Sunday, April 1, 2012

Homework

Hello, this is my first blog, so I hope it works!
I am writing today on how having a child with a disability effects school. I will go back in time a little to when my child was in 1st-5th grade. We had many conferences with teachers and principles and other administrators. We worked on a 504c plan. I was and have never been more frustrated and helpless when dealing with schools. They would often not follow through on their part of the plan. This made for many stressful nights of homework and grades and trying to catch up. I finally decided one day that 2 hours of my child crying from homework was not worth it and began writing notes to teachers. "We tried for 1 or 2 hours to finish this but we were unable to". I found that this relieved all much stress about homework. There are other ways to learn and having a miserable child and guilt ridden parent dies not help in the learning department. To this day, I will push my child to do his best, but, know when enough is enough and to stop. That was a very big lesson for me as a parent. Let some things go. Homework is important but not so important that it hurts the child's self-worth and exhausts them and stresses and exhausts patents as well. The teachers had no say because I documented all of the times we were not able to finish and why. Documentation is very important.
Any parents out there struggling with this, I hope this helped.
Our children are more important than homework being completed every night.

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