My youngest brother is 19...almost 20. He's a smart guy, but he makes dumb choices. Case in point: free ride to Howard U. from my parents and he neglects his school work so much that they make him come back home and go to community college. He claims that this is for the best because he didn't really like it there anyway.
Summer 2004 finds him at the local CC and he actually does well there. Fall 2004 rolls around and he does OK. Not great, but OK enough to keep my mom from squawking and prevent my dad from giving him the cold shoulder. That was the last semester he brought grades home. He spends alot of time at school....leaving around 9am and usually not coming back until about 8 or 9pm. He says he has extra-currics and he stays after to study.
Mom's been pressing him about showing grades from Spring and Summer 2005 and he always comes up with some excuse not to. ("I forgot", "the office was closed when I went", etc.) Mom has threatened to go down there and get the grades herself. I know that grades are available online, so I told him to just print them out at home. He conveniently forgets every time. Well...mom's patience is wearing thin, and I'm tired of my sleep being interrupted by her screaming about the grades, so I cornered him this morning and made him give me the info I needed to look them up online. (He didn't go down without a fight. First he told me that he didn't know the website offhand and it wasn't working the last time he checked---one google trip later, I had it and it looked fine to me--- then he said he didn't have the password. I suggested we try his SSN. What do you know? It worked.)
So I checked the grades and find out that the boy is .05 away from academic probation. F's, C's and incompletes all over the place. If he gets less than a C in any major class this semester, it's curtains for his academic career. He must have known about this the entire time, but if confronted with it, he'll act like he didn't know. The messed up thing is that our other brother is taking all these med school classes, doing well, and could have tutored him, but he refuses to take advantage of the help. I am not going to be the one to tell mom/dad about this, but he can't hide this forever. Even if he escapes without showing grades for now, mom needs to get a letter from his school every semester to show that he's in good standing, so that he can get insurance. He's going to be !#$$%^&.
But it's not just his problem. Somehow, when they're mad at one of us, they become mad at all of us. So she may start yelling at him, but somehow my other brother and I will get lumped into the "you children don't listen to your parents" and we will all end up in trouble. *Sigh* I need to start this new job so I have a place to escape to when it all goes down.
