Hi all,
I am struggling with DD a freshman. My first, DS is still straight A’s with full AP load junior year so this is the student I was used too. Then comes DD. Equally capable and smart. Just really doesn’t want to put a whole lot of effort into school and never has. So…here we are third quarter with 2 Cs and not sure she can pull one of them into a B. Trying not to compare kids but it’s tough.
Is she doomed to a low tier school or CC. Or, can she explain a rough freshman year on app if she can begin to recover next year.
There is a wide gap between elite schools and CC’s. Maybe she is a kid that will need a gap year. Maybe she will buckle down junior and senior year and be highly motivated. It will be fine.
And for that matter, my junior is dual enrolled at a CC. Some of the PhD holding professors teach adjunct and are primarily at 60K+ private schools. The classes are small and the teachers are accessible. The classes transfer directly to our state flagship and have a strong transfer agreement. They have an honors program and classes. It’s hardly the end of the world to start at a CC anyway. They totally get a bad name on this board. There are many good paths.
Agree. Doomed to “lower tier?” No. You said two C grades, not flunking out. If she’s been a strong performer before, you may want to get to the bottom of this. But comparing them or setting higher expectations than she can meet can do damage.
And while we’re at it, check the pressure you put on your son, as well.
Never a good idea to compare two kids. Drive, motivation, curiosity, creativity…all of that impacts how they “perform” in what is a very narrowly prescribed K-12 education. Secondly, I wouldn’t even think about colleges until junior year or at least when you have a better idea where your second kiddo’s strengths and weaknesses and interests lie. Thinking the best she can do is an Associates degree seems terribly short-sighted.
When in high school I was that B/C student that was constantly compared to two older straight A siblings. I was always asked why couldn’t I get the straight A’s they got.
That contributed to two issues. It caused me to rebel and not try harder. And, I truly believe that I have some mild, undiagnosed, LDs. I have a hard time with reading comprehension and with the short term memory needed for remembering things for exams.
I did start at a CC and I did transfer and got a BA from a well regarded Midwestern LAC. I also went on and got a master’s degree. I was never the top of my class, in fact I was near the bottom of my LAC’s class.
The fact remains that I was able to get an education without having a 3.0+ high school GPA.
Thanks! I do see the value of CC and would actually like that route for the savings. The issue down the line is the highly competitive high school and friends. She wants to run with the top dogs at school and relates to them intellectually. These are her friends and she doesn’t want them to know about her grades. So we have tried to explain that when grad rolls around and they are off to the big schools she may not have those same options. At some point she may not be able to continue on that sort of path and she needs to be prepared to be ok with it. She doesn’t like to hear this reality!
Helps to hear how important it is not to compare kids! I need to do better with that. She is rebeling right now. The more we push the more she digs in her heels and doesn’t try. I also believe she does have a 2E type profile. Gifted but some possible LDs. She compensated better when she was younger but may be running into issues now. Thanks
9th grade is when lots of students hit a wall because their oen compensation strategies no longer are enough. Set an appointment with the resource team at her high school, and start the evaluation process. You won’t know if there is anything that can be done to help her compensate more effectively until you find out if indeed there is an LD issue of som kind.
Kids who did a great job in middle school do not necessarily remain in the top of the class. Freshman year can be very stressful. Kids who never struggled at all find that they have to work hard to maintain high grades. My daughter was a high achiever in high school, but it was very noticeable towards the end of Freshman year that within her group of friends (other high achievers) some of the kids were not faring as well as they had been. The course work gets harder, and the pressure is on. Some kids do great with that, others don’t.
On the other hand, my son, not a high achiever in middle school, but always on the honor roll, blossomed in high school because he finally felt like he was actually learning something interesting. He could have high 90s in every class, IF he wanted to. Which he doesn’t. I can’t make him do it, and neither can you make you dsughter do more than her best. You can certainly have fair expectations, but as freshman, you need to ease off of her a bit, because you aren’t doing her any favors by getting upset.
I used to be way too focused on grades with my eldest. With my youngest, I literally haven’t checked his grades once this whole junior year. I ask him what his grades are and he tells me. Before we recently had his conference with his counsleor, I aksed him if there was anything he wanted to tell me before we had the meeting. He said no. It was a good meeting. I wish I had done that with my older child, but they don’t come with rule books.
