Me: "You love me right?"
Him (smiling): "Yes!"
Me: "And you'd support me in any decision I made right?"
Him (smiling less lol): "Ummmm this doesn't sound good...."
Me (rambling): "Well I'm going to homeschool CJ. I'm sick of getting calls from the schools and his grades suck and he's not learning anything and they aren't doing anything but making it worse and I need you to get on board with this with me."
Him: "Ok"
I definitely married the right guy. Over the following weeks, we talked about how we might actually be able to make this work given that neither of us can afford to just not work. We also talked about the many benefits that we hope to realize by doing this and then the dark cloud of challenges we think we might face and whether we think we can handle them.
I've only shared our decision with a few people and one of which asked to hear more about our decision and plans. She's pretty much my only blog reader (other than Jeff) so I decided to write it here. I also hope to use this blog as some record keeping for future reference. Hopefully I'll be like "see this is what we did" as we're talking to other parents at his Harvard graduation but I digress.
CJ just finished 6th grade for the second time. At the end of his 5th grade year, he'd gotten suspended several times, I'd been called in for countless conferences with the counselors, principals and teachers and his grades were pretty terrible. I'll admit that most people wouldn't agree with the last part. I don't think at that point he'd gotten Ds yet but I could just be blocking that from my memory. However, it is pretty much the easiest thing ever to get As and Bs in elementary school so even the Cs signified that something was wrong.
What was wrong was his behavior and interest in learning. His elementary school history was pretty consistent. The teachers acknowledged that his ability didn't match up with his performance and that when he's interested in something, he's pretty laser focused but the rest of the time (like 99% of the time) he's disruptive and unfocused.
It is inevitable these days that teachers automatically suggest that an energetic child has ADHD. I've had countless of those conversations with the teachers and have had him tested twice by two different reputable organizations at two different times in his life. Both results said that he did not have it. I am sure he doesn't. However, I completely understand why they would think that he did.
He's very social and that pretty much takes precedent over just about anything else going on unless something motivates him to work really hard to tune it out. We've tried to determine how to encourage such motivation. We've been successful only once and it was so short lived that it isn't worth elaborating on.
Anyway, at the end of 5th grade, it was clear that his behavior would eventually require them to remove him from the school. Seriously, how hard to you have to work to get expelled in elementary school. He managed to barely avoid it but was given the warning that the middle school administration wouldn't be so forgiving and that was terrifying to us as parents. We'd also become pretty fed up with the teaching methods these days (cue common core) so it just seemed like barriers we couldn't overcome.
CJ went to live with his dad for his (first) 6th grade year. That was a hard decision to make. We knew the school he would go to was not a good one and the demographic of the students came from undesirable backgrounds (just being honest). We worried the impact that'd have on him but what might have been scarier was what we'd face if he actually THRIVED there rather than in the highly rated Howard County school district where the median income is over $100,000. Ultimately, the end result was that he pretty much did nothing at school and made no effort at home to study or learn. His grades were terrible (there were definitely Ds this time) and so we made the decision to retain him in 6th grade.
You'd be surprised how hard it is to retain a child. We went to speak with the Principal and explained that we worried that advancing him would leave holes in the fundamentals that he should have learned in the 6th grade and that would have long term affects on his ability to learn more complex subjects (especially with math). CJ has a strong aptitude for math and we definitely don't want to lose that if possible. After several well thought out rebuttals about the social and emotional ramifications to retaining him, they finally agreed. I will say this was the best decision for him.
Fast forward to the present day and we've become even MORE frustrated with the teaching that is being done in middle school, irritated with the school's policy against disciplining kids who are disruptive and disrespectful and just plain worried about our kid's future if things continue this way. Here are some examples of what has us so fed up:
- The number of times CJ's math homework required the use of color pencils or crayons is unbelievable.
- The school requires each child to bring a device (tablet or phone) to school because the teachers routinely use YouTube to "supplement" (read: substitute) their teaching. I'm not even convinced they try to find useful videos at age appropriate levels. You can guess what most kids (especially mine) did instead. They played games and watched music videos.
- There was useless homework for the most part. For the classes that even gave homework, it was more or less a formality. Math homework, of all things, was graded for completion, not correctness.
- I regularly received emails that described CJ as disruptive to the classroom and interfering with learning. This angers me but there's only so much I can do since I'm not there with him. I encouraged them to remove him from the classroom. The response I got was that was against the school's policy. I resisted the urge to respond "so the school's policy is to let one child disrupt the learning of the other 24 - what genius came up with that?"
- I went in for a conference with the vice principal with maybe two weeks left of school. He'd gotten in trouble on the playground. During the conference, she commented that he's routinely the last one to line up when they are asked to. My response to her was to ask why he's still allowed to have recess. She says to me "well, we can definitely take it away". Um...you didn't think of that before? Obviously he knows he can do whatever without consequences at school. You've obviously set up a good learning environment here.
I could seriously go on and on but I'll leave it at that for now. Suffice to say there are countless frustrations that have been driving me nuts for years. More important are the convincing reasons of why we've decided to give homeschooling a try.
Visibility
As the work gets more challenging and also as CJ's grades were starting to slip, we really tried to gain more insight into what he was learning so we could supplement it at home. This has worked really well with math - to the extent that we knew what they were teaching for that "module" but we never got a good handle or resources to help us understand what was being taught in science, geography, healthy, etc. So, when his grades would slip, it was really hard to help. At the same time, these subjects are important so just passing him through the grades isn't really productive to him being well rounded.By homeschooling CJ, we will obviously be able to have full control over the curriculum, teach him things in the order that makes sense and have immediate feedback on his understanding and grasp of the material. This will allow us to spend more time in areas that are needed and less when he quickly understands things.
Flexibility
One of the things I think the hubby and I both value are the many experiences and opportunities that exist. We'd like to expose CJ to as many of those things as possible. Until now, we have to coordinate around school and in addition to the school requirements. Now, all of those things can be incorporated into his learning and be applied to credits for school.
We also are excited about the opportunity to find ways to expose CJ to certain subjects in ways that would ACTUALLY make it interesting to him.
