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The second part of my title did not describe my homeschooled student. It described me. I never, ever thought that I'd homeschool either of my children.
My daughter, my oldest, used to beg me to homeschool her, but I knew that could never happen. She needed time away from me, even though it wasn't always fun. I did everything I could to support her, the teacher and the school and it worked out well for her. She was able to get into the gifted program eventually which helped ameliorate the effects of "kill and drill." Somehow, my poor daughter nearly always got teachers who assigned crushing amounts of homework, often busy work. But this is not her story. It is my son's story and how I felt I had to accommodate him. Follow me below the tornado of truth for the saga.
My son was different from my daughter from the day he was born. Where she was fussy and colicky, he was mellow and calm. She had problems settling down to sleep. He could drift off with just my hand cupped over the crown of his head. She liked workbooks and projects. He created his own projects. And when they played with Duplos, my son supervised because his hands were still too small while his older sister did the grunt work.
Both my kids were small for their ages, perhaps because I'm so tiny (5'2" with small bones) and nature had had mercy on me. People always thought we were lying about their ages, saying they were older than they were, but we never did. They were both just tiny. My son actually had delayed bone age--his bones ossified at a much slower rate than the general population. But he was also quite bright.
So he was an unusual kid. He walked at bit later than most. He insisted we repeat his words back to him when talking to him. He hated loud noises and would cover his ears and run away when he heard them.
When we lived in a small city up north I took the kids to the local kids' science center for classes. I joined La Leche League after my son was born so that we could find play groups. There and when we moved south I enrolled first my daughter and then my son in pre-school classes. When it was time for my son to begin kindergarten I felt he wasn't ready so I asked that he stay in pre-school another year. It turned out that the staff had the same idea.
Then he was ready for kindergarten. We worked on pre-reading skills, but my son had a little secret, even from himself. His mind had already been decoding the mysteries of reading. When he was three, nearly four, he found a videotape at his grandmother's that she had made from TV. On the label in her handwriting was "Wizard of Oz." He brought the tape to us asking if he could play it since he wanted to see "The Wizard of Oz." There were no pictures on the tape, nor was there anything else to indicate what was on it other than his grandmother's handwriting. He'd picked it out from among several other similar tapes. Apparently he was learning to read on his own, but he didn't realize it.
So we worked on his pre-reading skills through kindergarten until one night in late winter, early spring my husband was putting him to bed. I was usually the one to do it, but that night his dad volunteered. There was usually a book before bed, but that night it was a very noisy book.
When I read to him I'd run my finger under the words, like Atticus Finch did with Scout. It was a technique of the "Whole Reading" approach that was popular at the time. My husband took a different tack that night and made my son read to him. My son found this very stressful (as did his dad as well as me downstairs), but in the end my husband emerged and said, "He can read!" As it happened, he was right. The final pieces of the reading puzzle had been falling into place, but the school had not told him that he was a reader. And when I informed the teacher that my son could read, she replied that many parents thought their kids could read. And in the type-A town where status is sought at every level I had no doubt that that was true. But in my son's case it just happened that he actually could read.
The skepicism continued until one day we were on a class field trip. As we sat on the bus, my son asked, "What's a 'bad hair' day?" He'd seen a sign over the driver's seat that read, "Having a bad hair day." Since every day is a bad hair day for me, I struggled to explain. Then behind us I heard another parent say to his teacher, "He can read?" His teacher replied, "Several of our kids can read." After that, the question of whether my son could read was settled, since he'd read the sign to himself (not aloud) and asked for more information.
My son was much later diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, but the school system came to feel that there was definitely something wrong with him. This led to what I called the "Yes, buts . . .." and a quest to find a label for him. They settled on ADHD, even though my son's grades were excellent and he was capable of concentrating. The problems they saw were all manifested in the classroom. My son was prone to bullying because he could become anxious at times and the kids liked to see if they could set him off. He drew dark colored pictures at school, though not at home. Yet the school needed to prove that his problems manifested everywhere, and they finally did to their own satisfaction if not ours.
His school problems had come to a head in 3rd grade culminating in an I.E.P. meeting in the early spring with 13 school officials and my husband and me. We had been looking for an alternative placement for schooling, but our area just didn't have much to offer. My husband was retired from the Army, so that meant that we didn't have the funds to relocate.
Further, my husband had become concerned over his father's health. His dad lived a 10 hour drive away and wanted us to move there, but it was largely a retirement community with limited schooling available and we had two kids to consider. My daughter was in the gifted program and was doing well, if a bit overloaded with busy work.
So, after the I.E.P. and the diagnosis, which my husband and I felt was really wrong, we felt we had no other choice than to homeschool. I chose The Calvert School curriculum and they placed him in Fourth Grade, though I wanted to be able to chose different grade levels depending on the subject so that he would feel that he was doing something interesting. At the time Calvert didn't allow that, although now I believe they do.
He missed going to school and I missed being able to send him, but when the kids came home from school they bullied him. He'd had problems on the bus while in public school as well as on the school grounds which was one reason I wanted to keep him at home. I knew from just general experience that when a kid is marginalized he is seen as deserving bullying. Even when teachers and aids are supposed to be watching out for bullying, what actually happens and what they see can be two different things. I later learned that while I was homeschooling my son, another "special" child attending his old school was bullied by a student who took the child's sandwich at lunch and smushed it in the child's face. The bullied child was in trouble for causing a scene at lunch.
Eventually the bullying died down, but my son's love of being out-of-doors had died by that time as well. After a year of Calvert I worked to design my own curriculum. We tried joining the local Christian homeschool group, but that was pretty much a disaster. The group courses they offered included ones such as "Refuting Evolution." We had to avoid using what I came to call "the 'E' word" while those around us felt free to express their religious opinions. Furthermore, they were a fairly political group and couldn't wait to see George Bush win the White House and "fix" everything that was "wrong" with the country.
So we worked on our own, taking field trips to the art gallery, botanical gardens and just going on hikes to observe nature. I ordered textbooks from the same companies that the public schools did and we visited the library frequently.
When my son was at the seventh grade age he took the SAT to qualify for Duke University's Talent Identification Program. At the ceremony where his high verbal school earned him an award, we learned about a program available for public school students where they could complete the last two years of high school at a college about one and a half hours away from home. We scrambled to enroll our daughter in that program since she was about fed up with the busy work in high school.
As the years went by, I was concerned that my own weakness in math would hurt my son. So for that reason we tried various programs and schools in the area which ran the gamut from disastrous to beneficial. When we decided that his math skills were adequate, he took the GED earning him a high score and a small scholarship.
In a "kinder, gentler" world we would have looked for a college or university which could accommodate students with Asperger's Syndrome, but we had to take reality into account. We decided that he should attend a local technical college and earn an associate degree. That way he wouldn't be carrying debt upon graduation which would add stress to his life.
So my son was more than adequately prepared and needed no remedial work. He has even informally tutored fellow students. I wish that we could send him to a four year school, but with the burden of student loans that so many graduate carry, it's just not practical for someone prone to anxiety as my son is.
Is homeschooling for everyone? Certainly not. But sometimes you just have no other choice. I believe in having a strong public school system and I worry about the push for charter schools, which haven't even done as well as the public schools in preparing their students. Nevertheless, I feel that there should always be options for students who don't fit the mold. Your mileage may vary.