The Root of the Poblem

Well, my dear reader, we have had some Major life changes in the past few months.

I had posted before about some of our frustrations with school. Our son J has had issues two years in a row.  We discovered over the summer that the root cause was anxiety.

We Never would have pegged J as having anxiety.  He is exuberant, extroverted and strong-willed.  Interestingly, these all made him more difficult to diagnose.  Once we did get the diagnosis, some of the things we have had issues with suddenly made sense. I won't go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that it was affecting pretty much every area of our lives.

We are still learning how to work with this new information. We have a lot to learn. The good news is, now that we know the cause of the problems, we can address them in a more appropriate manner.  The results have been a much happier kid, a happier sibling and very relieved parents!

One of the biggest changes that has come of this is that we are now homeschooling. We explained what was going on with J to his teacher at the beginning of the school year, what the "symptoms" looked like and some possible solutions.
Long story short, since he does not come across as the anxiety-filled stereotype, she did not believe the diagnosis and tried to discipline the undesirable behavior. If she had asked, we could have told her that didn't work. We had tried that for Years.
By the third week of school, his stress level (and ours) was unbearable, so we made the decision to pull him out.

The funny thing in all this was that we had talked about homeschooling before we had kids.  I was a kinesthetic (hands on) learner and thought that, if our kids were that way, we could do more hands on learning. I also liked the idea of being able to explore an area of interest more deeply and go on field trips instead of just reading about things.
We tried private school, we tried public school, and now we have come back to what we originally discussed.  Why are we so reluctant to do something different?

For the record: I am not anti-public school. My mom is a retired public school teacher. My grandmother was a principle. And three of my dearest friends are public school teachers and one private. I KNOW how overworked, under paid and under appreciated they are. I know how many spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to help students that are struggling. Unfortunately for J, he needs someone who can watch him closely enough to see when he is starting to get stressed out, figure out the cause and try to help him get past it. No teacher with 22 other students to attend to is going to be able to give him that kind of attention (even if she agrees with the diagnosis).

I do wish we would have made the decision over the summer so I would have had time to look at curriculum, etc. before we started. I was fortunate to know a few homeschoolers who quickly compiled lists of helpful websites, curriculums and local groups. We ended up joining a "support group" that is mostly social & does field trips and a co-op that meets weekly for classes and play time.

As I researched, I discovered that there are as many ways to do homeschool as there are families who do it! Some people do classes and memorization just like a regular school, some are very "literature-driven", some teach other subjects by studying history, some relate all subjects to a topic of the week or unit, some follow a packaged curriculum, many put together their own combination. And many of the books used by various curriculums are available at the library or free on Kindle. The possibilities are endless!!

Another thing I discovered is that there are WAY more learning opportunities and classes offered by museums, zoos, even amusement parks like Legoland and Disney World than I had ever imagined!
I think I can handle this ;)

The bottom line is, know your kids.  What is their basic personality? That's not going to change. Learn to work with it. Having problems? Maybe you need help finding the root cause. That is the key to being able to improve them. Figure out what works for Your kids. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing. Everybody else doesn't have Your kids.