You Scared? It’s the end of a term.
It’s the end of the term…what will Halloween weekend have in store for you?? If you are a parent of a student struggling with executive functioning then you might be more worried about missing assignments than running out of candy. Missing assignments are the worst! It has been more common than not for Emily to reach the end of the quarter with 30 or more missing assignments. It is draining, overwhelming, and further harms the parent-child relationship. But, honestly, the scariest part of this whole story is that the student despises school just a bit more and perpetuates the story they tell themselves that they aren’t good enough. I’ve watched this happen every grading period from 5th grade to 10th grade.
We would start out each school year with a grand plan on how we were going to be more organized and try better. How we were going to follow up on the plans outlined in our IEP and that we would know sooner than later that assignments were missing. And then for each and every term we would all become a little more defeated in this process. We bought planners and asked Emily and her teachers to fill it out at the end of every class. We tried emailing the teachers (almost stalker level) to keep getting updates on how Emily was doing with her assignments. We would sit at the kitchen table with Emily for hours and hours to complete assignments to have them vanish somewhere along the way to turn them in. We would sit at the kitchen table and redo assignments we did weeks prior with a room filled with anxiety and frustration. And yet, here we would be again at the end of the term in the same spot….every time.
We have seen this so many times…until this term. This term was different! While we used a planner, we set it up differently, we used it to outline school times, work times, and most importantly how much free time Emily would have to do whatever she wanted to do if we were able to get what needed to be done, done. We were able to get all assignments electronically which helped with keeping track of assignments. Every evening we would go through the assignments and be able to confirm the submit button was actually clicked (a very important step)! We started to use timers to disrupt her ADHD to get her back on task and collect information necessary for her to be working on current assignments. We were working on current assignments…not two week old assignments.
What has happened in the last 10 weeks has been a wonderful change! We have watched our Emily change in all the best ways. While she still thinks school is boring, she is proud of her work. She has been taking repetitive steps that are starting the foundation for her success long term. Emily has been an active participant in the outcomes of her work by putting in the effort to follow the process. Last night we were reflecting back on her work and how the steps she has taken have had a direct impact on her grades. Emily is ending this term with 6 classes having A’s and B’s and a C in Math. You wanna know the best part?! Emily is the most excited about the C in Math! I was so excited to see her positive attitude about her grades and that she didn’t view the C as bad but rather that she had worked so hard for the C. And then it was like the wins kept coming as she told us how she took notes, asked her dad for help, and attended extra study sessions to help her understand the concepts by reworking the math problems. She credits her success to these actions…the actions she took that resulted in her good grades and positive outlook.
Now, don’t get me wrong here, we still struggled and had hard moments. Emily still got distracted and wasted time. A few submit buttons were missed. It just proves even more that consistency in repeatable actions outweighs the times she went off on a tangent about something else way more exciting, forgetting to turn in an assignment, or whatever else it was that took us off track. Now we just need to keep going. This is a lifelong process of creating habits that create wins that we stack on top of each other. It took 10 weeks to make a drastic change in Emily’s view of herself. It took 10 weeks to have Emily’s story change from I’m bad at school to I can do this and I have goals for myself. 10 weeks to make a difference in her world.