Is this even reasonable?

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I think it's totally reasonable.

I worried (turns out, unneccessarily) about this for DS, and I had written into his IEP that he had to complete and turn in homework no matter the grade - and that teachers were to contact me immediately if he missed an assignment. Turns out, most teachers at our school will accept late homework, and they were pretty good about contacting me, so it didn't wind up being an issue. However, I've heard of enough kids who've fallen afoul of similar policies (a friend of mine did, and her son has an AIDE!) that I was ready to walk in there asking for this kind of accommodation, just in case.

DS magically developed (with some specifics written into his IEP of course - we told him he needed to write in his assignment notebook EVERY class, and the teacher has to check it; the school does "check-in, check-out" with him before and after school) enough executive functioning to take care of most homework on his own - we got in trouble with classwork, which he was too distracted to complete.

Good luck!

Can't take credit for it. I stole it from my son's neurologist. That's what he explained to me. It's not about him knowing what to do. He knows he is supposed to do his homework and turn it in. He's not stupid. It's about doing what he knows, which is a whole different issue, and has to do with a whole different part of his brain.

I get your point, though I do argue against the "sissy stick." I am not asking them to dumb anything down or make him learn "less" than anyone else. I'm not asking them to give him an A when he doesn't know the content. I just want his grades to reflect what he knows. If he is testing in math a grade ahead of where he actually is, a C hardly seems reflective of his knowledge of 6th grade math. Yet there are probably kids who know less than he does who are getting A's because their brains come hardwired to learn organizational skills. That inequity is so illogical to me.

I know this year's grades are a wash. I am actually looking for what to do next year when he hits 7th grade.

He is using a planning app on his Kindle Fire as of the last couple of weeks and it has been helping him to actually record his homework. Which is a big step up for him. He had at least 8 paper planners throughout the year. Lost them all. And while in general, I am very happy with this school district (we have only been here for 1.5 yrs), I am totally not impressed with the communication about homework. For example, his foreign language teacher emailed me today to tell me he was missing an assignment and she had offered to stay late tomorrow to help him finish it, but he refused (whole other issue), but when I asked him about it, the rest of the class did it almost 3 weeks ago. Um....it's great you are telling me...but why not almost 3 weeks ago?

All of it is very exhausting for both of us. <sigh>

I would also add this to your request: if a teacher doesn't notify you that homework wasn't completed within a day or so (sometimes it takes a day or so for them to check it in) he is then excused from that assignment. You can also ask that teachers sign off on his assignment notebook or whatever he's using - that is a common accommodation and we have it (not that they always comply, but it gives us some leverage if we need it then.)

Absolutely, positively, NOT! Asperger's is NO EXCUSE for not turning anything in on time.

I think it probably is reasonable, but only when arranged before hand. Put into his IEP, this and accommodations like someone mentioned earlier that the teacher's have to communicate with you, or they can't dock him, but I think this sort of thing would have to be arranged at the beginning of the year and might be unreasonable to try to put in retroactively to modify this year's grades.

It sounds like they were definitely not being helpful in dealing with his executive function problems this year, either as an acceptance of the problem and let's cope or as let's get some help in improving the problem, and those should both probably be in his IEP. Maybe take the grades he got this year and show them alongside what he would have gotten with all that completed but lost homework turned in as proof that he needs it added?

Thoughts:

1. Organizational/executive function deficits are part of his disability.
2. They are good skills to have in real life.
3. They have nothing to do with the material content.

So, I think that definitely your son should be given support for this and it needs to be in the IEP. My son has terrible organizational skills, but b/c of his age, I have not had to put things in his IEP, other than just letting them know at every IEP meeting (and getting it in the minutes for CYA) before the next school year that they could expect with 100% certainty that anything transmitted to me through my son verbally would never reach my ears, and that important papers should be put into his folder by the teacher. I also let them know that a general request to turn in your homework to the class, was not likely to be paid attention to, and that homework needed to be taken out of his folder by the teacher. So the teacher was very aware he had these issues and helped him. If I had issues, I would have had to have called an IEP meeting to get that expressly put into the IEP.

I do not think they have to do grade changes retroactively, but I think you do need something for your IEP next year, to redistribute the responsibilities so they do not all weigh on your son, when he clearly needs a lot of scaffolding. The check in/check out requirement as well as teacher's needing to notify you of missed assignments promptly are reasonable accommodations. Scanning and emailing the homework, might be a good accommodation, also, if he is losing his assignments.

I would make it so that he was still expected to turn it in, so that his progress in turning it in could be measured for his IEP, but that the teacher would have the homework electronically, if he didn't. Maybe set up some kind of reward at home for successfully turning in a certain percentage of it, so he doesn't stop trying to remember to do it.

