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When Is Reading NOT Reading?

September 6, 2006 by 1 Comment

The high school senior was asked to read a portion from the Bible during his Sunday School class. He struggled painfully over nearly every word. His efforts were so halting and disjointed that no one could follow the context of the passage easily. A girl seated next to him followed along in her own Bible, helping him with most of the words. The truly appalling part of this story is not that the twelfth grade student could not read fluently, but that no one in the room seemed to think it was at all unusual to have such difficulty in reading aloud. This young man, who was well known at school and considered a popular classmate and a “good” student, was probably reading at around a 2nd grade level. And none of his classmates in the room was alarmed by his performance.

The techniques that were used to teach reading when my daughter was in public school included identifying words by their unique shapes. “Does the word start with a letter that is taller than the others? Does the word end with a letter that dangles down below the others? Does the word have a roundish letter in the middle? That word is boy.” (Unless the word happens to be dog. Or toy. Hmmm. It could even be log.) Pictorial clues were also used to help identify words: “Let’s look at the picture in the storybook and guess which word fits best in the sentence. Yes, it must be boy. See that little guy sitting on a fallen tree trunk, holding a stuffed cloth puppy? This story is about him, so the word is definitely boy.” (Or not. If you missed the irony in my example, go back and read it again.) My daughter can still testify to the indoctrination of “identifying” words by only a few letters: she recently glanced at a price tag, bearing the code R8052CY, and mistook it for the word “Regency.”

When confusion over the correct word sets in, the popular instruction in today’s classrooms encourages students to think of words that start with the sound of the first letter or two in the word, again guessing a word they are familiar with that will fit with the rest of the sentence or story. I cannot judge your reading ability or your vocabulary, but I know that I occasionally find unfamiliar words in things that I read — now — today. How can a beginning reader be expected to know what all words will look like even before he can read them?

As you may suspect, children who have been taught to “read” using this shape-guessing technique do not become fluent readers. They do not enjoy reading. They cannot read quickly. They do not like to read aloud and, when forced to read aloud, do so slowly and without confidence. They are never quite sure if the letter is a b or a d or if it is a q or a p or a g. Ch- can make several sounds — how will they know which one to use? And do not even bring up a word containing -ough! These students are quickly labeled “dyslexic” and told that they have confusion over letter placements within words, but they are seldom given any instruction for how to overcome this difficulty. These students have little comprehension of what they read: they cannot understand what they read, so they also cannot remember what they read. Is it any wonder that they do poorly in school? Some who act out their frustrations at the inconsistency in their abilities are further labeled ADD, ADHD, and other multi-letter classifications which entitle the school to receive additional funding. And yet the funding does not translate into more efficient teaching methods.

So when is reading not reading? Obviously, the examples given above are not reading — they are guessing. To read, a person must recognize each letter, the sound it makes, and how it acts in combinations with other letters. Letters must be read as their sounds and not as their names, and the sounds of the letters must be read in the order that they appear within the word. Certain combinations of letters appear over and over again in various words, forming patterns. Phonics is the study of the sounds made by those letter combinations and patterns. Guessing at the visual shapes of words has nothing whatsoever to do with the sounds of letters. My daughter had been terribly confused by the difference between letter names and letter sounds: she thought they were interchangeable, since her school readily accepted her spelling of words such as “invite” as n-v-i-t. Incidentally, the “sight reading” method was invented as a way to teach deaf children to read — children who had no ability to sound out words. One would think that “professional” educators could recognize it as a “last resort” method for children who can hear, being far inferior to reading by sounds.

