Learning Experience….

Today, Ben has his first BIG test since being at his new school.  It's a reading test on the book they just finished, Fever 1793.  The teacher sent home all kinds of studying information… they even had to fill out this super detailed sheet about HOW they were planning on studying.

They have a folder with all their papers from the unit that they have to turn in today with the test. Discovered he was supposed to be doing this in science too… thankfully, I've only tossed a few graded papers. Unfortunately, no one mentioned this folder thing to Ben (or me).   (mid-year start issues again…people assume you know things.) So he only has like maybe 3/4 of the reading papers. Worse, several of them are from before he started, so they aren't completed. I'm a little irritated that this wasn't something anyone bothered to tell us (to keep everything in this folder) and the incomplete papers would have taken him hours and hours to finish, so I didn't make him do them. :\  He'll probably get marked down substantially but so be it. It wasn't fair to him. I really need to have a conference with his teachers to get on the same page… they are very hard to communicate with via email in that they don't respond… like EVER.  They told me early on that they have issues with mail going to spam, so I never know if they got it and didn't respond or if they never got it. Hence, REALLY need a face-to-face.

Anyway, so they were supposed to study. Ben basically didn't. He had a basketball game last night and the night before, he spent almost two hours on other homework. I tried to get him to at least look over it last night before basketball, but he said he feels confident in the material. I am apt to believe him… he has gotten As on every quiz he has taken so far and hasn't done anything except go to class, do the homework, and read the story. I considered pushing the matter to enforce good habits, but decided to use this as a learning experience. If he aces the test (which he very well might), then great, he knows himself and when he needs to study. If he doesn't, well, then, next time, he'll listen to me.

We made a deal that if he gets a low B or lower, we study together next time.  We shall see!