a chair for a week. It just sat there, on the chair. Dylan never asked me to sign it. He asked me to sign one for science, and another one for history. But he didn’t ask me to sign anything for Piano.
Because the Piano paper was still sitting on the chair. At one point, I moved it to his desk, in the hopes that he would notice it. I put it right on top of his driver’s ed papers, so that if he practiced driving, he would have to move the Piano paper in order to track his driving hours.
But the paper just sat there. He never mentioned it to me, or asked me about it. And he never turned it in.
It’s exactly the same thing that happened last year, with the same teacher, at the beginning of Chorus class.
Last year, I emailed the teacher The teacher sent me a note and said she’d much give him a zero on the first assignment, so that he would “learn” to turn in his work, than to give him credit for a paper that was turned in a month late.
She had a point. So this year, I said nothing at all to Dylan. I said nothing to the teacher. And Dylan – who was supposed to “learn” to turn in his work – did exactly the same thing he did last September.
Similarly, the grades in his two honors courses dropped from two A’s to a D and an E. The assignments and quizzes he’s completed are all good grades. He has nearly 100% in the assignments he’s turned in.
But he’s missing so much work that his grades have tanked. He hasn’t turned in nearly half of his Modern History assignments, and he’s missing one huge assignment in English.
Dylan works as a scarer at a local Halloween-themed venue. Other than singing, scaring is his favorite thing to do in the entire world.
I’ve told him that he will not be able to work on weeknights unless he has all B’s.
Dylan swears that, by the time he is supposed to work on a weeknight (next week), all of his grades will be B’s. “Those are all going to go up!” he says.
But they will not all “go up.” In fact, it’s quite likely that Dylan will not get to work a single weeknight during the entire Halloween season.
Which is fine with me.
These are the consequences of him being responsible for his own work.