education

Walking Into High School

By / August 19, 2016 / 1 Comment

I just watched my 15 year old Gleek walk into the high school building for her orientation day. There was this moment when she walked past the pep squad sent to greet all the incoming sophomores, where the bottom dropped out of my stomach because I could see all the way my daughter was visibly different from what is standard dress and behavior in our community. We live in a place with a predominant religion. In our town 80% of the students she meets will be LDS (Mormon). Since we are too, this is a little bit comforting. We have at least a baseline expectation for what priorities and values the people around us hold, even though there is a lot of individual variation in how committed people are and how they interpret doctrine. My daughter is a walking, visual variation.

The norm in our community is short hair for boys, long hair for girls, conservative dress, natural hair colors. Even the teens who aren’t Mormon tend to follow this norm. Utah is very clean cut, Orem especially so. This morning my daughter walked into the school building with bright blue hair cut into an anime style pixie cut, short in the back, long near her face. She wore flowered cargo shorts and a black hat. Her arms were adorned with sharpie marker flowers and swirls reminiscent of tattoos. Her surface defies the norms of our community. Her heart embraces our religion. She loves church, and she consciously examines its doctrines. She studies scriptures on her own. She has developed her own relationship with God which is part of how she navigates her personal challenges.

Mostly she’s gotten positive reactions from people at church. I get lots of women telling me that they love her blue hair, that she’s adorable. Thus far I haven’t heard from people who think her blue hair is a sign that she is drifting, lost, or not committed. I assume those people are out there, and I’m grateful that thus far they are keeping their judgements to themselves. What I don’t know is how her surface appearance will affect her relations with peers at school. High school always sorts itself into groups. I worry that she’ll be pushed into groups where her appearance matches rather than being able to find places where her heart matches, no matter what she looks like. She enters the school with a group of established friends who have long accepted her for who she is. I hope that continues. I hope she finds people who celebrate both her internal strength and her enthusiastic creativity. I hope she finds friends who will be there and support her on the hard days, because high school always has hard days.

There are so many things I hope and fear. Mostly I try to not let those hopes and fears leak to where she can see them. My emotions are mine, she shouldn’t have to feel the weight of them. In a few hours I’ll go pick her up and I’ll get to hear how everything went. I would love for this year to be more aligned with hopes than with fears.

Ten days to Start of School

By / August 11, 2016 / 1 Comment

Before GenCon we’re in the midst of summer. After GenCon, everything is propelling us toward the onset of school. This is true most years, but feels particularly true this one. I’m still wading through GenCon laundry and accounting, yet my schedule begins to fill up with school things. I filled out school forms, paid school fees, and set up appointments to meet with school counselors. I know that last one isn’t on the list for most parents. There is a part of my brain that wonders if doing it makes me helicopter-y. Except the universal response from the counselors is “Oh yes. We definitely need to meet.” School counselors are very busy people who are not shy about dodging meetings if they think the meetings aren’t necessary.

Tomorrow is the meeting for Patch. We will examine every class to determine how the teachers will affect him. Last year he had one teacher in particular who loved him very much and wanted to help, but the ways that she approached trying to help made him more anxious and shut down. We went several rounds of trying to help her help him. Ultimately we just muddled through. Sometimes it happens that way. There is a limit to the amount of change I can ask of another person in order to accommodate my kid. I can absolutely say things like “write down his assignments for him.” I can’t really say “Make sure that you aren’t projecting anxious concern when you speak to him.” It is easy to define “don’t corner him” when you’re talking about physical space in a room. But unless someone has an instinctive understanding of his internal landscape, they can emotionally corner him without even being aware they have done so. The school year will be much easier if we start by placing him in classrooms where student/teacher affinity already exists, then we can use the affinity to help education flourish instead of spending all our energy trying to create affinity.

