Little J spent the last year homeschooling. We pulled him out of his public school classroom half-way through 2nd grade because the problems he’d continually experienced in school up to that point – the constant complaints about behavior, his social difficulties, his complete refusal to do homework, and the school’s slow pace at doing anything to address any of this, plus his standstill in academic progress – all convinced us that the traditional classroom wasn’t for him.
In first grade we’d requested he be evaluated for an IEP, and despite the psychoeducational report that clearly stated he needed extra help and had major deficits in all academic areas, it was denied as his classroom teacher said that he was on grade level for all subjects – something we didn’t see at home, something our child couldn’t replicate on homework, and something the teacher couldn’t demonstrate at the meeting – but since that’s what the teacher reported, that’s what the IEP team went with.
In retrospect, we should have brought an advocate. In retrospect, we should have appealed. In retrospect, the standardized test the school gave him at the start of 2nd grade that showed below 5th percentile on all measures that should have kicked in intensive interventions should have alerted the school to what we’d been saying all along…but it didn’t. Shoulda coulda woulda.
It was like they had decided our kid was kind of bad and kind of dumb…and what do you do with a kid like that? Apparently our home school district does nothing.
Meanwhile, our home life had become explosive – J was usually completely worked up from a hard day at school and so needed to scream at SOMEONE to get his rage out, and on the rare day I’d attempt to get him to do homework (or the additional packet of work the teacher sent home that hadn’t been completed during the school day) it’d start more battles that wouldn’t end until we all tumbled, exhausted from the battle, into bed.
So we pulled him. Quit school. At first, it was really hard. J. would scream and fight me any time I’d bring up academic work, and he also had a hard time focusing on much of anything. He’d spend the day walking around the house, bossing me around, begging to be taken out to eat and refusing to comply with any request I made, no matter how fun. All he wanted to do was watch television, which I wouldn’t allow him to do. He fought and I fought and it was horrible. It was better than school had been, weirdly enough, but it was bad.
Then I got some really good advice from fellow homeschooling moms. They told me to take it easy. Decompress. Deschool. Quit trying to get J. to do anything academic and just relax.
So we did. From March until September he did little in the way of formal academics. If he wanted to watch something “educational” (meaning nothing on the Nickelodeon channel) he had to read to me, but beyond that he spent his days working on projects in the shed, attending homeschool activities like playgroup, art, Lego club, outdoor camps, and play practices. All was good. We essentially became unschoolers.
Unschooling is a philosophy that espouses that children should lead the way in their learning, and they’ll learn what they’ll need to learn when they need to learn it. Reading, math, science, etc. will all come along naturally. To read more about unschooling, please go here. Many kids thrive in the unschool environment, and there are many great things about it, but…
(image by flickr user stevendepolo)