Monday was Veteran’s Day, which in our area means a lot parents have the day off and kids have a half-day. Our school district takes advantage of parents’ availability by scheduling parent-teacher conferences on that day (and the following day, which is also a half-day for the kids). We scheduled a meeting with June’s morning teacher in the early afternoon, soon after school let out, deciding a meeting with the afternoon teacher was unnecessary as I’d been in her classroom to observe during the Columbus Day Open House, and just the week before to attend the second-grade publishing party.

Our meeting with Señora J was pleasant and uneventful.  June’s doing fine in her class and her grades are very good. The only thing Señora J had to suggest was that she check her work more carefully and speak up in class more.

In middle school you don’t make appointments, you just show up and stand in the lines that snake from the tables where the teachers sit in the gym and the cafeteria. So that’s what we did. We hit the gym first and eyed the huge lines for Noah’s English and World Studies teachers. For a five-minute chat with each of them, we’d be in that windowless room two hours—I got out of line briefly to talk to Noah’s Spanish teacher, who had almost no line, before re-joining Beth in the English teacher’s line. His algebra teacher wasn’t too swamped either so after we talked to the World Studies and English teachers, we saw her too.

It was no surprise the seventh-grade magnet English and World Studies teachers had mammoth lines.  It’s IDRP season—that stands for Interdisciplinary Research Paper. It’s due in a month and if the attendees of parent-teacher conferences are any gauge, the parents are nearly as stressed about it as the kids.

We told most of Noah’s teachers about his slow processing.  (See “His Different Mind” 7/20/11.) And we explained how it might affect 1) his class participation—it’s sometimes hard for him to formulate his thoughts quickly enough to participate in lively discussions—and 2) homework completion—sometimes it’s just impossible for him to finish.  We understand his grades will reflect what he produces and don’t expect anything else, but we wanted the teachers to know he’s not blowing things off; he’s doing his best. Noah’s first quarter grades were actually quite good, almost all As, but I think it’s helpful for his teachers to know a bit about his learning style. For some of the teachers, it seemed to be just the piece of the puzzle they need for Noah to make sense.  Right before I explained why Noah sometimes doesn’t talk in class, the Spanish teacher said he often appears to be daydreaming, but “he knows everything,” sounding a little baffled as he said it.

By the time we’d finished in the gym, it was time for the teachers’ break and we still had three teachers to go. We had to kill forty-five minutes so we took June, who’d been patiently (and then not so patiently) reading and drawing for two hours, to Starbucks for a treat before we headed back and saw Noah’s science, media, and band teachers in a little over a half hour. The media teacher said Noah is a good independent learner and “isn’t afraid of technology.”  When Beth asked about the procedure for trying out for honors band the band teacher explained the application was due a month ago (at which point the kids got their audition music) and auditions were the very next day, so he couldn’t audition.

Beth and I were both disappointed, because Honors Band was such a great experience for Noah last winter. When we asked him about it, he dug around in his band folder and found the band teacher’s invitation to apply, the form, and the music he had not practiced. He said he’d just assumed he wouldn’t have time to play in two bands. This seemed especially sad because recently when Beth asked him what his ideal class schedule would be he said all media and band.

Over the course of the afternoon spent standing in line we chatted with other parents, and in two cases mothers mentioned in a casual sort of way that school (academics, not social aspect) frequently make their children cry. One said she would count the evening as a win if her daughter didn’t cry hysterically while working on her IDRP outline and wasn’t up until one a.m.  Here I considered the fact that while Noah’s often up past his 8:45 bedtime on school nights, we never let him stay up half the night, no matter what he’s done or hasn’t done. Sometimes Beth will drive him to school in the morning so he can carve out a little work time before school and sometimes he just doesn’t finish his work, although he usually does.  I can’t imagine letting him stay up until one a.m. He’s only twelve, and growing like, well, like a twelve-year-old boy. He needs his sleep more than he needs a perfect grade on the IDRP.