Phonics instruction includes the rules for breaking words into their syllables. (Lesson #1 being that a syllable must have at least one vowel; a word with only one vowel can therefore be only one syllable. I recently had to pull out my trusty dictionary to prove to a skeptic that the word rhythm has only one syllable, since it contains only the single vowel y.) Recognizing individual syllables enables the student to read even long, complicated chemical names as a series of smaller word-parts making up the big word. Learning about prefixes and suffixes and root words as a part of phonics enables the student to separate syllables easily and to understand the meanings of the various parts of a multi-syllable word, bringing understanding along with the reading process. Phonics will successfully teach a student to read, and a student who understands phonics will be able to read any word placed before him. Any word. He may need to consult a dictionary for its exact meaning, but the phonetic reader can come close to the correct pronunciation.

An independent organization that evaluates the performance of various industries recently looked into the performance of the public schools in my state. What it found most surprising was that the “proficiency” standards for each grade level have been redefined. A student who is considered “proficient” for fourth grade only has to measure up to third grade standards. And the gap widens considerably with advancing grade levels, to the point that a graduating senior’s “proficiency” level is several years below what should be expected from a twelfth grade education. That could be compared to going to a store and attempting to purchase your items with a $20 bill and being told that your cash is really only worth $15 in spending power, inflation arguments aside. Regardless of the denomination printed on the currency (or the report card), reality lies far below the appearance. Most of us would be upset to learn that the “proficiency” standards of a new home were skewed to the point that when the builder says the house contains five bedrooms, he really means that it has only enough room for three people to sleep comfortably. I would not want to purchase a 12-pack of sodas and find that the box actually contained only eight cans. And yet, that is the same false advertising that is being accepted from the public schools. Proficient does not mean proficient, and reading does not mean reading.

The real tragedy here is that students are passing through school, not knowing how to read properly. (A young acquaintance recently commented that she “flunked tenth grade, but was still going on into eleventh.” How does that even happen?) These students are being led to believe that they are adequately prepared for college, where they will be expected to consume massive amounts of reading materials and retain that knowledge for future reference. A student who has mild to moderate difficulty reading a child’s storybook will have incredible difficulty digesting college-level texts at the commonly expected rate of one hundred pages per night. Is it any wonder that the average 4-year bachelor’s degree now takes at least five years to attain?

Parents, if you have chosen to homeschool your children, do not neglect a thorough study of phonics in your lesson plans. The time you devote to studying spelling patterns, syllable divisions, prefixes, suffixes, roots, and word origins will set your students apart from their peers and give them a tremendous boost toward independent learning for the rest of their lives. As my husband recently quipped, “Once you’re over 50, if you don’t know phonics, you can’t remember how to spell anything!”

Filed Under: Curriculum Choices, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschool v. Public School, Preschoolers, Reading, Roadblocks to Learning, Visual Learning

Homeschooling Is Hard Work

August 1, 2005 by Leave a Comment

As a young man, my father-in-law built houses. I doubt if he would have called it easy, and I think I could go so far as to say that building a house is hard work. But I am also quite sure he would have called it satisfying work, enjoyable work, and well worth the required effort. I watched him one day as he walked into my neighbor’s home, looked around a bit at the structural lines, and said, “Yep, I built this one.” The frame was many decades older, remodeling projects had changed a wall here and there, and the latest occupants had never seen it in its prime, but the master craftsman could still recognize his work.

Many things we do each day can be considered enjoyable and satisfying, even though they also fall into the category of hard work. Stripping the bed linens and stuffing them into the washing machine can be a chore, especially when bedrooms and laundry room are several floors apart. Carrying a basket of wet sheets outdoors and hanging them on the clothesline is also not an effortless task, but the sun-dried scent of clean cotton defies description. The delight of lying down upon cool, crisp bedding after a wearying day somehow trivializes the amount of work it took to accomplish the task.

Homeschooling your children is hard work. In the midst of this grueling task, we often have to remind ourselves of what our goal is and how much we will appreciate the reward when that job has been well done. Homeschooling can be either complicated or simplified in many ways, based on the tools we choose to use and the extravagance of the details we decide to add. If we have chosen the proper equipment to fit our task, we can progress smoothly — some days barely working up a sweat. At other times, we may compare our progress to hanging pictures with a sledgehammer and railroad spikes — it will get the job done, but the results may be less than desirable.

