Latin Students (2 of 2): Lost the homeschooler.

I think I lost the overscheduled homeschooler who didn't really know Latin all that well.

Her mom had asked me to write a year-end evaluation, which teachers often "write in the form of a recommendation", which I really couldn't do since her memorization wasn't that thorough, she would do word-order translations, and had problems with recognizing when she didn't know things and would have to double-check in a dictionary or grammar (and when she did consult those, she often came away with the wrong vocab word).

Even though we worked together for a year, she still did word order translations, and I couldn't assign homework, since she didn't have the basic skill set that would have allowed me to do so.

I said that nicely in the evaluation (not a rec) along with some mitigating positives, and ran it by my dad who did high school recs, and then I sent it to the mom in an email saying to have a year-end conference to go over it, and followed that up by text.

The mom texted me that we'd meet in 3 weeks once the schedule cleared, but she never did.

Now, it's a month in to when her daughter's term started, and no contact from them.

The daughter's last tutor sounded awful - he would assign her paragraph upon paragraph of translation, then say she didn't know anything, the mom said - and the mom said she liked her daughter studying a Latin because it was a challenge for her (her other subjects weren't), and that my style fit her daughter better.

I figure, either the eval shocked her, or the daughter finagled her way out of Latin since she hated it, since she wasn't good at it.

She really did hate it when she realized she wasn't good at it.

Right after we started, she got enthusiastic for Latin for about a month, and would read gravestones when she was on vacation with her parents and at some historic cemetary (though I don't know how she did that, she probably improvised translations off cognates and made something up that made sense).

That enthusiasm dwindled, though, when I started having to ask her how much time she spent on her homework, go over how she looked up words in dictionaries, etc.

She's a nice kid, but I think she's going to have long-term problems with anything she really has to work at, and isn't immediately good at.

Ultimately, her not doing well was never her fault, and her parents protected her from that, which isn't doing her any favors.