Gleek’s school counselor is going to be more difficult to track down, which is not surprising for high school. She’s answered my emails enthusiastically and would have been happy to meet with Gleek today, except that today began with getting Gleek’s wisdom teeth removed. She’s not coherent enough to be out in public quite yet. The teeth removal was a last minute, lets-get-this-done-before-school-starts effort which was triggered by her complaining that her jaw hurt. She’s a teeny person with big beautiful teeth, so I was pretty sure that the removal of the teeth was inevitably going to be necessary. The other school preparation which was important to Gleek was refreshing her blue hair dye. I’ve been assured by two different school personnel that blue hair will not cause her disciplinary problems on campus, but until she’s been on campus for a week without problems, a little worry will linger in my head. Fortunately we already know exactly what classes Gleek has and which teachers. We tuned it carefully, but the rubber meets the road when she actually attends class.

Next week will be Kiki’s packing week. She has to decide which of her things need to be transported to her college apartment and which things can continue to live here until she returns for Christmas. She and I are both getting weary of this nomadic two-location existence. She has 3 semesters of work left, so we probably only have four relocations left to do. I’m feeling how much I’m going to miss having her around. That feeling has varied from departure to departure. This time is a bit stronger than most. Tangled up in the packing week is some frantic scrambling to help her pound a story into shape before she goes. It is getting there, but unfortunately she ends up waiting on me for feedback. Often. Because my brain is full of all the things.

Link is not headed back to school this fall. We’re entering a gap year for him. None of us feel like spending the money or stress pushing him into a college education that he isn’t emotionally ready to handle. Asynchronous development is very common for people with autism. Link is more advanced than his peers in some ways and less advanced in others. He’ll be hanging with Howard and I at the house, taking an evening class, working for me, and pursuing some personal projects. We’ll also have him doing some of the family cooking, life skills for him, dinner for us.

I would like to be super optimistic about the coming school year. I remember that beginning-of-school rush when I looked forward to all the cool things my kids were going to get to do and learn. The past four years have leached all of that out of me. Yes there have been some wonderful teachers, some beautiful moments, but they feel like flickers of light. I’m entering this year with plans already in place for adjusting schedules, pulling back from stress, and partial home schooling as needed. I’ve laid groundwork with allies, and I know who I need to talk to in order to make adjustments happen. I’m braced for emotion. I don’t know what emotions I’ll have. I don’t know when they will hit me. I just know that I’m afraid that the coming months will reveal even more hard things. I refuse to stand helpless if the school system that is designed for typical children begins to wear away at my kids. They are not typical. This is both a wonderful and difficult thing. Of course I’m also afraid that I’ll be too quick to declare “this isn’t working.” So I’m sure I’ll spin in tight stress circles trying to decide what to do.

For today, I’m working to not borrow trouble. I’m consciously recognizing that Patch is going to get to have a couple of computer classes, which have the potential to be amazing for him. Gleek is getting to take a health sciences class which will let her explore possible careers in psychology, therapy, and other medical sciences. I don’t know if she’ll ultimately move that direction, but I think she’ll find the class interesting. There are going to be good things. I need to consciously remind myself of this instead of just stewing in all my fears.

Graduation

By / May 27, 2016 / 4 Comments

I can tell from the photos on Facebook that high school graduation happened last night. My son’s peers, the kids he grew up with, smile at me from under square shaped hats while wearing shiny gowns. I’ve wondered how I would feel when this happened. I wondered if it would hurt. Dropping out was a success for my son. Passing the GED was a success. It was the way we needed to take control of his path, and reduce the pressure that was crushing all of us. The decision was right, but it was also a permanent marker of the differences of my son. When we kept him with his grouped peers, those differences were less visible. Or maybe I was more able to fool myself.

Looking at the graduation photos doesn’t hurt in the ways I thought it might. There is some hurt, but it is mixed in with a half dozen other emotions. I’m happy for my friends and their children, for my son’s friends. They are rejoicing and they should be. I wonder if they recognize that the diploma really is an achievement. I know that when I graduated from high school it felt like a participation certificate. Somehow I hadn’t internalized the fact that there are more ways to not get a diploma than there are to get one. I see this far more clearly after I helped my child choose not to get a high school diploma. I still feel guilt about that, a creeping fear that if I’d been better at parenting then my son could have stayed grouped with his friends. So that hurts when I look at the graduation photos.

