It sounds to me that letting her manage her school responsibilities on her own, is NOT working. She needs personal organisation skills and just doesn't have them. That skill is not necessarily there in someone with a high IQ. Speaking form my own experience, I didn't get my act together until I had kids. I failed out of uni the first time, because life became too complicated and I couldn't cope. I was a mess. After I had kids, I had a sense of purpose; I was also a few years older and, I think, had finally a mature enough brain.
I saw similar things with my difficult child kids. easy child had her moments with needing to be made accountable with her work, but she rose to the challenge. If your child does not rise to the challenge, then you have a child who is sinking and not swimming. In which case - you need to be the water wings until her legs are strong enough to kick.
Using the swimming analogy - difficult child 1 was afraid of water. In Australia, we have compulsory learn to swim classes through schools. Some of these can be picked up by parents during the school holidays, and we subscribed to those too, with both boys. difficult child 1 became very skilled at always moving to the back of the line with the kids who had just completed the swimming task. There were time when he came home from swimming class with dry swimsuit. I took the same classes when I was a kid and had tried the same tricks and admired difficult child 1's resourcefulness because he succeeded at this subterfuge where all my wits had failed. He was clearly a bright kid, but one who was still unable to swim. Frustrating. difficult child 1 was unable to swim, because he was afraid of the water.
difficult child 3's swim classes were different. He loved the water, but was uncoordinated. He wold flail around and could not learn from watching. Dyspraxia and kinesthesia. easy child 2/difficult child 2 has the same problem, but has managed well. We finally managed to enrol difficult child 3 in special classes for kids with disabilities (long waiting list) and it took someone actually moving his arms and legs for him in sync, for him to gradually get the idea. Patterning. Labour-intensive. But it was enough for difficult child 3 to get going, and over time he's been able to learn to swim well enough to save him if he gets out of his depth at the beach. He is not a strong swimmer but he can manage.
The difference here - difficult child 1 was capable of swimming but avoided it. When he was old enough, he would refuse to come to the beach. It's ironic that he married a water baby, although he's OK with water these days. difficult child 3, on the other hand, was physically incapable until he had special assistance. The usual lessons were not going to ever help him, he needed a different way of being taught, just to get started.
With kids like this, the high IQ can really grab your attention when they are younger. Especially with girls, who don't always appear to have the same sort of social deficits as boys with Asperger's. But a girl with Asperger's can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time. They do not know they are fooling people; they would call it "trying to do what is expected of me" and would wonder why it seems so effortless for other people.
What really works with assignments with kids like this - break up the task. Mind map. If necessary, get her to dictate to you while you type.
Getting her into the special classes could be a good thing, but you will need to keep supporting her for a lot longer than you expected to. But as you break tasks up in front of her, as you work her through the tasks, she will learn the techniques from you.
difficult child 3 hates mind maps. But he needs them to get the job done. He also has been doing very badly quite suddenly in recent months, the doctor thinks it is due to his anxiety having ramped up, so he's just been started on an AD. All his exam marks are coming in for that period, and the marks are woeful. But he did well earlier in the year, and we're hoping that the new medications will be enough for difficult child 3 to be able to "see the forest for the trees" when he finally sits down to do his state exams in a couple of months' time.
easy child 2/difficult child 2 never got into the high IQ classes, because it was an exam entry and she could not do it. The standard is very high, you have to score almost full marks and the exam was right when we had discovered her memory problem; we lost too much opportunity. Her Maths was just too poor for her to get those marks plus her class teacher told us she would veto the entry. She sat the exam a year later, at which time (thanks to ADHD medications) she was the top of her class in Maths. I think she deliberately threw the test then, for personal reasons (best friend pressured her into failing, so they wouldn't be separated).
A bright kid will need some opportunity to use that intelligence or she will eel frustrated. Anything that prevents her from working to her ability will lead to frustration and a rise in anxiety - a Catch 22 loop builds up, often fuelled by the same high IQ that you want to develop. The gap between what she senses she should be able to do, and what she actually can manage, is frustrating her even more than it frustrates you.
The same thing happened to me at about the same age. It was aggravated by my parents moving me to a different school in a different district, where all the kids had come from a different feeder school. Not only were they already in their own established social groups, but there was a difference in the work we had done in previous years, and there were gaps in our respective knowledge. I had knowledge these other kids did not, but in other subjects they could run rings around me, but the teachers assumed we all had the same knowledge so I had no access to curriculum material to help me fill in the gaps. It set me up for failure. I did not begin to succeed again until we moved again, and I was back in a school environment where my background and experience matched. The gaps were still there, of course, but by sheer luck were not in areas that mattered academically.
What I needed as a kid, was support. But nobody in the family was equipped to help me, or had the time. My parents dragged me to psychologists when frankly, I should have had academic coaching, especially coaching in personal organisation as well as someone to sit with me and help me work. I needed a routine and an opportunity to get my work done instead of being required to focus on chores from the time I walked in the door. Yes, there were times when my mother said, "OK, use the next half hour to do your homework," but there was no follow-throuh and by the time she did this, I no longer knew how to get started. Again, an Aspie thing - how do you start?
I possibly was a borderline Aspie. I don't know. Any attempt to diagnosis now would fail, I have adapted. But when I look back - I was a weird kid. I also struggled in areas I shouldn't have. I also would do IQ tests and see the tester's eyebrows crawl into their hairline. Every. Freakin'. Time. But I learned early, that a high IQ will not save you, if you don't get the work done. I fudged through a lot of the time and found it stressful, but there were other times when I joyfully read the textbook cover to cover and outclassed the class. My final school exams were a case in point - I was 17 and therefore a lot more mature and a lot more capable by this time. in one subject, the teacher had refused to acknowledge my existence in the classroom because I was a girl. Only boys took his subject. We were taught three topics over two years (intense). Two of the topics I could not understand well. One was compulsory, so I set myself the task to learn it from the textbook. The other one, not even the textbook could help. So I went through the textbook and learned the other stuff. In my final exams (state-based, so we had to choose among the questions other schools may have studied) I simply picked the questions I COULD handle, and answered those. I did not do brilliantly, but I did pass. The ratbag teacher actually took the credit for all his students passing (including me) and he never knew I did it by myself. Part of me wanted to go tell him to rub his nose in it; part of me never wanted to see him again.
What I needed, was to know how to study and how to work. Without that, every assignment looked like a huge mountain and I had no climbing gear. The view form the top is spectacular, but it takes a lot to get there. After repeat successful experiences, you have a better idea of hoe to do it solo. But it's like the swimming lessons - there can be all sorts of subtle reasons why it doesn't always work as it should for a kid.
Get your husband to read these posts too. I do understand the frustrations for both of you. We've had the same differences of opinion at times, but since husband has become a member here also, he lurks and reads every post of mine and we often then talk about it, about our own concerns and also about other people on this site and their problems. So increasingly, what I post or what he posts is a composite of our joint opinions. And when you are so thoroughly on the same page as we are now (and we thought we were before!) it really gets results.
Marg
