Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments homeschool tipping points

so true. that's exactly what did it for me. if we can't send her to school for school - and we can't send her to school for friends... we'd best be thinking of something else. and honestly, no one in their right mind is going to send a 5 y/o to 4th grade...

thanks so, so much, everyone - it's been awesome to get all your thoughts on this.

an update - my husband had his epiphany this morning - so we have officially moved from considering homeschooling to actively figuring out the details of making it happen. all systems are go!

me too! it killed me to have consider a private school - and that was a disaster. ha.


seriously - it's like you read my mind. i'd met with a GREAT new principal at our local PS a few months ago, and i was SURE DD would be going there next year. then we went to the orientation night so that DD could have a look around and meet some kids. we walk in and sit down and she slings an arm over the back of her chair, looks at her contemporaries screaming and running around the back of the gym, gives me a world-weary eyeroll and says, "WHERE ARE THEIR PARENTS?" she then listens actively to an hour of presentations about curriculum and fundraising. she leads the applause, she asks several questions during the Q&A, she behaves like she's 40. and people are staring, like always.

i came home and cried. my poor husband (who only made the end of the orientation - dang transit!) couldn't understand how the meeting could have been so scary for me. i'm not really a crier - i tend to fall more on the "rage" side of things - but i just had this sense of rising panic. she's just. so. different.

i think i'm going to go and systematically read through all your posts, HK - i feel so incredibly hopeful now. thank you, again - i'm a fan.

Doubtfulguest, - yes, there can be a sense of rising panic. She's just. so. different. Love that one. Yes, you can feel like you've got a 40-year-old rather than a 6- or 7-year-old.

What was the tipping point? Um, two private gifted schools telling you that they may not be able to accommodate your child in pre-k and kindergarten. Problem #1.

Problem #2 is when your ds melts down and starts to act out and get bored because he cannot accelerate. When you're child starts to become listless and withdraw because he's not learning anything new, you decide to try out the homeschool lark and give it a go. You say how bad can it be and perhaps it's a least-worst situation.

Problem #3 is when public schools have no gifted mandate and absolutely refuse to accommodate/accelerate. What do you do when your first grader is reading adult books? You homeschool.

Problem #4 - 2e issues. Oy vey. Neither public or private schools can deal with it at this point, I've found. That's a double sigh. At least, homeschooling gave us time to do therapy. What fun.

oh man, cdfox, you've also nailed it.

Problems #1, #2 and #3 are definitely happening for us - i used to wonder about 2e (dyslexia) because she'd hoover up information, but didn't bother trying to read till this year. but you know, i actually feel excited - like i'm running toward homeschooling, rather than away from anything.

i do feel like a complete moron for having spent 4+ years of her life thinking that she wasn't that different. we're really weird parents*: we answer questions with questions, we assume she can rather than can't, we read her anything she's interested in, even if it is about schizophrenia.

but now that we've been through this horrible year, i know better. it isn't our choices that have made her who she is at all - at best, they've simply encouraged her. when i look back, i can see that i had a full conversation with her about mitosis when she was 2½ and that her hero at age 3 was Terry Fox, and now at 5 she wants to be a cancer surgeon or a biomedical engineer... she's just different - she's herself - and it's our job to make sure she has the freedom to stay that way.

my book will be probably called Sample Size of One: A Cautionary Tale.

(jk - i'm not writing a book!)

(*though i bet we're not at all weird around here - YAY!)

here's one of our tipping points pointing more and more towards homeschooling ... living in a school district that's low on money (while constantly increasing property taxes), as a result of which one of the schools will be closing down after this coming year, and with our luck it is OUR school that is closing down and having 2E kids, one with life threatening allergies and the other going from acting "normal" at home to acting "retarded" (it's really the best fitting word if I was looking at him as an outsider when he gets like that) when in a larger social setting ... the busride time increasing from under 5 minutes to about 20-30 minutes, we are looking at a serious safety issue for both of them (in terms of health and potential bullying with kids K-6th grade on the same bus). Also going from having the paramedics next door to having them 5-10 minutes away. This is a very big deal for us. So DS4.9 will start Kindergarten this fall before the school closes next year but what happens after that, we don't know.

My very social former cheerleader daughter went to public school and enjoyed it because she was smart, pretty, and could color in the lines. She has so many friends and so many good memories of school. I really, really wanted that for my son.

But he couldn't color in the lines because of a disability that caused him to have hyperflexible finger joints and muscle weakness. Lots of coloring and writing caused pain. My son's pain didn't matter in our one-size-fits all, everyone must learn in exactly the same way kind of education system where rules matter more than common sense.

When I was told by the kindergarten teacher at the end of the year that she recommended that he be held back in a transitional first grade the following year so that he could learn to color better and that he didn't need to really learn anything, I realized that what I had read about our education system--that "children should build on what they know" was just part of the public education system's propaganda.

We explained to the teacher that he had a disability that affected coloring ability and that we didn't care if he ever learned to color better. We didn't know the name of the disability because our primary care doctors didn't know anything about connective tissue disorders and would not refer us to specialists who did until almost ten years later. His connective tissue disorder does not affect intelligence or his ability to learn. He was reading beyond a 5th grade level in kindergarten. He taught himself to read at 2 1/2 despite the fact that Marfans also caused his eyes to tire very quickly. He was somehow able to compensate for his vision issues, but how would he have been able to compensate for a year of coloring and not being allowed to learn at his level?

After the kindergarten teacher's recommendation to hold my son back, I asked a first grade teacher who had gifted sons and training in special ed, including gifted education, for advice. I showed her samples of my son's work. She told me that she thought he might be highly gifted and I needed to homeschool. She convinced me that I could do it.

Before I made my final decision, I talked to our state department of education and was told that laws would have to be changed before my son could get occupational therapy for his disability because he was not failing. The final tipping point was when I realized I could not get help even at higher levels of the public education bureaucracy.

Lori - I can relate to the coloring. Ds7 had visual perceptual deficits and fine motor delays. He had 2.5 years of vision therapy between 4 and 6 years old due to the lack of eye-hand coordination, etc. He's better now, but he still hates coloring. Always has.

When ds was in special needs pre-k, they wanted to keep him in special needs for kindergarten too due to this issues and others. I pulled him and put him in a gifted, private school instead. I was also told by a 2e expert that I'd have to be prepared for ds to fail in the public schools before they did anything to help him. Gee, thanks.
..

Doubtfulguest - I do feel for you. I knew DS was bright when he was in special needs, but I didn't think he was 2e or so, so. I think a lot of us go through a process of grappling with what we got and how to deal with it, often without any help from the public schools.

No one mentions the fact that your child may not be accommodated at public/private school in the parenting books. Or the fact that the public schools are in such a state that you might not want them to go there anyway (e.g. bullying).

this year has taught me that what i thought i knew about school/teachers/education just doesn't apply to our particular situation, so we'll have to just make it up as we go along. and if that involves burning down the paradigm and starting from scratch, then so be it.

Oh, I'm sure we'll run into the color within lines comes Kindergarten in the fall. DS4.9 can't color within lines at all. But he can draw very extensive "machines" and "construction plans" on his white board. So what if he can't color! I LOVE the work he CAN do

Well, this is it. I don't know what to say, except to say I've been there and others here have as well.

Public/private schools seems to obsess about what 2e or special needs or kids in general can't do. They seem intent on 'fixing' them and concentrating on their weaknesses rather than building on their strengths or interests, which can be frustrating for 2e kids/parents. They'll focus on a child not doing timed addition rather than the child can do algebra. It's crazy.

Throw out the rules and start from scratch, I say. Homeschool/unschool and make up your own rules instead.