flowerbug
Super Self-Sufficient
he may find more motivation for school work when he can start tying it into things that he experiences and sees and feels. like feeling sick after eating school lunches... so try to gently encourage him to work at this more and try to tie it to more concrete things for him.
in many ways i was barely coasting through high school and didn't know i was going to college until halfway through tenth grade. by that time i wasn't on a college prep schedule and missed a few important classes i didn't even know existed or what they were for. even coasting i had good grades and was bored to no end. i was trying to get into a technical electronics program that was taught at another location for the afternoon of my last year of high school but they didn't have the money for bussing kids there that year so no luck with that. i ended up repeating some science classes because there was nothing else and in those the science teacher had me helping him with other classes he was teaching. that was more fun and interesting.
when i took the college entrance math exam i managed to do well enough on it to place directly into the first calculus class but i was so lost i flunked it (a five credit class). i really needed the pre-calculus class (i never took one - in retrospect i should have taken that before any other classes it would have helped). i struggled my whole way through the entire calculus sequence and then was so glad to have it done.
well that all said to get back to the topic...
somehow to encourage DS to be more engaged with school work when he has some topic that it would fit with. you can always encourage this sort of thinking in himself by asking him questions about it and to see if he can think of ways to tie it to things he likes. for me one thing that tied basic math to reality was that i enjoyed following the stock market and learning about savings and investing (though i could not do any investing until later on).
