If you're done or almost done homeschooling (a) child(ren)...

[Kathryn]

How, if they have, have their strengths and weaknesses changed over the years? If you were told where they'd end up when they were just starting school, would you have been surprised?

[ksr5377]

:bigear: I like this question.

[lllll]

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Edited July 8, 2012 by ksva

[Mandy in TN]

My oldest is 21yo. Even when he was a toddler, I knew something was going on. It turns out that he is mildly dyslexic and mildly gifted. It took what felt like forever for him to read, but he went to a school for dyslexics where he also went to speech therapy and occupational therapy for low muscle tone in his hands. Right around his eighth birthday everything started coming together and before he was 10yo he was reading The Hobbit, Harry Potter, and pretty much whatever he wanted.

 

What started as a weakness became a strength. He loves to read- reads all the time. I thought we had conquered the mountain, but that is not the case. Now in college reading isn't the problem. However, the dyslexia is still there and clearly visible in the effort it takes write papers. Fortunately, oral output isn't an issue. If he knows about the subject, he can discuss it. I told him that the good news is that after college most people will talk to him and won't ask him to produce a well-formed 5 page paper.

 

So, my oldest has had a few surprises, but in general he is doing about as well at 21yo as I expected by the time he was 11yo.

 

My 2nd ds was pretty academically normal as a toddler and is academically normal now at 18yo. However, he was a violent little Tasmanian devil as a toddler and now he is incredibly laid back. He isn't even competitive. This aspect of his personality is so different from when he was little that I probably wouldn't have believed a messenger from the future if they told me that this is how his personality would unfold.

 

Mandy

[Laura Corin]

I home educated Calvin from the age of 6-13. As a small child he was physically uncoordinated (very late writing), very wary of unfamiliar situations and a bully-magnet at school. By the time he went back to school at thirteen, he had gained enormous confidence and his physical skills had mostly caught up. Watching him up on stage, lead singing in his friend's rock band, I could never have imagined getting to this point. As I write, he is off with two friends investigating a university, staying overnight and (as it turns out) dealing with his suitcase having been stolen. I couldn't be more proud.

 

Laura

[MamaSheep]

I don't know what you meant by "almost done". We're going into our seventh year of homeschooling and will have two (or maybe three) after that. I keep telling myself to hang in there because we're almost done, so I guess I'll count that as close enough and toss in my two cents.

 

When ds was young, he was a real handful--violent outbursts, weird obsessive paranoias, very bizarre behaviors, and extremely quirky personal habits (OCD was just the start). When he was four I was thoroughly convinced he'd have to be institutionalized when he got too big for me to physically pin down when he lost control. Also, he HATED being around other people, and he wasn't reliably toilet trained until he was about ten.

 

On the other hand, he figured out reading on his own when he was three because he was tired of having to come get me to read the screen on the computer games he liked to play. He beat Spyro and Legend of Zelda a long time before he was potty trained. He was also quite interested in numbers--in love with negative numbers and the concept of infinity when he was five. Memorized the names of all the bones in the human skeleton when he was four, just for fun (that was an interesting "trip", actually, as he was deeply interested in human anatomy and got library books that talked all about all the systems of the body --ALL the systems; he was a very "well-informed" four year-old).

 

He was very much a child of extremes.

 

He attended public school through third grade in a regular ed classroom with a one-on-one technician (actually two of them, since he was judged too intense for one person to deal with all day; I can't say I blame them, he gave one a bloody nose, and bit the other hard enough she had tooth-shaped bruises for at least a week). By the end of third grade things had deteriorated to the point where he arrived late and left early to avoid the bustle of other kids milling around, which he found completely overwhelming, had several scheduled "breaks" during the day to calm down, as well as "break cards" he could turn in when he felt a meltdown coming on, reward systems, behavior management plans, and a number of other accommodations and adaptations, and still a "good day" was when he sat in the back of the classroom and read novels all day instead of being disruptive. He wasn't really learning (although the kept giving him good grades "because he's so smart, and when you can get him to answer questions he always knows the right answer), and his mental health was getting worse, not better. At nine years old he was talking about wanting to die (and meaning it) in addition to the autism, OCD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and I don't really even remember what all else. It was not pretty.

 

Everyone thought I was crazy when I decided to homeschool him (including me--there was a LOT of prayer and some serious tears involved). We had a whole team of "professionals" at school that were genuinely doing all any of us could think of to make it work, how was I going to manage at home? By myself? With a toddler? But SOMETHING had to change; the placement he was in was making him suicidal, and the only other placements the school had to offer for him were an autism unit for kids who were learning to communicate by pointing at pictures (completely inappropriate for a boy who could read at a high school level and had a college level vocabulary--though he still couldn't carry on a coherent conversation, he just "lectured" on random topics, and saw no purpose in greetings or small-talk), or a unit for children with "behavioral" problems (for a kid who is traumatized by being around "normal" kids? Um...no thanks). There were charter and private schools, but he'd still be in a classroom setting there, which would still be too overwhelming for him and would not solve the problem. Homeschooling really seemed like pretty much our last option at that point. Dh was working from home and able to give me a hand with dd if ds flipped out (ds didn't respond well to anyone but me at that point). Our first year of homeschool did not go smoothly--in fact he occasionally tried to stab me with his pencil, and shredded his worksheets on a regular basis (which is why I gave him photocopies, and not the original workbook pages). He hated math with a passion, and absolutely refused to write anything for any reason in any subject. And it was still better than public school in SO many ways. I remember about a year after we started homeschooling he was in the other room playing on the computer or watching TV or something, and he let loose with this big, loud belly-laugh--a real, genuine, heartfelt guffaw--and I realized I could literally not remember having heard him really laugh in years. I stood there in the kitchen and cried.

