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What To Do If Your Child Fails A High School Course

“Fail” is an awfully loaded word. Despite it coming to mean — within the education system — a failure to meet the expectations of a course, it carries a lot of other baggage. “You failed”, to the ears of a child, can quickly translate to “you’re a failure”. And that’s simply not the case. You will find below tips on What To Do If Your Child Fails A High School Course.

A failing grade can be attributable to a number of different things. Your child might have struggled early on with a few core concepts, which left them behind and unable to contextualize further course concepts. Your child might have struggled with issues external to the course work: emotional or social setbacks which distracted them from performing their academic best. It could even be that your child felt unchallenged by the course work, allowing boredom and apathy to affect their studies.

What to Do If Your Child Fails A High School CoursePin

So, what do you as a parent do if your child comes to you with a failing grade? In this post, let’s explore how you can talk through the situation with your child, find out what happened and put in motion a way of upgrading their marks.

What to Do If Your Child Fails A High School Course

1. Enrol in Online Classes

A great way to rectify a failed grade is to retake the course online. Through online schools offering accredited Ontario courses, like Ontario eSecondary School, your child can work through the course again, this time at their own pace and with the discrete, direct help of a teacher. If there were certain concepts your child struggled with the first time around, here’s an opportunity for them to take their time focusing in a pressure-free setting. And if your child felt unchallenged by the pace of their classroom course, here’s an opportunity to move more quickly through the course material.

2. Encourage Instead of Punish

Everyone’s brain is different. While it’s tempting as a parent to jump straight to punitive measures when you hear about a failing grade, it’s important to ask yourself, “what tools will my child need to rectify this?” One of those tools is your encouragement and understanding.

The end goal, any time a poor mark shows up on your child’s report card, should be to improve that grade. Punishment may only lead to a further resentment of their education — feeling “checked out”, in other words. It’s important to maintain a you-can-do-it attitude throughout their education, helping them understand that failure is just an opportunity to pick back up and try again.

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3. Determine the Issue

One of the benefits of encouragement over punishment is that it puts you in a prime position to figure out what went wrong. In a judgment-free way, ask your child to explain what happened, what held them back from achieving their academic best. Was it that the course material felt too difficult? Was it shyness around asking for help? Or was it external pressures or problems? The more you know, the better poised you are to help them.

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A failing grade isn’t the end of the world. With a little encouragement and investigation on your part, and the help of an online school, that failing grade will be nothing more than a hiccup on the road to their academic success.

Lyne Proulx
Lyne Proulxhttps://ottawamommyclub.ca/
Lyne Proulx is a Certified WEBB Bodywork Pet Practitioner, Certified Infant Massage Instructor (CIMI), Certified Professional Wedding Consultant, and an Event Planner. She loves all things Disney and is an avid teaholic and chocoholic. She coordinated the Annual Infant Information Day/Early Years Expo for the City of Ottawa for 8 years. She was the Queen B of the BConnected Conference, Canada's Digital Influencer and social media Conference in Ottawa and Toronto. She was also the co-chair of the Navan for Kraft Hockeyville 2009-2011 committee that organized five community events within 6 months, and helped Navan reach the top 10 finalists in Canada. In April 2011, she received the City of Ottawa Mayor's City Builder Award.

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Comments

  1. Totally agree its not the end of the world and if you are aware your child is having problems in a class you can look into getting them a tutor. Another style of teaching maybe all they need to understand the subject.

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