From time to time I found our homeschool “product” becoming less than satisfactory: the children were not learning the material as easily as I had anticipated, some or all of us were frustrated with the presentation of material, or some or all of us became bored with the materials, the lesson format, or schooling in general. Those were the times when teaching and/or learning were becoming hard work, with few rewards to maintain our focus or enjoyment of the task.

The first time this happened, we were brand new to homeschooling. I had purchased an all-in-one language arts program that was becoming very popular with the other homeschoolers I knew. My daughter looked at the material with some apprehension, but faithfully gave it a try. Day after day, we worked together on the lessons, and day after day she became more frustrated. One part of the lessons required me to dictate a story excerpt to her while she transcribed it into a notebook. As simple as that seemed in theory, it was tremendously difficult in practice. As we pressed on through increasingly trying days, I began to analyze the process, hoping to determine what was making this so hard. After all, the homeschool families I had talked with told me how their children progressed from one lesson to the next without difficulty — what were we doing wrong? Our first two months of homeschooling made us question our motives along with our sanity: how could we possibly continue on this path for an entire year, let alone multiple years?

It finally became evident that we were following the instructions accurately as laid out by the curriculum’s publisher, but their plan of action for this particular subject just did not fit our needs at this time. Heart-to-heart discussions with my daughter revealed what she was hoping to receive from homeschooling. Her public school classrooms had too few books to go around, and the students were required to copy their lessons into notebooks instead of writing directly in the workbooks. My daughter’s vision of homeschooling included being allowed to write in her very own workbook! I grabbed my stack of curriculum catalogs, and together we read through the descriptions, looking for a program that would meet her expectations besides providing the basic grade level instruction. As soon as the parcel-delivery service brought the desired package, our homeschool days underwent an amazing transformation. My student had her first personal work-text to write in, without any reprimands for doodling in the margins or plastering each completed page with “job well-done” stickers, gold stars, and smiley faces. The stigma of her public school experience was suddenly vanquished, and she became an overnight homeschooling enthusiast. We were no longer bashing the walls with sledgehammer and oversized spikes: we had the proper tools for our job.

Houses do not get built in a day (except through the “magic” of television), and children do not obtain an education overnight. Homeschooling takes dedication, hard work, and a little sweat, but hopefully not too many tears. While still in the midst of your mission, you can look around to see what has been accomplished so far, and from that obtain the encouragement needed to see this project through to completion. The reward will come when one day you look at the finished product and recognize a job well done.

Filed Under: Curriculum Choices, Deciding to Homeschool, Encouragement for Parents, Homeschool How-To's, Leaving Public School, Roadblocks to Learning

The Know-It-All Attitude

April 1, 2005 by Leave a Comment

Nothing gets my dander up more quickly than the Know-It-All attitude. Child or adult, friend or total stranger, I find this attitude prideful, self-serving, and downright ugly. The Know-It-All wants to be better than everyone else in the room and wants everyone else in the room to know he is better. Sometimes the attitude surfaces only briefly; at other times it is a full-time occupation.

The Know-It-All has a self-imposed learning disability — he has chosen to block his mind from learning from anyone. No one can instruct or correct the Know-It-All, because he already knows and will be the first to tell you. No matter what fact you present to the Know-It-All, his response is always the same, “I know.” Even when you can be certain that he could not know and does not know, the Know-It-All still responds in the same matter-of-fact, yet superior, way, “I know.”

When my children began to display the Know-It-All attitude, we stopped everything and had a serious heart-to-heart discussion. Okay, it was more of a one-sided lecture, but I got my point across. “You did not know,” was my calmly delivered opener. “Why do you think you told me that you did know?” — a mostly rhetorical question, followed by my explanation of how we let pride take over our minds and try to make ourselves look smarter than we actually are. The desired result was that my children would recognize and admit to learning new things, no matter who was providing the information. We can learn from anyone and everyone, and the more we learn, the smarter we become. I do not gain any intelligence by falsely declaring myself to be in possession of a fact.

