Anya Delachene
August 28, 2019 3:34 PM
I have a problem by Anya Delachene
Anya was rarely tentative. She was bouncy. She was bold. She was excitable. She got up into places she wasn’t supposed to be and wasn’t the least bit abashed when people told her to get down.But the knock on professor Skies’ door was not bold or excited. It was reluctant and quiet, almost like the knocker hoped not to be heard at all. She was heard though, and invited to enter, and she did, though she hung back by the door. Not nervously, though, Anya was not nervous. She was just . . . wishing she was somewhere else. Preferably outside. The office was too small, almost claustrophobic to her.
“Hi.” It wasn’t the best opening and, okay, maybe she was a little tiny bit nervous. She was wildly independent. She didn’t like asking for help. “Jasmine says you do academic help?” she asked, even though she was perfectly certain that was what Jasmine had said.
“I’m . . .” she hesitated, not liking to admit to personal failings, even ones that Professor Skies couldn’t have failed to notice, and in fact had already been quite clear in being to both Anya’s attention and her parents’, “um, having trouble remembering to do my homework.”
When she did do her homework - which admittedly was not often, as was clearly indicated by the warning notes on her first progress report - she did get decent grades on her essays and worksheets, so the problem obviously wasn’t that she couldn’t do the work. It was that Mom and Dad weren’t hovering over her anymore telling her to stop doing the fun things she would rather be doing and that she should just hunker down and get it done or she wouldn’t get to go to gymnastics this week.
She’d been telling herself for weeks that she could self-discipline herself into doing it on her own and she didn’t need the professors to take over that role. But that hadn’t worked out at all. In the past two weeks, she hadn’t turned in so much as one complete homework assignment. She’d only managed a few partial ones that got started over breakfast on the day they were due, and had greasy splotches on them from the bacon.
So here she was.
“You, um, cover bad study habits, right? It’s not just for people who don’t speak English?”
Because Mom said no gymnastics over the summer if she didn’t start doing her homework, and Anya only had until midterm to figure this out.
1
Anya Delachene
I have a problem
1453
Anya Delachene
1
5
DH Skies
September 07, 2019 8:58 AM
I've noticed by DH Skies
CW: mild ableism. Selina is probably not very familiar with organisational difficulties and that said children are not ‘badly behaved’ and that ‘just pulling your socks up’ won’t fix the problem.IC
Anastasia Delachene was, to put it in technical and professional terms, a real pain in the butt. Selina had lost count of the times she had already had to remind the girl of things that seemed like incredibly basic rules, like not sitting on the desks or that wearing her uniform was a requirement. She was pretty sure Anya had already set some kind of record on that front, but she would not be using that as an admonishment because she seemed just about contrary enough to take it as a compliment. The only thing that seemed to really penetrate to any degree was threats to take away her broomstick or keep her inside and even those seemed to only have a temporary effect. 'Things go in one ear and out the other' was another fairly apt description.
Selina might have thought it was poor parenting. Anya had all the hallmarks of someone who'd never had a single boundary set, but that usually ran in families, and Jasmine was - if a tad away with the fairies and just, to put it bluntly, not the brightest Lumos charm - at least well-behaved.
Thus, when there was a knock on the door, and in came Anya, it might have been reasonable to suspect that this constituted a bad day for Selina. However, Anya was less than her usual bouncy self, and in fact resembled nothing so much as a sad little puppy with its tail between its legs. This was followed by a frank admission at being bad at things, and asking for help. Anya seemed so sincere and Selina considered, for the first time, that possibly what she saw in class constituted Anya doing her best, and that her best just happened to be pretty awful. She felt a little bad for the cross thoughts she’d had about her, seeing as Anya at least seemed able to recognise the flaw and be motivated to work on it.
"It can be tricky adjusting to being away from home and having to take responsibility for your own schedule," she acknowledged, because she was at least willing to admit that much was true - suddenly all these eleven year olds had the seeming freedom to choose how to spend their time, and when to go to bed, and there were all these distractions like flying and MARS and friends - it was a lot of temptation, and Anya wouldn’t have been the first to give into them and let her studying slide.
“What things have you tried so far in terms of keeping track of your homework?” she asked, and her tone was gentle - not an admonishment, or a rebuke, but just an invitation for Anya to open up and make sure they were starting from where she was at.
13
DH Skies
I've noticed
26
DH Skies
0
5
Anya
September 12, 2019 4:12 PM
I don’t know where to start by Anya
Professor Skies did not yell at her. That was a good start, she guessed. In as much as this discussion could start well. Anya took a step further away from the door and escape. She twisted her fingers together.“I, um, well, that’s the problem,” she admitted, “I don’t know where to start fixing it. At home, Dad or Mom nagged me to do my homework until I did it, and now they’re not here, so I just don’t do it. I mean, I don’t even decide that I want to do this other thing more, I mean I just don’t even think about it. It’s just, not in my brain at all that I should be doing my homework.”
She took a breath a ran her fingers through her hair. “I write the assignments down, but they’re in my bag, and that gets tossed next to my bed as soon as classes are done, and I don’t even see it there after that, it just blends in as part of the scenery, even when I’m in the room, which, usually, I’m not. I sleep there. That’s about it. Sometimes I remember at breakfast, right before it’s due, when I’m thinking about what I’m going to do that day. But by then it’s usually too late.”
1
Anya
I don’t know where to start
1453
Anya
0
5