What to Do with Bear

Sharon - my limited experience with school toilets is that they are grim. Fortunately it all seems to be dying down, according to bear.

We had a report today, via email. Bear is doing okay. He may be doing better than okay, but I don't really understand the whole of the reporting system. Apparently green is 'at expected level' and bear is at that for a third of the marks, and the rest are higher. So that's okay and probably good. Possibly quite good. It's hard to tell.

And as usual, it has a story within it. Bear utterly aced French (apparently) even though he loathes it. I have had far too many bitter complaints about French and the necessity of learning the words to have expected much, but he totally rocked it, with the top grade in both effort and attainment (I think). For Drama he has put in more effort than he got attainment, and I'm good with that. As long as he has put in the effort, I will tolerate a very poor attainment mark (he is at level expected of his age). He has an excellent attainment mark in RE, which is a change from last year. I gave him a pass on that last year, as long as he worked hard at other subjects. This year he has gone for it with gusto. However, as it involves him diving into stuff like arguing about ethics and philosophy, I may regret this. He can already argue rings around me. I should add that his effort in this is only at 'expected' so I think it comes down to him being naturally argumentative.

All in all, he has quite a few subjects where his attainment is far higher than his effort. This means that motivating him is something of a challenge. If he can just coast along in, for example, physics, and get what I think is the top mark, why should he put in more effort. I also suspect that while he has a good mark for effort in English, he may have been blagging the teacher as he hasn't got a good attainment mark for that, and he is more than capable of good marks there.

He is going to get a reward, separate from Christmas and his birthday, but I am still left with wondering how to encourage him to up his effort. Also, to be honest, I'm going to spend some time being smug as I am incredibly proud of him.

Hugs to all.