Oh the Book Report.
Thankfully it is done, and probably turned in by now.
In my quest for her to learn about procrastination “the hard way,” I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to bring it up or say a word about it until the Teen did. She has known about this assignment since the first week of school… in fact, she has the list of dates when all of the book reports are due until the end of the year. (I think there are 6 in total.)
On Monday she said something about it, which was my queue to start asking questions. Even with all of the talk about waiting until the last-minute to do things last week with the science fair proposal, I never crossed her mind to do anything with the book report.
“We are going to start them in class tomorrow.”
START THEM??!?!?!?!
They are due on Friday!!Are you serious? Now the teacher is encouraging the procrastination. So.unbelivably.frustrating. Despite the apparent “starting” of the reports in school the next day, I made her work on that night.
It’s a good thing I did.
Guess who wasn’t in class Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday to “start” them?
Her teacher.
Who thanked me for making her start the assignment on Monday?
The Teen.
Fancy that.
She had about 8 options she could pick from for the assignment. She chose to write an alternate ending to the book she read. Which was “Ninth Grade Slays” by Heather Brewer. It’s some teenage vampire series that her BFF loves, so she started reading them. She’s into vampires right now.. she just finished reading the Twilight Saga.
I guess what she wrote was good. It made sense for what it was.. not having read the book. She worked until after 10 last night to finish. I guess it could have been worse…
I hope she gets the lesson I’ve been trying to teach her. Even if she just picks one day a week and works on it an hour or so… it’s going to be better than something she just scrawled something down on the paper at the last-minute. As much time as she spent rewriting her draft and editing it, I think that is totally the case.
She was trying to convince me that she can “write a good paper in two days.” Which kind of showed me that she really thinks that this procrastination stuff is okay. I don’t think she’s a seasoned enough writer to pull off “good.” I think she could probably write an okay paper in two days.
I’m really curious to see what she gets on this paper.
I’m sure it won’t be an A.
Why won’t be an A you ask?
For starters- she didn’t put the title of the book or the author on it. If she read the assignment- it specifically said it would be lowered one letter grade if it was missing the title and author. How do you write a BOOK report and NOT put the title or author on it? At one point, I made her find the paper to see if there was any specific format she had to use… and I caught that stipulation.
She apparently missed it. I asked her 4 times if there was anything else she needed to put on it. Maybe it was wrong of me to not say anything… Maybe she’ll read the assignment next time. I’m also not sure the format to use dialogue. The way she typed it looked really strange to me. But, she swore that’s how her teacher said to do it.
Oh well…we shall see what happens. I’m sure it will be a week or two before she gets it back. I’ll keep you posted.
A Not-So-Wicked Step Mom 