Do You Trust Your Instincts?

The biggest challenge in raising a special needs kiddo is deciding when to intervene with extra help and when to let a kid be a kid. I err (by choice) on the latter. The Boss is excellent at stepping in when a little extra help is needed. Our decisions are made with lots of discussion, prayerfully considered. I trust my wife’s instincts, which is why I agreed to her wishes over the last couple of years where our daughter’s education was concerned. The end result was that Captain Chaos spent far more time than I was comfortable with in our local elementary school. This year I decided to trust my instincts. We scaled back our time at the local school to only speech and occupational therapy. That made our daughter our third fulltime homeschooler.

I’m in my eighth year of homeschooling, but in some ways it feels like my first. Those same concerns (Can I do this?) that I experienced in my first year resurfaced when I realized that I was solely responsible for the education of my special needs daughter. I don’t usually define the Captain as “special needs.” She’s simply my daughter in the same way that my sons are my sons. She’s my child. I adore her. Where her education is concerned, there are other issues that must be addressed. Teaching her is not as easy as was teaching General Mayhem. I learned very quickly in this young school year that having three children with three distinctly different learning styles makes for quite the instructional juggling act. Of the three, the Captain needs the highest level of one-on-one instruction. Ultimately, the biggest question we had was whether or not we would be able to use the same curriculum with Captain Chaos that we used with her brothers. My gut told me the answer to that question was, “Yes.” I’m glad that I trusted my instincts.

Yesterday, Captain Chaos took her first math test. After spending the first nine days of the school year sitting by her side while she completed her math lessons, I spent most of lesson ten in another room while she completed the test on her own. We’ve suspected for a while that the Captain likes to keep her intelligence a closely guarded secret. She let that secret slip with this:

We are thrilled!

I learned two things about teaching my daughter from this test. The Captain caught her own mistake on the first tower. She corrected her mistake by writing X’s on the boxes that she should not have colored. Later on, she told her mother that her mistake bothered her a great deal. The Captain possesses a level of self-awareness about the accuracy of her work that she does not demonstrate on a daily basis. The second point of interest came from the third tower. At first glance, it appears that she sloppily colored two squares when she should have colored three. If you take a second look you will see that she colored four, put an X through the fourth box, and then decided to erase it. For reasons too silly to explain here, Dad hasn’t allowed her to use the block eraser very often. She doesn’t have much practice. She doesn’t have much control over the eraser, either. Lesson learned. Let the girl erase.

Captain Chaos will take her first grammar test tomorrow. It's the same curriculum we used with the boys. I’m hoping for similar results. Good instincts, prayerfully considered. Trust them.

The Rare Grey Striped Albino Rhinoceros

Teaching Captain Chaos is a lot like trying to get Governor William J. Lepetomane to sign a bill into law.  “Give us a hand here,” Governor Lepetomane commanded.   As Lieutenant Governor Hedley Lamarr grabbed the governor’s hand and guided it through his signature, Lepetomane announced, “Work, work, work!  Work, work, work!” while looking everywhere and anywhere except at the bill in front of him.  Life imitated art yesterday when I told Captain Chaos to color a rhinoceros. 

It was a simple Language Arts assignment.  On a sheet of paper there were different shapes.  Inside each shape was printed a letter of the alphabet.  She needed to color all the shapes with consonants in them green.  All the shapes with vowels in them were colored grey.  If she colored all the shapes properly, there would be a picture of a rhinoceros standing in the jungle.  Captain Chaos understood the concept.  The problem was that she was more interested in anything and everything going on around her than on the art assignment in front of her.   Her hand moved as if it had a mind of its own, while she looked around the room and spoke about one of her brother’s video games, a fly in the kitchen, the squirrel running across the phone line in the back yard, and cumquats.  I only kept her interest by coloring a little bit of green for every little bit of grey she managed to smear on the paper.  I discovered that my daughter has an amazing ability to repeatedly drag a crayon back and forth across the same segment of paper without ever branching off to uncolored sections.  She completed her assignment with a nice rendering of the rare Grey Striped Albino Rhinoceros.

