{Here We Go Again}

If you've been following me for a while, you know that for a long while now, Gaige has been struggling in school. He has this defiant attitude when it comes to his teachers and I'm not sure where it's coming from. But all the meetings and trying to find ways to motivate him to do anything finally came to a head on Thursday.


I got a call from his principal saying that he was removed from his Language Arts class for flat out refusing to do his work. This has been the main struggle since the start of this year. He just refuses to do anything and ends up in their detention room. We have tried everything to motivate him. We've grounded him at home, they've tried to make things as easy as possible for him in class, he never had homework. It was always met with more resistance and more defiance. On Thursday when the principal called it wasn't just to inform me of the current situation, he was calling to ask me if I could come pick him up. Something that had never actually happened before.

When I hung up the phone I just looked at D and said I don't know what I'm supposed to do anymore. We had talked about pulling him out of school numerous times through out the year but we didn't want to do that. We didn't want to pull him and just let him get by with this defiant crap. Finally we decided that instead of pulling him so close to the end of the year, we would go ahead and let him finish the year. And then that became an excuse for him to do nothing at all. He didn't care if he was getting in trouble at school and not getting good grades because he wasn't going to be there next year anyway. So D just looked at me and said pull him out. So I did.

I am now home schooling again. I signed him up for Time4Learning today and set up his lesson plan. To get back to where he needs to be to go on to eighth grade next year, he needs to do a years worth of work from now until August. Which means he won't have a summer break and he will only have one day off a week. We set it up so he's doing multiple lessons a day for each subject also so that we can get through it all.

On top of his online schooling, I set up his phone with my library account so he can check out ebooks. He's currently found one about four friends who join the military during the Vietnam war. I think it's the first time he's voluntarily read something that was a facebook post or a text message. So I'm pretty excited about it.

I'm really hoping this all works out and that he can get through school this way. Traditional school is just not something he was cut out for and that's fine.

-Kristin