The Conference

OK- so I must have dreamt that I wrote this post, because I swore that I did. Apparently not!

I have told the story probably 15 times since Friday, so maybe that is why I thought I wrote it. I don't know but here it is.

We conferenced with both of Will's teachers and the school counselor as planned. Bottom line is that I feel Chris and I have a good feel for what is going on with Will in the classroom. We understand better what their frustrations are and what they are seeing. It is pretty much what we have spoken about over the last couple of weeks, but they were able to give us more examples.

Will needs to slow down, he needs to pay better attention, he needs to care about his work and he needs to doublecheck his work.

They showed us several examples of incomplete work, wrong answers that are the results of careless mistakes, etc...

So, we were given his report card. All A's and B's. Well a couple B-'s, actually. With all A's and B's one might wonder what the problem is. His reading teacher said it best when she said he is trending down in his grades and that is not what they want to be seeing at this point in the year.

What are we going to do?

Well, we want to figure out if this is all really a result of laziness/lack of motivation etc... Or is there something else going on? He seems to have some trouble following both verbal cues and written cues. Is there a deeper problem there? We aren't sure.

So, we are going to begin by having Will correct all careless mistakes he makes on in class assignments as well as on tests. At school he will be kept in at recess to redo his work. At home he will be forced to do it when he gets home BEFORE he does anything else.

We hope that once he realizes he will have to correct his work no matter what that maybe he will realize he should just do it right in the first place!

We are going to give this tactic 3 weeks to see if it helps. If we see good improvements then we know we are on to something. If not a lot changes then we need to look into some other issues.

On a very positive note, Will received his Rock Test back today that he took on Friday. He and I studied together for it. He felt very ready for it.

He got an A! He only got a half credit on the last question, otherwise it would have been a 100! He was really very proud of himself. It was wonderful to see!