The level of disappointment I have for my son is off the scale right now. I recently wrote about how he consistently lies to my wife and I. Now we have issues at school coupled with defiance of our wishes.
At the end of last week, I get a phone call saying that he was placed in the D & F list at school for failing grades. It later turned out that he had done the work in the class that he received an F and that changed to an A as his teacher allowed the assignments to me handed in late, one was over two weeks late.
If it wasn’t for the notification from the school; we would never have known and it would have remained an F. Our son just does not care about school, all he cares about is video games and computers; he does his school work to get to the electronics, without that to incentivize him, he’d fail every class.
Yesterday, I received an Email from his math teacher explaining that when the kids finish their math tasks early, she allowed free-time on the school Chromebooks. She continued on to say that our son kept pestering her to use the Chromebook several times daily and then he became argumentative when she said no. To add insult, our son threatened to not do any school work unless he got Chromebook time.
I printed out the Email and made my son read it and his response was “I guess I won’t get any Chromebook time then”, completely unrepentant. When my wife arrived home and we tried to talk to him, he simply stared at us impassively, like what we had to say was not important in the slightest.
The third issue, remember, all this has happened since 9/16, our son has continued to use up his lunch account to eat breakfast in school, despite us telling him to stop, he had plenty of time to eat at home. Bottom line, we told him two weeks ago to stop eating school breakfast, if he continued, we would not refill his lunch account, he ignored us, now he’ll go hungry for the rest of this week, he had been warned!
Our son is 12 years old; he knows exactly what he is doing. I’m sick of bailing him out, he will have to face the real world consequences, which in this case is having to go hungry while at school. Maybe this will pull him back to reality, I will not tolerate any more of these behaviors. He’s about to be a teenager, it’s about time he took responsibility for his actions and stop making excuses for his behavior.
Update [Sep, 22 2016, 17:28]: Now I am pissed off with the school, despite having no funds in his meal account due to the issues above, the school has allowed him to keep charging the account despite it being -$8.65, it’s now -$10.95. I didn’t authorize these charges and I don’t intend to pay, I will be visiting the school tomorrow. My daughter’s school has a better system of calling when her account is negative.
I’m also pissed at my son, who made the decision to ignore me and take lunch anyway. Ultimately I don’t like the system, charging the child’s account regardless of whether parents have the money or not is unacceptable. If an account is negative $8.65, chances are that they cannot afford to pay, so adding more charges to the account makes the problem worse and could end up going to collections, ruining lives.
Our situation is different, I am trying to teach our son a life lesson, clearly a lesson that won’t be learned because the school gives him lunch and bill us despite being almost weeks worth of meals in arrears.