Copyright © 1995 N.S. Gill
The experts say if you read to your toddler every day he'll soon be reading. Even better, if you read to yourself
every day you'll prove how important reading is. If such advice were foolproof, my son's nose would have been glued
to the page from the age of three. Instead, his buddy whose mother read to him only sporadically could read entire
children's menus when my son was still learning to recognize the alphabet.
Individualism
My son knew how to sing the alphabet
song, although he preferred his own tune.
Still, it was the only
song he sang that he hadn't made up. He clearly had his own ways
of doing things and his own priorities. This was borne out when he
took the pre-school screening test at age three.
He lost points for things that
had nothing to do with his skill level. The first loss was for vision. Since he is colorblind, he couldn't
distinguish all the required colors. The next step at which he suffered a loss of points was, arguably,
my fault. Although I had given him blocks, I had never encouraged him to play with them. Since he never had,
he had no idea how to put blocks together. I was also in trouble because I wasn't concerned that my son couldn't
pronounce "f." That he was missing his two front teeth made no difference to the evaluator. By this time I was
feeling like the focus of a sociological report on the assimilation difficulties of children of the underclass.
I felt redeemed by the next area in which my son lost points. The test giver asked my son to provide
a series of comparisons. "Which is bigger, a mouse or a cat?" "An elephant or a dog?" By the fourth
comparison, my son was thoroughly bored and not a little concerned for the mental health of the adult
asking such questions. Figuring he'd set her straight once and for all, when she asked "which is bigger
a dog or a mouse," he answered using his hands to show relative size. "A mouse is this big, a dog is
this big, but a dinosaur is th-i-is big," he said. She asked again and he repeated his answer. He'd explained
it to the stupid adult as well as he could. If she wanted one word answers, she'd have to find some
other informant.
It was a good thing I was planning to homeschool. Even my skeptical friends agreed after the screening.
Sure my son could be forced to behave in standard and predictable ways, but to do so would be to suppress
his essence and teachers couldn't do anything about his having an odd mother or a minor visual handicap.
Besides, his communication skills were excellent. Not only did he explain relative size visually as well as
verbally but he had an enhanced vocabulary and could tell complicated, interesting stories--if only an adult
would listen carefully to his long, rambling monologues. I discovered this by accident.
Not Understanding Him Was My Fault
One friend he'd made, a toy store manager, seemed to have no trouble appreciating his stories.
It was my fault I couldn't concentrate well enough, so I decided to write them down. My son took quickly to dictation, slowing down and repeating sentences until I had transcribed them.
When I read the complete stories back to him, he'd make corrections as needed.
His stories were coherent, action packed, and uncluttered by extraneous detail.
Did He Really Need Glasses To Play?
When he was five we went for his eye examination. I was embarrassed that he couldn't always recognize
the last six letters of the alphabet, but needn't have worried. The eye doctor said he was slightly
far-sighted--like a lot of children--and that he would probably outgrow it if only he didn't have to do
the close, detailed work of learning to read.
However, since he would be entering school soon he'd probably need glasses.
Thoughts of my active, happy son running across cement
school yards, taunted as four-eyes by school mates, briefly flashed through
my mind before I told the ophthalmologist that since he was homeschooled, we would work on reading
when he was ready. She was right about his self-correcting vision problem.
Worries About His Not Reading
When he was ready turned out to be nine. My equanimity had long since vanished. Even immediately
before he started to read, he had shown no signs of readiness. His half-sister, on one of her rare
visits, told him that if he were in a real school he'd certainly know how to read. I don't know if
he felt badly about not-reading or her comment.
He didn't mind telling the librarians on our weekly
trips that while he wanted to check out books, he couldn't read the card catalogue--but I did. Still,
I believed what I had read repeatedly about homeschooled children, especially boys, learning to read late
and catching up almost instantly.
Enunciation
On the other hand, I was worried about his inability to pronounce or distinguish letters like "f," "s," and
"v". He knew most Sesame Street words--like cat, but when I'd ask him what "at" with an "f" in front of it meant,
he'd as likely sit down (sat) or point (that) as gesticulate a rounded belly.
So I found a phonics program with a voice in which he could hear the distinctions between single consonants.
