Smrt Lernins

Hi there! Been a while, hasn’t it.

It’s been a hell of a summer. Sprained ankles and weddings in the US Virgin Islands and cracked teeth (well, only one a piece of the first two, and two of the third one — one for me and one for Patchfire). We’ve been busy.

Today we start our ‘11-’12 school year. I can’t even wrap my head around how weird that is. I mean, I graduated from high school in 1997 and now my older son is starting 6th grade and my younger son is starting Kindergarten. How did I get old so fast?

I think our schedule this year is going to be pretty decent. Captain Science sat down with it and wrote out some ways he could keep himself on track, as well as (on his own) some things he thought made it a good schedule. High point point is apparently well-timed snack and lunch placement. He wants to set a timer for himself so he’ll have a bell to signal class change.

We’re moving our schedule up an hour this year, starting at 8 instead of 9. We all need to start getting up and at ‘em a little earlier anyway, so this will force my hand. I need to start going to bed earlier and waking up earlier to make the most of my day. Or something. Hell, I don’t know.

Tank is ready to go w/ school work. He won’t start most of his stuff until next week, because Daddyman is teaching the game camp, but he can’t wait to get started.

Pissed off today because I will no longer be teaching at the local homeschool co-op. The woman who runs it decided to wait until today to inform me that there will no longer be internet access, and did I need that for my classes? You know, my classes on blogging and online safety? Could I just use “snapshots” of the internet? Could I provide my own internet? Um, no. She’s had my course descriptions since the spring and only just bothered to talk about this with me, for classes starting in two weeks? Thanks, but no thanks, lady. We out.

This week is a light week. Today was orientation and the start of 10am piano lessons (a vast improvement over the 2pm ones, btw) and game camp homework and reading. The next three days are game design camp. Friday is an overview of the curricula for the year, then academic schtuffs start on Monday.

As an aside, Babypie is no longer Babypie. She is now The Honeybadger, because you know what? Honeybadger don’t care. Honeybadger don’t give a shit. She takes what she wants.

I’m so tired. Can’t I just go back to bed and claim I’m unschooling?

I didn’t go all out and do a full month of thanks, but I think the days leading up to Thanksgiving are a good time to express my gratitude for some of the most awesome people in my life: my three children.

I am thankful for Captain Science, who is turning 10 on Sunday. Double-digits, as he has pointed out several times in the last few weeks. That’s a Big Damn Deal(tm).

My pregnancy with Captain Science took me by surprise and I wasn’t quite prepared to be a mom at 21. Luckily, after a loooong labor and a hard first few weeks, we got it together pretty quickly. I spent the first 4.5 years of his life as his only parent–my ex-husband left when Captain S. was 7 months old and his infrequent visits petered out to nothing and then into a request to give up parental rights–with the help of my own parents, until I remarried and Officer Daddyman adopted him.

Captain Science was a pretty easy baby, incredibly (almost frighteningly) quick to learn. I could usually reason with him, which (I learned w/ child #2) isn’t all that typical. When he was really set on something being a certain way, though, he dug in his heels and nothing could convince him otherwise. He spoiled me in the “parent as teacher” department, saying his first two words by six months (Mama and “NO!”, used correctly), learning his upper and lower case letters by 18 months, reading simple words by two, and able to read most of the young reader books in the house by three. He potty trained completely in two days. He did so well in his pre-K that his teachers encouraged me to put him somewhere more challenging, because, “He already know everything we teach.” He was always a little gentleman, introducing himself politely with a firm handshake. He loves his “women,” as he collectively referred to me, my mother, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother — yes, he was lucky enough to spend his first three years of life as the sole member of the 5th generation of five living generation.

When he got older and went to first a Montessori and then public school, things got harder for him. His nature was too sweet to understand the bullying nature of children under poor adult supervision…or the bullying nature of petty adults in positions of power. He was on an asthma-maintenance medication for several years that contributed to the anxiety and a growing depression; we immediately took him off the meds when we figured it out. He skipped a grade and could have skipped another, academically, but emotionally, he was still a little boy, not ready for the meanness he encountered. He continued to perform well in school, but he became withdrawn and unhappy. My happy and outgoing boy was slowly becoming sullen and introverted. We put him in therapy, only to discover that the terrible social dynamics at school were his only real source of unhappiness. Home was where he felt secure. We made the decision to start homeschooling.

Oh, my Captain Science! I never would have taken that leap if he weren’t exactly the kind of boy he is. I couldn’t let the public school system systematically destroy all his beautiful quirks and uniqueness. He needed more security and more academic challenge. It scared me to death to consider it, because it was big change, and I feared change, but Captain Science has been challenging my preference for stasis and pushing my beyond my boundaries since he got here. For him, I could do anything.

Now, a year and a half later, we’re so much happier. Though we have frustrating days, homeschooling has brought us closer and made both of us lightyears happier. I enjoy him. Captain Science is a remarkable boy, growing into an equally remarkable young man. He has his moments of moodiness, when I jokingly call him “Book 5 Harry Potter” (CAPSLOCK HARRY!!!) and moments of selflessness, like how he cares for his younger sister. He loves Legos and computers and science and reading…always, always reading. He can’t sit down at the table without reading the cracker box or pass by my desk without picking up any flier or magazine. He loves language, both written and spoken, and plays with it well. He writes creatively far above his age.

He is a truly delightful boy and I am so grateful that he came into my life.

He also just came over here and said, “What’s a parasite?” What? “Something you see in Paris.”

That’s my boy.

You’ve probably met those parents. Those parents: the ones whose children can do no wrong. It’s never their children’s fault; their babies are being wronged by the system or picked on by a bad guy.

I always prided myself on not being one of those parents.

