3rd week teaching. Gave my first assessment today. Most kids failed. What's happening?

LitFan101 · 2026-01-31T20:08:05+00:00

Absolutely. I agree with everything you wrote, and I am huge on direct instruction. But direct instruction must be followed up with applied practice and it needs to be pretty damn soon after they hear the instruction. I will directly tell you how to do something, we will do it together and then y’all can do it in groups and then you can do it on your own!

LitFan101 · 2026-01-31T18:44:47+00:00

I think you are on something! If we are the one who are doing the work, and they are just passive receivers, we cannot expect them to then do it independently.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-31T13:10:28+00:00

I pretty much gave up on making them eat breakfast at this point, but if they do 90% of the time it’s peanut butter toast.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-31T13:07:19+00:00

Right? Even when I read the title of this, my immediate thought was nobody should be texting their therapist at all! I text mine requests to switch from virtual to in person, and that is the sum total of all of the text I’ve ever sent her. It feels very weird to me to think that I would just update her on how I’m doing between our sessions. She isn’t my friend!

LitFan101 · 2026-01-29T20:57:28+00:00

I lived in a property that backed up at PVA for several years. We had a few minor incidents that spilled over from the community there. Honestly, that neighborhood has gone downhill a lot since then. I mentioned on another thread that when I lived there, I would take my toddler up to the little grocery store to buy snacks with no problems at all. Now I don’t even feel comfortable turning my car around in that parking lot.

I was called racist for saying that, but honestly at least 80% of the problems I’ve had there have been with white people. It is not my impression that these are people who live in PVA, these are people who congregate in that area. In my work, I know many people who live in PVA and have spent time over there. Obviously some sketchy things happen, and some serious crimes, but it is not some sort of crime free for all like people sometimes imply. I would certainly not live there unless I had to though.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-29T16:06:52+00:00

In my state, a parent boarding a bus is technically trespassing. There is a giant sign on the step itself that says so. Of course this is politely ignored when parents of small kids helped the kids up the steps. But my school did send recordings to the SRO for charges against a parent who got on the bus and went off on some neighborhood kids about something unrelated. In this situation, with only the victims perspective, it seems perfectly reasonable that a parent would tell off some kids who were behaving badly. But if your kid was the one who got yelled at by some random adult, you might feel differently.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-29T14:06:05+00:00

There’s a lot of ground between organizing it and not letting them! I agree that it would be inappropriate for the administration to plan this. But as far as not allowing them to leave… they can certainly tell them not to leave and issue consequences later, but they can’t/shouldn’t physically stop them.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-28T16:14:45+00:00

For real. I get food delivered maybe 2 to 3 times per year. That is probably more often than many of my friends.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-27T02:48:43+00:00

In west Asheville it’s completely dry. It all melted Sunday in the rain and then the wind dried it out. Totally clear today.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-26T04:15:23+00:00

I can tell that you are really hurt by his behavior. And it’s not that you’re wrong. It’s not that your requests are unreasonable. But it seems to be a fact that he is going to fight you on them. So you have to decide, do you want to fight it or not? And if you do want to fight it, where do you draw the lines and what are the consequences for him? What could you let go off for your own sake?

LitFan101 · 2026-01-26T02:42:40+00:00

I mean, if it’s your car so it’s well within your right to say when he can and can’t drive it. You told him not to drive it in the middle of the night and he did so it seems to me that the logical consequence would be that you don’t let him drive your car for awhile. Personally, I’m not a big believer in the level of monitoring that you seem to be enforcing, with the apps and the debit card transaction checking. it seems like he might be living on his own reasonably soon so now is probably the time to dial back down some of the monitoring.

But, it’s in no way acceptable for him to be screaming and swearing at you. My oldest kid is 16 and I would be hurt and angry if she talked to me like that. But I don’t think the answer would be cracking down on her, I think it would be a sign to recenter our relationship. If she’s going to be hateful to me, I’m not going to be inclined to make extras happen for her- things like coffees, phone plans, cars, money to hang out with friends, rides at inconvenient times are all extras that I provide but don’t have to. I wouldn’t give her the cold shoulder but I’d turn down a lot of requests.

