III's school curriculum is all online. It is a good curriculum for the most part, but sometimes the assignments are extreme. Last week they suggested that he visited the Linneaus' Museum in London to better understand the assignment on animal classification. Obviously, we skipped that one.
He is supposed to read through his work and make a judgement call each day on which parts of the assignment he should complete. He makes a list of things he thinks he should skip because they are too diffiuclt or too involved. (Examples would be trips to London, science experiments that involve live electricity, assignments that involve reading a whole book for one day's work, and things like that.) We are trying to work on his ability to understand what is reasonable and what is extreme.
Earlier this fall, he started "hiding" assignments from us. If he didn't want to do it, he would "forget" to put it on the list. Of course, we check behind him each day, so it NEVER worked. We ALWAYS caught it. Then, if possible, we had to assign him the extra work because it became an integrity issue.
One of his lessons on Nov. 11 assigned him to read a historical fiction book about the Civil War and write tons of stuff about it. It was a HORRIBLE, lenghty, useless assignment and I never would have made him do it, but he chose to "forget" to put it on his list the day after we had sworn that if he ever did that again, he would have to do the assignment "no matter what."
He turned in one messy, misspelled, poorly punctuated version of the book report in December, and got told to do the whole thing over. I am glad to say that after almost 4 months of drudgery, the book report is finished.
Unless you also home school a mule, you can't know how exciting this is to us!!!! What a dark cloud has lifted at our house!
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