All the emotions are stronger because earlier this week I was quite forcibly reminded that my son’s path to self-sufficient adulthood is going to be non-standard. While my friends are launching their children, or letting go while the kids fly free, I’m staring down at least three more years of long slow learning. Much of that learning will be in the shape of “Okay try it your way.” When everything in me screams that the way won’t work. Of course, having a high school diploma wouldn’t have changed how the next three years are going to go. All it would have done would be to add massive pressure and delay some of the necessary learning. It was the right choice. I just wish I could stop arguing with myself about it in my head.

Over time I win the arguments, achieve an internal peace on the matter. Until I see the graduation photos. I’m glad people post the photos. It is right that they celebrate their milestones. I’m glad that all the photos have flocks of comments “Wow, she’s so grown up!” “Congratulations!” “I can’t believe he’ll be headed for college.” The comments are evidence of the networks of people who collaborated over the years in helping this child become an adult. Facebook allows that network to participate. I am part of that network. I click Like and perhaps add a comment of my own. Then I move my mouse and click “hide this post.” No need for me to face my emotions over and over as new comments keep floating the image back to the top of my news feed.

In a few days or a week I’ll have found quiet in my head again. I’ll be able to feel (as well as know) that everyone has their own path and that all journeys are valid. We’ve had triumph already and more triumphs are coming, even if they don’t look much like triumph from the outside.

Late Night Thoughts on Parenting

By / April 18, 2016 / 2 Comments

It is late and instead of being asleep I am noodling around on the internet. I’m looking at articles talking about how helicopter parents need to back off, and lists of ways in which incoming freshman are not ready for college because their parents hovered too much. Then I think about parents who get prosecuted for letting their kids walk to the park, and about how my kid’s schools contact me every time one of my kids has an F. Or if my kids are marked absent for any of their classes. Or if my kid misses a flex session where they are supposed to make up work. The messages urge me to talk to my child about their choices. The unspoken message is clear: It is the parent’s job to make sure that their kids succeed. So parents get caught in this system that pushes them to hover, and then complains later because they hovered.

I’m thinking about all of this because, with one of my kids, we’re out in the weeds. There may be a path here, but it is hard to see and maybe it will only exist after we’ve trampled our way through to create it. I’m doing my best to step back, let him struggle, let him fail, let him learn. On the other hand I’m also doing what I can to make sure the path isn’t impossible, to help him keep moving, to make sure that the obstacles are surmountable with his current allotment of resources. At times it feels like the worst of both worlds. I have to explain to others why I’m letting him take a potentially failure laden path, and I’m having to explain why I step in and intervene in ways that look like I’m the one keeping him mired in childish dependence. I’m wending the best parenting path I can figure out, and I’m usually convinced that I’m getting it all wrong.

That “convinced I’m getting it all wrong” is a normal parenting experience. This is one of the reasons that society gets so focused on touchstones and check points. Semester grade reports and end-of-year testing are used as a way to know if the kid’s education is on track. High School graduation is a huge measure of success. Other touchstones are getting a job, getting a driver’s license, earning an award, college admission, picking a major, getting married, getting a job. Any success that the child has can qualify. When kids hit the checkpoints it is a small reassurance that maybe the parents aren’t completely failing. I read this behind many facebook statuses “Johnny won the spelling bee! (maybe I’m not completely failing at this parenting gig.)” Parents aren’t the only ones watching, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, neighbors, they all take note and help to celebrate. Milestones let everyone relax because the kid appears to be on track.

“Appears,” note that word carefully, because sometimes the internal experience of the child does not match the external success. Sometimes a checkpoint reached is more a measure of parental management than child growth. This is why helicopter parenting is scolded, because child growth should be the goal, not the checkpoints. Eventually the missing growth is exposed when the child is not prepared. Conversely, sometimes a checkpoint missed can also indicate growth rather than failure. Sometimes the strongest thing an almost-adult can do is to head out into the weeds because the standard path isn’t working. But a missed checkpoint looks like a failure. It makes everyone anxious and uncomfortable, because there is no reassurance that all will be well. then there is enormous pressure to get the kid “back on track.” People like the comfortable answers, the solid and stable answers. They like to know which college and what major. They want the major to be one that they can picture leading to steady employment. They try to steer artists away from art majors. They try to push college as the sure path.

