I was really worried about Shelby going into Middle School for a number of reasons. My anxiety about the whole thing grew to fever pitch that was quickly dispelled after that first day of school. Shelby has astonished me time and time again with her ability to adapt to situations. She came home from school that first day, sat down to her Chromebook, and has worked ever since on her homework. Having struggled with kids doing their homework without prodding, you would think this would be a blessing. And it is, but it's also a curse. You see, this girl works from bus to bedtime every single night. She works on weekends, including work on Sunday, just to keep up. She does not have time to be a kid anymore. But being ever adaptable, she has not complained about the workload once. It's been me that's done the crying and complaining!
Because it is all so new, I wasn't prepared for the structure of the curriculum. In theory, it's amazing. You have to pass things at 80% to move on to the next skill. If you do not pass the "test," called Content Assessments, you are required to go back, study again, and produce notes to prove to your teacher you are ready to take the test again. You have three chances to pass the Content Assessment at 80% or above before the grade becomes permanent. Knowing that a lot of things are built step-by-step, this sounded amazing. But when you factor in how much Shelby has worked with tutors over the last 6 years, how we pulled her from two grade levels behind to actually at grade level at the end of last year, expecting her to get 80% on every single thing is ridiculous. Because of this, Shelby fell behind quite fast. Add in that I didn't quite understand my role as a parent in her learning and you have a child that was working all night to get C+ and below on her first report card. She worked all that time to be less-than average. It truly broke my heart. I came away from her first Parent Teacher Conference with a new resolve: I was going to tutor my daughter until the end of this semester, guiding her towards which assignment to work on when. If she didn't get those grades up, I would pull her from public school.
I immediately sat down with her to have her help me understand what her Dashboard looked like. Every single assignment for the entire year is visible on this Dashboard for every single core class. When you hover over each assignment, the deadline/due date is shown. It became apparent pretty quick that Shelby had two past-due assignments, two coming up that week, one the week after, with four due on November 29th. That doesn't sound like too much, right? Wrong. Here's how a current assignment due today looks-- one of four due today, mind you:
Mesopotamia
Objective 1
Objective 2
Objective 3
Content Assessment
Mesopotamia
~ Objective 1
** 9 Assignments
~ Objective 2
** 6 Assignments
~ Objective 3
** 9 Assignments
Content Assessment
I am not exaggerating it at all when I say that one of the assignments under Objective 1 was reading only. I, as the adult that reads a book a day many days a week- meaning I do not stumble over my words- sat down with her and read out loud for FIVE HOURS. One assignment under one Objective under one main category took five hours. There were nine assignments in that Objective. It is not an uncommon occurrence for an Objective to take us 10 hours to complete, with me being the reader. With Mesopotamia having 3 Objectives, that's 30 hours for what looks like one "assignment" posted on her Dashboard. It is much more intense for her Projects, for which she has one a month. In each core class. Added on top of the in-class assignments, projects, and book reports they do. In sixth grade.
As I look over the schedule I made for November, now that we are on the last day assignments for November are due, thank goodness, I would like to document (a glorified word for validate) what we've been doing, her and I, to get her where we are today:
Past Due:
Early Humans- 3 Objectives
Area & Surface Area- 4 Objectives
Due that week:
Read 15 chapters of Holes and assemble your thoughts for Book Report
PROJECT- Weather- 5 Objectives (more on that below)
Due the week after:
Water & Earth 2- 3 Objectives
Due November 29th:
Expressions & Equations- 4 Objectives
Mesopotamia- 3 Objectives
Reading Strategies- 2 Objectives
Imagery- 2 Objectives
All with that Content Assessment that needs to be passed at 80% to move on.
If we assume that each Objective takes approximately 5-10 hours (again, I am not exaggerating one bit!), that's a minimum of 130 hours. With five days a week working for 5 hours after school, that's 100 hours of homework a week. It was not difficult for her to get the other 30+ hours necessary when she worked Saturdays and Sundays as well. There were two Saturdays this month that she worked 10 hours on homework. We'd give her an hour or two here or there as a break, but for the most part, Saturday was just another school day. I felt like a monster. An overwhelmed, emotionally unstable monster. And there was always the possibility she wouldn't pass and we would have to do the Objectives again to prove she was ready to take it a second time.
Side Road for a brief second: Her Weather Project was my first real understanding of how they expect their work to be turned in. She had 10 questions about Marseille, France for this one Objective in the Project. She needed to know the Latitude and Longitude, so I thought, "Easy, we'll just google that." Wrong. They need to site a credible, educational source for every single question. So, when it came time to tell what people in Marseille like to eat, you couldn't just google that answer, you had to find a credible online source to back your answer. Each question took six times longer than you would imagine, because we had to choose from a limited number of acceptable sources.
Once those questions were answered, they had to move on to adding the answers together into a kind of skit that they recorded as if they were weather people on the news. As we were working on that Objective, having spent 2 hours on it that day (not counting the 2 hours we spent the night before looking for the answers and sources), Shelby commented that another girl was on the assignments as well. I was confused... "See that pink thing (cursor) right there? That's Meytyn. She's one of my partners." I kid you not, at that exact minute, the entire text we had been working on for two hours went pink. I could tell she was dragging her cursor down her screen to highlight all of the text, and then deleted it all in that second. DELETED ALL OF OUR WORK. Apparently, because it was a shared Project, the page we were working on was a Google Doc, which can be accessed by multiple people. This girl had been "up till 1:00am working on that assignment" and had drafted her own words. She deleted all of ours, and added her own. I started shaking in rage, and then cried.
When I contacted the teacher about it, asking if the assignment was one where "two girls copied and pasted the work of another, regardless of the hours they'd spent on their own," the teacher told me she'd work with them on Tuesday. She said nothing about the fact that this girl had erased Shelby's hard work, nothing to the fact that it "didn't matter." Shelby's work was gone, and that was that. What made me literally want to punch this child in the face was the point where she asked us where we had gotten some of our information. Typing with fingers that were on fire (on the document, because we can read and communicate on that one Goggle Doc!), I told her that we'd just spent 2 hours filling all of that information in, information that was deleted by her just seconds before. We moved on. I still do not know what grade Shelby got on that Project. I hope I never meet that girl in person.
OK, back to the main reason of this rant post: Last night, as we were finishing up work for assignments that are due today, I happened to click on Shelby's Progress. I, once again (surprise, surprise), started to cry-- happy tears this time. Shelby's Science is Incomplete (thanks to that one Project that the teacher is still helping them on), with B's in all other Core Classes. B's for the girl that has struggled her entire life. B's for the girl that had many late assignments and has worked so hard to claw her way to today. I am thrilled beyond words! And, oh, so proud of my Shelby-kins!
It's working. Our work together is working!!!!! We'll see how things go from here on out, but for now we're celebrating like she just won Valedictorian. Because if anyone deserved an award for the hours they've put into their schooling, it's Shelby Jacquelyn Dirks! I do hope the work load calms down, now that we're not behind, but it's easier to sacrifice my nights knowing she has to potential to excel!
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