You Have a List?
When I discovered the plummeting of Dylan’s grades, I texted Dylan. I won’t go into the details about which grades had tanked and why, but the gist – as always – was that he hadn’t finished a whole slew of stuff. And some of the stuff that he thought he’d finished, he’d never turned in.
We texted for 20 minutes back and forth. Dylan was down on himself. I was trying to remain positive. I had recently come to the conclusion – again – that we needed to focus more on his brilliance and less on his disability. (It’s just that his disability is so darn prevalent!)
Dylan met with his case manager on Friday, and didn’t text me again after that. But when he came home, he was full of resolve.
“I spent today at lunchtime getting caught up on Algebra. Then basically, Monday is NSL day,” he said, referring to all the missing Work he had in U.S. Government class. “On Tuesday, I’m going to finish my Algebra test and my Computer Science test because now I only have like three questions on each of those.”
“What are you going to do this weekend?”
“Spanish,” he said, almost laughing. “I have a lot to do to get caught up in Spanish.”
“What about English?” I asked. Somehow Dylan, who really doesn’t want to write, always procrastinates worst with English.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “This weekend I’m going to do the 21 questions that I somehow missed in English, too.”
Then he trotted upstairs. About twenty minutes later, he came downstairs.
“And Gretchen helped me make a plan,” he said. (I had never heard of Gretchen before and, quite honestly, I can’t remember who actually helped him make the plan.)
“What kind of plan?” I asked.
“We had a sub, so she said she was really organized and would help me make a list of all the stuff I needed to do. So we spent all of third period going over all the stuff.”
“You have a list?” I asked, incredulous. I’ve been telling him to make a list since …. well, forever.
“Yeah,” he said. “And it’s all prioritized with what I should do first and stuff.”
“Great,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s really nice having friends.”
Then he trotted upstairs again.
Dylan’s birthday was this weekend, so we tried to make it a nice one. But then we forced him to do some work on Sunday.
“It’s only going to take 20 minutes!” he said.
An hour later, we told him he needed to finish up.
“I’m almost done!” he said.
After that hour, he didn’t do a single thing. He swears that everything needs to be done during school, and that his GPA is going to skyrocket just as soon as these next few days pass.
We shall see.