Homework completion and HS Asperger's student

Monica - posted on 02/25/2012

wow it's like reading about my son. Same thing. If he remembers to do his home work at all, it's usually incomplete. But he usually aces his tests and exams without studying at all, and manages to be pass fairly well. This drives me insane, but since he sees it as good enough, it is difficult to motivate him to do the daily work.

Debra - posted on 04/23/2009

High school is hard with Aspergers. My daughter, we are hoping, will graduate in May. She has approximately 20 missing or late assignments to complete or graduation will not happen. We have done everything I can think of to help her. We still have crossed fingers that we will see a diploma.



Best advice I can give at this point is work with the school. I know it is hard but keep trying. Our team has been average at best in helping our daughter but at least they know that we are "up to speed" as best we can be.



One BIG challenge that we have faced is constant lieing. We never feel like we know truthfully what she is missing or has turned in. Watch for that. It may just be our daughter. Maybe harder with female aspergers kids.

Toni - posted on 04/23/2009

My son is not quite there yet...he's going into the 7th grade, but had the same kind of problems. He never wanted to do his work when he got home from school, especially if he viewed it as a "stupid" assignment. We have had many fights over it and I'll tell you the same thing I tell my son...you have no choice but to do it. I don't care if I have to stand over him until the work is done (which I have had to do many times) I don't care. I'm sure you feel the same way... we know our children are smart enough and can handle it if they can only push past the block they have. I don't think there is any really good soution here. I think you just have to keep explaining how you know that he can make something truly special with his life, but to do that he has to get past HS first! Keep talking and fighting for your son...no one else will!!!

Lana - posted on 04/22/2009

My son is 17 and a junior in high school. He has struggled so very hard this past year. His favorite class had a teacher leave mid term and her back up the school board did not approve of.So his back up was so messed with. I was promised by the school principal that they would take care of his issues.. His new teacher is really not a teacher she is a "Field Biologist" with no teaching experience, I met her and told her that he has a IEP and that he doesn't do written things too well, but he can verbally tell you what you want know. She said that she would help him out and let me know if he got behind.. Come to find out at the end of the term that she didn't ever call me and she expected everything in writing including Labs, which he did and his lab partner wrote the notes. The lab partner got credit but he didn't even though he was the one that dissected fish, birds and pigs.
James will flat out tell you that he has it in his brain but he has a block that doesn't allow it to flow out of his hand but he will tell you anything.He has on his IEP that he gets extra time for writing. And he gets a 1/3 reduction of his written assignments. His English and History teachers knows he has the grasp of the lesson. If fact fall term he used to debate the History teacher to the teacher's amusement,
So try reducing his written assignments and tell him that he has to show the teachers that he knows the work. I told James that it was his way of making the teachers realize that he really does know what they are talking about.

Lana - posted on 04/22/2009

My son is 17 and a junior in high school. He has struggled so very hard this past year. His favorite class had a teacher leave mid term and her back up the school board did not approve of.So his back up was so messed with. I was promised by the school principal that they would take care of his issues.. His new teacher is really not a teacher she is a "Field Biologist" with no teaching experience, I met her and told her that he has a IEP and that he doesn't do written things too well, but he can verbally tell you what you want know. She said that she would help him out and let me know if he got behind.. Come to find out at the end of the term that she didn't ever call me and she expected everything in writing including Labs, which he did and his lab partner wrote the notes. The lab partner got credit but he didn't even though he was the one that dissected fish, birds and pigs.
James will flat out tell you that he has it in his brain but he has a block that doesn't allow it to flow out of his hand but he will tell you anything.He has on his IEP that he gets extra time for writing. And he gets a 1/3 reduction of his written assignments. His English and History teachers knows he has the grasp of the lesson. If fact fall term he used to debate the History teacher to the teacher's amusement,
So try reducing his written assignments and tell him that he has to show the teachers that he knows the work. I told James that it was his way of making the teachers realize that he really does know what they are talking about.