Beyond that I wanted my son to learn to read when he thought it was time, providing help when he asked.
This was the method used in the Sudbury School in the U. S.,Copenhagen's Ny Lille Skole, England's
Summerhill, and written extensively about by pioneer homeschooler, John Holt.
Peer Pressure To Read
Just before he started to read, a homeschooled friend, annoyed that he had to read aloud the
instructions on a video game they were playing, asked why my son didn't know how to read when he, at eight,
and his sister, at six, already knew how, not only in English, but in Ukranian.
I don't know if this gentle taunt spurred him on, but it was shortly after
that ninth birthday party that my son started reading.
When his permanent front teeth grew in, they were twisted, requiring braces. Our monthly trips to
the orthodontist included long waits. There were some Dr. Seuss books on the rack, so my bored son decided to
give them a try. Within two visits he had read them and was looking for other easy
Dr. Seuss books at the library. He quickly
ran out before he could handle the harder Dr. Seusses. He had no patience with the insipid stories in "readers,"
books designed to almost hold the attention of six-year olds. Bruno Betelheim explains that when readers were first
introduced they averaged 645 different words. By 1962 the average had dropped to 153. With the reduced vocabulary,
readers which were probably initially tedious, had become somniferous. Eventually,
my son found comics, Peanuts at first, then Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes.
Once he learned to read, he was always in a comic book.
Late Readers Aren't Always Great Readers
From what I had read about late readers in the homeschool world, it seemed they learned to read one day and within a month were reading Dostoevsky. Not so my son. Although he gradually added video gaming magazines to his reading list, it looked as though he would never get to serious reading. Besides, he was making little headway reading words beyond a basic core. When he read, he ignored troublesome words. He still wouldn't read "where" or anything longer than eight letters. He understood only the essence of what he was reading. It was clear he couldn't or wouldn't sound out new words. Holt, says children will usually make a good guess about what an unknown word is, or figure it out after running into it in multiple contexts. While my son undoubtedly did this with some of the shorter words, there were so many words he ignored that he wasn't amassing much of a reading vocabulary.
His father, my husband, had prepared me for my son's difficulties.
Labelled by his schools as functionally illiterate and borderline
retarded, my husband has read very few books in his life.
What he has read, including Richard Brautigan's and Kurt Vonnegut's
novels, and John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, he remembers in such
intricate detail that I am amazed (and jealous). My husband,
although a display and sign maker, cannot spell words he hasn't
memorized. To look at his spelling, you'd think he was dyslexic,
but the problem is more involved. He can't sound out words out or
sing a tune. Still, he functions beautifully outside of
academia--even in a profession dependent on literacy. In
The Magic Feather: The Truth About "Special Education," Lori Granger says "Children who are successful in every sphere of life except the school are not handicapped, and educators are flimflamming when they pretend that they are."
Labels
I didn't want to take my son to a specialist to learn whether or not he were "learning disabled." Once labelled, the label would stick with him for good or ill the rest of his life. Clearly, we needed to work on understanding sounds and their relationship to printed letters. Other people have their limitations. Mine is the inability to concentrate. If I went to school today I'd probably be labelled ADD, but I grew up and went to graduate school without that label, compensating as well as I could by going over things time and again. I guess that if someone had told me I had ADD, I would have given up, figuring that concentration, something I needed to learn long lists of Latin and Greek vocabulary, was impossible. Instead, I felt ashamed of how long it took me to learn, but kept plugging away privately until I got it. In my husband's case, he was labelled. Since he hadn't learned early enough to compensate for his school learning problem, he graduated convinced he was stupid.
He's not. I don't want the same thing happening to our son.
Last fall, my son decided he wanted to join a church choir. This was good news.
He had added only one song to his repertoire of songs familiar to the rest of us, Skye Bonnie Boat.
Otherwise he sang tunes that came from within. After the ten week children's choir the teacher said he had made significant improvement, he knew several hymns, but was still singing a little low.
Distinguishing sounds is a problem in singing and in reading.
Working on the sounds of letters and syllables is especially difficult in English where
the same cluster sounds different in different words. Not so phonetic Latin.
In most of our home education to this point, we'd relied on following my son's interests.
Encouraging Behavior
As Holt says, "we can best help children learn... by making the world accessible to them and
helping them explore the things they are most interested in."
