Normal Isn’t For Everyone: How My Son Taught Me a Lesson in Schooling
A story about why I started homeschooling my 8 year old son(who is now 10): reason number one.
Every year at my son’s physical exam the doctor asks if he is eating his fruits and vegetables. He says “a little” and without fail she always says “Don’t you want to be a big, strong, tall man” again without fail he says “No, I don’t”.
That is my son in a nutshell. He has stayed clear of societal norms. It is so normal to hear that men should be strong for so many different reasons: to survive, to thrive, to work, to get the money, or to get the girl. He does not care what normal is and it is one of my favorite things about him. Herein lies one of the reasons I started homeschooling him.
My son has absolutely hated school since kindergarten. And I completely understood why he hated his first year of public school. His classroom had none of the centers we remember, a reading center, home center, or blocks. There were no naps. No joy. Just straight to the seriousness of school. No warming the babies up to the truth of what the next 12 years of school life would be.
Every morning he would cry when I woke him up for school. He would cry the entire time he got dressed, the whole ride to school, and as he walked in the gate. It was heartbreaking to watch. Other parents thought he was my first child and would always offer their two cents: “he will stop crying when he gets inside the class”, “ he will only do this the first week” and many more cliche statements. But this wasn’t my first child. I was aware of the things they said, but this was not that. He hated the business of schooling.
To add insult to injury, every year his teachers would tell me that he was behind and that he needed intervention (additional after school help) to help him get on par with his cohorts. He was a quiet kid and didn’t get excited about things that didn’t interest him. He wouldn’t finish the assigned work and would daydream about playing video games. That’s going to be a challenge for a teacher that relies on assignments for assessment.
Moreover, he was a July baby, which means he is younger than his cohort. In order to enroll in kindergarten your child must be five years old at the time of enrollment or will be five by September of the enrollment year. So kids turning five after September will wait until the following school year to enter kindergarten. As a July baby he is a year younger than most of the kids he is being compared to in class. When teachers tell me during parent teacher conferences that he is behind, I always tell them that to better assess him, they need to stop comparing him to his peers and only compare him to himself. Was he learning? Does he know more now than he knew last year? Does he know more now than he did at the beginning of this school year? But they cannot do that: number one, that’s not what the school wants them to do and two “it would be unfair to others”. My response: “Then do it for everyone”. Why are we as a society having five year olds judge their progress against someone else’s work? That’s the way school generally works. Your child is compared against their peers, not against their own progress
Teachers always make it known to my son that he is behind because they post the achievements in the classroom. They even go as far as having an assembly to acknowledge how great other kids are doing. They argue that the purpose is to motivate the other students. This is not motivation for him nor do I agree with this process.
So I had to ask myself, why am I forcing him to do something he hates? What kind of world forces people to do things they hate? So, I thought I would simply move him to a different school, maybe he didn’t hate school, maybe he hated that school. Around this time I’d also noticed that he was spending a lot of time on his xbox. I found a STEAM (Education is an approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking) magnet school that offered robotics and legos as part of the curriculum. I thought this school may spark an interest for learning within a school setting because by then I knew my son didn’t mind learning. Clearly, he has the capacity to learn what interests him because he masters each new game I purchase faster than I can replace them. I was hoping that a school with a STEAM focus would do the trick. He still hated it!
TO BE CONTINUED…
