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Original poster

DS winging it in year 8 - wwyd?

103 replies

Floottoot · 18/10/2018 12:02

DS is in year 8 as a music scholar in a selective indie.
He's pretty able - not genius or a super high flyer, but more than capable of getting good and very good marks in all subjects.
Since September, we've left him to his own devices much more, with regards to homework and revision. It's recently become obvious that he is winging it quite often - leaving homework to the last minute, barely doing any revision for tests etc. In most areas, he's getting away with it, getting good marks for homework and doing ok in most tests, but he's not doing well in things like Latin and Spanish tests.
More concerning is that he has now started to lie about his failings, even though he knows we can easily uncover his lies by going into his school online portal. For example, he had a Latin vocab test on Monday which we were aware of, so made sure he revised for it. We asked him how it went, but he replied that he'd got his days mixed up and it was actually the next day; the reality is that it WAS on Monday, he failed it and had to retake it on Tuesday. What he'd actually failed on was very conjugations, which he'd told us he didn't need to know when we'd asked him during revision - the fact that he was able to pass the test with nearly full marks the next day shows that he's just not putting the effort in initially.

We're struggling to know how to address this issue. One of the factors that seems to be at play is that he feels he gets very little free time. His.music commitments and the location of the school mean he's out of the house 11 hours a day, sometimes more. On top of academic demands, he also has to fit in practice on 2 instruments. That said, he's wasting a lot of time trying to avoid doing the things he has to do and generally managing his time poorly. We've said that life would be much easier if he got the chores out of the way before going on the PS4, but he's not buying that because, on the occasions we've made him work first he's faffed around so much that there's little or no time left for anything enjoyable afterwards.

So, what's the best way of tackling this, and is it fairly par for the course with 13 year old boys?

OP posts:
Original poster
Floottoot · 18/10/2018 12:38

Hi Myotherprofile,
Thanks for responding. We can and do check on what he's meant to be doing, but the issue seems to be his lack of motivation to do it. We don't really want to have to go down the road of supervising every single piece of homework, because he's capable of doing the work independently and we feel he should take responsibility for getting it done - perhaps that's our mistake?
With regards to hobbies, if you mean music, it's fairly non-negotiable as a music scholar.

I guess we're just going to have to supervise him much more closely. My fear is that he won't develop his own work ethic if we're constantly dragging him through school life and hand-holding. I was rather hoping we could find a way for him to find some self-motivation, but perhaps that's unrealistic in year8?

OP posts:
MissLingoss · 18/10/2018 12:32

One of the factors that seems to be at play is that he feels he gets very little free time. His music commitments and the location of the school mean he's out of the house 11 hours a day, sometimes more.

Well, he does have a point, doesn't he? Eleven hours or more out of the house would be quite a long day for an adult in full time employment, and (teachers excepted) most adults wouldn't expect to have to do more work when they got home.

When you take out necessary things like eating, sufficient sleep (is he getting enough sleep?), showering, etc., how much time is left in the evenings to divide between homework and chilling out?

MyOtherProfile · 18/10/2018 12:17

The first thing i would do is to write an email to his tutor and tell them what has happened. Ask for their help in staying more in the loop with exactly what he needs to do and then monitor him. Tell him that he will need to earn his independence and in the meantime you will be keeping a closer eye on things and he will have to prioritise school over his hobbies.