That explains a lot.....

It is the end of term at school and all of the assignments are due. The writing teacher let the kids look at their progress report in the middle of the week so they could make up any assignments that may be missing.

Chance was missing 3 sets of journal entries which totals 15 pages total. And he got zeros on every spelling test.

Huh?

So Chance spent a pleasant if not slightly annoying night at the kitchen table writing. And writing. And writing.

Chance was adamant that he had done the work and I felt for him, but as I told him,"If the teacher has no record of it, you have to do it again."

And after all of that work, Chance came home on Friday with all of the pages still in his binder because he forgot to turn them in.

Naturally, I was annoyed that all of that work might go for naught, so I drove him back up to the school to turn the papers in so he could get credit for his work. Chance explained to me that he had therapy every Friday during writing and that is why he forgot to turn his work in. That made sense. If he he didn't attend class, it would be easy to forget to turn in the work.

We met his teacher in the hall as she was coming out of faculty meeting.

As we were talking, the teacher mentioned that Chance was marked absent in writing that day. I told her that he was in therapy and that is why he forgot to turn in his work.

His teacher paused and then asked,"Does Chance have therapy every Friday?"

When I explained that he did his teacher responded,"Friday is when we call for the journal entries and take the spelling tests. Chance probably didn't have any idea that we were calling for journal entries."
It was a moment when a light bulb went on for both of us. Chance's missing assignments were due to the fact that Chance was never in class when they were called for. We were scratching our heads at home trying to figure out why our very conscientious and driven Chance would be missing so many assignments. It would also explain why we could find several journal entries in Chance's various notebooks yet they had not been turned in.

The writing teacher explained that each Friday, the writing teachers took turns teaching the lessons so each teacher only taught every 3rd Friday so no one had realized that Chance was gone each Friday.
WHEW! This explained a lot.

Chance was adamant that he had been doing the assignments and seemed genuinely confused as to why he had so many zeros on his progress report.

So, now we can work on the logistics of letting Chance turn in his assignments on Mondays (after having time to make up Friday's journal), so he is getting credit. Also, we can arrange for Chance to take the spelling tests on another day.

Spelling is one of Chance's strongest points which has always amazed me since he spent several years not hearing the words he spells. He can spell words he doesn't even know the meaning of. Due to this fact, I told the teacher that Chance could probably take the missing spelling tests right then which he did. 100 percent as I expected.

So, the moral of this story is, we need to communicate with the proper teachers and therapist so that everyone knows what the schedule is and so Chance does not go crazy wondering what in the world the expectations are :)