 

Anyway, you probably get the picture.

 

So yes, if you had told me then that at age fifteen this kid would be a laid-back, mostly cheerful, helpful young man with reasonably good manners, who was able to ask store clerks for assistance finding things, order and pay for his own meals at restaurants, make small talk with a bank teller while making a deposit in his own checking account, which he could manage responsibly, and even be trusted to babysit his (admittedly extremely cooperative) little sister for me for a couple of hours while I run to the store, not to mention be able to complete most school assignments on his own, without close supervision, and be able to mostly manage his own anxiety issues with only occasional help from a parent--if you had told me that, I would have been WAAAAAY beyond "surprised". I would have been absolutely certain you were talking about some other kid entirely, and got the file mixed up with someone else's.**

 

There's still definitely some room for growth. For example, he has a post-traumatic stress type reaction related to school buildings that we're working through (go figure). But this past year he survived a religion class in a classroom setting (though not a school building), and he's taken a lego art class and a web design class offered by the local arts council, both of which involved being with a small class in a classroom at the actual high school building. This coming year he's even planning to try taking a TV production class and a computer tech class down at the high school, which has me crossing my fingers and holding my breath, but I honestly think there's a pretty good chance it might actually work out. And if not, there's always plan B. Or C. Or D. Or...I dunno, we'll figure something out.

 

But yeah, the progress he has already made has surprised and amazed everyone who knew him back when. I can't even guess where he'll "end up" here in a few more years. He wants to go to college, and I see no reason not to aim for that, though he doesn't yet know what he will want to study there. I think it will have to be a gradual transition from home, but there are two big universities and a couple of smaller community colleges and tech schools within fairly easy commuting distance here, so I think we'll be able to work out something. If I've learned one thing about this kiddo, though, it's that, as he puts it, "You never know WHAT I'm going to do next." So, so, so very true.

 

____________

 

**Actually, when ds was in 6th grade he attended a social skills class at the neighborhood elementary school, while doing all his academic work at home. At the end of the school year I got a very tense call from the school psychologist, whom I knew pretty well after working with her for a year (but it was a different school than he'd been at before, and the people there had only known ds during 6th grade--he'd had some minor behavioral problems, but nothing like when he was younger, just refusing to participate in an activity, or hiding under the table for a while when it got too loud; that sort of thing). Anyway, she was all in a fluster because she was getting his records ready to transfer over to the junior high, and after spending several hours trying to organize his file, she'd come to the conclusion that his records must have gotten mixed in with those of another student with the same name, and she needed help untangling the two files because the forms didn't all have middle names or ID numbers or anything useful like that to help sort it out. She wanted to respect the confidentiality of the other student, though, so she was going to be a little vague and see if I recognized some of the incidents in the reports. I said that was fine, so she said she'd start back with kindergarten, which had a number of items in it that she was pretty sure were the other boy, but she just wanted to check. I said that was fine. She asked if I would remember anything about a chair from kindergarten. I said, "You mean that time he threw one at another student?" Silence. Then, "That was YOUR son?" I assured her it was. She said there were some forms that had to be filled out when a child tried to run away? I said oh yes, that must be a really big stack, though they were only required to phone me on the occasions when he actually made it off school property. And something about a bloody nose? Yeah, head-butted his technician in the face. Also, he bit the other one, in case that's another one you weren't sure about. After a few more she said that if all those things really WERE about my ds, then probably there had not really been any mix-up with the file, and she could just go ahead and put it all in chronological order and send it on over (two binders' worth, evidently, after it was culled). But she kept saying over and over how she couldn't believe that was even the same boy she'd been working with all year.

 

And that is a really truly actual true-life story of which I like to remind myself when I'm frustrated with the dratted man child and need to remember just how much progress he really has made. So much, that it's hard for a psychologist to imagine that it's even the same kid--3 years ago.

Edited July 5, 2012 by MamaSheep

[Kathryn]

Thanks! I love reading these.

 

Amy--I've got tears in my eyes. My 6yo is ASD and violent. I have no doubt that in a public school setting his violence would be much worse. He has made some progress in the last year, but we still have a long way to go. I've been dreading the teen years and seriously wonder sometimes if I'll be able to live with him as big as he is on target to be and as small as I am. I pray that he mellows.

[Scuff]

:lurk5:

[Meriwether]

I don't know what you meant by "almost done". We're going into our seventh year of homeschooling and will have two (or maybe three) after that. I keep telling myself to hang in there because we're almost done, so I guess I'll count that as close enough and toss in my two cents.

 

 

And that is a really truly actual true-life story of which I like to remind myself when I'm frustrated with the dratted man child and need to remember just how much progress he really has made. So much, that it's hard for a psychologist to imagine that it's even the same kid--3 years ago.

 

That is amazing.