Sophie's schooling

A quick recap of how we got Sophie back into school. From the first week she was admitted to the hospital, I was going to the school to talk to her teachers and try to figure out what to do about her schooling. At first, the higher ups just wanted her to repeat 7^th grade, but I really didn’t want that to happen. She’s already 14, and she didn’t want to have to redo half the year. So, if they insisted on that, I was just going to withdraw her from school and put her in what is basically alternative school so she could catch up to her age level. I kept asking them if we could just homeschool her, and they were like “What? Homeschool? What’s that?” I was like “You know, you give me her homework, I get her a tutor, she comes back to take her tests and then she continues to study with her class.” They were like “uh…I don’t think we can do that.”

However, I kept going to the school to talk to different teachers. Her homeroom teacher was amazing and I totally credit her with getting through to the headmaster. She really wanted Sophie to continue with her class, so she wrote a letter to the headmaster/principal, petitioning for Sophie to rejoin them after she was discharged. After Sophie got discharged from the hospital, I went to talk to her headmaster one more time. This time, she said that IF Sophie could do all her homework she had missed, AND take her finals from first semester and pass, AND take her mid-terms and pass, THEN she could rejoin her class. I don’t think she really expected that to happen though. But…I had my amazing Thai teacher, Kru Niti, come tutor Sophie every day for a week, and she passed all her tests! Not only that, but at the end of the semester, when I went to get her grades, she had gotten a 3.42 GPA! Not bad for a kid recovering from a deadly illness and missing nearly two months of the semester, huh? I was pretty proud of her perseverance and her good grades. She was disappointed because she wanted a 3.5 but my reaction is, hey, she’s alive and she passed. That’s enough for me. We’ll work on the 4.0 next year.