The next misstep, which falls close on the heels of the Know-It-All attitude of pride, is jealousy. How I get sickened when I see a parent who does not want his child to excel past the parent’s abilities. This sounds completely ludicrous — parents not wanting success for their children — but I have seen it over and over. I have caught myself in the thought pattern, severely reprimanded myself for it, and then taken steps to help my child progress even farther.

My son wanted to learn to play guitar. I dug out my old “beginner” guitar, showed him how to read a chord chart, and gave him some basic instructions on technique and a few simple worship songs to try. Then I stepped out of his way and let him try it on his own. After a few false starts, he began having success. I gave him a better guitar — success should be rewarded with a quality instrument. Eventually, he and the guitar became like Siamese twins, joined fingertips to fretboard. When he goes to his room just to retrieve a book, and I hear a few bars of sweet guitar music before he returns. His ability has quickly exceeded mine, and I think of myself as a fairly good player. He has taught himself to read tablature found on the internet for his favorite CD songs. He has learned to finger-pick complicated rhythms just by listening to them and trying. He absolutely impressed the socks off me last Christmas by picking “Carol of the Bells” for us after dinner! CAROL OF THE BELLS!!!

It has been tempting at times to become jealous of his ability. I could reprimand him for spending “too much time” on guitar and not enough time on his schoolwork, except that he does get the schoolwork done also. I could have made him buy his own guitar, rationalizing that he would “appreciate it more” if he had worked for it and earned it himself. I could point out his mistakes and ridicule him for not having each piece perfect when he plays for me. I could so easily completely destroy his love of music. Which is exactly what happens when jealousy is given a foothold. Instead, I have sat under his tutelage and allowed him to show me new chords. We have played together, laughing with delight as I struggled to keep up with his flying fingers.

My daughter and I have engaged in theological discussions in which we share new perspectives on familiar passages of scripture. However, the Know-It-All attitude often dances through my mind as she is explaining her latest insight. I must fight against pride to remind myself that I definitely do not know all there is to know, especially about the Bible. Humbly, I remind myself that I can learn from any situation, from any person. I turn my back on jealousy and remind myself to pay attention to what she is saying… and I learn. She is an adult now and lives in a different city, in a different cultural-mix, and has the benefit of many new experiences from which to teach. If the Know-It-All attitude were allowed to reign, I would miss all of that.

I grew up without encouragement. My family did not express emotions of joy, at least not to us as children. Our accomplishments received a mere nod, if anything at all. Once when I had worked very hard and finally mastered my desired goal, my mother responded with a flat, emotionless “I knew you could do it.” The Know-It-All attitude strikes again. Confidence shattered, excitement crushed, self-esteem ground under the heels of the Know-It-All.

That old race between the tortoise and the hare should teach us a great lesson: the hare was a Know-It-All. Perhaps we could have learned even more if Aesop had continued his story after the Finish Line: did the hare humbly and graciously congratulate the tortoise on his victory, or was the hare ensnared by jealousy and pride?

Knowledge continues to expand and increase as technology advances. None of us knows it all. Each of us can learn something from everyone. None of us is so perfect that he cannot be topped by someone else. We will all benefit from humbling ourselves and seeing every situation as an opportunity for learning.

Filed Under: Attitudes, Behavior, Encouraging Your Student, Roadblocks to Learning

Ignorance Is Not Forever

December 2, 2004 by 2 Comments

There are some things that I just take too personally. For instance, I recently heard about a woman whose now-adult son had been diagnosed as “Learning Disabled” all through his public school education. Despite her protests, despite her insistence on closer examination of the problem, he was dumped into LD classes and left there.