There is no sure path. All of the paths are made of struggle, failure, getting up again, and moving on. Parents may manage their kids into college, but then the new adults have to do the growing they missed out on before. Sometimes people are exactly on track for a very long time, until life takes an unexpected left turn. Then they have to figure out how to find a new path for themselves. All of us will, eventually, have to venture out when the way ahead is not clear.

So perhaps I should use this as reassurance, that in “allowing” my kid’s education to veer away from standard, I’m letting him grow in a way that most people don’t until much later, even while he is not growing in some of the ways that his peers are growing right now. Maybe I’m succeeding and failing all at once. And maybe that is just fine.

Special Needs Scavenger Hunt

By / November 18, 2015 / 2 Comments

I’ve spent the last eighteen years participating in an educational scavenger hunt and I’ve only just now recognized that was what I was dealing with. By age three it was obvious that Link was a special needs kid. It was also obvious that he was friendly, happy, loving, and smart. With the first diagnosis of language delay, I began seeking for things that would help him. I made up games, bought games, and worked with Link regularly. All along the way we had teachers, psychologists, and administrators who were very helpful to us. They gave me pieces I needed and helped us find our way forward. Yet we still spent a lot of time stumbling around because for all the help we did get, there was other help that we didn’t get because we didn’t know the right keywords to unlock those options.

A year ago depression loomed large in Link. He was desperately lonely and overwhelmed with trying to manage a full load at public high school. It seemed like we were constantly readjusting his schedule, dropping classes, switching to different ones. We were trying to find a balance, a way that he could do homework before he left the school grounds so that home time could be free of school stress. When I finally was able to identify depression as the problem, I called for a meeting with his school counsellor. It was like the word “depression” was a key that opened up a cupboard in her brain. “We could put him in home health.” She said. Then she described to me a mode of schooling which was something I’d been trying to describe for at least two years. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help me before, but until I said “depression” she didn’t make the connection I needed.

I know a lot of parents shy away from seeking diagnosis for their special needs kids. I’ve done it myself. There are so many fears attached to diagnosis and the worry that the child will be labelled or pigeonholed. That has not been my experience. Instead I’ve found that a diagnosis is a passcode that opens up options. It is a lever which pries open pathways. I thought that because everyone was so willing to help, that I was getting all the help I needed. But that became less and less true the further along we got in Link’s education. At the high school level, staff is compartmentalized and specialized. There are lots of options, but it falls to the parents to seek out the options and ask for them. Parents have to be advocates. This requires lots of work, and it is exhausting.

I really recognized the scavenger hunt when Link was diagnosed as having autism one week before his eighteenth birthday. The diagnosing doctor handed me a folder with the phone number of a parent advocate and information sheets on three different transitional programs which might help Link. At that moment I thought how naming depression had led me to scheduling an appointment with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist had given me information about autism advocacy groups and had suggested that getting a definitive diagnosis regarding autism was probably worth the time and expense. He also referred me to NAMI, who runs education and support for mental illness. I went to a support group for the families of those with mental health issues and they suggested that I sign Link up for Voc Rehab and the WIA youth program. So we did that. Multiple places encouraged me to finally plunk down money with a diagnostician and say “Is he autistic? I’ve seen autistic things since he was little, but I’ve also seen distinctly non-autistic things. I’m tired of not being sure.” The answer was that yes, he definitely is, and the diagnostician was frustrated that it hadn’t been identified when Link had been in kindergarten.

This is how it goes. One piece of information leads to another. There is no central source that knows all the options. Or if there is, I somehow always manage to arrive there last instead of first. By the time I was in touch with the parent advocate, I’d already heard of all the options she mentioned. We’ve still got more hunting to do. At this moment we’re waiting on funding from Voc Rehab. I’m waiting for a call back from the school district about their transitional program. I’m also waiting for a call from an adult educational specialist who can explain the GED process to us, because maybe that is the way to go. We’ve accepted the fact that Link will not be graduating with his class, even though his school counsellor would really like for that to happen. Sorting it all is a huge burden in time and emotional energy. It always has been. I constantly feel like I could be doing more and simultaneously I worry that I’m over helping.