Lana - posted on 04/22/2009

My son is 17 and a junior in high school. He has struggled so very hard this past year. His favorite class had a teacher leave mid term and her back up the school board did not approve of.So his back up was so messed with. I was promised by the school principal that they would take care of his issues.. His new teacher is really not a teacher she is a "Field Biologist" with no teaching experience, I met her and told her that he has a IEP and that he doesn't do written things too well, but he can verbally tell you what you want know. She said that she would help him out and let me know if he got behind.. Come to find out at the end of the term that she didn't ever call me and she expected everything in writing including Labs, which he did and his lab partner wrote the notes. The lab partner got credit but he didn't even though he was the one that dissected fish, birds and pigs.
James will flat out tell you that he has it in his brain but he has a block that doesn't allow it to flow out of his hand but he will tell you anything.He has on his IEP that he gets extra time for writing. And he gets a 1/3 reduction of his written assignments. His English and History teachers knows he has the grasp of the lesson. If fact fall term he used to debate the History teacher to the teacher's amusement,
So try reducing his written assignments and tell him that he has to show the teachers that he knows the work. I told James that it was his way of making the teachers realize that he really does know what they are talking about.

Christine Weinandt - posted on 04/20/2009

wow ... sounds totally like two of my kids lol...too smart... figured out how to avoid it..

i have totally found with my aspbergers child...bribes and rewards seldom work... but we have found astrategy that works for us... prob not everyone will agree with our methods....but its the only thing that works for us... well maybe it is sort of a reward system...we have had constant battles with the school.....he has lots of time etc...supposed to have para blah blah......but you can tell him all you want to do it ... no way it happened ever at school... we tried to get school to comunicate with us better so we could do it at home...too much workf or them ...rolls eyes....a few things that helped while we still were at the school....harder classes...honor etc.... alot of aspberger kids really have a very good brain in there... and they dont want to do the work because its boring.. and iep changes.... missing stuff didnt negitivly affect him if he had 90+ on tests.. my son could always ace his tests with doing none of work...that i think drove teachers crazy. It was a full time job trying to get him to get work done at school and then some... and was ever more work to just get school to tell us what to do at home



but in the end we felt he woudlnt graduate no matter how much time i spent talkin to school etc....

he now does online school...some of his friends (mostly kids with aspbergers and autisim) tried it a few years before we did



we got off to very slow start.... had to try lots of diff things but we have a very specific "school day"

i let him stay up late... lol he doesnt have to.. he sleeps til when ever... but when he first gets up.....he pees.. lol.. sorry... then straight to comp... no radio no tv first no eating....nothing else first...its like he just cant get going on school work if he does anything else at all first..



and i give him monster erg drink.... and offer breakfast..usually he refuses lol



now.... if he goes to comp first our day goes like this....colt take a break ... eat ...take a walk take a break lol



if he does anything else first.... colt start our school work.. repeat about a hundred times



now the great thing about online school...........if hes having a crappy day...no prob dont do much work if any if he has a day like he usually has...colt get off comp take a break..... hes always ahead of schedule and can take a break for a few days if he wants....or he can finnish all classes early.. if he sat down and did all work evenly spaced out he would prob spend about an hour a day doing school work....but being he hyper focuses and then cant some days lol....(still should have iep for online schools so late things dont neg affect them) so for us... he never gets dressed or eats or anything first lol...and usually if one of his freinds call him before he starts...might as well give up that day... also....someoen totally needs to be home.... we tried first when i was working ..and son got a desk etc at myhusbands office.... but i dont know about you but my aspbergers child will NEVER ask for help lol he always thinks all is good someoen has to actually physically over see him and look over things now and again to besure hes not missing anything......

Eitel - posted on 04/20/2009

Frustrating is realizing that my post from last night didn't actually post.....Now if I can remember what all I said.



One was to give him the option of writing out the problem on an alternate media (type it, wipe board, etc), that can help him disconnect from the "it's part of my homework".



