After two days a naseau and shivering under 40 blankets, I have returned to walk among the living. Unfortunately, tonight Arielle is sick. There's definitely a bug in the house. The good news is that Aaron is in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show and out of range of infection. Husbands are the biggest babies...
For those who asked....YES!! I certainly DID go dance on the stage at Hair. Would YOU pass up the chance to dance on a Broadway stage? It was clearly the only way I was ever going to get there. It was great!
I have a little story to tell about Joel, but first a little background. If you read my blog WAAAAYY back....you might recall that he
a) digs his stubborn heels in about homework and
b) he is the world's pickiest eater. He's actually gotten worse in this regard, with his list of acceptable foods dwindling to about 5 choices...most of them white.
This semester he has been in his third year of Spanish. He's never done very well in Spanish as he made up his mind on day one he HATED Spanish and that it was just "too hard." But, he's coasted along in the C range. It caught up with him this year. He was behind from the start and rather than do the work he needed to do to catch up.....he just fell further and further behind.
He has asked me repeatedly to allow him to drop out of this class. But, I've refused to consider it on the premise that letting him out of it because he's decided to slack is just the wrong message. What's to keep him from deciding to slack in all the rest of his courses next year? It would be worth a try for him if he knew he had the option to bail. It's a path a want to avoid.
But, both his guidance counselor and his teacher have come to me with the recommendation that he drop the course. They feel that at this point, the pressure we're all applying to the spanish situation is having a negative impact on his performance in his other classes. So, I have finally decided to bend on this on the condition that he steps into another elective next semester. Dropping Spanish does not buy him a free period.
His counselor emailed me yesterday and told me that the only available elective that will fit in his schedule is......international foods. The ultimate irony. I wrote her back...."Have you met my son?" But I decided this would be an interesting test. Would he opt for a course where he'd be faced with "exotic" food, or would he suck it up and decide maybe spanish wasn't quite so bad/impossible?
Well, he chose the food.
He knows he'll have to handle and cook food, but he seems pretty sure that they can't force him to eat it. His counselor has told him that he can't go in there and start immediately making a stink about how none of the food is anything he would consider eating. At the very least, he will (hopefully) learn to at least politely push the food around on his plate. Maybe.....just maybe....if no one makes a huge deal about it, he might even TRY something new when no one is looking. I can always hope, right?
These situations are not in the parent's manual. I know....I checked.
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5 days ago
3 comments:
How old is Joel now? Is he in middle school? How times flies.
Y'all are going to be in for an interesting ride. I hope we'll hear more about this.
Well, I doubt they'll cook anything too bizarre in the class, so it might actually be a good opportunity for him to try a couple of new things. Maybe once he sees how it's made and knows exactly what's in it, he'll try some of it. Who knows? Maybe he'll discover a love for some exotic food!
At any rate, as much as I'm sure you're disappointed about Spanish, some kids just can't get the hang of it. My youngest son was one of those kids. We ended up letting him drop the course in high school. They gave him some kind of a language waiver so he could graduate. If your son's not in high school yet, you might want to look into something like that or once he starts, he'll end up in the same place again with high school Spanish.
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