Okay. So you know I host for A to Z Home's Cool on Friday and Saturday nights, right?
If you ever want to come chat, email me and I'll send you a chat room link. Nothing to download.
But here I am, two sentences in and already digressing.
A person came into the chat last night wanting to know if she could 'use homeschool materials to teach her son outside school hours.'
Well, there's the obvious 'duh' answer, he's your child, you can teach him whatever you want and you can use whatever materials you want.
We chatted a minute or two, and found that her son is six years old and 'behind'. I just want to scream when someone says something like that. Behind WHAT for God's sake? Behind some arbitrary standard thought up by some educrat somewhere?
(Blogger doesn't think educrat is a word. Blogger is a dumbass sometimes.)
The studies are out there. Children learn at their own pace, no matter how you try to force it. The child who learns to read at five and the child who doesn't learn to read until age 8 show virtually no difference in their literacy skills by the time they're 15. Their self-esteem usually is in the toilet by then if they've been labeled a slow reader, though.
And a person's enthusiasm for reading suffers if they've been forced to read all sorts of crap that doesn't interest them.
Ever see that study about how many adults NEVER EVER pick up a book again after getting out of school?
Let's pause for a moment and reflect on the whole 'behind' thing, shall we?
Instead of thinking about academic subjects, let's just decide that all babies should be walking by the age of 10 months. If your baby is not walking by that age, you're going to need to take him or her in for tutoring.
After all, if he isn't walking by 10 months, then he's going to fall short of the next benchmark, which is running by 12 months. If he's not running by 12 months, he's going to be so far behind by the time he's supposed to master the skill of eating with his own spoon and speaking in complete sentences that you may as well just send him to burger flipping school. He's obviously never going to catch up with his peers. He'll have to be held back. He may have a walking disability. We'll have a professional work with him all day, and you can supplement the lessons at home.
Ridiculous? To me, not any more so than what this mom wanted to do to her son.
We suggested to this mother that if 6 hours of schooling a day wasn't working for him, another two hours of it in the afternoon probably wasn't going to be a great idea. Can you imagine being in school all day long and not being allowed to relax once you get home?
She said that he needs more one on one. Great! Bring him home then and give him all the one on one he needs. He's sure as hell not going to get it at school, it's logistically impossible.
Can you imagine how pressured a little guy would feel knowing his mom found his learning ability inferior based on the crap being fed to her by the school?
So we suggested learning activities instead. Read to him. Bake cookies with him. Go to the library, take a walk, look at the stars, sing songs, count things. Draw and play and interact!
The chat room has private message capabilities. Just before she signed off, she sent me this message.
"I just don't want him to miss out on college."
How do you even begin to help someone like that?
Who knows. Maybe she just needs time to really think things through and find out her own answers.
ReplyDeleteI don't think my younger son (he's 6 now) would do well in a regular school because he is not a text book kind of learner. He has to have hands on learning and they don't do a lot of that in schools. So I am so glad I homeschool.
I wish someone had said all that stuff you just said to me when I was a young Mom. It's SO true, but when you're brought up to follow societal norms, it's hard to break free without some assistance. For me that assistance came in the form or Mom #2, I hope you were that assistance for that lady. Hopefully you gave her the courage to break free. It can be SCARY!
ReplyDeleteMy oldest loves to read. Maybe it's because I read to him all the time. When he was in my tummy I would read out loud to him. Often it was a Glamour mag, but oh well. That obviously had no impact, he still can not match his clothes!
ReplyDeleteI agree with MOM#1, let's hope you were here preverbal smack on the forehead.
How sad! I pulled mine out because they tried to label them. They have done just fine being at home. Plus, they enjoy learning more now than they did in PS. KB was a late reader and she tried to use it as a crutch at 1st because of what PS had put in her head, but now she has got that out of her system, she reads fine. No more crutches!I did worry when JB wanted to go back to school, but he is doing just fine.
ReplyDeleteSome people (IMO) try to make something so small, so big!
Things like that make my blood boil. It is just so frustrating. I had an acquaintance call last week for guidance in what public school board she should put her child to learn the Alberta Curriculum. I am with a private school board that allows me to use whatever curriculum I want and unschool. Her daughter is in grade one and was told by one school board she would have to do a bunch of stuff or her daughter wouldn't be ready for grade 2 should she send her to PS (which she may). I told her to look at what she needs to learn (our standards are on the net under Albertaed. and if she knows those things, she will be where other kids are despite not using what they tell her to. I can't believe that for grade one, they expect her to use a specific book to teach such basics and they threatened to hold her child back. I told to mom to stop worrying and teach her anything and if she goes to school, there will be kids who don't know how to read some words and won't know all their addition facts and yet passed too. Sometimes it is so frustrating.
ReplyDelete