So, what is this IDRP? It’s the biggest project in seventh grade and from what I’ve heard from parents whose kids have finished the Humanities program at Noah’s middle school the most difficult project during the whole three years. Parent after parent has told me, “It will be better after IDRP,” and I believe it (partly because of all the parents who told me, correctly, that fifth grade is easier than fourth at the Highly Gifted Center). Sixth grade was intense, but usually manageable and often fun, especially their GreekFest projects (See “All the World’s A Stage” 5/7/13). And in eighth grade, the payoff year, they take a five-day trip to New York City and make a documentary film, which I’m confident Noah will enjoy.

Meanwhile, we have IDRP, the middle child of the Humanities program, an eight to ten-page research paper, researched partly at a university library. The kids took a two-day field trip to the University of Maryland last month (and then Beth took Noah back so he could have more time with his sources). Noah’s topic is product liability law. He took an interest when we visited Cedar Point last summer and he and Beth had a discussion about amusement parks’ liability when something goes tragically wrong on a ride. The two of them have talked a lot about his paper and she says he’s very engaged and knowledgeable about the topic when you talk to him about it.  He’s just not so keen on communicating his knowledge in written form.

It’s been a big week for IDRP.  Noah had to turn in his second set of thirty-five note cards on Monday, and then an outline with an introductory and a concluding paragraph the very next day. Knowing how close these assignments were spaced, we’d hoped for him to finish the note cards a week ahead of time so he could have the whole weekend to work on the outline, but it didn’t happen.  In fact, he didn’t finish the note cards until the very end of the weekend before they were due.

I kept thinking he was almost done, when he’d reveal another requirement of the assignment he had not mentioned previously. So, when he was almost finished with the thirty-five cards (five to go), he reported that the cards needed to cover ten sources and he’d only done five.  And when he’d almost finished covering ten sources, we learned he was supposed to have five primary sources and he only had two. The finish line kept retreating further away the closer he seemed to get to it.

So, the note cards were completed and turned in on Monday (minus one primary source), but even a whole afternoon and evening courtesy of the half-day was not enough time to write the outline and the two paragraphs. (Go ahead and guess when we found out it wasn’t just an outline due Tuesday? Did you guess Monday? You’re right!)  We let him stay up past ten and he turned in a solid introductory paragraph and an outline but no conclusion.

All this time Noah had, understandably, been letting some of his other work slide. He didn’t do his math on Monday and there was a big World Studies reading with questions due on Wednesday.  Yes, Wednesday, right after grueling back-to-back assignments for this very class on each of the two days previous. (I joked while standing in line for the World Studies teacher that we should open with, “Why are you tormenting my child?).

Anyway, Tuesday was another half-day so I thought he could get it done. He got home around one and buckled down to work.  About an hour and half, he told me he’d just realized he’d been reading the wrong chapter.  He didn’t seem that upset, but I had that familiar feeling of progress dissipating, like a mirage retreating back to the horizon.  And this was when the line from “Lady Madonna,”—“Tuesday afternoon is never-ending” flitted through my mind and I posted it on Facebook.

“Noah, I’m so sorry,” I said. And then I advised him to save his answers in case they had to read that chapter later.  Oh, they did, he said. That one was due on Friday.  Okay, an assignment for Friday was half done. I felt a little better. Noah got to work on the right chapter and worked on it until five-thirty, shortly after June and I got back from her violin lesson. Then it was time for the rest of his homework.

Through the rest of the week, I kept hoping Noah would be able to write the overdue conclusion, but he didn’t. He doesn’t get home until four-thirty most afternoons because he has band practice and of course he had homework in other subjects. He wrote it this weekend, though, because the rough draft of the paper is due the week after next and he wants to take the conclusion to his conference with his English teacher this week.

This weekend we excused him from vacuuming and cooking dinner so he could work. As of last night, he’d done a math packet, practiced drums, and written two pages of rough draft, including the introductory and concluding paragraphs. I thought I saw light at the end of the tunnel, but then he spent four hours on Sunday, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., writing a thirty-second speech for media and he still had more media assignments to do before he could even go back to IDRP. It will all get done somehow, and my worrying about it doesn’t help, but I think it’s going to be a long month.