Whenever I ask my son if he has homework, he says no. When his progress reports come out, he has several zeroes for missing homework. We ground him, he says he is sorry, and then the same thing happens again. Why does he lie? He knows our family values honesty above everything else. We are so disappointed in him. 

I am so thankful that you asked me about this. It is a classic problem, about which most parents react the same way with the same worry. First, WE ARE NOT DEALING WITH A VALUE TRAIT. We are almost always dealing with students who just forget. They may be distracted by TV; the teacher may have announced it at the end of class, and he missed it; or there are long-term projects that he thinks he can do the night before it is due.

He isn’t lying to you out of a character flaw. In that moment he thinks he doesn’t have homework. WE ARE DEALING WITH SKILL DEFICIENCIES. There are basically two: one is not correctly recording assignments in a place where he remembers to retrieve it; the second is an unformed ability to estimate how long an assignment will take.

I suggest two changes. One is NEVER AGAIN ASK IF THERE IS HOMEWORK. The reason for that is that there is ALWAYS HOMEWORK. He may have weekly assignments he can do such as reading an article on current events or on science, other reading, a book report, or even extra-credit work. He can always clean out his book bag and binders, putting graded papers in the right sections. 

Therefore, now knowing that he has homework every night, it is your job to protect and enforce a study time: no electronics or interruptions. This protection of time and space is vitally important to students; they need to know you will support them in this way. 

My kids are in a great school with wonderful teachers who are trying hard, even with thirty kids in their classes. What can I do to say thank you? I know the Parents Association sponsors a Teachers Appreciation Day, but I want to do some little things along the way. My husband and I work and I have very little extra money, so I am not talking about gifts, but surely there is something I can do, when the teacher has stayed late to help my daughter or even given my son the motivation to write an essay (he’s a great football player!) A thank you note seems pretty lame. Any idea?                        

You and your kids are why teachers teach. Believe me, a thank you note is mighty special these days. All of us have become careless about writing letters. One teacher told me that on one holiday she made gifts for all of her students and not one child or parent wrote a thank you note. Your note will be held dear, I promise. There is nothing like a kind word from a mother or father’s heart. I keep thank you notes I receive on my refrigerator until I replace one with another one!  

How about your son offering to wash the teacher’s car? Bake a casserole some weekend for the teacher’s freezer. Offer her an hour some weekend to cut, paste, staple, collate or box his or her materials for students. Brainstorm with your family ways to say thank you, and say thank you every time you see the teacher.

I do not understand why my daughter can just rattle off her spelling words correctly and then fail the spelling test. HELP!

This is such an important question to raise; thank you for posing it. The phrase “rattle off” makes me think that your daughter is studying the words orally. A student needs to study in the same manner in which they have to reproduce the word on tests. This means she needs to write them as you pronounce them to be able to write them on a test.

My son has an unusual academic problem which we cannot figure out. He is a good student and a fine young man, who tries hard to achieve honor grades, which he usually does. The paradox is that he usually scores all the possible points on essay questions on tests, but the essays he writes for his homework and his research papers are low C’s. I thoroughly agree with the teachers’ grading. The papers are disorganized and do not have the flow of thinking that he demonstrates in a test situation. We could understand it if it were the other way around and he suffered from test anxiety, but that’s when he performs the best. He works hard on these papers; he may sit at the computer for hours over a weekend, turning down invitations from friends (he is well liked and has good friends). What are we missing?

I am thrilled you asked about this because I had a student precisely like this who struggled for weeks and weeks trying to figure out what was going on. I read his drafts of papers, which were awful. If I didn’t know the student and didn’t know for a fact that he wrote them, I would have thought someone else was writing them.

THE PROBLEM WAS THAT HE WAS TRYING TO COMPOSE HIS DRAFTS ON A COMPUTER. When he then wrote his initial drafts by hand, he had great papers. He was reluctant to invest that kind of time, but fortunately we had worked together long enough that he trusted me when I said, “In the long run this doesn’t take longer because you won’t need nearly as many drafts.”

It worked. He got A’s on papers. However, every once in a while, he just had to try to write the first draft on the computer and, sure enough, he would write a C paper.

Have your son try this. Another slim possibility may be that he is trying to write papers while watching videos or TV. Inasmuch as screen time is audio and video, it does produce lower quality work. The effect of music in the background varies from student to student; some can do it, and some cannot.