The root of the problem was that, as a boy, he had never learned to read. No teacher had ever taken the time to investigate why he had difficulty in class. Teachers repeatedly tested him year after year, always with the same result: he was at grade level and should be moved on to the next grade. When Mom’s persistence succeeded in inquiring as to how he was being tested (since the results strongly contradicted his at-home behavior), the current teacher confessed that her tests had been given to him orally. “He has so much trouble… it’s just easier to read it to him… reading it to him keeps him from becoming frustrated… ”

Now the boy is an adult, and the scene is being repeated with his child. The mom/grandmother is concerned that this time will have the same undesirable result. She was inquiring about homeschooling, probably wondering if it could rescue her grandchild, and whether it is too late for her son. As a former student of poor teachers myself and as the parent of a student whose early education was similarly neglected, I know first-hand some of the frustration these people are going through. Therefore, I tend to take these stories personally, flashing back to my own bad experiences. I find myself offended when students are purposely neglected, parents are intentionally ignored or pacified, and we are all expected to believe that this public education system is something sacred that should not be questioned. As Dorothy was instructed by The Great and Powerful Oz, we also are advised to “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
If I were to purchase a car and drive it until it ran out of gas, would anyone think I was justified in calling the junkyard to come and get it because it no longer ran? Hardly! I would be laughed at as the new village idiot. Even a child could tell me I only need to buy more gasoline to make my car work. Yet, here we have a car (student) which has used up its supply of fuel (knowledge) and cannot proceed without more. However, rather than simply adding more fuel (knowledge) to the car (student), the chosen method of propulsion is to push the car manually to the next block (grade level) instead of enabling it to move under its own power.

Is it so difficult to teach a child to read? I did not think it was when I taught my children to read. Millions of children throughout history have been successfully taught to read, whether by “professional educators” or by their very own parents. Yet, we have here the unfortunate account of professionals too baffled by their own system to diagnose (correctly) a child who had not learned to read. This problem is easily remedied through homeschooling — avoid the “professionals” altogether and do it yourself, one on one. It is not too late for the man in the story above — he can still learn to read with an intensive phonics program and the assistance of a caring friend or family member, and he will probably learn this much more quickly as an adult than he would have as a child. Illiterate adults have conquered reading in as little as 3 weeks. His child should also be taught intensive phonics to avoid a repeat of his tragic scenario.

I once tried to discuss phonics-based reading programs with some local professional elementary educators, only to discover that we had words in common, but meant different things by them. They sincerely believed that using a few starting-letter sounds and contextual hints made their program “phonics.” Buzzwords, such as “decoding,” were used to lull curious parents into thinking their children were learning to break down words into syllables and letter patterns. Creative writing exercises were required of students who had not even conquered handwriting, again to persuade the unsuspecting parents that their children had a reasonable grasp of the reading-writing connection.

The evidence that reading has not been learned phonetically will show itself in the inability to spell. A person who understands how to break down a word into syllables will repeat those syllable-patterns when trying to spell a word. Fluent reading ability will also prove itself in composition: elegant sentence structure is easily mimicked. If you are reading good sentences, you will be able to write good sentences. A person who cannot read will not be able to spell consistently. A person who does not consume quality reading material will not be able to write well.

Perhaps I should pity the educational system that is pawning off such methods to future generations of teachers. I see it as a prime example of “the blind leading the blind” — those who do not understand are trying to give understanding to others. The contemporary axiom, “Ignorance can be fixed; stupid is forever,” has been altered: ignorance is no longer seen by them as being fixable. I am here to testify that ignorance is not a life sentence: ignorance is simply a lack of knowledge. Once a person has been taught the skill of reading, a world full of knowledge is there for the taking.

