A Twist of Things to Come

So, our increasing frustration with Big Boy's disappearing homework seems to have been partly solved.

I've been stealing it, you see.

Allow me to explain. He lost his Thursday Folder some weeks ago. That is a folder the teachers use to send his graded work home to his parents. This happens once a week, on Thursday. Only since he lost his Thursday Folder, he has been stuffing his graded papers in his agenda pocket. I take them out and look over them, and then file them away.

Only sometimes he has homework assignments, ones he finished during bus duty or on the way home, in that same pocket. Usually, if it doesn't have a grade on it, I ask him if he still needs it, but sometimes he answers without looking at them, and I'm sure I have forgotten to ask at least once.

Yes, he has also had some assignments that have been genuinely mislaid or lost, but this accounts for the marked increase in missing work. I have been stealing it and filing it neatly in the folder for this semester (I keep absolutely everything until each semester is over-- a practice that has proven helpful in the past when a teacher forgot to record a grade or some such).

Going through the file searching for the rough draft of his narrative project (which he needed to turn in but told me he thought he didn't need to keep it) I found at least two other bits of work that I'm certain we made him do over and turn in late after it turned up "missing."

Poor muffin. He's been getting the stank eye from his teachers and from me about the volume of missing work he swears he has finished. I told him what happened and I sent emails to his teachers, owning up to it. He was pleased because at least now he knows he's not crazy, and that some of his homework did, in fact, mysteriously disappear after he'd done it. Also, it removes some of the suspicion he's had to deal with from his parents (*shame*) and teachers.

Sometimes trying to be an involved parent backfires spectacularly. :D At least he knows that grown ups make mistakes, too and that we own up to them.

Oy.