There is nobody more surprised than me at the current state of BigGuy’s grades through the virtual school.  He is completely done with the first unit in each subject.  Each subject is broken down into roughly 5-6 units.  Here is how it’s going…

It’s taking a metric f*ck-ton more time than I ever imagined.  Seriously.  That’s the first situation.  I’m sure part of this has to do with us just figuring out a rhythm to things.  Like, how long are the interactive lessons for Language Arts…?  And now that I know they don’t have a natural end point for a presumed day’s worth of work, I know to just set a timer for it.  We’re gonna see how that goes.

BigGuy learned that writing out his math problems means he does a LOT better on the first go-round.  Of course, he learned this by force.  He’s able to redo his homework and resubmit it.  I have a policy that he has to resubmit any homework scoring lower than 85%.  Well, he was at 70% the first AND second time he submitted an assignment and he’s supposed to write out his problems.  Part of writing out his problems is that he’s going to need to be able to lay out his work on the paper in a way that is organized and readable.  He couldn’t do that.  But the other part, of course, is showing his work so that problems can be quickly found and identified when he needs help.

Well, on the third go-round, after writing the problems out–he got 100% on his homework.  Suffice it to say that he is converted.

We’ve now spent quite a bit of time getting the hang of the virtual school and I think we can now integrate back in his social studies and science work.  Science is pretty dodgy because we’re trying to study for the Science Olympiad; but we’ll get to working on it.

Crossing my fingers for him.