Sorry to Interrupt your Saturday

It's been a busy weekend down here in My Beloved South (the Civil War Sesquicentennial, dontcha know?) but I did manage to squeeze in some grading on Friday night and Saturday night.  The rest of it will have to wait until Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, we've been doing our Dragon Project in class, which is an exercise in genetics, heredity and a whole lot of Punnet squares.  This is, from the comments I get from former students, one of their favorite things we do all year and the kids really enjoy it.  It's a four day, in-class project, worth 200 points, so it can really boost a kid's grade if he or she actually puts forth some effort. 

So, I'm grading the projects yesterday and I come to Goober Boy's.  He has done half of the first page of an 8 page assignment (a lot of which is coloring dragons to represent their phenotypes).

That is all.

25 points out of 200.

In four days.

Of class work.

Really.

Well, ordinarily, I wouldn't pick up my home phone on a Saturday and call a parent (I'd usually email, and I do a lot of that on the weekend, even though, as the mythology goes, teachers don't work after 2:30 on a weekday afternoon).  However, I know this parent pretty well.  I've had Goober Boy's cousins and his Aunt was one of those parents I'd like to keep forever.  She was that good.  And his parents are cut from the same cloth.

So I picked up the phone and called and got Mom on the line.

She was (a) shocked I'd call on a Saturday, (b) beyond annoyed that Goober Boy did nothing, and (c) promised that if I'd give him a second chance he would get that assignment done and turned in.  I mentioned to her that this nine weeks has pretty much been an exercise in goofing off, giggling, and not doing work and she mentioned my email from the week before about low grades.  She stated that Goober Boy said that "reproduction is really hard" and I had to bite my tongue at that one.  (The possibilities of snarky and sarcastic comments are nearly mind-blowing with a statement such as that.)  I did mention that never once did he raise his hand to ask for help, and that I've talked with him about that as well.  She agreed that she thinks it's simply a matter of not wanting to do the work (honestly, the kid should be a solid B student), rather than not understanding the work.  

He will be removed from his lab group and will have a new seat when we return on Tuesday.  He also will be making up all his missing work and knowing this mom, she'll see that it gets done.

However, I really would have enjoyed hearing her conversation when Goober Boy after we ended our call on Saturday.  From her tone, it would not have been fun for him in the slightest.