Will demonstrated a great depth of understanding of the themes and central ideas of the novel, “The Glass Castle”. When questioned, he always starts with the literal, however, when asked to delve deeper, he is absolutely on target with his understanding of the themes and central conflicts. While discussing character motivations, he shared that he thought the “father cared too much, but the mom doesn’t care enough. ” He accurately described the father figure as “active and always looking for the next opportunity”, while he described the mother in the story as being “lazy” and “not looking after her kids.” While he described the parents as not caring, he still was able to consider the “good” in them giving the example that they taught their children literature, reading and math. We had a great discussion as to whether it was more important to take care of the “physical” verses “emotional” when raising children, with Will deciding that it was important to do both. Our literary conversation was outstanding, and I was so impressed by the depth of his understanding. He has grown so much! After completing our novel work, we continued our look at media literacy through a discussion about social media and the problems associated with portraying perfection in the on-line community. For homework, Will is going to read up to page 93 and answer questions. We talked about time management and divided up the weekend homework into manageable chunks. His goal is to complete his homework by Friday afternoon, so that he can enjoy his Friday evening and not worry about homework while he was working over the weekend. I am also encouraging him to set limits on time in order to prevent himself from overthinking work and making it harder on himself. He continues to work on independence, and I couldn’t be happier for him.