Tough Character Lesson

When you spend all year kind of skating through school and not really paying attention to deadlines or homework, it can really bite you in the butt.  Ash found this out the hard way this week.  To her great credit, she has really tried to buckle down and pay attention and get things done and turn homework and assignments in.  But a big research paper was due last week and has disappeared.

Since she has never tried to tell me something was turned in when it wasn't, I do believe that it was done and got turned in.  However, the hard fact is that the teacher does not have it.  Where did it go?  No one knows, of course.  But with Ash's track record of procrastination (handed down from me - I will take full credit there) and turning things in late, her teacher is simply not inclined to give her any grace on it.  This could easily bomb her grade, and depending on how she does on her final exam, may even mean she has to repeat the class.

It's the classic "boy who cried wolf" scenario.  So many things done late or not at all ... and this one time that she really did do it, it gets lost.  It really sucks, honestly - and I went with her today to talk to the teacher, all prepared for a fight and ready to make the teacher straighten up and do her job, etc. (Mama Bear was raring to go!).  But after talking to the teacher, while I don't really like her style of communication with the kids, I cannot argue with her logic or methods - I can't think of anything else she could have done to ensure things from her end.

The optimist in me is still hoping that the folder with the research paper and all related assignments will miraculously appear in an overlooked/misplaced stack of other folders and that Ash will be vindicated and her grade salvaged.  But the realist in me realizes this is unlikely ... and simply hopes for the lesson to be learned this time, on a (relatively) unimportant life event, so it won't happen again on something major.


This is what character comes down to.  Is your character such that people *know* you will do what you say you will?  Or is it kind of up in the air and they'll believe it when they see it?