Filed Under: Encouragement for Parents, Encouraging Your Student, Phonics, Reading, Roadblocks to Learning, Visual Learning

Spoken Destinies & Learned Behaviors

October 14, 2004 by Leave a Comment

“I just HAVE to keep moving and making noise! That’s what my mom says.” I heard these words with my own ears. What was more surprising to me was the realization that this 10-year-old boy had taken his mother’s observation and turned it into an assignment. Moms and Dads, be careful that your idle comments and observations do not become “spoken destinies” as this mom’s had. Children will learn to behave exactly as you say you want them to, as this boy had done. Unfortunately for this family, the words were not intended to express an expectation of the future, but just to be a summation of past experiences.

“‘Turn at the red flowers’ — that’s an ADHD-marker.” Why was it not considered simply “being aware of one’s surroundings” or “noticing a landmark” since the street sign was missing? It seems apparent that the family responsible for this remark expects ADHD-type behavior and watches for any little sign that can be attributed to it. Never mind the fact that the same boy who knows the turn is marked by red flowers also can sit calmly during an entire 2-hour movie without a wiggle, and he can focus intently on a subject of his own choosing. It seems to me that this student has incredible powers of concentration — powers that simply need to be taught how to focus on different subjects at different times.

A dear “church lady” told me the following story in order to teach me, a new mom, a thing or two about raising my children. She had been the babysitter for many children over many years and had learned much wisdom in the process. I greatly appreciated her insight and put it to use as often as possible. She had one particularly ingenious little boy in her care at the time and had caught him trying to reach the cookie jar by climbing on a kitchen chair that he had pushed over to the counter in order to facilitate his endeavor. When she had removed him from the chair and replaced the chair at the kitchen table, she told him, “Do not push that chair over there again.” A few minutes later, she realized her error as she heard an extended scraping noise and concluded that he was pushing a chair from the dining room all the way into the kitchen. The woman made sure I understood that this boy was not being disobedient — he was doing exactly according to her command. The error was, in fact, hers for not telling him all chairs, stools, and other climbable furniture were not to be used; the cookie jar was off limits.

I had a similar experience in a college computer-programming class. My program would not run corrrectly, and after much frustration I finally turned to the teacher for help. He took one quick glance at my notes and smiled, saying, “Machines are stupid. They can only do exactly what you tell them to do.” I checked back through the program and soon found my error — I had told it to do the wrong thing, and the machine was merely obeying my commands.

The point of these seemingly unrelated stories is that we need to be cautious of our words and our actions, lest they work against us. Although our children are not machines and are not “stupid,” they are to a certain extent “programmable” and can be heavily influenced by our words. We can unknowingly, unintentionally fight against our own best plans by simply tossing about a few careless phrases. Our words are like bricks: they can build up great fortresses or they can become weapons of random destruction. A few well-chosen, positive words can do wonders for our children’s behavior and attitudes. Words of confidence can instill hope in a child and the strength to try a difficult task one more time, the time that results in success.

Filed Under: Behavior, Family Unity, Parenting, Roadblocks to Learning

Kids Will Be Kids

July 27, 2004 by Leave a Comment

You have heard them, maybe you have even used them — those alphabet-soup-acronym-labels that get tossed around so flippantly today. They have become the easy excuse for not remembering things, for not paying attention when we should, or for feeling restless and wanting to change our circumstances. “I can’t remember that; I have XYZQ.” “She won’t listen; she’s JKLM.” “He can’t sit still; he must be MNOP.” We seem to find it much easier to excuse poor behavior than to correct it. This is not to say that such physiological conditions do not exist, but to toss their names about carelessly demeans any person truly suffering from them.

My role as an educator requires that I do just that — educate. If I stop the process before it is completed, I have not done my job. Therefore, I will persist in teaching phonics to ensure that my student can read any word put before him. I will teach reading and comprehension to ensure that my student understands whatever she is reading. I will teach math to ensure that my student can perform the various calculations needed throughout life for wise purchases, financial planning, and home improvement projects. I will teach geography, history, and science to ensure that my student can comprehend the importance of news items and current events. I will teach social grace and manners to ensure that my student can converse with confidence and ease in any situation. I will pursue this teaching adventure by trying every tactic necessary to impart understanding to each of my students. I will not throw up my hands in despair when the subject gets tough or my student balks at its difficulty. When my student is confused by a lesson, I will not assume it is the student’s fault. I will instead analyze the material being presented in light of my student’s personality and learning ability and see if there is another way to teach the concept that my student would understand better.