Grading policies are made for a reason. If the teacher starts showing favoritism by ignoring the grading policies set for the course, then it leaves them open to everyone else complaining that their kid should get special treatment as well.

If he is making A's on tests without doing the homework, I suspect that the tests are too easy. When I taught math, it was inconceivable that someone could possibly make an A on any of my tests without doing the homework.

Perhaps you should consider going to college at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico (http://www.sjca.edu/). St. John's does assign grades, but the grades are meaningless. The evaluations are considered important, not whatever grade they assigned.

They even have a library dog named Seymour.

Out of curiosity, one year I accepted homework no matter when it was turned in. The due date was mostly advisory and most students turned it in on the due date.

What I found out was that some students would wait until the last minute before starting on it and often wouldn't finish it at all. And since they hadn't been doing the homework all along, they had no idea how to do the problems on the test, either.

I came to the conclusion that in most cases, accepting the homework late like that did not do any favors at all for the students.

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The reason I tried that was because years before in my Calculus of Variations course in grad school, we had homework due every Monday. The first Monday that homework was due, this one engineering grad student asked if he could see my homework and I obliged. I thought that he was going to compare answers, but instead he took it into a room and copied the entire assignment.

The next Monday he came to my office an hour before class and asked if he could see my homework. I told him the truth, of course, that I hadn't done it yet. He looked rather surprised at that. Every Monday from then on it was the same thing. He would come by my office and ask to see my homework and I would tell him that I hadn't done it yet.

Finally, on the last weekend before the end of the course, I did all the homework for the entire course. Then on Sunday evening, I took it to the department mailroom and put it in the prof's mailbox.

The next morning was the last Monday of classes. Sure enough, the engineering grad student came in and very worriedly asked if I had done my homework yet. When I said that I had, he really brightened up and asked if he could see it. His obvious happiness disappeared as soon as I told him that I had already turned it in.

I haven't been able to get through all of the posts, but I do realize I was not clear about 2 things:

I am not hoping to get this year's grades changed. He didn't meet the standards set forth, so he needs to get the grades he "earned." I am looking at things I can do for him next year. THe discrepancies this year have just caused me to realize that something needs to be done. Such as asking them to weight his test scores and class participation higher and his homework lower. I don't think he shouldn't have to turn his homework in (although maybe having less of it would help), but I think that his mastery of the content should not be overshadowed by his executive dysfunction.

He doesn't have AS. He has ADHD with marked executive dysfunction and NVLD.

Here's another thing...when he was in lower middle school, he did poorly in math. But when they put him in remedial math, he ended up with a 99% average that semester. So they took him out of remedial math. And his grade dropped to a D. Put him back in, and it went back up. Flash forward to middle school. He was not in remedial math the beginning of this year. He was getting a D. They put him in remedial math, and now he is apparently working above grade level as per testing. Weird, right? Though it may be related to the NVLD because math abilities are often affected. His remedials in early elementary involved the use of manipulatives and I think the different instruction helped it to "click" for him.

He is so very frustrated. He's got a bright mind in his head, but because of his wiring, he feels as though he is facing constant failure. I remember being him. It was sometime during middle school that I decided I wasn't smart, after all. I stopped trying to get good grades. I settled for getting "good enough" grades. There is really no reason with my IQ that I shouldn't have gotten straight A's in high school. No reason except that I had ADD and no one realized it, so I was seen as lazy and unmotivated, which I eventually began to believe myself. I don't want the same thing to happen to him. It took me years to learn not to hate school. Years to learn that I actually am intelligent.

We are on much the same teeter-totter with Math - DS is going to be pulled out of remedial math for next year - we'll see how it goes.

I hear those of you who are saying "AS (or whatever) is not an excuse" but please be aware that executive functioning failure is a real thing, and sometimes it takes temporary accommodations for a child to feel safe enough to learn the strategies to do things on time.

InThisTogether, another thing we do that you could ask the school - ours has this for anyone - is to ask that he have someone do his homework with him at school, after school. Take yourself and your home out of the equation, and make sure that he has access to everything he needs. Also, ask that long-term assignments be "chunked," or broken down into small pieces (for instance, if it's a week-long project, I have DS divide it into 5 parts and then do a little every night.)

There's a tightrope to walk here: if a kid (any kid, not just disabled ones) thinks the system is arbitrary and stacked against him, there is a danger he will just stop trying and give up on school entirely - and that can be a lifelong handicap. No amount of being punitive, by grades or otherwise, will change that - you need to find a work-around. If the work-around is simply not counting homework in the grades, and counting it as a separately accountable goal in his IEP, then that seems reasonable to me.

My personal belief is that much of what we call the "achievement gap" is this failure in accommodating the needs of students who don't have the resources to do homework at home.

Accommodation does not mean just giving up, it means finding a way to offer the support each individual student's needs.

