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I have something to
confess. Whenever I see all those magazine articles
with wonderfully organized children's rooms or home
offices, I want to throw the magazine across the
room. You see I tried a lot of those
wonderful ideas with my son, and all it did was
cost me a lot of money in organizers and time in
arranging things. Two days after the intensive
reorganizing project was complete and his room
looked wonderful, I opened the door to his room to
ask him a question. Here's what I saw:
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Another
entry from my "Good Ideas Gone Horribly
Horribly Bad Files"
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So... before you go
investing in all those wonderful space organizers,
talk with your child and see what ideas they have
to help them organize themselves. How many parents
have spent good money to buy desks that never get
used because the student prefers to lie on the
floor to do their work? File cabinets or organizers
also sound great, but if your child merely throws
last night's snack into them and closes the drawer,
this isn't going to work.
Having totally
separate work areas for different activities may
work for some children or adults. Make sure that
they have a complete set of supplies at each
workstation, however, to discourage items being
removed.
Children and
teenagers with EDF are notorious for losing their
belongings or necessary homework materials. All too
often, however, we mistakenly attribute their
behavior to lack of motivation. When you realize
that they are also losing their most valued
possessions, too, you may start to wonder about
whether the problem is really motivational or if
there is a neurocognitive problem.
If your young child
or student is always losing pencils, pens, or other
supplies, berating them won't help. Parents can
send in an extra stash of supplies to be kept in
the closet so the student can help himself to his
own supplies when he needs them without having to
go around trying to borrow supplies or interrupting
the lesson. Teachers: if you sent home a note
asking the parents to send in extra supplies and
they haven't, well, it may be that your note never
got delivered due to disorganization -- or maybe
the child is a 2nd generation disorganized soul and
the parents are just as disorganized as the child.
In that case, you can set up the stash and let
children who lose supplies know where they can go
find the extras.
And finally -- and no
matter how much Prozac you have to take to steel
yourself for this -- schedule a weekly time when
your child will clean out their desk and clean
their room. Children with EDF will get quickly
overwhelmed. If you let them put things off even a
few days, the job may become too immense for
them.
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Students with EDF
tend to have major problems associated with
homework. One of the most obvious obstacales to
homework completion is the frustrating reality that
despite what are often the best of intentions, the
assignment or the materials do not make it home.
"But I know I
put it in my (folder, backpack) before I left
school" is a common report.
Somewhere, there is a
huge bus terminal for yellow school buses that are
filled to the roof with all of the assignments and
papers that never made it home or if they made it
home, never made it back to
school.
Some teachers have
gotten very creative about how to provide support
for assignments or materials. Certainly, there is
the use of the Internet for posting the homework
assignments on the teacher's web site, and students
can be told that they can find daily assignments
(and long-term assignments) on the web site. Some
teachers, if their classroom is on the first floor
of the building, have taken to taping a copy of the
assignment to the window so that the student who
comes back to school can stand outside and read the
assignment to see what they are supposed to
do.
Assuming that the
student brings the necessary assignment and
materials home and actually completes the
assignment, there is always a good possibility that
the assignment never gets turned in. The student
may search and search his bookpack, where he knows
he put it, but not find it. It, too, is in that
fantastical school bus somewhere, with all of the
other EDF students' papers, signed parental
permission forms, signed report cards, and lots of
fascinating things.
If the student tends
to lose important papers by the time she gets to
school, parents and teachers should try to think
creatively about how the student can turn the
assignment in on time (assuming it's been done). In
some cases, I've had students use email to send
their teachers their assignments. In other cases,
I've had students use their family's personal fax
machine to fax their homework back to the school
when they've completed the assignment. I still ask
the student to bring in the original homework and
try to turn it in normally, but their "backup" is
that they have taken responsibility for getting it
to the school before class. I do not encourage the
parents to take on this responsibility -- what
I am doing is giving the students an
alternative way for them to meet their
responsibilities. Yes,. sometimes it may be
necessary to give students an accommodation such as
"no penalty for lateness," but if we are trying to
prepare them for life after school, the reality is
that there frequently is a penalty for lateness --
we have to meet our work deadlines or we may lose
our job, we have to pay our taxes on time or we may
pay a penalty. Hence, whenever possible, I try to
downplay the "no penalty for lateness" if the work
is done, and focus on how to successfully turn it
in so that the student gets credit for their hard
work.
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