Yeah, elh, that sounds familiar! This is another reason I'm unsure about homeschooling-- the anxiety seems worse with me. At school he is sloppy and wildly underachieving, but cheerful. Probably the teacher does not have so much at stake with him, and doesn't ride him as much. He even cheerfully ignores much of the work he's asked to do (any writing), and she lets him because she's got too many other students to manage.

He claims to not want to go to school anymore and he hates much of what they do, but he looks pretty happy coming out at the end of the day. But when I ask if he'd prefer to continue going to the school or be homeschooled with me, he says he wanted to be homeschooled. Confusing.

And yeah, you guys have good memories... he did just have surgery, a little less than 2 weeks again. And he had a rocky recovery. I didn't make him do anything at all for a week-- bad cartoons seemed to be all he could handle-- then I switched what he was watching to something more educational-- then I starting asking him to spend some time reading. Finally, after a week and a half, I tried to address the huge folder of homework that had come from the school. I picked out just a few pages that I thought would be interesting to him, tried to approach it with good humor and not too much pressure on him, but-- boom! there was the same defiant, resistant, almost panicky reaction of no! no! no!.

This is what prompted me to post.