Having a child in public school this year reminds me of one of the reasons I homeschool. When my beautiful step-daughter moved in with us, we knew it would be challenging. She struggles in school. She was diagnosed with learning disabilities years ago, but she has fought hard to remain in the mainstream classrooms. She works so hard that teachers all commend her effort. She goes to a tutor four days a week, an hour each day.
She gets high marks most of the time on her homework. It is her homework grades that keep her scores high. She does horrible on her quizzes and tests. We studied the other night for HOURS for a history quiz. We went over the questions repeatedly in the study guide that was sent home. I read to her from the textbook and then tried to explain how it all related and what was going on at the time, so she would understand the stories behind the dates. She knew it well. She should have aced the test. She got a 76%.
That 76% was a high score for her for a test or quiz. I was frustrated though. We spent at least three to four hours going over and over the material. The more we worked to learn these dates, places, and people, the more she began to detest history just a little more.
History was exciting! This was boring. I shared the stories behind the dates, people, and places as much as I could to make it more exciting for her. However, that wasn't what she needed to know for the quiz. When it came to the quiz, she needed just the facts. How Boring!! The stories in history are history, not the mundane details that alone hold no significance. I can only attribute the 76% to the fact that my step-daughter did have some of the stories to work as "hooks" to hang the facts on. Most of the time, she fails these quizzes.
I know that learning to take a test is important. Testing well, on things like SATs, is a big deal when a child wants to get into college. However, I don't think teaching boring, unrelated facts from a text book and then quizzing on those facts is teaching my step-daughter how to learn or what was important in history. It just teaches her how to put information in her short-term memory and then forget it once the test is done. For children like my step-daughter, that have issues retaining information even in short term memory without it being significant to her in some way, this is a catastrophe. There are no "hooks" to hang the information on for those dates and places to have any meaning.
Learning "hooks" have become something that I realize make all the difference in the world in an education. Raymond and Dorothy Moore, homeschooling pioneers, discussed the importance of learning "hooks" in education. When I think of my beautiful step-daughter, I can only think in terms of she was rushed too fast, and never developed the essential learning "hooks" that would have made all the difference.
"Very young children do indeed learn very fast, as is commonly believed, yet only in proportion to their maturity. The child who combines cognitive maturity with eight - ten years more of free exploration has developed thousands of “learning hooks” and an ability to reason consistently which is impossible for the younger child. Without this maturity, and confined to a classroom, the child often becomes anxious, frustrated, and eventually learning disabled." The Moore Foundation
Jasmine was put in school at three years old. She was in preschool, year-round until she was old enough to begin Kindergarten. She had suffered from chronic ear infections as a baby that left her speech a little garbled. She entered Kindergarten in need of speech therapy. She struggled with learning from the beginning. In first grade she was held back due to her learning issues. Of course, she wasn't taught to read using phonics. She was taught with the sight word method. She could never remember all the words she was supposed to know. I taught her phonics during the summer between her two first grade years.
Over the years the school has tested her repeatedly for learning disabilities. She was diagnosed with a reading comprehension disorder in first grade. In third grade she was diagnosed as ADD. We were told to put her on medication. We refused, and the school didn't push us. She was repeatedly given IQ tests, and we were told that she would never function in a normal classroom. She struggles, but she does function and gets passing grades.
I feel like the real child is trapped inside this girl. She has been through massive testing, IEPs, LD classrooms and LD teachers, years of tutoring, summer schools, and ridicule. I feel like she's been beaten down so much that she feels that she can't learn like others and isn't as "smart" as her peers. She struggles with tests, but most of them only show how little she can retain short term, not how much she really knows.
Yet, she is bright. She has been through things in her young life that no child should ever have to endure. (Some of this has just now been brought to light.) I feel like she just needs a chance, and a different way of learning. I pray God opens the door for us to homeschool her. I would love to see the real child after a couple of years of encouragement and learning that fits her. I would love to see how she would blossom under that environment. The decision to homeschool isn't in our hands at the moment. I have left it up to God. If He feels she should be homeschooled, nothing will stand in His way.
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