Jane's Posts

June 1 1998

Your stepdaughter sounds an awful lot like my son. The seemingly twitlike things she may do, like not telling you why her teacher wanted you to call her, are not lies; she may very well actually not have known what her teacher wanted. Perhaps she was daydreaming or staring out the window when her teacher was explaining about the party that first day, or she heard it but promptly forgot it because her mind was buzzing with something else. Then the next day she did pay attention when her teacher talked about the party. She couldn't answer you when you asked why she hadn't told you about the party because she truly had not remembered what her teacher 's phone number was for.

Some children just have an awfully hard time concentrating; the educationese for this is 'staying on task.' When my son was in the early grades, we would ask him questions about some event going on at school and he would consistently not know, yet his best friend would pipe right up with the answer. My son has all of the problems your stepdaughter has in class concerning completing assignments; it has frequently happened that he hasn't even known what the assignment is, or if he does complete it he'll forget to bring it to school, or bring it in and cram it into his school desk and forget to hand it in when due. I think it definitely is a type of learning disability. What we have done is talk to his teachers to work out a system of reminders for him - things like having the teacher check his assignment book daily to make sure he has written the assignment down correctly, or make sure he brings home the correct study materials.

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This also sounds like my 10 year old daughter. It is one of the great challenges of my life to get information about school out of her. One thing that has helped this year is the planner that all the fifth graders get. Even so, if I don't stay on top of things, I just can't keep up.

I agree with this post. I just want to add a couple of things:

If you talk to both her current teacher and her teacher 2000 miles away you may be able to figure out whether this typical of SD or a recent development.

Class size makes a huge difference in kids staying on task.

For some reason, elementary school teachers (and a lot of pediatricians) don't seem to think of the possibility of ADD with girls.

Try not to get frustrated. My daughter is actually getting better as time goes on.

jane