Last night I went to a Relief Society dinner. This is the women’s organization of my church. I spent quite a lot of time visiting with a woman in my neighborhood who also has an autistic son. We’ve known each other for years, but me speaking about Link’s recent diagnosis opened up a huge well of shared experiences that we spent an hour talking through. She listened to me and was frustrated on my behalf that I spent so long without access to autism-specific resources that would have made the journey easier. As part of the decorations for the dinner there were anonymous notes on the wall where people wrote about the kind things that others have done for them. One of the notes said that I’d pushed to get her daughter into early intervention. I feel like I should know who wrote that, but I don’t. It could have been one of a hundred different conversations that I’ve had with people about special needs resources.

Last week I got a message on facebook from a friend who had read my post on Finding the Right Therapist. She asked me questions about therapy and children. I gave her what answers I had, but mostly those answers were in the form of additional questions she should ask and some direction for whom she should be asking. Thus I become a stopping point on someone else’s scavenger hunt to figure out how to help a child who is struggling.

I must admit that I spent some time this morning looking back at my past struggle and grieving that no one thought to give me answers that would have helped. I went ahead and let myself feel that grief. I know that I don’t want to spend a lot of time and emotional energy looking back with regret, but I have to feel it before it can pass and I am able move on from it. Moving forward is what is necessary because the scavenger hunt continues. I suspect it will always continue for Link in one way or another as he tries to navigate a neurotypical world while being who he is. Though hopefully we can reach a point where the hunt is not a major feature of daily life, and the hunt is primarily Link’s quest, not mine. He needs to be empowered to find his own solutions.

Some days I can believe that we’ll reach an independent adulthood for him. Other days I can’t. This too is part of the hunt. I’m not just seeking resources, help, and answers. I’m seeking emotional balance, peace, acceptance, and maybe even joy. This year is better than last year. We’ll continue onward to see what comes next.

My Child Through the Eyes of Others

By / March 28, 2015 / 2 Comments

Eleven years ago, when my son Link was in kindergarten, he was in a class so large it required a teacher’s aide. His name was Mr. A. For us Mr. A was a godsend, because he had a special place in his heart for my son who was mostly non-verbal and often lost in his own imagination. Years later we’d diagnose the inattentive type ADHD and Auditory Processing Disorders that made Link so different from his classmates. At the time I was just glad to know that there was someone at school who thought Link was wonderful, who took time to tell me little stories about things that Link did. His teacher was worried about Link, but Mr. A saw Link as amazing and interesting. We were glad when Mr. A became the PE teacher and then was Link’s fifth grade teacher. Fifth grade was a good year. Not all of the elementary years were good.

There were a string of teachers in elementary school. One for each school year. They variously saw my child as stubborn, lazy, genius-level smart, frustrating, and a dozen other things. Sometimes I liked seeing what they saw. Other times I wished they could see what I saw. As the baby-cuteness vanished and teen gawkiness arrived, Link turned more inward. He was less willing to be vulnerable in public. This is true of most teens, but in Link’s case it meant that the vast majority of adults in his life saw him as an enigma. Often they liked him, mostly he fit in and learned exactly like all the other kids, but then he would hit some road block that was huge to him and invisible to everyone else. Then he would shut down, draw inward. The teachers didn’t know how to reach in and he didn’t feel safe enough to reach out. “How can I help Link?” they would ask. I didn’t have good answers to give, because he was a different person for them than for me. He was different at school than he was at home. I made a bridge of myself to make sure that he had a way across the educational gaps.

In junior high we had Mr. H. He was the resource teacher who held Link’s IEP file. He watched out for Link and liked him. Link liked Mr. H too. Sometimes Mr. H got to glimpse who Link was when he felt relaxed and happy. Mr. H wanted very much to help Link, so sometimes he helped too much. He took away opportunities to struggle and learn. We were grateful, because there was far too much struggling, but I also knew that Mr. H saw Link as a person who struggled and needed help.

