Tuesday, February 3, 2015

I must not be communicating clearly...

My 17-year old is doing her course work through an online program. She's focusing just on her social studies course right now with a goal of doing a unit per week. She's gotten slightly behind, finishing up her unit 4 yesterday but not able to start unit 5 because she needs to do a midterm first. But the midterm has its own password. So, I emailed the teacher repeatedly yesterday (lesson learned: call the next time something is urgent). He finally replied back before 6:30 this morning--with the password for a different course.

Now, my first reaction was, "Did I not specify the course?" Nope, I did: right there in the subject line, as the teacher had asked for, it says the course name and number. He had the right subject, but not the right grade. I tried the password anyhow; it didn't work. I emailed him back, saying that we needed it for the grade 11 course. I got an immediate message back: he's out of the office.

So, the unit she was supposed to start yesterday she will have to wait until tomorrow after she does the midterm. She won't have time to work on the unit Thursday or Friday this week. Now, granted, had she kept up, she would have had Monday through tomorrow to work on it, but it's a certain frustration that I'm trying not to have in clearly explaining what we needed (or so I thought) and not getting it.

I then contacted one of the office staff, saying we needed the password for the midterm exam for that course; she replied back with the login information. I said, no, it's the password for the exam within that course. She's seeing what she can do.

They say everything happens for a reason, so, why is this happening? Add to this, the social studies teacher has different things written in different spots about what is due. I can't keep everything straight.

So, instead of the original plan, my daughter is working on her art course, which is perhaps, actually, a very good thing, so let's say this all happened so she could have an enjoyable time with something else instead of being focused only on social studies.

I still, however, wonder if I need to be clearer in how I ask for things...

No comments:

Post a Comment