Homeschool dad and speaker Gregg Harris (father of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl author Joshua Harris) profoundly states, “A teacher’s idea of a good little boy — is a little girl.” What an impact that one statement had on me as a prospective homeschooler! At the time I heard Gregg speak, my young son was spending government school Kindergarten on the “Time Out” chair for committing the socially unacceptable sin of being an energetic little boy. Our society as a whole has forgotten that God created our males to be warriors and protectors of their nurturing female counterparts. It is not within their natural make-up to sit quietly, watching life pass by. For me to expect my son to forsake his favorite game of sword fighting would be for me to expect him to deny his God-given warrior instincts. It would also be doing him a disservice to stick a negative label on his natural tendencies to be a “Defender of the Home.”

I attended a seminar once on memorizing scripture. I did not memorize much scripture (ok, any), but I did learn a valuable lesson: before you can find something in your memory, you have to have put it into your memory. Most (all?) of us have trouble remembering things from time to time — it is natural. As life becomes more and more fast-paced, we each have more and more things to deal with and to remember. If the necessary details are not put into our memories, we have no way of pulling them out again. Back when we had only one car, no children, a tiny house, and a slower pace of life, I had no trouble remembering all the things I needed from the grocery store. Now we have a driveway full of vehicles, a larger home, one adult-child leaping out of the nest, another near-adult-child climbing to the edge of the nest and admiring the view, and a website to tend. I often walk to the front of the refrigerator to write something on my grocery list, but instead open the door and wonder why. The only syndrome I am suffering from is the same thing we all suffer from: a busy life.

Right now I could click my computer mouse and instantly be chatting with my dear friends on the other side of the planet in Uganda, East Africa. I can click a few more times and read the reactions of homeschool moms reading my website across the US, Canada, and northern Europe. At no other time in the history of civilization have these things been possible. I remember being very excited as a little girl any time the party-line telephone rang, but having my mother say the call would not be for us… if someone was going to call us, we would know about it. Times have changed. We have so much more to deal with on a daily basis. Back in the days of the party-line phone, my family owned one radio and no television. My home right now has multiple radios, televisions, and computers. Times have changed. We must adapt to survive. Listening means paying attention to what we hear and filing the important details away in memory for later retrieval, or writing them on the planning calendar for future reference.

The point I am so far successfully avoiding is this: Please do not assume that your child’s behavior is the result one of the many alphabet-soup-labels being bandied about so freely today. Your child is, after all, a child — an energetic little person trying desperately to fit into a busy world. Our children emulate us in ways we rarely notice: playtime today is more likely to include “busy” activities, rather than slow, carefree relaxation. A child who does not enjoy sitting still for school time may not be overly-active as much as he may just have a few wiggles to release before he can efficiently listen to a lesson. We have also allowed television to teach our children to want to be constantly entertained without personal involvement, to expect all of life’s problems to be solved in 27 minutes, and to change their focus of thought every 10 seconds.

A child who seems not to be paying attention to you may be deeply involved in thoughts of his own devising: planning out a new invention, playing a game in his mind, or contemplating the details of the last story he read/heard/watched on video. I have suggested to my own family members that we speak a person’s name as the first word of a sentence, in order to break gently into those busy thought-patterns and gain the needed attention, thereby avoiding the need to repeat statements.

Many parents become concerned when a child can sit still for extended periods of time for an activity of their own choosing, such as a video game, but not otherwise, such as for schoolwork. Stop for a moment to consider this from an adult perspective: I find myself much more likely to sit with rapt attention when I am enjoying the activity and fidget when I would rather be anywhere else doing anything else. Perhaps a lack of attention during school time simply indicates that the child is not interested in this material or in the way this particular lesson is being presented.

