Nathan's school called on Thursday, and told me he had another meltdown. They said they want his meds re-evaluated. They might have a point - it has been years since the prescription has been changed. However, I'm not thrilled with the idea of making the dose stronger, when he is frequently complaining of headaches.
I had wanted to get him off of those drugs. I'm still not convinced he has ADHD. I believe it's the autism that causes him to get so riled up. Even the tests the school had run on him showed without a doubt that he doesn't have ADHD! Yet they were the ones that pushed so hard to get him on drugs in the first place and made their references to the psychiatrist!
In the past two weeks, we have been averaging about 3-1/2 hours of homework a night on a school night, and up to six hours on weekends. This has got to stop. At this point, I suspect Nathan is shutting down, and can't deal with so much homework. I don't know if the meds are not strong enough or if he's just so overwhelmed that he's shutting down.
Last weekend, in additon to the 25+ pages of homework from that workbook, they sent home two reports that are due, one about The Great Basin, and one about Coyotes, plus four chapters from the Science book, plus worksheets from class in math and science! How could we get him to do all that in one weekend??? We didn't finish it, by any stretch of the imagination. It's still not done.
And this from the teacher who said we wouldn't have any homework on the weekends, that kids need to 'just be kids.'
Friday he had another meltdown at school. He was in the principal's office when dh went to get him. They said it wasn't too bad this time (but they did try to call me at work, but I missed the phonecall, and they didn't leave a voicemail message). Sigh. When dh was leaving, he ran into Nathan's teacher, and told her that Nathan's been doing from 3-1/2 to 6 hours of homework a night.
Her response was, "And it's just going to get worse!"
Hooboy. The hell it is. There's no way I'm making this child do that much homework. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason this couldn't have been done at school. If he wasn't getting the work done there, we should have been notified sooner, so we could have tried to get him caught up and keep him caught up. Or they should have been trying to figure out how to keep him on task. Maybe they should be increasing the number of para minutes, or find more effective ways to keep his attention. Having him dumped-on with all this extra work is not good for him. If you overwhelm him, he will just shut down.
I'm going to send a letter to school with him, requesting that his IEP be adjusted to include a limit on the number of hours of homework per night. This is crazy. He's got to have some kind of break - he's just a little boy! That's nearly 30 hours of homework in a WEEK! He's eight years old, for crying out loud!
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