it's not fun for me either

getting some help from Dad

We had the corn maze and dinner with costumes planned for this evening for more than a week, but due to current state of my children's academic standing, instead they spent all night doing homework and I went to a meeting and did homework of my own. Meetings and homework are way less fun than fall adventures and good food.

But, despite Azia's working on her math from 3:30 -10:30 she's still not even half way done getting caught up in just that one subject. We still have others to tackle next. Yes, "work" is probably used loosely here. . . I hear she didn't accomplish a whole lot while I was gone, but that is still an awful lot of hours to sit in one place and look at a math book. Way too many, I think, even if she hasn't done the work at school, but I can't seem to convince her (or get her to remember) to do it there, so I'm at a loss when trying to figure out what else to do. I asked her the other day why she wasn't doing her work or finishing anything and she just got very distraught and told me she just gets distracted or people talk to her and she forgets to finish. I believe that is probably exactly what is going on.  I asked her if we were going to have to do school at home for awhile to get her caught up and work on focusing, and she wasn't too to happy about that. This also makes sense since she likes school well enough, except for all that schoolwork people keep expecting her to do.

Israel is in a little better shape, but still across the board on the lowish end of mediocre.  I printed out the assignments for every class and sort of left him on his own, because once I got to his English class and saw there were nearly 80 assignments listed he should have completed (when I think we've had just over 30 days of school?) I was beginning to become more annoyed with the mounting collection of small annoyances like that ludicrous ratio than I was with my kids' laziness and lack of discipline, which are the real problems in the whole mess. I'll have to revisit his progress tomorrow.  Israel is too perceptive for me to be talking to him when I'm clearly annoyed at the school; it's already a struggle to get him to buy into much of what's going on there.

Part of my plan for this weekend is to figure out some new organizational tools and routines because clearly not much we're doing now is working.