Day: March 21, 2007

The other day Link brought home two plastic vials from school. At the time he brought them home one was filled with blue sand and the other was filled with multi-colored gravel. I’m still not clear on how he acquired them except that they were give-aways as part of a class party. I’m also not clear on what happened to the sand and gravel because after that first appearance they’ve been filled with a variety of other things. Link has carried them around in his pockets and filled them with what ever struck his fancy. They’ve been filled with water, soap, beads, and slips of paper at various times. This morning at breakfast I saw him carefully filling one with milk from his bowl of cheerios. (He used a medicine dropper.)

This evening I entered the kitchen to check on Link’s homework status. He was all finished and had run downstairs to play. I picked up the papers to put in his homework folder and my eyes fell on one of the vials. It was filled with pale yellow liquid. My brain stuttered trying to find something, besides the obvious, that this liquid could be. I left the vial sitting on the table and called down stairs to ask Link what was in the vial. His grin told me all I needed to know. He was very pleased with himself for collecting his own urine sample.

I required him to empty and wash the vial. He did, pleased with himself for grossing out his mom.

Nothing says “Good Morning!” like emergency laundry and carpet cleaning at 4 am. This is especially exciting when there was already emergency laundry from a different child at midnight. Kiki and Patches have both been quarantined for stomach flu. I suspect that Kiki will not be pleased to learn that stomach flu still does not excuse her from the pile of homework which she has to complete and turn in by tomorrow. I’ve been doing failure analysis to figure out how we got into this situation with Kiki.

My fault: I was aware that Kiki was claiming far less homework than she should have had. I did not dig to find out what was going on. I get weekly grade reports mailed to me, for the last month I’ve been busy and filing them to look at “later.”

The teacher’s fault: She is weak on follow through. She frequently creates assignments which fall by the wayside and never actually come due. This means that if Kiki doesn’t hear about an assignment she’s learned that she may not have to do it at all. Several times the teacher has instituted consequences for late work. The consequences are enforced for awhile, but then the teacher gets distracted and forgets about them. This also affects me. When regular notes don’t come home, I have no idea whether it is because Kiki didn’t bring it to me or because the teacher neglected to make one.

Kiki’s fault: She assumes that if she hasn’t heard about an assignment, that it isn’t due yet. It does not occur to her that overdue assignments no longer get mentioned. She doesn’t lie about homework, but often “forgets” to bring things home. She inflates the importance of assignments she likes and deflates the importance of ones that she doesn’t. Notes from school frequently go missing. Completed homework will sit in Kiki’s backpack and she doesn’t turn it in.

So the analysis shows me where the gaps are, but doesn’t tell me who should step up to fill it. I could do it, but I’ve been trying to step out of the student/teacher loop. Kiki needs to manage teachers and assignments without my constant intervention.