Despite a rough beginning of school (for everyone not just ds) ds11 is doing very well in his new grade. Ds11 skipped 6th and went to 7th. He has a couple of challenging classes: one because the teacher has high expectations, and the other, compacted 7th and 8th grade math, is challenging because he skipped all of 6th grade math. Guess which classes he likes the most? The challenging ones. Seeing is believing. And he has even articulated that he loves math because he's learning new things. He received interim reports from all classes and of course he's doing very well, but he's prouder of his grades in the harder classes than he is of the easier classes. So all's great...
except...in one of his favorite classes, SS, the teacher shows relevant videos. Sometimes it's of the brutality of the Renaissance and Reformation times, sometimes it's of current events, and one day it was a video of people falling out of the towers on 9/11.
ds is now having nightmares and what he called this morning "nervous feeling." He's mostly dreaming about losing me (which could be a normal working out of growing more independent). He's back to talking about death. (when he was 5, he talked for months, nearly a whole year, about death and what it meant.) Last night in the middle of the night he was very upset there were so many wars and death and shootings. He was also upset about dying in general and of the possibility of losing us. Maybe this is normal, but when ds starts thinking about something like this, it can be overwhelming for him.
We have probably done a disservice by not having cable television, by only getting our news from NPR and the internet. He has not been exposed to the reality of "news" and does not yet understand that there are far more good people that the media doesn't deem newsworthy than bad.
I can't help wondering that despite being academically ready for the skip, for a sheltered, sensitive, kid, maybe emotionally he's not.
Last edited by KADmom; 09/17/13 06:23 AM.