I had a real hard time remembering to do homework or getting started on it. in my IEP it had something about my teachers signing off on my assignment book and emailing my mom when I did not turn things in. at the time I really hated it because it forced me to do the work but in the end it was beneficial

I definitely think it is reasonable to ask for accommodations next year for executive function issues. Based on what I have read on here, you will unfortunately have to keep an eye out to make sure accommodations agreed upon in your IEP are lived up to, whether it be a differently weighted grading or a different set of accommodations. Some teachers are good about it, and some are not.

So, if you end up with anything like a homework notebook that needs to be signed when things are turned in and assignments written down and that kind of thing, you will have to make sure the teachers are complying. This way if they aren't you can get things straightened out, right away. I know it is probably obvious, but I just wanted want to throw it out there.

My son, too, but here is what I decided when he was your son's age: at some point my son has to learn how to play the game in the world that exists, as opposed to the one we all think should exist, and middle school is the training ground for it. I played administrative assistant to my son, I got him enrolled in academic support partly so teachers could review his binder and check assignments and make sure things got turned in, etc; I taught him to check the on-line systems that track grading, I joined a task force hoping to change the grading rubric for all students, my son and I spent hours venting about how unfair grading rubrics are, and I cried to myself about the loss of a world where school was the place kids like ours - who really KNOW things - could shine.

And then I let go and taught my son to play the grading rubric game.

It isn't just school. The work world looks a lot more like the modern grading rubric - heavy emphasis on organizational skills and getting things done on time - than the pure academic model our kids would get A's in. As much as I hate it, my son is going to have to face a world in which people who aren't as smart as he is are more likely to have business success. Unless, of course, he becomes the next Bill Gates - and maybe he will But real life involves knowing that being smart and having control of the material is not, by itself, enough.

So I railed against the realities of the world and then taught my son how to survive in them. I had to sell my son on why he should bother, get him to focus on his personal goals for his adult life, and that was probably the most difficult part. The "game" is something I know how to play; the "why" agree to play part is something I'm more morally conflicted about. Long run, the choice will be my son's, but he needed to know what that choice really was, and how his decisions now might affect his adult life (emphasis on might; few roads take you places you can never, ever, return from).

The book, "The Trouble with Boys," by Peg Tyre, is a very interesting read on why boys like ours struggle in the current rubrics, and it gave me a big rallying cry for a while. But, as I thought about the business world, I realized that my son will rarely have the privilege of functioning in systems that either of us would ideally want, and so he might as well get that difficult lesson today.

There is also another important message in that book, and that is many boys are not developmentally ready for the organizational expectations placed upon them in middle school. Your son may not be unmotivated as much as simply not in the right developmental space. And the schools are not going to step back for that, so we step in, and help our kids through the gap years best we can. Because if no one does, the child will check out and give up. It is frustrating because it isn't just ASD kids; all sorts of kids can't survive the grading rubric for purely developmental reasons. But, heck, real life waits for no one, either, and so I moved on and helped my son through it.

But I do wish he could have had what I had in school: those shiny years where you are rewarded simply for being smart, without having to do much else.

Life isn't like that right now. We just deal with it.

Do consider getting teacher assistance with the organizational skills and paperwork as an accommodation. Many families here have done various version of that and it really does help. And the schools can be talked into it.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 12 Jun 2013, 11:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

That is interesting, b/c it is almost exactly how I split it up when I was a teacher, only it was 40% tests 30% labs and projects, 20% classwork (participation - we weren't allowed to give a participation grade) and 10% homework. I also allowed ALL students to correct tests/work for half the points lost back, tried to give hw a week in advance for those students who were busy and kept extra copies in a folder by the door for kids to pick up at the last minute. If a student was making an A average without hw, they were excused from HW, and notebook checks. Basically, I used these to boost grades for kids who struggled with test taking and writing skills on the labs. I scheduled time for organizing, kept folders (portfolios) in the classroom with only a small homework folder to go home.

As for your question, if the goal is for him to learn the skill, then scaffolding accommodations are necessary to support and build the skill. So there should be some reasonable expectation, meeting his ability, and providing a small challenge goal, natural consequences when he does not do what he is capable of doing, and reward for meeting the challenge. The proposition for limiting the consequence makes sense as a part of this, but the real question is what are they doing to build this skill (and just telling him to do it won't work). It is not always about the organizational products btw, but often about the personal checks and balances. For example, my NT daughter does well with an organizer, folders, lists, email reminders, and a calendar. She does pretty good at staying organized, with only a little motivation here and there. My AS son does better with a scheduled time each morning and each afternoon in the special ed room with the aide to dump his folder and backpack, check his locker, and putting all the things to turn in in one folder to carry from class to class, and all the things to take home in one folder to take home. He just cannot keep it organized during the day.