I wasn’t one of those parents throughout Captain Science’s rocky pre-homeschooling educational career. When educators brought problems (or “problems”) to my attention, I didn’t immediately jump to the assumption that my child had done nothing wrong. In fact, I tended to err on the side of it probably being something he was doing that wasn’t quite right or, at least, not quite what they were looking for. When we had that horrible last year in public school, the third grade year of misery, I thought that perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a little something wrong with Captain Science. After all, if both his teacher and the gifted teacher thought something wasn’t right, it had to be him, right?

I was determined to not be one of those parents, brushing off concerns about possible developmental or behavioral problems simply because it was something I didn’t want to hear. Even though my gut told me that there was nothing “wrong” with Captain Science (even if he were different, different =/= “wrong”), I tried to listen with my brain instead. As a result, I not only jumped through hoops, but I made my child jump through hoops. He was assessed by a speech therapist. We asked my PT sister-in-law (who specializes in children with developmental/neurological disorders) take a look at him. We had my SLP brother-in-law and my PhD in early childhood education mother-in-law quietly assess him. We took him to a counselor to ascertain if he was “on the spectrum” as his teacher implied (“He reminds me so much of a boy I had in here last year who had Asperger’s.” “Having a label isn’t a bad thing! Everyone had a label these days!”) or if he had some deep-seated emotional problem that was causing his school problems.

After we’d jumped through the hoops, we discovered that the answer was that Captain Science was a quirky, incredibly bright boy with one glaringly big problem: the very school system that had insisted we had to jump through hoops to begin with.

At about that point, it hit me: maybe, just maybe, being one of those parents didn’t necessarily mean being blind to my child’s faults. Maybe it meant being my child’s advocate and supporter first, speaking up for him first, taking his side and believing his rightness first, instead of assuming that the adults were right and my child was probably wrong. Instead of presuming him guilty and allowing his accusers or detractors determine the means through which he would be cleared or condemned, perhaps I needed to presume him innocent until they could come up with some compelling evidence as to why I should believe he was anything otherwise.

Last night, I had a golden opportunity to be one of those parents when Captain Science’s soccer coach’s mother called to complain about his behavior at soccer practice (Captain Science is apparently one of “three or four” miscreants on the team). Instead of immediately becoming angry at Captain Science and assuming he had, indeed, cut up, I asked for some concrete examples. The coach’s mother could give me none, but said her son (the teenage coach) would. The coach had a difficult time articulating any specific examples, or articulating much of anything at all, other than one claim that Captain S had told another coach “you can’t make me” — something the coach I spoke to didn’t experience first hand, but only heard about after the fact. The only direct complaint the coach could give me was prompted by his mother, whom I could hear carrying on in the background: Captain Science had taken off his shirt during practice and hadn’t immediately put it back on when asked. This apparently greatly distressed both the coach and his mother, but is hardly an infraction I feel necessitated calling home.

I decided to be one of those parents. I know Captain Science pretty well. If he were being consistently criticized, fussed at, told he was doing something wrong, he would be complaining about how much he dislikes soccer when I got him at the end of practice. Instead, he’s bouncing off the field each day, full of joy, telling me how much he loves it. That doesn’t tell me my child is misbehaving and being corrected, so either he’s not the cut up he’s being accused of being or his coach lacks the authority to command respect and discipline the lack thereof. Neither of those makes me feel I need to “handle [this situation] at home,” as the coach’s mommy thought I should. In fact, that female coach Captain S had supposedly sassed? He brought up, unprompted, the brand new coach he’d had that day and how tough she was. He said she threatened to make them run laps, do pushups, etc. if they didn’t follow her instructions, and, Captain Science added, “I believed her!”

So, being one of those parents and assuming my child was NOT in the wrong lead me to investigate this further, without getting upset at him or about the situation, and discover that the source of the coach’s (and his mommy’s) dismay was probably the shirtlessness (their hangup, not mine), not the sass. Sure, I’ll keep an eye on him at the remaining practice and a half to make sure he’s not being rude to his coaches, but I’m not disciplining him for something I don’t remotely believe he did. I don’t doubt that the coach may feel disrespected, but after speaking to the kid, I think that any issues of respect problem lies in him and not in his players.

Yes, I know that this isn’t exactly the same as thinking my kid can’t ever do any wrong. It’s certainly more of a middle ground. It did, however, require a little bit of a paradigm shift away from thinking adults are right, children are wrong. More importantly, it involved a shift to thinking in favor of my child. Nothing wrong with a default of “I know my kid and he’s not a bad kid.” Nothing wrong with that at all.

If that means I might be one of those parents, even just a little bit, I’m ok with that.

We’ve successfully started our school year on a positive foot! Captain Science rocked his first day of fifth grade (seriously, am I old enough to have a 5th grader? when did this happen?) and Tank thoroughly enjoyed his first day of homeschooling.

Captain S. woke up at 8 and by the time I was downstairs at 8:15, had his morning chore completed, was dressed, had been on his run, and had eaten breakfast. He filled out his daily schedule, deciding he would do history, grammar review, and then math review. He finished his history chapter, a two page spread on Bronze Age China in History: The Definitive Visual Guide, in under a half-hour, then did a few sentences in Practice Town, which necessitated a brief review of the various phrases, and then did a pass on the final bridge of Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents. He’s gung-ho about starting his new materials and his online classes (which he can on Wednesday, when our Internet is hooked up!).

Tank loves, loves, loves his school work. He did about eight pages on colors in a wipe-off work book and then another five or six pages in a book on opposites. I had to actually cut him off and send him to do some other tasks. I insisted that “block time” was an important part of pre-school and that he needed to go down and play with blocks for a while. We also had a little trampschooling for a while, when I put him on the minitramp for exercise time. I’m going to have to come up with a lot more to do, even when we add in the reading stuff.

All in all, great first day. Go us!