Today after school I get handed a little note by my fifth-grader that just crashed my mood for the rest of the evening. It was a notice that she will be attending a detention on Monday for “failing to turn in assignments.” Apparently three missed assignments in one day, earns you the detention.

Well one of the papers her father and I were aware of, she had forgotten to bring it home in her folder to complete. The other two papers in question were only missing one answer on each, and this was because her dad was unsure of what the teacher was looking for, so he instructed her to ask the teacher the next day. She was then supposed to complete and turn in the paper. Apparently she either did not ask about the questions, or was afraid to ask, she is unclear about what occurred. In either event I do not see how one missing question on each paper qualifies as not doing the assignment. In my book it counts as one wrong on each paper.

This is not the first time we have had issues come up with school. This is our first child so we are learning for the first time, each time that we deal with school work and problems getting it accomplished. I know we expected that there may well be issues with her learning ability, because we had been informed by her birthfamily that two of the other children (her half-siblings) had problems in school. Her oldest sibling in fact dropped out of school (not an option in our home) when she was just 16. Our daughter, however had been an A honor role student until recently.

Of course I tried to call her teacher this evening, to get more information about how things got so far, without our being informed along the way that a problem was developing, but no one was home. After trying repeatedly over several hours, I gave up and called the principal (since he is the one who her note is supposed to be turned in to tomorrow.) His take was that I just needed to stop looking for excuses and “learn to let her take responsibility” in life. Excuse me? I did not know that seeing the need to be informed before a problem escalated into a detention, was the same as neglecting to teach my child about accepting responsibility.

Truth is I am not sure if this is something to do with Danika’s ability to learn, or perhaps way too much is being expected at her school. Right now she does about two to three hours of homework each evening. I know because her dad sits with her working on it every night. Even he feels like it is more than the norm.

She generally does not get time to play outside, watch television, play with the computer, and she has basically never used the internet. She does not get to do dance anymore (kept us out to late to get homework done), and she has no other extra-curricular activities out side of Girl Scouts. Often she even spends the weekends doing homework actually assigned for Saturday. In my opinion it is too much.

I don’t know if we have set our expectation for her too high. Perhaps we should not expect as much, because of the patterns of her biological siblings. I feel like she is intelligent and capable, but I am not sure why we are having the problems we are. Some of it might also be the added stressors in our home, dealing with her younger sister’s behaviors among them.

I wish I could say that tomorrow will be better, but now I have to find her teacher (who was unreachable by phone) and get more information about what is going on in class. I am honestly dreading it.

In case you were wondering, this is some of how I DO teach my children about responsiblity...

Love Thursday- Lessons In Responsibility

Other related posts about school...


A RAD-ish Grows In Kindergarten

Baby Boy Becomes A Little Man



For information/instructions on how to subscribe FREE to your favorite AdoptionBlogs, please visit this link.