High school hit hard. Link struggled. There was no Mr. H to see the struggles building and to whisk some of them away before things got too much. There was no Mr. A to remind Link that he’s amazing. I searched for an on-campus mentor, someone that Link could turn to when things felt hard. But all the people moved so fast, they were so busy with so many students. Taking any of their time felt like an imposition. Link felt it too.

Two weeks ago I sat across the desk from a woman at Vocational Rehabilitation. She told me that it is her job to take teens with disabilities and help transition them into independent adulthood. Two days ago Link and I sat in her office while she talked to him about his application. I watched this woman watching my son. She sees him as a bright prospect. She sees a person whose challenges exist, but are fairly easy to surmount. She sees a worthwhile person who has a lot to give to the world. She is prepared to mentor him as he becomes who he wants to be. I want to just hang out in her office and soak up the way she sees him and I want him to soak it up too.

Finding someone who sees Link this way is such a relief. I need to remember to tell other mothers the good things I see in their children.

Finding Someone with Answers

By / March 11, 2015 / 2 Comments

I cried when I got back to the car. I almost didn’t make it there before the crying overtook me. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I’d talked to someone who actually has the resources to help my son. It was the first time I met someone who had a road map that could take us from where we are to a future where my son is in control of his own life. Some of the tears were relief. Some were just because hope hurts. It hurts because of how often I’ve had my hopes crumble apart. Crumbled hopes are a natural side effect of trial and error. They become sharp and painful when time feels important and the stakes are emotionally high. I’m steal healing from my prior encounters with hope shards.

The meeting was with Vocational Rehabilitation. It turns out that there is an entire governmental department whose mandate is to help people reach independent adulthood. It turns out that they can start helping at age 14, which would have been nice to know three years ago. We have a slow paperwork process ahead of us, but beyond it is vocational diagnosis, social skills classes, and job coaching. We’ll have a case worker who is focused on helping my son pick a type of job, get the education for it, and apply. This is the guidance that I prayed for last September. Or I hope it is. I’m ready to walk out across the shiny hope, trusting that it won’t turn to shards beneath my feet.

It never occurred to me that vocational rehab could apply to my family. What we deal with is subtle, only noticeable when the troubles accumulate. But the counselor says that auditory processing disorder and ADHD are valid reasons to apply. So we have an application and an intake appointment. I expect the process to be slow and paperwork heavy, but I’m happy to put up with that if it gives my son a map and a guide for becoming an adult.

Educational Off-Roading

By / January 16, 2015 / 5 Comments

There are things I don’t realize I hope for until the moment when I realize they won’t happen. In that moment I am smacked with sadness just as I have to figure out how to readjust my expectations. It was somewhere in November or December that I realized Link’s high school education was going to veer sharply from the standard path. He needed it to. I needed it to. Yet I still had to find that part of myself which had expected “normal” and make it let go.

The new plan is a partial home schooling arrangement. Link does most of his coursework through online packets. Most of the time he does that work in the computer lab at school. Sometimes he does that work at home. He still has a few regular classes on campus. I’m functioning as the enabler, assistant, and aide. I don’t make the curriculum, but I assist him in understanding what he is expected to do. Link loves this new format for school. For the first time he isn’t constantly overwhelmed by noisy classrooms where the coursework goes so slowly that he tunes out and misses important assignment details. He doesn’t get surprised by assignments being due when he didn’t even know he had one. He doesn’t have to fret over knowing he has an assignment, but not being sure how it is supposed to be done. All of the instructions are right there in front of him, patiently waiting for him to absorb them and do the work.

I can see how this arrangement is going to be good for him educationally. We’ve spent years adapting his school work to allow him to keep up in a regular classroom. Now he has to struggle with types of assignments that he’s never done before. But instead of simply failing an assignment and rushing onward because the class can’t stop for him, he will be required to re-do assignments until he has learned the necessary skills to move onward. In the areas where the assignments are easy for him, he doesn’t have to sit around and wait for other students to catch up. For a student like Link, who has some significant learning disabilities that impact some of his educational capabilities, this is brilliant. Especially since Link also has some off-the-chart educational advantages in other areas.

