Dad reports:
Tommy’s school day yesterday as reported by Tommy:
Bus: Daydreaming and made the bus wait on him
Homeroom: (He is assigned a homeroom but never goes to it) Got to school before the teacher, classroom was locked, so he hung out in the hallway by my class and talked to the other teachers. When the teacher got there he showed her how to get breakfast. Then he surfed the Internet looking for D&D sites (I’d love to look in the cache on that computer and see how many naked pictures are on it!) When I asked, “Why don’t you go to your homeroom?” Tommy replied, “I just don’t.” I said, “Do you know where it is?” He said, “yes.”
1st class (Reading): “I slept”
2nd class (Math): “I slept”
I show up at this point to take him to his psychologist appointment and the teacher’s aid says energetically “We’ve had a GREAT day!” then when I prompted Tommy with “What have you learned?” and he replied “Nothing. I’ve been sleeping” the aid responded with “well, we’ve had a little problem with sleeping today.”
During the car trip to the doctor’s office Tommy acted wacky and I guess worked himself up a bit. At the doctor’s office he sat in the lobby silently passing noxious gas and reading. The doctor took me in the office first and we talked until Tommy knocked on the door and joined us. He was really turning on the immature behavior. We talked together with Tommy about how he has substituted the nose picking for the eye rolling and we even told him he was going to force himself to do the eye rolling since we brought it up (and he did). Tommy insisted “I still do the eye rolling” which has almost completely stopped. When Tommy started making spit bubbles and declaring “I’m not making spit bubbles” I said “Tommy, I can’t sit here and talk while you do that” and I got up and left the room.
After the appointment I took Tommy to the eye glass shop to fix his glasses that he broke when trying to get out of doing school work. Tommy’s mind thinks “If they are fixing my glasses, I can’t see to work” but the consequence was that he went a week with a wad of tape holding his glasses together. Turns out his frame is discontinued so the warantee is gone. I thought I’d be buying him a new pair right there (actually, I wouldn’t do that without coordinating it with an eye exam and checking on insurance coverage). The glasses shop fixed him up with a stem that almost matches his frames. It won’t be long before we are buying him new glasses. He got very excited at the prospect of picking out new frames; however, I don’t see that as a proper lesson. It would reinforce the behavior “break glasses” == “mom and dad buy me new glasses”!
Next I took Tommy home. He wanted to stop at Sonic but I didn’t think his behavior constituted the reward of fast food plus I thought I could use his eatting time to yank the starter from the Jeep. Then as I took him home I could kill two birds with one stone (didn’t happen). After his mother, Tommy and I debated whether or not to keep him home, I decided to let him go back on the school with the urging “to prove us you can work.”
Tommy checked himself in (that was fun just dropping him off and not having to run up to the office with him!), went to his classroom, then to science class where he did not sleep—instead he read a fiction book that was unrelated to the class.
Basically, Tommy blew the day off, did nothing, and was congratulated by his teachers for his outstanding performance!
When he came home he had homework and did it (Mom will have to report the afternoon as I was out of pocket working on the computer and the Jeep) took a break and when I discovered some forgotten math homework he did that too. As I recall, there was much attitude and ugliness in the afternoon and evening. He was so bad that he was sent to bed without a bath (smelly day tomorrow!).