Needles & Pins

I had a busy afternoon yesterday.  First I had to take Megan for her diphtheria, tetanus and polio booster, then we all had to go to Megan’s school for a meeting with her form teacher and head-of-year about the problems she’s having at school.  As expected the jab was a nightmare.   All the kids had it at school several weeks ago, but Megan had gone into meltdown and got so upset they couldn’t do it so they asked for me to arrange to get it done at our GP’s surgery.  Megan has a fear, not so much of needles, as of pain.  She can fall and hurt herself and deal with it just fine, it’s anticipated pain that is such an issue.  If she knows it’s going to hurt, even slightly, she just goes into a panic.  We had discussed the jab several times in advance and talked about situations where she had hurt herself and dealt with it OK and how the jab wouldn’t be as painful; about times in the past where she has had to have needles and it hasn’t been nearly as bad as she thought it would be.  It was all a complete waste of time!  As soon as we got in there she started to panic.  I had warned the surgery in advance and the nurse who gave her the booster was so patient with her.  After about 10 minutes of persuading, it was done.  I’m always really torn, I do feel sympathetic – while completely out of proportion, Megan’s fear is genuine.  On the other hand I always end up feeling very frustrated and cross with her and have to bite my tongue not to tear a strip off her.

Next was the meeting at her school.  We’d arranged to meet David there and by the time we got there both Megan and I were all hot and bothered, we’d been so long at the surgery (the clinic was running late anyway).  We were there to discuss the same two issues that have dogged Megan through secondary school – bullying and under-performing.  I had hoped that the bullying had died down.  Megan hasn’t mentioned anything much this year and as she gets older she is finally developing a thicker skin.  When her teacher rang me and asked for the meeting I talked to Megan about it and it turns out that she is still being bullied; not the obvious abuse she was on the receiving end of in years 1 and 2, but more subtle, trivial stuff.  The problem is there is a lot of it.  She hasn’t been saying anything because she feels it’s too trivial however it’s getting her down because of the sheer scale of it.  As ever, it seems to be down to certain kids realising Megan is easy to wind up.  It is all silly, trivial stuff but it’s widespread and relentless.  The cummulative effect is as bad as when she was being bullied before.  Pin pricks are trivial when there’s only one or two, when there’s dozens all the time it’s a different matter.  Megan was able to put names to 7 or 8 ring-leaders and hopefully they’ve been read the riot act this morning.

The other issue is her under-performance.  I always feel so sorry for Megan’s teachers, she must be so frustrating to teach!  She’s obviously very bright but as ever the problems she has a result of her ADHD hold her back.  She is poorly organised, her work is messy, she’s innatentive in class and if she’s not that interested in something she puts in the absolute minimum effort.  There is a Learning  Support Department and they have been involved with Megan since she started there.  A couple of months ago they assigned her a learning mentor who has been helping her organise her homework and it has helped a lot, the problem is that Megan isn’t doing it for herself, it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.  Megan has her GCSE’s next year and a large component is coursework and Megan’s is poor.  She’s not doing enough and it’s always late.  After the parents’ evening last week we’ve set her a sort of homework timetable at home.  Her form tutor is going to go around all of her teachers and get the coursework schedules from them so that we know what work is due in when.  We discussed different ways she could get herself organised.  One thing I think might work is Google Calendar.  Megan uses Gmail frequently so she can set it up to e-mail her reminders.

One of the other issues is her lack of participation in class.  This was mentioned in her school report and again at the parents’ evening.  A lot of that is down to the ragging she gets.  If she gets things right she’s accused of sucking up, if she gets them wrong she gets called stupid.  A lot of her teachers have commented on how, if asked a directly, she will answer (usually correctly) but won’t participate in general discussions.  In addition where she’s unsure of something or doesn’t understand what’s required for a piece of work she won’t ask to clarify it.

It felt like a useful meeting.  Bullying is taken seriously at her school and her head-of-year will be tackling that.  Her form teacher is going to do the rounds of her teachers and get hold of schedules etc and e-mail them to me.  I was thinking last night about the web site her school has.  Megan is quite happy to browse the net, it’s a shame her school don’t have schedules, homeworks assignments posted up there.  She’d probably find it easier to stay on top of it all then!