It’s really easy to suggest OP not compare her children to one another or that her daughter not compare herself to her similarly intelligent friends. But neither of those things are realistic. Granted OP should not throw her son’s success in her daughter’s face - no good is likely to come from that. But if OP knows her kids are more or less equally bright and capable, why wouldn’t she take that into account while working with her daughter. Maybe it’s a matter of making better use of her time, developing alternative study habits, or just deciding that doing well is or isn’t important to her right now.
I agree that there’s going to be a good fit for her ultimately, which may or may not be a school with selective admissions. That of course is just one variable to consider, and hopefully not the most important one.
My younger son had a similar dynamic. C+ in chemistry, B- in Latin freshman year. He did much better in other science courses, never much better in Latin. He got into some very selective colleges. He’s a kid with some probable LDs. He’d had a 504 plan in middle school, but decided in the end the accommodations were worse than muddling through without them. The older he’s gotten the better he’s gotten at coping - though foreign languages will always be an issue - and he attended a college where he majored in international relations and was required to take the language all four years - and to make matters worse he chose Arabic - an extremely difficult language. Got a C the first year, spent his junior year abroad, some of it in an immersion program and got an A in Arabic the last year.
Your daughter may continue to get B’s and C’s and believe me there are colleges out there that will be happy to have her, both public and private. Or she may find her groove and do better next year. I agree with the suggestion for testing for LDs. At least it will take accusations of laziness out of the equation.
I can relate to @Lindagaf DD was a model citizen. Did everything by the book. Hardly needed any parenting. Off to a dream school. Then comes DS, who has taught me to love the kid I have not the kid I wished I had. I have to actively resist comparing the two in my own mind. It was so hard. Checking his grades was a panic-trigger for me every week. Each quarter’s grade report felt like a jury verdict on his prospects and my parenting. Guilty. Doomed. I had to try something different his sophomore year - I was so exhausted, emotionally and physically. So, I stopped obsessing about it. I stopped pushing him into things he didn’t want to do. I let “it” happen, whatever “it” was. I had to sit back and watch consequences fall on him. It was painful, full of conversations about regret and doing it differently if he had the chance. The silver lining in all of this, is that he’s learning life lessons that were impossible to impart through normal parenting methods (lecturing, cajoling, bribing, punishing). He had to learn it this way. I had to learn it this way. We are at peace at last.
Bless his heart, he’s going to college in the fall, y’all. There is hope.
Well as a parent of a quirky profoundly gifted junior who had executive function lagging academic level, I get this. I think getting an eval if at all possible is a great idea. She may benefit from some accommodations or at least knowledge of anything else going on. At a minimum it’s likely to confirm she’s smart and capable and give her some self awareness about her learning style.
I have 2 very different kids and setting a tone of there is no one right path and it’s not a race or a competition has been helpful. I have a younger daughter that feels like she falls in the shadow of an older brother sometimes.
While comparing kids is never a good idea, it is frustrating to see a kid not live up to their intellectual potential. Can you figure out how she is getting the Cs? Is the work too difficult for her? Is she not turning in the work but doing well on the tests or is she also not studying? Is she in honors classes and will now have to step back to “college prep”? Or does she do the work and not hand it in? Does she have an overall hard time concentrating or following through on school work as well as in other areas of her life? Does she sit down to do her work and spend more time on her phone than on the the work?
I am not a big fan of looking for LDs any time a kid does not live up to expectations, but smart kids can often compensate for LDs (including ADHD inattentive) until HS. Not saying this is what is going on with your daughter, but getting Cs if she is in the right level (and you say she is the intellectual match of the “top dogs”), may warrant some investigation. OTOH, she just may not be interested in doing well in school and will have her college choices limited by that. That doesn’t mean she will not be successful, and getting a couple of Cs as a freshman would not mean she has to go to a community college. There are plenty of schools that are happy to take kids with GPAs of low Bs or even high Cs. If her other grades are As and Bs, there is likely nothing to worry about at all.
