Ever wondered what might convince a mostly sane mother of three energetic boys to home school? Especially when two of them are ensconced in the best school in town and she’s well on her way to school-provided semi-quiet? Well, here’s my attempt at answer.
My oldest son breezed through kindergarten at our zoned public school. The next year, my two oldest were drawn in a lottery for a charter school. So we started the 2008-2009 school year with high hopes! Just after the school’s open house, my first grader’s teacher called. I suspected there was trouble. I had no idea.
My little guy was struggling. Terribly. He could barely read. She showed me his classmate’s work. They were writing legible sentences, while he strung letters together randomly. I was devastated.
This is him during first grade with his class bear.
She immediately began interventions, which are required by the No Child Left Behind Act before a child can begin assessments to determine if there are learning disabilities. We hired a reading tutor and started occupational therapy. In the end, he was meeting with a math coach, reading coach, reading tutor, and getting extra help from his teacher when class time allowed. Still, he wasn’t progressing.
Near the end of his first semester, his progress card filled with N’s and U’s, which is first grade language for BAD, he began to undergo assessments. To my dismay, we found out this process would take months. And already, his teachers and counselor began preparing us for him to likely repeat first grade.
In the mean time, my son hated school. He struggled through a couple hours of homework, which shouldn’t have taken us nearly that long. But he cried and raged and I wanted to also. He’d have every spelling word memorized and still flunk his test. Or at home, we’d go over the questions he’d missed on a test and he got them all right.
I prayed and agonized the whole semester. I hated the haunted look in his eyes. When his teacher said he never smiled in class, my heart broke. When the dentist pointed out our son had been grinding his teeth enough to wear them down to bits, probably due to stress, I got desperate.
My husband and I decided to pull him out and return him to the regular public school. We thought that the pace of the charter school must be too much. He was only there a week. While volunteering in his class, I looked in his eyes and realized he was hopelessly lost. He had no idea what the class was doing.
We had tried everything. I’d visited classed throughout our district, including ESE, looking for the right answer for our son. I realized, some children don’t fit the public school model.
The answer came to us quickly. Home school. While, I felt this was God’s direct answer, I was afraid to take so much responsibility for his education. What if I messed him up? But my husband reminded me that nothing else was working. Plus, we had the support of family and help of other home schooling friends.
So we pulled him out of school and started at the beginning of first grade. During the first few weeks, my little boy said, “I can’t do this Mom. I’m not smart.” I felt sick. For months he’d been sitting next to kids who knew exactly what they were doing and he didn’t. His only rational was that he was stupid. My bright, funny, athletic little boy!
We worked through a lot those first few months. And we plowed through summer, too -much to his dismay, since his little brother didn’t have to! At the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year, he was read to start second grade.
Now, my 2nd grader is reading a little ahead of grade level. He’s making A’s and B’s. He loves to laugh. His adult teeth are in and looking good. Last month, he said to me, “Mom, I think I can learn anything!”
This home school road can be difficult. Not all of his learning challenges were solved by the switch. Plus, I’m not terribly organized or self-motivated. Sometimes my patience wears thin. But to see my son change from seeing himself as “not smart” to believing he can “learn anything” makes it worth it.
2010 field trip to a grocery store
with our home school group.
