Seeing you and Crisc struggle reminds me of our last fall. DS5 (at that time) was in K Montessori at that time. We hit quite a rough spot. At the beginning I thought it was all due to him having no current obsession. He just got over his huge geography stage and there was no new interest on the horizon. Usually as long as his brain is busy he is pretty good otherwise he tries to use his brain power to get into mischief and trouble.
That was all I thought about it when it started but things got much worse than usually. The kid had me in tears on a few occasions and trust me it's not easy to get me crying. He never acted out at school but he was a terror at home. One of his worst incidents happened about 2 weeks before he asked to be homeschooled. A week after that I upset his teacher (another Crisc's post) and a few weeks later we had him finally tested.
Things did eventually get better, he got more challenging work at school and calmed down. He got into math (after the testing, of course) and things were sort ok in winter.
The thing is that I never realized that the school could be the culprit. I though that perhaps somebody was bulling him and quizzed both him and his brother about it. It didn't really occur to me that the school might have caused all that. I considered pulling him out for a few days and see if he was better but he was so awful at home that I really didn't want to try that and loose the few peaceful hours when he was at school.
I completely forgot how bad he got. This really wasn't a typical behavior for him and now it seems impossible to even imagine that he behaved like that. He gets in trouble these days too but it's very different from then. A few months ago I was looking for an old post on my blog and came across this stage. I couldn't believe that I didn't put two and two together. I still don't get how I could have missed that. If any of you told me that in last month that your child
1) faked being sick
2) has been acting horrible at home
3) asked to be homeschooled
I would tell you that chances were quite good that the school was the main reason for all that.
May be if you are in the middle of this you don't see it. I wasn't new to gt, I should have known better. I didn't have his tests scores in my hands yet but I knew he was gt. Perhaps because the school did give him better material than he would have gotten in PS K I thought it was ok. There were a few new things he got to learn (like another language and such) there and he was slowly getting moved up in math.
I should have pulled him then but I didn't. I freaked out when he asked to be hs. It was obvious enough to him or anybody who talked to me at that time. At the end I gave him a few days to think about it and told him that we would do it if he insisted. He changed his mind. I guess because I did look quite shocked and unprepared.
JBDad and Crisc, chances are your children have really hard time at school. I don't think 6 is a bad age. I think it's more about your children's first year in a f/t school. The kids realized that being at school is no fun that they are asked to do things which are boring and make no sense to them. They don't see the point in doing so. They just got back from a Christmas break which might have made things even worse by highlighting the difference between free unstructured time and school where almost nothing interesting is done. DS was 5 at that time and only in p/t K I don't even want to think how things would have turned out if he had been going f/t.
May be the reasons are different or there is more to it but I wanted to offer my point of view and personal experience.