Of my three children, Captain Chaos is the most easily distracted.  She has the shortest attention span.  She also has physical challenges that make holding a pencil or a crayon difficult; consequently, she tires easily.  This causes her to lose her concentration.    I have to be aware of the need to chunk her work into smaller bits so as to not lose her attention.  This is easier to do at home than it would be in a classroom full of children: 24 individual sources of distraction for my daughter.  Our local elementary school wanted to greatly increase the number of hours Captain Chaos spent in school this year.  I politely declined their offer.  She will only attend Speech and Occupational therapies.     It wouldn’t take much time for my daughter to become a major distraction for a classroom teacher and the other students.   Seeing the success that we are having teaching her here at home, I am grateful that we have the freedom to homeschool in our country. 

Pinky, We're Going to Take Over the World!

Well, it’s almost time to begin the new day.  In a few minutes I will gather my hand-picked students, chosen for their unique gifts and abilities, and start them on their daily lessons.   That is the position of Tracy, a teacher writing on a Wall Street Journal community forum.  In her post, Tracy wrote:

Homeschooling - I have no problem with homeschooling, but please don't compare that with my job. There are VERY FEW similarities. If I had only 3-4 self-selected students to educate in the comfort of my own home with any bathroom/food/physical activity/food break and could set my own hours and discipline appropriately, etc. etc. etc ------ I could get even better results than those parents. If you don't believe me, then please fund that study and I will be happy to participate. I will even take 10 students.

She discovered our secret.  Homeschoolers self-select only the best students.  This self-selection process skews the results of home education unnaturally higher than those of our public school counter-parts.  Tracy is such an incredibly talented teacher that if she would do the same, her homeschooling performance would be better than the rest of us teacher-wannabes.   I’m stepping up today to raise my hand and admit, “Guilty as charged!”

I self-selected only the best students for my homeschool.  I did not simply accept the children that God gave me.  I self-selected a girl with a congenital heart defect.  She’s a stroke victim with learning delays that caused us to hold her back one year in school to better prepare her to complete the first grade.   It gave us time to help her gain the ability to hold and manipulate a pencil.  Nothing screams “academic success” like repeating kindergarten!  I self-selected OCD Boy.  He’s the child that must ask the same question three times in a row before hesitantly accepting the same answer given three times in a row and gingerly moving forward through his exercises.   If he had his way, I would be holding his hand through every question on every task that he completes.  His ability is high.  His self-confidence is low.  I even self-selected Walter Mitty, my teenager whose hold on reality is tenuous on his best days.  I wanted him to possess a genuine talent for mathematics coupled with a genuine loathing for the subject that allows him to stretch even the simplest math assignment into a five hour marathon.  

I’m a bit of a sadist that way.

I’m fairly certain that if I asked my homeschooling friend Daniel, he’d admit that he self-selected autism for his oldest boy.  Teaching a non-autistic child would be so…mundane.  I’m quite certain that most of the thousands of the parents who homeschool their special needs children would agree.  And those homeschooling parents who chose “normal” students?  Selfish buggers.  All of ‘em.  They could have self-selected special needs children, but nope, they opted for normal.  And we all know that normal homeschooling children never act up, disobey, sass, fail to complete their work, fail subjects, miss deadlines, lose assignments, daydream, lollygag or repeatedly make the same mistake that their parent-teachers have explained to them over and over and over again until they are banging their heads on the refrigerator in frustration.  It never happens because those traits have been self-selected out of normal homeschooled children.   

It’s time to let the world in on a little secret.  Homeschoolers hold all the secrets to manipulating DNA in order to produce only the best possible students.  Pinky, we’re going to take over the world! 

Or maybe…just possibly…Tracy has no idea what she is writing about.