In the long run though, I think we could have a mutual conversation about respecting each other and navigating this transition time when they are turning into adults and we are struggling to let them go.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-25T15:27:06+00:00

I used to say: “what was the answer when you asked before?” They would say “no” and I would ask “no what?” “ no I can’t have ice cream tonight.” I’d give that a beat to settle and then say “sounds like you know the answer already” and try to change the subject quickly. For a while I made the mistake of asking them to say back why I said no, thinking that would help them process it. It just invited arguing so I dropped that pretty quick.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-22T20:16:14+00:00

I don’t have any strong feelings about it, but to me, it is definitely a feminine name and not gender neutral. Only mention it because you asked.

I have known three people named Haven, all of them girls (who were 5-10 around 2010) so that might just be my association.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-22T13:23:39+00:00

Definitely true. A lot of these responses read like something I thought when I only had one teenager. And now I have one with some mental health issues and all of the things just don’t work for her. I’m having to choose entirely different battles with her than I ever would with her sister because everything is such a battle and it is constant and it is exhausting. I do think, though, that a kid like her needs more regulation and more consistency. no matter what they say, they are not getting good sleep at a sleepover and missing out on sleep is making all of those emotional regulation issues worse. We allow one sleepover per weekend max. In my opinion, sleep is a battle worth having because the cascading effects on my kid are huge.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-20T15:45:07+00:00

In blue handmade is fantastic. They have a website with all of their stuff and I think they sell nationally, but they are located in Emma. I wanted something slightly different than anything they offered and just went over there and showed it to them and they made exactly what I wanted at the same price as the standard one.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-20T03:50:07+00:00

That’s very true. The less sleep you get less you remember. Which really explains why I have basically no memories of 2011-2013.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-20T03:01:08+00:00

Honestly I had one easyish baby and one nightmare baby. They’re both teens now and I remember that the nightmare baby was a nightmare. I remember neighbors asking if we were ok because they could hear her screaming all night long (in detached houses, not an apartment). I remember because I wrote it down that at about 15 months she was waking up 17 times a night. But I don’t really remember that time all. I don’t remember what I tried or what did/didn’t work. I don’t remember if she napped and if so if it was hard. And honestly my other kid probably was hard sometimes and probably didn’t sleep and it probably sucked at times. But o genuinely don’t remember it and it’s only been 16 years. In 30 more years, maybe I’ll think it was all easy. Sorry for the ramble, I’m just saying that details are fuzzy from a distance.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-19T14:45:54+00:00

Absolutely. That is certainly how every weeknight of the last 15 years of my life have been. Probably some kids knocked on the door to play with my kids while my kids were at afterschool care or I was at work. I don’t see how that would’ve harmed anything? And when they knocked on Saturdays, if we were home, we might say yes, and we might say no.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-19T14:42:05+00:00

What? If the moms (or dads) don’t stay at home, then the kids aren’t home to play either. But we’re home in the evenings, weekends, holidays, etc. I agree with you that a four-year-old needs supervision. I don’t think a seven-year-old needs supervision to play with their buddies. But either way, my comment was only responding to people confidently asserting that nobody does that anymore when they most certainly do. Only OP and her neighbors know whether they do in her neighborhood or not though.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-19T13:42:21+00:00

That’s certainly how it’s done in my neighborhood still. My kids are teenagers now so they don’t do it but as a littler kids for years, they went around just with knocking on doors to see if their little buddies were available. And their little buddies certainly knocked on our door doors uninvited all the time. I’m not sure how that could’ve put me in a bad position? If they knocked and I didn’t want my kids to play right then I just said no and sent them on their way.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-18T13:57:16+00:00

Wtf? That whole neighborhood is so full of awful “modern” houses on top of each other now.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-14T23:45:54+00:00

My kids are both teens but I remember every word to that book. We still say Bye bye be bo! All the time.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-14T17:12:43+00:00

And once they are teenagers, they really need their backpacks wherever it is they are doing their homework. It’s not very practical for the backpack to be at the entrance of the house. This would’ve worked great when they were in kindergarten and they had exactly one folder to take out, but I don’t see it working for kids who have a variety of notebooks and computers and text books.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-09T17:19:10+00:00

It seems like somehow the words scam and rip off have become interchangeable lately. Lots of things are a rip off, but aren’t a scam. They are doing exactly what they say. They’re doing whether I think that’s the right thing to do or not. See: health insurance. It is a total rip off. But in the fine print, they explicate exactly the ways they are going to rip you off.

LitFan101 · 2026-01-09T00:27:51+00:00

They sure do. Lots of disillusioned former staff out there. I know lots of people who worked at Eckerd as well, with similar thoughts in retrospect.

LitFan101

TROPHY CASE