It was a weird semester. The students for the most part were good as always. I had a couple of students who thought they were too smart for my classes, but after a couple of tests and assignments, they quickly clued in how smart they actually were. Then of course there were the Asians in the classes. The ones who could regurgitate the info, but could not put the info into practice. Then I had the one student who started off really really well.
This one student at the start of the semester did really really well. Received 100% on many assignments and tests and high 90's on most the other projects. Parent teacher interviews can around and no surprise the parents did not make an appointment, they didn't need to. He was an intelligent, thought provoking, young man who had the opportunity if he continued on this path to gain many scholarships to pay for his college.
After the first report card came out, he was sitting at 95%; the top mark in the class. He was proud of the mark as he should have been. After that, his mark started to slide. Literary the day after report cards came out he received a zero on the test. When I handed back the paper I commented "What happened"? His response "never studied". I thought it was a strange answer as even a kindergarten kid could have scored more than a zero on that test.
One the next couple of assignments, sure enough the same thing happened. The assignments were poorly finished, answers incomplete, or not even handed in. Tests were poorly written and I noticed a huge change in attitude.
Gone was the friendly young man. The student who could be relied on to give his input into an idea or about a concept was now very caviller in his remarks. He was rude in class to not only his friends and classmates, but to me as well.
I was inputting the marks into the computer a month after 1st reports went out and I decided that after seeing his overall grade slip to a 65%, I needed to talk to him alone. When the final bell of the day rang, I asked him to stay behind to talk to me. When I showed him his current grade he just shirked it off.
This bothered me so much that the next day at lunch in the staff room I brought up his name and a couple of colleagues told me there history with him.
He starts off really great, slacks off then after talking to the parents he end up with a decent mark. It was then that I needed to talk to his parents.
I sent an email home to his parents explaining the situation and asked for help from them to see if he could turn his grades around before the end of the semester.
I received an email back from mom and she confirmed that this was a pattern that developed back in his sophomore year. She went on to say how her husband and her would punish their son by eliminating his phone, computer, and had escalated to the car last semester. However, the threats were beginning to fail and the son would somehow convince them to give him back the privileges he lost.
She asked me to keep in touch with his progress and in turn, they would come up with another threat to get him to improve his grades.
So after a week of catching him skip class, hand in someone else's work and receiving a 13% on a unit test, I again made contact with his parents. I explained the weeks progress or lack thereof and ended off with a reminder that college and scholarship applications were coming due quickly.