It seems like a perfect plan, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time being afraid that it won’t work. I fear that it will cause as many problems as it solves. In this plan Link has to sit for hours in a room mostly by himself. He has to keep himself working. He’ll have to work longer and harder hours than he has been used to doing. Unlike regular classrooms, those hours will all be focused thinking. Some of the skills he’ll have to learn are how to run the necessary software and format assignments for himself. There won’t be a teacher there tap-dancing and trying to keep him engaged. Instead it is just Link, the material, and Link’s own motivation. It is very possible that Link will not step up. That he won’t work at a rate sufficient to keep him on track for graduation next year.

This is one of those hidden hopes which I have had to acknowledge: I really want my son to graduate with his class. Ultimately the decision to do so is up to Link. I’ve done everything in my power to turn that goal from impossible to possible. Now he has to do the work to make it happen. It has been important for me to see that graduation goal. Even more important is for me to consciously recognize that I may have to sacrifice the graduation goal in service of a much more important goal: preparing Link to be a self-sufficient adult.

This is one of the other potential drawbacks of this plan, social isolation. In order for Link to be ready for adulthood, he needs to interact with other people. He needs to learn how to socialize and make friends in ways that he hasn’t yet learned how to do. He needs to figure out how to communicate his needs and how to listen to the needs of others. Sitting in a room by himself does not help him accomplish any of the important social learning which happens in high school. We’re going to have to figure out other ways to make sure he learns those things. That will mean more work for us as parents. This whole plan is a lot more work for me than the standard educational route. On the other hand, I’d much rather do this work than what I have been doing in the past few months. I was constantly manageing emotional crises as Link began to despair and consider himself a failure in all things. This new educational approach means that for the first time in years, Link can picture himself succeeding. We are both very aware how fortunate we are that the administration at his school is willing and able to support this plan. There are other schools in our school district who would not do the same.

We are now at the end of the first week and we have mixed results. Link loves it, but we’ve been confused by assignments frequently. I had to purchase and install Microsoft Office to make sure we had the same tools at home that Link has at school. We’ve spent lots of time just figuring out how to find necessary information, how to take the tests, how to submit assignments. And at the end of this first week, Link had a moment of despair because he could see that the work was all going too slowly. He thought he would fail at this too. I told him it is too early to tell if this will work. We need to keep going, ironing out the wrinkles, giving this our best try. So we’ll keep rolling along bumping our way over weeds and gullies as we travel parallel to the standard path.

Learning is not Always Fun

By / April 26, 2014 / 4 Comments

I read a blog called Mayaland. I love reading Maya’s blog. Her approach to life and raising kids warms my heart. They have adventures, a pond which sometimes has a turtle, a dog, there used to be goats, and they build houses out of found parts. I truly respect Maya for the life she has built and how she is raising her kids.

Maya unschools her kids. This is a form of homeschooling that doesn’t require structure or formal lessons. Instead it lets the kids follow their own interests. Maya wrote about how it works for them. I’m so glad that it does work for her family, but that post made me cry. In particular, this sentence hit me hard:
“learning is easy when you’re having fun”
Because I do not think that all learning can be fun for all people. I do not believe that a dyslexic child, left to herself, will automatically learn how to read when she is “ready.” There are a host of other challenges and disabilities which act as road blocks to learning because the associated activities can’t be fun. At least not until a certain level of skill is acquired first. Yes it is possible to use future fun as an incentive to get over the hard bits, but for some people learning itself is hard. Worthwhile, rewarding, but hard.

I remember fourteen years ago when my two and a half year old son was tested for developmental delays. That test revealed much, as did the classes and education that came afterward. The classes taught me how to teach him. My son did not know how to communicate beyond a couple dozen words. He did not even know how to point to indicate something he wanted. Toddlers point and insist on the things they want. They demand and reach to communicate. My son didn’t. The teachers gave me a simple activity to teach my son how to point. An M&M candy in a cup with a black dot on it. I put my son’s finger to the dot and gave him the candy. We played the game four times and the lights went on. Suddenly he pointed at all the things he wanted and his world was larger. A simple adult-structured activity gave him a tool that enabled him. Yet that first time, I had to grab his hand and put his finger on the dot. I had to push him to do something that did not come naturally to him.

