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Let him fail as to humble him haha!
Nothing got me more motivated to “learn the rules” then the actual percentage/marks at the end, even for subjects I didn’t necessarily care about because marks tap into intj arrogances.
Also, money for grades worked for me (10 bucks for every A, 20 for every perfect). Or at least.. I made my parents pay me for good grades. It was a good system for me! Maybe research for “average kids” when your son is technically 2% of all mbti types and on the spectrum to boot is not all that useful. I think for intj, once you have them set a goal, it’s almost good enough, as they will wrangle around to figure out how to achieve that goal within the parameters of the goal (make sure it’s good parameters because intj can get into shady business like cheating just to say they got it done).
Does he read the comments in your posts? Tell him to read mine and see if he agrees.
Can he be bribed with anime/game fanart.
I will draw him something within a 2-hour timeframe if you do well on your AP Chem exam lol.
/bribing kids
I would like to add that the best part is: if he doesn’t do well, I also don’t have to do anything because I am super lazy and haven’t drawn a thing in months! Win-win both ways!
My daughter-in-law paid a tutor to help her get her ACT math score up and it paid off with a full ride scholarship.
Re: paying for grades
I know someone who does this in a way that seems to work in his family. Each kid signs a contract. Every semester, each A is worth something like $100, each B much less but still something, each C is a wash, and each D or F incurs debt. The dad, who is not rich, says paying big for top grades is worth it because he makes the money back with interest in college merit scholarships. It’s worth it to his kids because it’s real money. Getting straight A’s all year for money doesn’t seem so onerous when one is a teenager looking forward to $1400.
Not everyone will have the same motivators whether internal or external. I know plenty of kids where external motivators are HUGE and on the flipside finding kids who are internally motivated are much harder.
Adding executive function issues to the list? I mean if anyone has any ideas that have actually worked for kids who struggle with EF that would be great!
ps the thought of me spending 2k on tutors makes me ill… I hope the payoff is significant! Then you’ll have your answer! Let us know how it goes.
I tried paying my son to get better grades. It didn’t work. He wasn’t extrinsically motivated enough to get the grades in the first place, and somehow I think that’s correlated with not being extrinsically motivated enough to earn the money.
He’s working much harder this last quarter, now that it doesn’t matter. He’s already been accepted to a school he likes much better for the fall, and I think now he’s interested in better developing skills that will help him succeed there. His grades at his current school (from teachers he doesn’t respect) continue to be irrelevant to him.
It may be hard to find intrinsically motivated kids, but I think it’s even harder to figure out their motivations once you have them.
Extrinsic motivators can work for the short term, mostly for getting through drudgery. Intrinsic motivation is a slower road because it relies on children developing their own desire to do something. It may not appear as effective in short term achievements like tests and grades, but their effect is intended for long term outcomes. It’s about the pattern that is established. A cash payment might work a few times, but will not tap into a love of chemistry or an interest in developing skills for lifelong learning or a desire to solve problems in the world using science (all examples of intrinsic motivation).
I don’t know if hiring a tutor at 189 an hour is the most effective way to support a homeschooled kid studying AP Bio. A homeschooled kid could take AP Bio online at CTY, which comes with an accredited transcript, online class meetings, homework, quizzes, tests, and an online instructor who can communicate via email, phone, and interactive virtual classroom, for 1500. That’s a 30 week class (or 12-week intensive), at 6-8 hours (12-15 hours) a week. If my son were homeschooling for high school, that’s what I’d do (before he started on college extension courses).
I agree with May up there that there may be some type tendencies going on here, haha.
“Showing your work” is basically illustrating for other people what’s going on in your head to show them how you got your answer. I feel like that would be incredibly onerous work for an INTJ. It’s like, “As long as I got the right answer, who CARES how I got it?!”
He is probably hung up on that – on how pointless that process seems – but maybe it would help to point out to him that the neurotypical adult world is filled with seemingly pointless processes like this, so he just has to learn to deal with it. Acing the AP chem test is just another step towards the independence I bet he wants.
My son was pretty averse to showing his work too, resulting in many zeroes for homework. Which he also didn’t care much about.
The only explanation I had that worked for him was that showing your work is a good idea if you’re a daydreamer, because then when you finish your fugue it’s easier to pick up where you left off without forgetting something and getting the wrong answer unnecessarily, or having to start from the beginning again.
As a kid, I often got reprimanded (and even worse had points deducted) for not showing my work on math problems. I hated it, but I hated not having the highest score in the class even more, so I eventually learned to show my work in excruciating detail.
Twenty years later, I was an actuary building hundred page spreadsheets with literally millions of calculations. I also had to review other people’s spreadsheets. They had to review mine.
And you know what, when you have millions of calculations, you “will” make mistakes.
And you know what else, if you haven’t shown your work (which in Excel means often means creating an incredibly long and complicated formula that gets the job done in a single cell instead of spread across 6 or 7), figuring out where you made a mistake, or diagnosing someone else’s error is incredibly painful. It’s also incredibly time consuming.
I agree that the way that most teachers present the idea of “showing your work” seems pointless and maybe even a little bit insulting to someone who really gets the concepts on an intuitive level, but all the most interesting work these days is done in teams, and even when everyone on the team is super smart, communicating about complex concepts is super hard. Learn to leave an audit trail. Learn to love it. It will pay dividends in technical work.
Mr. Butter Passing Robot, I very much agree with your reasons for the importance of showing your work. It’s not just for yourself, your boss, or someone else who you may have in mind but for anyone who either needs or wants to know how you arrived at your conclusions – now or at some time in the future. It informs other people of your approach, assumptions, and the variables taken into account to arrive at your conclusion(s). As you say, work today is more focused on teams and it is more important than ever to communicate your reasoning and logic as to how conclusions were reached. I like your Excel example. I have limited experience using Excel but can very much appreciate its power. It’s the complete package with formulas, text to label, and graphs to illustrate. It gets my highest mark of all the Office programs for its versatility.
Penelope, your son is taking the AP test as I type this comment. He’s doing his best to get the highest score he’s capable. Nobody can ask for anything more. It’s the advice I got from my Dad whenever I did something whenever I somehow felt I wasn’t doing enough. He would tell me that all you can do is do your best and know that you’ve done your best. Your son will take more tests in the future and he’ll get better at taking them because he’ll have more experience. If there’s a will, there’s a way. It applies here and I’m confident that he will be successful with your help. Please write more homeschooling posts.