When a Student Falls in the River (grade-wise)

Last month I had a phone conversation with the mother of a student who has been “falling badly behind,” and she’d been meaning to hire a tutor for months. She told me all the particulars, but it’s the same story I’ve heard over and over so many times, I can quote it as well as I can quote The Princess Bride (“boo… BOO!”).

“He is a smart kid - so bright - but it just doesn’t seem to translate to school. He has always struggled with reading (or could be math), and this past year I just feel like the demand is higher, and he’s just sinking, failing several classes, and I don’t know how to help him. Punishing him just seems to make it worse.”

I’ll address the last part first; punishment doesn’t work in these cases for the same reason that torture doesn’t work when the victim genuinely doesn’t have the information. You’re just forcing a lie out of them. When a student himself doesn’t know what to do, you can’t motivate him - either negatively OR positively - into doing it. If you don’t know the steps to the dance, taking away your XBox won’t make you foxtrot.

Usually the issue first shows its head in one class - the one that’s “the most difficult,” or maybe where a disability is affecting the student. Maybe it’s math. But as soon as missing assignments start to accrue, it’s Chemistry too - the second mathiest subject. Two subjects is critical mass; if the problem isn’t addressed soon, you go to check your kid’s grades pages and find that every subject has taken a nosedive (except for Ceramics, which is still a 94. At least there’s that).

This is usually when I get called. Once the grades drop, the student is failing five classes, he has lost his will to even try to get caught up, and the parent feels like their only option is to start filling out the transfer paperwork yet again.

I usually use my car metaphor. Way long ago, before I started teaching, I worked for a time as a car mechanic. There I learned how quickly one problem, one broken thing, when unaddressed, turns into ten broken things. I also learned that a lot of people won’t call in the mechanic until there are ten broken things, and the car has become a hazard to anyone inside or anywhere near it.

There IS a solution, believe it or not. It’s simple, which is not to say that it’s easy. But you have to figure out the first thing that went wrong. What actually caused the problem in the first place? When a student falls in the river, so to speak, plenty of people rush in to fish him out. But that’s only half of it. If you don’t figure out why he fell into the river in the first place, he’s very likely to end up right back in there again.

At the risk of oversimplifying the matter, what I’ve come to find after working with students with all different ages, backgrounds, interests, abilities, and disabilities - is that a LOT of students simply don’t know how to DO school. Many do well enough, follow the rules, stay in the middle of the pack, exert the minimum necessary effort to get a B and keep the parents at bay. But then one day, they get to a grade level where the load on their executive skills simply exceeds them, and it all just starts to slip away. “The teacher assigned something in class, but then something different was posted online, and there’s a standing reading assigned every week, which I’m already a week behind, oh - and the discussion boards which are due every Tuesday, and then there’s a quiz I plum forgot about - and how’m I supposed to get all that done, what, with soccer practice tonight?!” Even the explanation is confused, and it reflects the confusion they feel.

So what to do?

Everyone’s situation is different, but here’s a pretty good plan of attack if you or your beloved child ever ends up “in the river.”

1. Turn In Your Missing Assignments

Missing assignments are the bane of a student’s GPA. They sink your battleship. I don’t think I ever saw a student (at least up through high school) fail a class without having any missing assignments. Lousy test grades? You can survive. Did a lousy job on a project? Yeah, but firstly, your teacher will probably let you re-do it anyways, and even if not - you got a 65 on it, and while 65 is not great, it’s 65 miles away from a 0. Missing assignments are worth 0. It’s the easiest way to drop a letter grade.

It’s also the easiest way to get your grade back up. Go through your Canvas page, make a list of all the assignments you’re missing or have a 0 on, DO them, and then turn them in. You might have to beg. You might have to email your teacher, ask for an appointment. You might have to humble yourself, eat some crow, take a tongue lashing. But even if you get partial credit back (which, you should happily and gratefully accept), watch your quarter average pop up like it just got electro-defibrillated.

