Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Trying to plan for next homeschool year

It is sink or swim time for him now. The 7 hour a day musical theater class is very challenging in all kinds of ways. The director is even having him work through his lunch because he has a lead role and they are only taking a month to do this play instead of half days over two months like they did last year.

He doesn't want me at rehearsals so I stay home. He doesn't want me to help him practice his lines like I used to because some of the lines are embarrassing--there is mild sexual innuendo throughout the play. He also doesn't want me to be there to see him kiss the princess which he will have to do as the prince. He says it is embarrassing but he will get over it, but he doesn't need me watching him while he does it. His friend told me that my son had to work on Song of Love with the girl who is playing the princess after lunch so he was supposed to be going over the song lyrics as he ate his lunch so I left his lunch there. I couldn't even stay for a few minutes.

My son learned that he can write notes easily using his iPhone that he keeps in his pocket and there are a lot of notes to take, lots of things to remember when you have a lead role.

The director, on top of asking him to have his lines memorized by next Monday wants him to write a 10-minute play and turn it in to her on Monday. She talked him into running for assistant director or something like that and writing a play is a requirement for this. He agreed to it and now he's regretting it but he says he will do it if he has to.

I talked to the director this morning and told her I wondered if he would be able to write the play and memorize all of his lines in such a short amount of time but she said she knew he could because he had such a good memory. She has known him since he was four and she has never seen him have trouble memorizing anything. I told her his memory used to be good before he had such trouble sleeping because of the brace and the migraines and the foot and back pain. She still thinks he can do it.

I have noticed that my son seems to be enjoying the attention he is getting from the girls in his class. This could be a motivating factor in getting all of the work done in time.

For now he is spending enough time around other kids. I don't know how much is really enough. I know that it usually gets kind of lonely at home when school starts and all of his friends go back to public school and he only sees them once or twice a week.

I do think he learns more at home by himself than he would in a classroom but he would miss out on classroom discussion. I really wanted him to take a co-op literature class in the fall but he says he will learn more if he doesn't have a teacher telling him what he has to read. He says he can talk to me and his dad about what he reads and he does this all the time.

My dad agrees with my son and says there are lots of people who were self-taught. He doesn't think my son needs any more friends because there are about twenty kids ages 4 - 20 in the musical theater group. He says he didn't have any friends as a teenager because he had a job and school and didn't have time for friends. He said it didn't hurt him.

I just see that my adult daughter has so many friends that she has kept in touch with since high school and she just seems to have so much fun with life. I want that for my son too.

Thank you. That is helpful.

Thank you. Online classes that have live components might be something good for me to look into. My son does not want people to see that he needs any kind of accommodation. I couldn't understand why until a few days ago. I was trying to get him to hold the knife the "normal way" when he cut his food and he got really upset and asked why people just assume that anyone that has to do something differently has a mental disorder? He showed us how his hand weakness and index finger with hypermobile joint is worthless for providing enough support to cut food normally. He says he has to do it the way he does it and whose business is it anyway?

He is very aware of judgmental people. He is a very smart kid and he sees it in their eyes. We have judgmental people in our family and it is one of the things that really bothers him. My college professor sister-in-law said something about his problem with cutting with a knife several years ago. She didn't think the way he did it looked very attractive. He can write legibly because writing doesn't take as much strength as cutting but his writing is slow and he has pain in his hands if he writes very long.

If more teachers would let him use his iPhone for taking notes and answering essay questions and let him leave the class to take pain meds when he needs them or stretch to relieve the pain from the scoliosis, I would feel better about putting him in more classes. My son is doing the best he can to deal with all of this. When he was little, clothing tags and socks bothered him and now he lives with pain and it makes me so mad that some teachers just expect him to color in the lines exactly like everyone else without any accommodations.

These really are tough decisions and I still have mixed feelings.

Thank you for the suggestions.

It is great your son is doing so well in the play. I know it is really hard Lori but I would strongly encourage you to stay out of it. It is your son's obligation and his responsibility to complete it or ask for an extension or whatever help he needs. Learning what you can take on is a life skill everyone needs. Learning how to ask for help when you are in over your head is again something people need to learn to do. You aren't going to be going to his college professors and telling them his private medical information and I don't think you should with the theater director either. Your son is telling you he wants distance and you should listen to that. Let him work it out.


It isn't his whole education, he will still have plenty of time to learn on his own. There are certain things that can only be learned in groups and one of them is how to handle it when you get an assignment you don't like.


But, your son doesn't have school or a job. So, other than the once a week theater group he's got nothing. And, people are all different. For many kids loneliness intensifies during the teenage years. I don't think it makes sense to opt for isolation because it didn't hurt your dad.

Your son may not get a great gang of kids he can really relate to at this age, but doing all of his school work on line he's closing off one potential avenue for interaction.

If teachers, even private school teachers, are refusing your son necessary and reasonable accommodations for his disability, they are almost certainly in violation of the ADA and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

From this page :

Q. Does the ADA affect private schools?

A. Yes, Title III of the ADA prohibits discrimination by public accommodations. They must eliminate unnecessary eligibility standards that deny access to individuals with disabilities, make reasonable modifications in policies practices and procedures that deny access to individuals with disabilities unless a fundamental alteration in the nature of the program would result and furnish auxiliary aids such as interpreters notetakers or readers when necessary to ensure effective communication unless an undue burden or fundamental alteration would result.

