11th December, 2007
Finish what you start.
I haven’t written anything for a long time. Mainly because we haven’t been homeschooling and I lost my haphazard drive to blog once I didn’t need to document anything. We tried public schooling with Joe this year for 5th grade. I am sure it could have been more disastourous. He was pretty miserable right from the start. “What do you mean I have to raise my hand to go to the bathroom?!?”, “Why do we have to eat lunch sitting in alphabetcial order?!?” (honestly that one threw me too), “We never do anything interesting!” and on and on and on. The probelm I had was that all of his statements were completely reasonable and valid. If these children are in 5th grade, ready to shoulder some responsibility, why not give them some? I will not digress into all the reasons we disliked 5th grade. That isn’t the total reason we are back to homeschooling.
When Joe first started homeschooling a couple years ago, we noticed some motor tics creeping up. His doctor said let’s keep an eye on it and see what happens. If you think it is getting worse we will reevaluate. For two years he had them on and off, but not really a big deal. Once he started 5th grade, all of sudden we had full blown simple, complex, motor and vocal tics. Everyday, all day. In October Joe was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome. This is not some devastating thing to us, he is still Joe. I also kind of thought that was what we were dealing with all along. It does however, give me the iron clad reason to homeschool again. Not that we felt we needed a condition to homeschool. We approached this year as, “ok you wanted to try out public school again. We will finish an entire year. No quitting just because you don’t like it.” We wanted him to be a finisher. But clearly this is something beyond finishing what you start. He is withering. He is trying to inhibit his tics all day long, which is impossible. He hates it there, is under enormous stress. Some children are making fun of him and there seems to be little intervention in that department. We decided that the next few years of his education were to crucial to risk being turned off by education all together. So we are bringing him home. Maybe, in a way, this is what God had in mind all along. He really did want us to finish what we started.
Posted at 12:38 pm |
