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DJ,
Welcome to my world. 🙂
OK remember you are dealing with a teen. ANYTHING you do that disturbs their world will be met with great resistance. In fact, they will strive to be such a PITA, that you will not attempt such a heinous thing ever again. Now to make things worse, you are dealing with a teen who is ADD. The hallmark of ADD is poor executive function (Maintaining your cool) and not liking to be derailed. As parents, getting an ADD teen to do something, we hit the triple whammy in melt-down scenarios. Yea… it is so much fun. ADD also delays our emotional maturity as well. So dealing with a 15yr old, is really like dealing with a 12yr old in a 15yr old body.
you are the parent. You are in charge.
What you are doing, while painfull to you, the kid, the pets, the neighbors and even the aliens in orbit, has to be done because you are not only getting him/her to do their work, you are teaching skills that will allow them to live productive lives.
Start small. The year is going to be a fail, so take their best class and coach them on doing better. My son likes math. He was failing. I started out by working the problems and talking him through them, with him not doing much of the work.
Why just one class? You are not only trying to get them to pass High school, you are trying to prepare them for the world.
Baby steps.
Patience.
Don’t try for perfection all at once. With me doing most of the work, I started asking him to take the chalk and continue, with me providing guidance.
Patience.
Introduce new concepts. “Lets look it up in the book” I said. He said “This class has a book?”
Patience.
Challenge him/her. At their age, they think they are smarter than you. Let them prove it by doing more of the work. Help them through the rough spots.
My son has an A in Geometry, now and thinks I am from another planet, because I do square roots in my head to 6 digits of accuracy. He is wanting to start AP Algebra next year.
Was this transformation easy? NO WAY. We fought, yelled, screamed, stomped around, swore (in several languages) and sulked in opposite corners. After a while, in my best imitation of Monty Python explaining the use of the “Holy Hand Grenade”, I start to explain 3 dimensional, Euclidean Geometry. Weird. But it worked.
I hope this gets you started.
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