Thursday, January 17, 2013

Long-awaited Decisions

A couple of weeks after writing my introductory blog post, I started feeling the pressure for a follow-up.  No, you won't find one anywhere.  I wrote a few - even a nice, cohesive explanation of what we were going through in mid-November.  But, ultimately I felt like I was airing dirty laundry.  It has never been my intention to ridicule or lay blame on the education system, administrators, or teachers - but that's what anything I could have said would have sounded like.  So I've been on hiatus.  Here's what happened in the interim, in a nutshell (or the closest my wordy self can come to a nutshell).

My daughter started the second grade with a bang.  She enjoyed school, her classmates, the gifted program - all around it was good.  On November 1, she gave up.  Seriously.  From November 1-28, she had "problems" every day.  Most were small behavior issues, a few were more serious.  She spat on a kid and got sent to the Principal's office.  She refused to do her work.  After a week or so of this degradation of behavior and lack of participation, her teacher started calling me, sometimes multiple times a day.  One day she called me THREE times while the class was completing the assignment - draw a robot and write a story about it.  The first time she called was to say Cecelia wouldn't write her story - she had been sitting there for twenty minutes doing nothing.  The second time she called, my daughter was crying in the background and I asked to speak to her.  When I asked her why she was not completing the assignment, she immediately told me she couldn't think of a name for her robot.  Since my daughter was in the middle of her re-run through all the Roald Dahl books, the first thing that came to mind was to call him Roald.  So I gave her the name.  The teacher called me a third time about an hour later to say that Cecelia had completed her assignment, but had lost her computer and recess time as a punishment.  Whatever.

What really bothered me was the conversation that came later that afternoon.  The one in which Cecelia divulged that she did not feel comfortable asking her teacher for help because her teacher did not listen to her.  She tried to tell the teacher she couldn't think of a name for the robot, but the teacher couldn't even give her 10 seconds of attention to come up with a silly name.  Instead it was more appropriate to call Mom in hopes I would threaten some kind of punishment as a motivation.

Throughout the terrible month of November it became increasingly obvious that there was a horrible miss-match between my daughter and her classroom.  Her weekly folder that had previously been filled with quality work and good grades became routinely stacked with skipped problems and ridiculousness like bubbled patterns on the Scantron and oodles of drawings of Pokemon.  She called school "a waste of her day" and came to hate it.  We took away prized possessions until she had none, and she had her first spanking since she was six.  We tried to get her to comply, but eventually realized it wasn't going to happen.  All of this was going on while she was perfect - I kid you not - at home.  This was increasingly difficult to deal with day by day because we personally experienced none of it.

The funny part is...what turned her behavior at school around.
My daughter spent her last three weeks in public school with almost all E's in conduct.   She completed her work and the phone calls ceased.  Around Thanksgiving, we made the decision to pull her out of public school at the semester break and begin homeschool.  This was something we had often considered throughout the 2.5 yrs she spent in public school - but it was not yet necessary.  Our plan was to keep her there until the problems outweighed the benefits - and we had reached that point.  Once Cecelia knew her personal hell would come to an end, she again gave her best effort until the final day when we walked out the school building for the last time.  There were no tears, at least not from my child.  Her best friend buried her face in her mother's coat.  The children lined up to hug her goodbye.  But Cecelia skipped out of the building with a giant grin on her face.

We ultimately chose the online K12 Advanced Learning Program because, for us, homeschooling is an intervention.  We need a program that will keep her "on track" for returning to a public or private school.  We need accountability built-in so that grade skips and subject accelerations can be recognized and converted.  We cannot put her through this again.  Aside from appropriate academic challenges, she needs the support of a true gifted program, which K12 provides.  I could have just pulled her out and let her play all day for two or three years and then let her go back to school.  But that's not what she needs.  One of my immediate goals was to re-engage my child in the learning process; she literally learned nothing at school.  So our first task was testing and more testing for placement in the program.  Immediately she was put up a grade - and in our first phone conversation her teacher said "unfortunately we can only put her up one grade at a time," with other adjustments in specific subjects.  The curriculum includes subjects that her school did not provide (actual history, can you believe it?) and is based on the national curriculum...so it's much more conceptual than the skills-based state standardized curricula.  You can find very mixed reviews of K12 on the internet, but like all things - it's what you make of it.  The curriculum and online classrooms are phenomenal.  The teachers are kind (think - they don't have to deal with classroom management!) and supportive, something my daughter talks about every day.   For us, it has been a Godsend.

Does she miss school? Not nearly like I thought she would.  She has yet to ask to call her friends or visit her class at school.  The few things she liked about school (gifted programs, art, music) she gets to do every day instead of once a week.  Personally I think she's a little too young to really think about the friends she left behind.  After finishing a challenging week long writing portfolio assignment, today I asked her if she still liked homeschool.  Her immediate response, "Of course, Mom. I just needed more challenges and more time and now I have it."

Which brings us back to the darned robot assignment she wouldn't complete.  I'm well aware that she's a dreamer - naive, friendly, sensitive, creative...inside and out I know every one of her eccentricities.   I know how to bend her slowly and steadily so she's always making progress, but never reaching her breaking point.  I know she's a brilliant, open-hearted person that really just wants to freely be herself.  I know if you put her in any kind of box she will kick and thrash until she shreds it to pieces.  The robot assignment is forever engrained in my memory because the entire incident was stopped by a thought that required only a fraction of a second: Roald.  That day I realized just how much my daughter needed me.  Yes, she needed an academic challenge.  Yes, she needed out of the routine and cramped big-box school system.  But most importantly she needs to feel valued, be allowed to participate fully, and be supported when she needs assistance.

Sometimes only Mom will do.  Over the last seven years I've come to learn that Moms really are magic. We reached a point where something had to be done and I realized how easily only I could fix this problem.   No one else was going to make her a priority.  No one else was going to help her.  No one else was going to listen.  No one else was going to care about all the little things that had piled into a formidable mountain in front of her, much less why all those little things were so important.  All too soon she will outgrow her need for Mom - but for now I'm proud to walk alongside her.  I'm still learning how to own this role of magnificence; when I have doubts, I turn to her.  There's a twinkle in her eye we came so close to losing, a bound in her step that was, for a while, indeed lost.

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