Sometimes, I feel like I'm the only one who takes SD's education seriously. GUBM won't - and we all know that already. SD doesn't seem to have as much self-motivation as she did back in November. And FDH doesn't seem too invested, either. He hasn't once logged on to the online site to check on how many assignments SD is SUPPOSED to be completing so that he can compare the expectation with the reality, nor do I think he's actually logged on to check what she is submitting. He's relying on SD's self-reports that everything is going 'fine.' So, needless to say, he was pretty blindsided - by his own doing - when the school called him on Tuesday to tell him that SD messed up bigtime in December and didn't submit enough work.

FDH had a talk with her in the car on their ride to PGH on Wednesday, and he said that she owned up to the mistake and that she knows she needs to try harder. He told her she's going to have to spend the next week working on school every day, until her next touch-base conference with the school, so that they can reassess how far along she has gotten. She's OK with that. So, he accepts what she says and gives her a chance to prove herself yesterday, and understandably so.

But, what happens? SD messes up. Again. She spent all day goofing around and barely working on one assignment that she didn't finish or submit until today (because she didn't get home until it was bedtime last night). What does FDH do when he finds out? Gives her a "stern talking to" and lets her go out with her friends that night to go play card games. Uhm. What? "It's important for her to socialize with people her age." Yea, well, it's also important for her to follow-through and do the required work before she can go do the fun stuff. I would have made her stay home (he said he knows I would have but that he didn't feel it was "right" because she was "upset with herself", which she should have been! She messed up!). She would have stayed at that table, save for bathroom and food breaks, working on the two assignments she said she would work on (which were literally baby ass assignments that test your comprehension of the material you have already learned).

No consequences were doled out for this yet, FDH is still trying to figure out how to 'punish' her when, in reality, he should have made her stay home last night to do the work she failed to do during the day. I told him that she slacked off all December, got a talk, slacked off yesterday, got another talk and has received zero consequences for her actions. "Well, she got plenty from my talk with her, and I'm going to give her consequences, she knows she's getting some." I never told him she didn't get anything from the talk, but, I imagine that the talk he had with her yesterday was very similar to the talk he had with her in the car on Wednesday and, she didn't get shit out of that talk if she went right back to goofing off and slack-assing on her work. So, he's giving her yet another day to 'prove herself'. *smh* And the consequences remain to be seen.

And, shock, FDH still has NOT looked at the expectations online for this school since this all went down yesterday. So he has no idea what SD needs to do every day to catch up (again) and stay on top of her work. And his knee-jerk reaction when he found out that she messed up on her work yesterday was that he should have stayed home from work to hover over her and monitor her. He needs to stop thinking like that because, if she's here every other month, she'll have one month of a parent hovering over her when she's working and then go back to a house where there's a parent who doesn't give a rat's ass. First off, SD is 14. That's old enough for her to take charge of herself when she's working on school, whether it be homework or homeschool (and I mean legitimate homeschool, none of that bullshit GUBM was pulling). SD has teachers she can talk to, she has FDH, and she has me. We are all literally a phone call, text message, or email away from her at all times. She messed up and didn't utilize her resources that she knows exist. When FDH reached out to her yesterday to see how it was going she said "fine" and didn't let on that things weren't fine with her progress, same as she did ALL December. It's always going "fine." FDH has to start learning that "fine" is SD code for things are not fine.

The plan now is to have SD keep trying the asynchronous online school for a month or so, to see if she can get into the habit of staying on course whether she is here or at GUBM's. If she can't, then she's going into the synchronous curriculum which will have her attending classes virtually on set days each week and provide her with way more structure. And, if after trying that, online school still doesn't work for her? She's going to have to go back to a brick and mortar public school. She said she is tired of the schools in NJ and that she's OK with trying public school out here because everyone in public school in NJ is too mean and the teachers didn't seem to care. I told her "You aren't going to find any unicorns here, SD. There will always be mean people, there will always be issues at school, and there will always be teachers who don't care. So don't be too surprised if you find those same exact things here in PGH schools. But I will tell you this, if you move out here fulltime and attend a brick and mortar school, that's it, you're in school until you graduate. You are not going to 'run away' from those problems. We will help you deal with them if and as they arise, but, you will not run away from your problems."

But, SD needs internal motivation to do the things she needs to do. She needs to be able to monitor herself, manage her time, and do what she needs to do before goofing off and doing the fun things, regardless of what school she is attending. She claimed that she had decent grades when she was in public school in NJ, and that was mostly true with the exception of the last year she was in school. Her grades were not good and every teacher remarked about how her performance did not meet her abilities. She slacks off because GUBM has let her slack off, and FDH is now kind of letting her get away with slacking off. She also needs to learn how to deal with problems rather than running. When things get tough, SD runs away, because that is what GUBM has taught her. School in NJ got tough, and she had a problem with absenteeism, until GUBM pulled her out. When things here were not easy breezy lemon squeezy, she refused to come visit.

I have low expectations of her doing the right thing today for school work. And I have high expectations of FDH making up some excuse as to why she didn't get it all done. I'm hoping to be pleasantly surprised when FDH picks me up from work this afternoon. But, I won't be let down if I'm not. Afterall, I wasn't surprised yesterday when I found out that she did very little work.

But, with the way FDH has been with all of this, I feel like I need to disengaged from the SD school thing, but only with him. I don't want to disengage from school with SD because her mom literally does nothing and asks nothing about school and I can tell that she really enjoys having me come home from work and ask her how school has been going and ask what she has been working on, rather than the typical snark-ass "Have you done ANYTHING today??" nonsense GUBM throws at her. Now, if only FDH would pull his head out of his ass long enough to realize that there are better ways to handle things...

Or, maybe I'll just resign myself to the fact that SD is likely going to slackass her way through life without anyone lighting a fire under her ass.