It seems to me there are possibly three choices (maybe more that you can think of).
1. Get some occupational therapy and see if there are other options for helping him with these tasks. The purpose of this isn't just to please other people, but to make his life easier so he's less tired and he has more options available to him. While right now he may not care, someday when he is on a date or whatever he may wish that he had another way to use his knife.
2. Do nothing and internalize the negative comments from other people and feel bad about them.
3. Do nothing and reject other people as judgmental for hurting him.
4. Learn healthier ways to deal with feelings.

If the only choices are two and three, well then yes three is a better choice. It is probably better to feel bad about other people than to feel bad about yourself. But, that isn't without cost. Feeling so negative and dismissive about other people damages relationships and really promotes feelings of anxiety and rejection. That's not very healthy.

So, it seems to me the better choice would to see if there is any possibility of progress in occupational therapy. I suspect he could learn a few things that likely might help a lot. Just like he learned piano and just like he's learned to type. And, I'd consider some work with a psychologist to get more comfortable with living with disabilities.



I thought he just took one class last year and the teacher let him use his iPhone once he asked to. Has he taken many other co-op classes and had these accommodations refused? My memory was that he didn't want to ask for accommodations and didn't want to draw attention to what he needs. That is exactly why I think he needs to do this at his point in his life because learning self advocacy is a huge part of learning to live with disabilities.

I just don't think it would be that it could be this difficult to get his needs met. Our child just carries a pill in his pocket and has a water bottle and discretely takes meds when he needs to. It is hard for me to imagine if he set up a time to talk with the teacher and explained the exact accommodations he needs for stretching that he would be refused. How often are these classes and how long do they run?

Having an iPhone in class was actually against the co-op's rules. When the writing composition teacher announced that there would be about 15 short answer essay questions requiring answers of at least several sentences each in addition to some multiple choice questions, I knew there was no way my son could finish in one hour. He did not want to advocate for himself because he knew he had a high enough average that he could pass the class even if he got a bad grade on this test. I didn't want him to settle for a lower grade just because of a disability. We had never really talked about how important grades are since this was the first class he had taken since kindergarten where a grade was given. He looked at it like what was learned was more important than the grade and there would be no difference in what he learned, the difference would only have been in what he could show that he knew. It was not worth it for him to risk letting others,like the cute girls in the class, know that he needed to use some kind of accommodation.

I asked for opinions of teachers on teachers.net about the use of an iPhone for typing essay questions answers. One said I was mistaken if I thought no other students would notice and negatively judge the iPhone use. They said what they would see was a kid who thinks he is above the rules and can do whatever he wants, even though phones are against school rules. The teachers.net teacher said hiding the Iphone will cause social issues and it was better for him to follow the rules and use something like an alsphasmart instead. I disagree but I seem to be in the minority.

I just have a feeling that the co-op leaders would feel the same way as the teachers on teachers.net so I am afraid to ask them. I felt that the teacher would understand and she did, which is why I asked her. The co-op leaders are very rule oriented. They are very strict about other things like the types of clothing that can be worn to class. They are very religious and if you say the wrong thing or disagree with something they believe you can get kicked out. My son and I are very aware of this because we have experience with ultra religious family members. He would have rather taken a lower grade than go against their rules. I can understand how he would be reluctant to advocate for himself in this environment. We both worry that we might say the wrong thing to the other members of this co-op. He doesn't know which books or movies are considered by them to be appropriate. A lot of members of our community believe it is wrong to read or watch Harry Potter or play video games. It is one of the reasons he doesn't want to go back.

Our experience has been that the ultra religious people like the people in our co-op and family avoid people and things that go against their views. We are not rejecting them. It is the other way around. My very social daughter moved away from here and rarely goes to our extended family dinners because of the way our family makes her feel. She has lots of friends who invite her over for holiday dinners and she says they all seem to love each other and are not so judgmental. It was healthier for her to move away. My son will move away the first chance he gets and I will miss him but I know this will be the healthiest thing for him. I want him to be able to move away from here.

By the way, Facebook makes it so much easier to see what the people in my family and the co-op believe. I recently read all of their comments about how horrible it was to let kids read or watch Harry Potter and it isn't just Harry Potter, it is anything with witches or wizards or any kind of fantasy. When one of my relative's facebook friends said she would never let her child watch or read Harry Potter or even Disney shows, my relative thanked her for her convictions and said it was a matter of what you put in you will get out. So they watch us and see that my son is reading things they would never allow and playing video games in his free time which they also don't allow and they act like they don't really want my son around their kids, yet they go to public school and are exposed to all kinds of things I don't think she would agree with which doesn't make sense to me but I would never say anything to her about that. It is none of my business.