When the time came to teach my son to read, I used exactly the book that Maya dismisses as a waste of time. I didn’t need a structured reading program for my older child. She took to reading easily, but my son needed someone to break things down for him. He needed smaller steps, different steps. Truthfully, he probably would have been content to grow up without ever learning to read. He’s sixteen now and still does not seek out reading, but the fact that he can read enables his life in hundreds of ways. I suppose it is possible that left to himself, he would have tackled reading in his own time. But back in first, second, third grade I had to choose whether to push or to let him continue not knowing. I chose to push, to create structured activities, to insist that he learn skills that I knew would make his world a larger place. It was learning to read that finally taught him how to speak comprehensibly to the world at large.

My son has an auditory processing disorder. All language was scrambled on the way into his brain. This was a large part of his developmental delays. It was why, even at ten years old, he spoke in sentences that sounded like he’d thrown the words into a cup and pulled them out in random order. Given context and familiarity with him, we could figure out what he meant. But when he started reading sentences, he finally learned that spoken sentences should have a natural rhythm and order. Requiring him to learn to read made it possible for me to talk to my son, and that is truly worthwhile. He is amazing inside his head. He sees things that I don’t. He thinks in ways that are unique to him and now he can share that with me when he couldn’t before. It is possible that his innate brilliance would have eventually led him to read without my structured lessons, but I would have missed out on years of being able to talk to him. I don’t regret those years, nor the educational pushing that gave them to me.

My choices are different than Maya’s, which does not mean that either of us is wrong. It just means that we have diverse challenges, children, resources, and capabilities. We definitely agree that people learn best when the process is enjoyable. I structured my son’s lessons in games as often as I could, because games spoke to him. I just think there is also value in learning that comes in ways that require a person to do something hard that they dislike.

Balancing Current Happiness Against Future Plans

By / March 11, 2014 / 5 Comments

When Kiki was a sophomore in high school she nearly broke for a little bit. Utah is strange in that freshman year is spent at the junior high school. Sophomore year is when the kids start high school and the switch was really rough on Kiki. It was so rough that we found ourselves in a school administrator’s office saying that we wanted Kiki to drop out of one of her classes so that she could get extra sleep. The administrator advised against it. Making up lost school credit is difficult. But we chose the option which allowed Kiki to retain a good life balance for that year even though we knew it could adversely affect her later.

When Kiki was signing up for classes for her junior year, her teacher gave her a slip of paper saying that her next math class should be pre-calculus. Those teacher recommendations were spoken of as edicts in the group scheduling meeting. “You must sign up for the math class that your teacher recommends.” Except that we had spent all of sophomore year struggling with Algebra 2. Kiki only survived it because an adult friend came over and tutored her at least once per week. We could not picture Kiki having a happy year if pre-calculus was part of her life. I was very ready to get off of the math emotional roller coaster. So we put Kiki into accounting. It was not college prep. It would not help with her ACT. But it filled a math credit and was likely to be very useful for her long-term life plans. We chose what was right for her growth at that time instead of for an imagined future.

The moment kids hit high school, it seems like everything is aimed at getting them into college. I know much of this effort is because some kids do not think of the future at all unless someone really gets in their faces. It is good for kids to have an inkling of the big picture, yet it is more important that they make choices based on what they need to develop as knowlegable human beings rather than because it will look good on a college application. The truth is that kids who are living life fully and who are growing and developing will look good on a college application. They may not get into high-pressure schools, but then maybe a high-pressure school is not the best choice for their ongoing growth and learning.

Despite the fact that Kiki had to make up a credit and that she took accounting instead of pre-calculus, Kiki made it into college. She even got a scholarship. The school she entered was only medium competitive to get in, and she is very happy there. It is exactly the school that she needs.

I keep this all in mind as I’m helping Link figure out what classes he should take next year. There are so many factors to weigh, because I want to foster current growth while not closing off future possibilities. Yet I find that I don’t have to carry that “won’t get into college” panic, because I know that we’ll find ways to make things work so that he can keep growing through high school and beyond.