You also need to commit to not missing any more assignments. Teachers don’t ever want to say or hear this - but doing a lousy job on an assignment is still WAY better than not doing it at all.

If you’re missing assignments because you DID then, but you “forgot to turn them in,” then you have an issue with task completion, which is an executive functioning skill that we need to talk about. It’s extraordinarily frustrating - like a football team marching 99 yards down the field and then fumbling the ball on the 1. All that work, zero points. You gotta make it show on the scoreboard. You have to get credit for the work you do.

2. Then Find The Killer.

Like I said before, most people stop after #1. I get it - it’s hard enough. Especially when you’re the parent - you’ve had to sacrifice your evenings for the past two weeks to re-involve yourself in your child’s schoolwork. You’re skipping Beer and Blackjack night down at the Rafferty’s to make to-do lists and hulk like a sentinel over your pouty 15-year-old as she drags her heels through another IXL, threatening to take her phone for another week. You’re finally caught up. I mean - she’s finally caught up. Back cards and beer on Thursdays, and business as usual, right? It’s a dangerous gamble either way..

Missing assignments are not actually the killer. They're the dead bodies. The best thing to do is figure out what’s at the root cause. Firstly, rule out the obvious things - if the family pet died two weeks ago, or your child had a romantic relationship come to a sudden and inauspicious end, then the mystery probably ends there.

But if there’s nothing obvious to point to, and it just feels like the sudden flowering of a long-dormant but ever-present weed - then you need to get it at the root. Academic nosedives often follow the same pattern Hemingway equates with bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises - it happens “two ways [...] Gradually, then suddenly.”

It’s true that every student’s situation is different, and there are lots of factors that can play into it, but what most of them - maybe all of them - have in common is this: one of the links in the chain of executive functioning is busted.

Executive functioning (or EF) is just a mouthful of words that basically means, “the 10 things you have to do to do 1 thing.” And there are a bunch of different schools of thought about exactly how many EFs there are, and to what degree of resolution is appropriate for different practical applications, but think about it. In order to do anything you at least need the following:

1. Know what the goal is

2. Resist distractions

3. Get motivated

4. Make a plan

5. Assemble relevant materials and organize them

6. Get started

7. Track your own progress and manage your time

8. Remember relevant information as you work through

9. Persevere through inevitable adversities, and

10. Change up the approach if needed

So this is how I approach the question of how the student fell into the river in the first place. Usually the myriad problems facing the student all share something in common, and it’s one of the links in that chain. I use a model with 10 EFs, (roughly based on the McCloskey model, for those who are curious, because I find it to be the most practical and effective with staging interventions), and the items above are roughly akin to the following executive skills, respectively:

1. Aim/Prioritization

2. Inhibition

3. Emotional control

4. Planning

5. Organization of materials

6. Initiation

7. Self-monitoring

8. Working memory

9. Task completion

10. Cognitive shift

And then we can start. Once you have a proper diagnosis, you have a treatment plan. People only feel desperate and hopeless when it ‘could be anything.’ This is as true of the parents as it is of students. If all you know is that you can’t get upstairs, you feel stuck and helpless. If you find out it’s just one broken stair, the second floor doesn’t feel so unachievable anymore. 

A lot of times I feel like an Academic EMT; I’m first to the scene of a disaster, I get the call about a student who’s on academic life support, and I need to revive the patient. Step One from above is the most dramatic, since we just do all the missing work, and the grades come up out of the red zone, and the family is ecstatic (since Beer and Blackjack is back on, baby!) - but Step Two is the game changer. Finding out the root cause of the problem, and then taking decisive steps to improve the specific executive function that’s gone awry, is like not just fishing the student out of the river (to belabor the metaphor), but equipping him with high traction shoes, a hiking stick, binoculars, and giving him a kayak, just in case.

Click to take a free EF self-assessment