Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Homeschooling and Schedules

One of my husband's sisters, a former college geology professor married to a rocket scientist, and mother of two gifted kids who do not have dyspraxia like my son told me that it was "just a matter of scheduling" when I mentioned that I sometimes had trouble getting my son to practice piano. This is the same sister-in-law that seemed bothered by the fact that my son with dyspraxia can't use a knife as skillfully as her kids. This just is not one of our priorities at the moment.

I have done some more thinking about our lack of a schedule and I wonder if this really is a problem. I know that in my former working life I lived by schedules, and in fact really liked schedules, and most of the time things seemed to work out according to schedule. But there were times in my working life when something unusual happened and then we had to do things in order of priority, with less important things just stacking up to be worked on some time in the future, and it feels like this is what my son and I are doing.

One of our priorities at the moment is helping my parents which means being available to take care of my mother if my dad has to go out for any reason and spending time with them daily and this can't always be scheduled. People, especially family, will always be priority number 1.

But there are other reasons that would make having a schedule difficult. Little things like my son taking twice as long as I think it should take him to get dressed and handwriting practice taking three times as long as I think it should take him and the migraines we both get that tend to slow us down. I think if we had a schedule, it would just bother me that we couldn't stick to it.

I also think a schedule might not work as well for a kid like mine who learns best by reading and discussing and there is no way I could estimate the amount of time he will need to get through all the questions he has.

If I had made up a schedule, I might have scheduled only 30 minutes to read and discuss the five page story in the Story of the World about the Russian Revolution. By the time we looked up the answers to all of his questions, it was two hours later.

It took 30 minutes to get through the first two paragraphs because he wanted to compare the lives of Russian peasants with the lives of African Americans after the Civil War. Lots of discussion there.

We talked about his need to discuss things and he told me had the gift of looking at things from different perspectives. He said he thinks he must have inherited the optimism gene from his Dad and the pessimism gene from me and he thinks that "nothing is good or bad--it depends on how you look at it." As an example, he talked about Jim Crow laws and he said most people would say that they were bad, totally bad, but he wondered if the Jim Crow laws might have prevented deaths in a few cases because he thought some people were so upset about changes after the Civil War that maybe they needed to be kept apart, like a cooling off period after a fight, before things could really change for the better. He just wants to take the time to look at things from every angle.

The second page of the Russian Revolution story took us about 30 minutes because he wanted to look up more info on Rasputin and hemophilia. Looking up info on hemophilia led to questions about blood transfusions, HIV, and whether or not kids infected with HIV could be immunized against common childhood diseases.

The Rasputin article led to looking up the word hearsay, because my son is interested in law and had heard the word before but had never looked it up. Somehow we ended up talking about where the term right wing conspiracy originated and whether or not there was now a left wing conspiracy.

He kind of laughed when we read that a "provisional government" took over after czar gave up the throne and he said "yeah, anarchy."

When we read about Lenin, he had to make a joke because the name sounded a lot like linen but he wasn't a "man of the cloth."

He will practice piano today. It is a priority even with him now that the teacher says she wants him to do a recital. He never had to do this before even though he has taken piano lessons since he was five.

And he will have to practice writing even though it is not one of "his" priorities. I didn't realize that I needed to have him continue practicing printing when he was focused on learning cursive. His printing is getting sloppy again, especially on paper without lines, but I won't have him practice too much. I want him to have time for fun. This is another one of our priorities. You are only a kid once and Rock Band is waiting.