Teaching Life Lessons

In our home education is very important (as you probably guessed with me being a teacher and having teachers as parents). The expectation in our home has always been A's or B's as acceptable grades. C's are very rarely allowed (when the child is working their but off but is just struggling with content). D's and F's are completely unacceptable!

So with that as background you can imagine the uproar in our home when one of our children came home days before Christmas break with the report of 3 D's!!! I was furious! This child is extremely smart but can be dare I say lazy at times. He wasn't turning in his work. So he got a list of all missing assignments from his teachers and spent all of Christmas break doing the work, regardless of whether it would be accepted or not. He has also been grounded until I have written proof that grades are acceptable again. Has my little angel been happy with mom. No not at all. Especially when additional consequences are added for breaking the grounding rules. However he needs to learn now to be responsible for his work and understand that things are to be completed in the best manner possible (yeah he wasn't happy when I made him redo some work at 10:00 at night so it was done right).

This is new territory for this child as he usually passes all classes without even trying. I guess he just had to test the waters to find out what he could get away with and found out he couldn't. So now the real trial for him will be that if the grades aren't OK at report card time he will lose spring sports (track which he loves). Education will always come ahead of sports. I hope my son has learned his lesson this past month and chooses to work hard to excel instead of fail.