update on Andy

After reading the last post, I realized that I left out a very important part of Andy falling off the balcony. When Andy fell off the balcony, he was wearing his bike helmet. He was not trying to commit suicide. What he told me was that he was upset with MB & I, b/c we had disciplined him for lying to us about his homework. After I disciplined him that morning (& mind you it wasn't anything really harsh, I just made it clear that I wouldn't tolerate lying), he wanted to find out how much or if we cared about him so he jumped off the balcony.

Andy, in 4 days of hospitalization (psychiatric) and a week and a half of outpatient counseling is learning better coping skills.

Andy will be back to his normal school schedule on Thursday. His last day (& it's actually only less than 3 hours) at Children's Memorial Hosp. is tomorrow. Yesterday and today he has gone to the Arbor Park Middle School (his normal school) for an hour and then the rest of the day at Children's Memorial.

I was going through the coursework he missed in the 2 1/2 weeks he was out. It was multiplying decimals, dividing decimals and long division. Math is unique because skills you use 1 week are applied the next week. That's not really true of other subjects.

I discovered that Andy doesn't know long division. He can do problems like

72 divided by 8 =9

36 divided by 6 = 6

But he can't do problems like

723 divided by 8 = ____

452 divided by 2 = ____

So, I've been teaching him this. It's going to take awhile. I wonder how long it will take him to learn this??

I can't figure out why he didn't know this!! When I was ten and eleven, I worked on long division in both 5th and 6th grades. He told me that they worked on it some in 6th grade but he didn't do very well. He's in a good school district. I don't understand how this happened.

At any rate, he is going to be all right and we will work very hard to see that he does well in school.