High Expectations

So, I admit it is not fair. I have even admitted that to Tyler. The fact is, when it comes to school & grades, I expect Tyler to get A's, but with Cameron, I am happy with mostly B's. It's just because Tyler just naturally excels in school, with little effort. Cameron, on the other hand has to put in a lot of effort just to get the B's. Cameron is our creative child, and excels in Art & Band.

I had checked Tyler's grades on line last week, and was very pleased to see he did, in fact, have strait A's. (I am not able to check Cameron's grades online yet, as he is still considered to be in elementary school). Then, I went on again today to check his grades, since the quarter just ended. I was surprised to see that one of those grades dropped to a B+. Now, I admit that is still a good grade, but I also still know that Tyler can do better.

I went into the progress report in that class to see what happened in that week, and saw that he failed the last quiz. I'm not talking he just missed passing it, he failed it....42%!! So I called him up to discuss it with him. Now, to show that I am not completely overbearing about his grades, I did make sure to tell him that his grades were really good. But I wanted to know what happened on that test.

His excuse is that lots of kids did bad on that test. According to him, "She used really hard words on it." I said that if he had studied for it a little, maybe those words wouldn't have been so hard. He disagrees and just kept saying that all of the kids in the class did bad. And then, he wanted to know how much his report card was worth?!

While we do pay them for good report cards, since they are so different, we don't specifically say so much for an A, B and so on. We usually pay both of the boys the same amount. I told him we'd have to wait & see what his dad thought. But in the mean time, maybe he should do a little studying in that class!