Alternately, I had a similiar problem that my son encountered when he was required to show more work (he's always been required to write the problems out even if HE didn't need to per our school district's requirements). If he gets stuck on a problem we always taught him to skip that one and come back to it later. Unfortunately it took a few frustrating weeks to realize that he wouldn't do that anymore because he didn't know how much space to leave and didn't want messy papers. We solved it by alotting 1/2 of a page to each problem (I think on his own he bumped it up to 1 page per problem in college), and a "scratch" pad for non-perfect work. I did have to insist that the change from skipping one line between problems to varying whitespace was a requirement of higher level math but clearly he accepted that in the end.

Patricia - posted on 04/20/2009

Does Nick have a 504 or IEP? If so, can you add doing less homework to the document so he doesn't get so frustrated? Instead of 30 problems he does 10? My son has difficulty with writing as well and we dictate a lot of his answers. He likes using the computer as much as possible too rather that writing an answer. We shed lots of tears over the dreaded homework. You are not alone. Good luck.

Ani - posted on 04/20/2009

He doesn't care if he fails. Literally, it doesn't bother him. We looked at an academy for after high school and I am hoping that this is the motivation he needs. I work in IT and so he understands the requirements to get himself to be able to be a programmer. It does help, thank you Eileen. We will keep moving forward. One day at a time.

Eileen - posted on 04/20/2009

My child has Asperger's with the same problem. It has recently improved. I think its because now he thinks he my fail the grade because of it. But we have been working on this idea for 6 months at least. What finally worked is that he finally understood that he has to give the teacher what he wants to get a passing grade.
The other thing that helped (that is in math) is that he has found applications in the real world and needed to figure things out for himself.
I hope this helps. It is a very frustrating problem.

Ani - posted on 04/19/2009

Quoting Eitel:

I'm sorry, I'm not following. Is he not doing the work or just not able to complete it? I assume he has an IEP for a reason and just because he was doing well for a while doesn't mean that he shouldn't still have the extra day. Add to that the fact that research papers throw your schedule off, it's no wonder he's having problems. It sounds like you need to redo his IEP for more time.

Thank you, Eitel.  To clarify futher:

He is not doing the work.  He has the extra day per his IEP.  We are trying not to utilize the extra day.  Even with that extra day, he won't do certain assignments. 

He is two years away from graduating and we are trying to reduce his accommodations and make him more self reliant.  He is extrememly high functioning.

What we are tying to figure out is what is blocking him from doing it.  Why isn't he doing his assignments?   One theory we have is that he's never had to write down math problems to solve for the answer.  He is now in Advanced Algebra and he does have to write the problem to figure out some of the solutions.  This creates an internal struggle for him.  If we could figure out what is blocking him from doing the work, then I could address it.

Eitel - posted on 04/18/2009

I'm sorry, I'm not following. Is he not doing the work or just not able to complete it? I assume he has an IEP for a reason and just because he was doing well for a while doesn't mean that he shouldn't still have the extra day. Add to that the fact that research papers throw your schedule off, it's no wonder he's having problems. It sounds like you need to redo his IEP for more time.

Ani - posted on 04/12/2009

Quoting Debra:

See if they will give him time to complete his homework in class or during a free period at school. My son hid his homework and this is the only way he would get his done. I guess in his mind this is where you do school work...not at home.

He already has more than enough extra time, that's not the issue.  Right now, he is failing many of his classes due to lack of work completion.  He sees a tutor every single day after school.

The problem is that there isn't enough time to complete everything within the allotted time.  He is mainstreamed taking advanced classes and getting ready to go into his junior year.  Although he has an extra day on his IEP, he is to the point where he is expected to do it in the allotted time.  he was doing ok until his research paper.  He's fallen behind in absolutely everything because of this.

Debra - posted on 04/12/2009

See if they will give him time to complete his homework in class or during a free period at school. My son hid his homework and this is the only way he would get his done. I guess in his mind this is where you do school work...not at home.