School Stuff

Lately we've been struggling with difficulties at school. Grayson has a teacher who is, I'll go ahead and say it, a bit of a hard-ass. This is a woman who has rules for her rules, and doles out punishments on a formula. Enter X you always get Y. And Grayson's not integrating all that smoothly into the New World Order. There's just no wiggle room.

Unfortunately, Grayson is all about wiggle room.

So, he is feeling the pinch. The whole household is. Primarily all the drama is caused by his consistent failure to put the number 6 on the upper right hand corner of his papers before he turns them in. Not only does he lose five points from every paper on which he fails to do this, he also as to sit out recess. He has had, consequently, only one recess this week.

I'll go ahead and say this, too, while I'm at it...I totally don't agree with this system of punishment. It's completely counter-productive. I think if you make a kid sit out recess, what you get is a restless, resentful and distracted kid, not a kid who has learned any kind of lesson. Not my kid, anyway. But I don't make the rules, and me thinking they're stupid doesn't change a thing for Grayson. So I'm doing what I can to try to nudge him into compliance. I remind him every morning to put his number on his page. I ask him every afternoon if he got recess. I've taken his TV privileges away. But I don't think piling on more punishments is going to produce any better results. So I will have to come up with something else. I just don't know what. What can I do to make him remember? I can't be there, whispering in his ear. I just have to hope it gets better on its own. He has no recess today because he put his number on the wrong page on work he turned in yesterday. Sheesh. Today, I hope, is the last day of no recess. We've had two difficult weeks. I hope next week will begin a new era.

Today is Book Report Day. Grayson was up late last night, finishing his first-ever "book report:" actually a shoebox diorama accompanied by a five-sentence synopsis of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. I was worried that it would be torture getting him to work on this, and it has been a challenge to get him to do some of the preliminary work. He was convinced, of course, that he could complete the whole project in a single night, and resisted when I made him starting drawing the figures for the diorama on Tuesday night. But last night went well. Fortified by milk and cookies, he plowed right into the project and kept at it, not even fighting me on the writing bit at the end.

Grayson hates writing. He'll be the first to tell you so. But turns out he just hates the mechanics of writing. He's actually a bit of a dab hand with a sentence. A chip of the old Mom Block, perhaps. I was worried that the synopsis would be an ordeal, but here's what he came up with:

"Harry has had a mysterious life, but the day he turns eleven, everything changes. He realizes he is a wizard and goes to a school called Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He meets two friends named Ron and Hermione but once they find the sorceror's stone it leads them on a great adventure. Together they accomplish any obstacle that comes their way, including He Who Must Not Be Named. But then Harry has to say goodbye to his new found friends, but he will see them next year."

Myself, I think the kid may have a career in writing book jacket blurbs.