My son and I just don't know how to carry on a conversation with people in my family who don't read anything except the Bible and talk about sports that we are not interested in. I have reason to believe they think people with disabilities might be more sinful than they are and are being punished by having this disability. Since I have a mother who was a wonderful and very religious woman before suffering a complication during surgery that caused severe brain damage and a son with mild disabilities, I do have a problem being around people who feel this way. They volunteer to help with meals for the homeless and tell everyone about it but they don't visit their sick relatives like my mother or my dad. I think this might be one reason my son thinks he needs to hide his disabilities. I think it is healthier for my son and me to just be polite to people like this when we have to see them but limit contact with them if we can.

The musical theater people in our town have felt some of the same things we have felt. They consider the musical theater group to be family. The kids love each other like brothers and sisters and are very supportive of each other unlike our real family so we are lucky to have this in our community. I don't think my son really has mental health issues because of the love and support he receives there. In this group he has the opportunity to use his gifts and he sees other kids that can't memorize or sing or do some things as well as he can, but they can dance better than he can. It is a very healthy environment for him to be in. He is very social with kids of all ages when he is with this group and I hear him laughing and talking a lot when I go to pick him up. When I brought him lunch yesterday he was sitting in a corner surrounded by four or five girls and he was smiling and talking to them. No wonder he doesn't want me to stay.

My daughter often tells my son that he will find it is very different when he moves away from here. She says most people she has met are not like a lot of the people she met in the town we live in. She even told me that it felt like we were the only normal people here. We moved here from the city where people tend to read more and who are more accepting of differences. We had no idea it would be like this here. I don't know how a psychologist would help us with this kind of situation.

Lori,

I am having a hard time here separating out the issues you and your son have with family members and the co-op over religious beliefs, philosophy and lifestyle choices, and the issues that you are having with the co-op asking for and getting appropriate disability accommodations. Not approving of personal choices and refusing disability accommodations are (or certainly should be) two separate questions. In my opinion, as a mom with a son with some similar issues, if your son is refusing to even try to advocate for his disability-related needs because he assumes that the response will be negative, due to a climate of hostility at the co-op regarding people with disabilities, I think it is doing your son a disservice to leave him in that environment. If he is generalizing and projecting your family's attitudes onto the people at school, or acting based on fear of rejection, then he needs help, either from you or from a counselor or a mentor he trusts who is familiar with disability issues, to help him see that that is not appropriate or healthy, and that he should at least try to get his needs met rather than acting out of learned helplessness. He is at an age where he needs to be getting some practice advocating for his needs in an environment where that advocacy is likely to be successful, if he ever expects to be able to function in a higher education or work environment. In my opinion, as he is at an age where he is also really developing his own self-concept, he doesn't need to be in an environment where he might internalize shame or guilt over his disabilities, which,at least to some extent, are probably going to be with him for life.

I can see the point of the teachers on teacher.net about the use of the iPhone versus a non-internet-connected laptop or Alphasmart on tests. The iPhone allows a student access to a number of aps and online resources that would be very helpful even to students without disabilities on an exam, including spelling and grammar checking and Cliff's notes, etc., and the teacher has no way of ensuring that your son is not using them other than standing over his shoulder continuously. Yes, the other kids will know he has a disability. Yes, the teacher will know that he has a disability. He has to come to the realization that unless he can remediate his disabilities well enough that he will never need any accommodations to participate fully or show what he can do, at some point other people are going to have to find out about them. I'm not knocking the value of being able to participate in settings where the format is already completely accessible to him, but I think that it is unreasonable to expect that it will be the norm. I would point out that the more he can remediate rather than accommodate, the less frequently the question will come up.

I really hope that the two of you can find a solution that will work for your son.

Is there a reason why he can't use an Alphasmart? It is the device that is most commonly used so there is a reason why the teachers online suggested it. They are fairly low cost and they are durable. If part of what he's trying to sort out is for the long term how he will function in a classroom environment I think it would make a lot of sense to look to the tools that are used. I don't find it at all unreasonable that a co-op, school, or classroom of any kind would not allow a student to use an iPhone on a test because access to apps, internet, etc. are not appropriate to have during a test. I would not let a student in my class use an iPhone during a test. It is not a matter of being against people with disabilities or against homeschoolers.

I am hearing some what seems to be very negative and unfair prejudgment of people. It seems everyone in your town will not be understanding, yet, you or your son haven't actually explained the situation or asked for help. Posting a homeschooler on an Internet forum for teachers, asking about an iPhone and then generalizing from that the attitudes about disabilities that all of your son's teacher's doesn't make sense unless your goal is to prevent him from becoming independent.


You asked what a psychologist could help with and there you go. If your son hopes to be able to go to college and get a job, your son has got to get to a place where he's better prepared to live as a person with disabilities. He needs to be able to self advocate. He needs to be able to cope with feelings of difference. The foundation for that comes RIGHT NOW. It isn't something that can just be put off until later.


How do you see that happening? Do you have any sort of plan for that? As I understand it this co-op class last year was his first class with a teacher and grades since he was in kindergarten. And, you stayed with him to take notes and monitor if he was okay. Your son is 12 or 13 right? What are the steps you see needing to happen in order for him to be prepared to move away from home at 18? What will he need to be successful in college?