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you are not alone
You are describing what happened with my daughter in high school (she just graduated last June). Your description of her "just shutting down" is absolutely accurate because that's literally what's happening. We thought originally that it was a motivational thing, but what it turned out to be was extreme anxiety that eventually led to depression. Starting her on Cymbalta made a big difference, but that didn't take care of everything.
For my daughter, ADD means not only that her mind goes a mile a minute, leading to distractability, but also that once her interest is piqued, she will hyperfocus to the exclusion of all else. Combine that with the high school experience, where kids must take six and seven courses every day. Not only is she dealing with the distractability, not to mention great problems transitioning from one class and subject to another in the space of less than ten minutes, but they're also expecting her to manage several projects and homework assignments in many subjects every day. No wonder she became anxious to the point of paralysis!
If this sounds like what's happening with your daughter, here's one solution for math: find the best tutor you can who can literally be her teacher, i.e., not just someone to help with homework, but someone who will assume she has absorbed nothing in the classroom and so will reteach it anew at every meeting. We learned a long time ago that our daughter learns best in one-on-one situations--fewer distractability problems that way. Doing this, she went from a D in Algebra II to a B, an F in Statistics to a C. The teachers, by the way, would cut her no slack on the amount of homework and papers she had to turn in (despite a 504 plan to the contrary), so these grades reflect the same amount of work everyone else did. In fact, because of her anxiety and depression, we convinced the school that it was detrimental for her to even attend class (it didn't help that the teacher thought it would be "motivational" to remind her she was failing). They vetted the tutor and agreed to accept him as her de facto teacher. Not having to attend the class helped tremendously with the anxiety. What's the best tutor? Someone not intimidating to your daughter, but definitely not another high school student (we found a graduate student in math at our local university). By the way, the tutor turned in her homework for her, so the usual problem of forgetting to turn things in magically disappeared. :)
As for papers and projects, we found that her tendency to perfectionism led to her staring at the computer screen for hours trying to perfect three sentences, but if she dictated what she wanted to say, she could knock out a paper in a day. Dictating to me worked freshman year, but after that she didn't want to have to work with Mom. So we convinced her to hook up with a friend of hers who was attending the local university. My daughter would dictate, her friend would key in, then when my daughter would want to hyperfocus on a sentence or a paragraph, her friend would tell her it was good enough and get her to move on. It made writing a fun social experience, which in turn seemed to dissipate the paralyzing dread that used to accompany such assignments.
As for the usual motivational techniques of taking away car keys and privileges, it's not going to work because this is not a problem of motivation. Believe me, the desire is there, but it's like there's a brick wall preventing her from doing what she really does want to do, and at least for my daughter, that made her feel even more helpless and hopeless. Working with a very sympathetic principal, we learned in her junior year that our daughter didn't need to take a full load every semester in order to graduate. She helped pare down our daughter's schedule from seven courses every day to four. That also helped tremendously.
There's no way to sugar-coat this--high school is going to be a really rough ride for you and your daughter. All I can say is that it really is true that college is a whole lot better (at least so far) because it's not seven courses every day all week long.
Good luck.
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