When my own son showed these signs, I knew something drastic had to be changed in order to keep his attention long enough to impart the lessons. We changed reading material to include his interests, teaching comprehension by listing questions for magazine articles covering paintball, military body-armor, and new automotive innovations. It did mean more work for me, reading each article myself and making up questions to ask about the information, but I decided the result would be well worth my effort… and it was. My son’s involvement increased dramatically, along with his reading speed, when he was excited about the subject matter. We also had some unique bonding time as I was able to share his interests in scientific breakthroughs. We took trips to the local library to look for magazines; he chose the articles he was interested in, and I read them first to write the questions for him to answer (nothing fancy, just short-answer and fill-in-the-blanks). We also subscribed to Popular Science for its reports on the latest developments in technology. My son still reads those and delights in pointing out which inventions the magazine predicted would be out in 3-5 years, but the US military is already using, only months after publication.

Another tactic we effectively used was competition in math assignments. Plodding along at his own pace, my son could barely focus enough to do a dozen problems in a day; his time was just too precious to “waste” on math. When he reached a level of math higher than I myself had learned, I felt my responsibility was to learn it myself first, then teach it to him. With Mom as a classmate, he got faster, trying to get ahead of me — knowing that I would have to hurry to keep up. (Unfortunately for him, math is my specialty.) That first year of Saxon Advanced Math went by fairly easily, but he was not looking forward to another year to finish the book’s 2-year-plan. Then my daughter began looking into 4-year colleges for transfer from our local community college and found she could pick up a needed semester of pre-calculus during the summer session. That class was a duplicate of my son’s math class at home, and she convinced him to take the class with her — completing his next year of homeschool math, giving her a companion, and fulfilling their dream of someday taking a college class together.

One horribly-hectic month later they were done: 5 hours of college credit (1 semester) crammed into 16 class days. Class time took 5 hours a day, 4 days per week, and homework took everything else! For 4 weeks they ate with one hand while doing math problems with the other. But they loved it!!! The super-fast pace and the added competition of other students was something my son really thrived on. (However, it was a very small class — only 6 students — and very informal, not at all like government school high school would have been.) It may be that your bored student needs a bigger challenge. If you do not have access to a nearby community college (or if your student is not yet at high school level), try seeking out other homeschoolers who may be willing to do a class together, adding a competitive edge and camaraderie to a boring subject.

I remember an old movie with Walter Brennan as a mule-driver (Skudda-hoo, Skudda-hay, or some such silly name). At one point in the movie, a young punk is trying to move a mule team, and they refuse to budge. As I recall, he wants to get the mules out of his way so that he can use his truck to pull a large fallen tree out of the road. Anyway, the line that has stuck with me for years is when Walter Brennan says, “Mules got pride! They won’t move ’cause they know they’re not needed. You give them a job to do, and they’ll do it!” So Young Punk backs out of Walter’s way, while Walter hitches up the mules to the tree trunk — which they proceed to remove with great effort — and great personal satisfaction. Moral of this story: be sure you are giving enough of a challenge. Perhaps your student is reluctant to do a lesson because it is just too easy; skip on to the harder stuff and see how he responds.

Skipping easier lessons to substitute harder ones, skipping rope (or any physical exertion) before lessons, approaching subjects from entirely new directions, all can help to put a fresh spin on subjects considered “taboo” by your students. Give the wiggles an outlet or channel that energy into your lessons. Explore all these avenues before you jump to conclusions and are tempted to label a student as having some physiological malady. Kids are kids, children are children, and if we expect them to be children, we will all be a lot happier with the outcome.

Filed Under: Behavior, Homeschool How-To's, Homeschool v. Public School, Math, Parenting, Reading, Roadblocks to Learning
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