Losing Interest in School Just Before the End

Your child is in Year 11 or 12 and is about to finish school when they start to lose interest. This video will help you with some strategies around this.

TRANSCRIPT

Good morning! This is Jason Ursino from Learning Space, and I'm driving to school. Today, I'm going to be talking about what happens if your son or daughter loses interest towards the end of their high schooling.

So, they're in Year 11, Year 12, they're almost done, and the HSC is not too far away, but for some reason, they've just lost interest. They're burnt out, they're done, they don't want to do it anymore.

So, what you could do here is talk about their goals. If their goal is to do something in particular with tertiary study, then what you can then do is sit down with them, look up what sort of prerequisite subjects you need for university. You'll find that the big HSC subjects like Mathematics, English are sort of subjects that they will need to do well in to get into some sort of tertiary study for university, so it is something that you would have to consider.

Now, if you have a son or daughter that passes that off and already has a mindset on something, for example, it could be to become a hairdresser or it could be to just become a laborer like a bricklayer, for example, not that there's anything wrong with those vocations, just that perhaps you would like your son or daughter to do something a little bit different, or you're not too keen for your son and daughter to do something like that. Also, you may be concerned that they might not enjoy it as much as they think they would over here.

What I would do is I would utilize the school holidays, so perhaps your son or daughter could go to a hairdresser if they want to become a hairdresser. Send them to a hairdresser for a week in the school holidays and let them see the good parts and the more difficult parts of the job. So, perhaps something that's not very pleasant about the job, it could be hair in your clothes every day, other people's hair in your clothes, and you have to come home with that every day, something that's not very pleasant. And if they're okay with it and they're still passionate about being a hairdresser, then that's something that you could probably entertain the idea of going down and getting the TAFE courses in place to do so.

Or it could be getting up very, very early in the morning and working in the hot sun and being very dirty in the mortar and being the laborer for a bricklayer, for example. So, it is important for your son or daughter to experience the unpleasant things of a particular job if they are really interested in doing a particular thing.

Recently, I've known of a student who was doing quite well in high school and all of a sudden lost interest in high school and had his mindset on being an electrician and simply said to his parents, "I really just want to get out of school and become an electrician as quick as I can." Perhaps what he needs to do there is actually go in the holidays and work as an electrician a little bit, get into those hard-to-reach claustrophobic grooves, and see what it's like, experience the unpleasant part of the job, and if he's still quite keen on it, then it's something that maybe he should pursue and then he can pick the proper subjects in Year 11 and 12 to line up with what he wants to do.

If you like my videos, there are more of them at learningspace.net.au/drivingtoschool

Have a good day.