Latin is my interest. I hope it will become my son's key to discrete sounds. An audio program helped him
understand the sounds of consonants and I hope a
Latin (Artes Latinae) CD-Rom program will continue the phonetic process
at the same time that it teaches him something about Roman life and
culture.
Computer Addiction
My son has been a computer addict since sometime between age two and three. He went from smashing computers to playing on them overnight. Since we, his parents, spent much time on computers, his initial reaction was hostility, but soon he learned to think of them as toys. I've received harsh
reminders from the homeschool community that computers give off dangerous radiation, that they are especially harmful to the eyes of little ones and
that they are no better than television, but the reminders only worry me.
They don't spur me to action because we have other concerns.
My son has a life's vision. He intended to become a video game maker, even before we read in Growing Without Schooling about a boy who did just that. From the article he learned that to fulfiill his dream he needs several skills, among which are the traditional academic ones of writing and mathematics, as well as computer programming. He still enjoys writing (dictating stories), but has changed his focus slightly. Instead of making up stories, he reports on video games. He has come out with a newsletter in which he reviews, rates and answers questions. He hopes to obtain access to more games through this project and has, to our delight, been promised one game to review (on loan from a used software company) for each issue.
Mathematics is not particularly hard for my son, nor is it particularly interesting. It is just a necessity. Not something like Latin that he always balks at. At the moment we are working on algebra. That my son is ten makes it sound as though he is terribly precocious, but he's not. When he finds the missing number in an equation, that's algebra. When he determines the angle at which to hit the gorilla in Gorilla Basic, he's using slopes. What's more, our year is 365 days long and our study of any given subject may only be fifteen minutes a day once or twice a week. So it's not as though he's sitting around solving twenty-five quadratic equations every day.
One aspect of video game making my son is reluctantly willing
to learn is drawing. As a small child he never wanted to paint
or touch clay. Although he has a large supply of markers and
crayons, his friends use them, not he. Latin is my bailiwick, art his father's. With the perverse logic of genetics his colorblindness has made appreciation for art tenuous—just as his auditory difficulty has made Latin more of a chore than it would be for most children. So, working on art, while a necessity he recognizes, is not something he allots time for.
Like programming, it is something to come—very soon.
Working To The Test
Compromise
Most of the year we go along using a relaxed schedule in which
my son is free to work on his games, playing, and reading,
interrupted for only a couple of hours to deal with schooly
stuff and intermittently for chores. However, there are at
least two months when we go through intense work. One is in
April as we prepare for the annual test. Minnesota homeschoolers
are required by law to take a nationally norm-referenced
standardized achievement test each year. If their performance is
below the thirtieth percentile, the parent is required to seek
further evaluation. When my son was to take his first test, I
worried because he couldn't read. I explained this to Tom Murray,
the Minneapolis Public School's homeschool liaison, who said it
sounded as though I'd already provided evaluation, so not to worry.
Except for that month each year, the test seems so remote that I
can't remember if my son ever actually scored below the thirtieth
percentile.
The other month is in the fall--probably a residue of my own schooling. Anyway, I feel excited enough then to tackle new subjects in depth, The first official year we combined learning about frogs with starting a support group. Last year we tackled Ancient Egypt, reading Eloise Jarvis McGraw's The Golden Goblet and all the books we could find in the children's library on Egypt until
the information became hopelessly repetitive. As a related project we studied geometry.
Teaching one child intensively for a month can cover what a traditional school does in a year. A month is also a short enough period that I don't feel terribly guilty about cramming information into my son without his full consent. I believe, with Thomas Jefferson that an education, particularly in history (my usual focus), is essential for an informed electorate. Creating a responsible, self-sufficient, happy citizen is what I hope our home education is all about.
Life Learning
Before their children leave home to go to school, families teach their children. What we homeschoolers do is continue that process. When babies learn to speak they have accomplished an immensely complex task compared with which no later educational feat comes close. Babies, like young children, are inquisitive, eager to learn. This doesn't have to stop at age six, but failure and discouragement suppress their eagerness. Thus, in my experience, the only parents who have given up on homeschooling are those who have brought the school into the home, complete with grades, rigid structure, and busy work.
Today my son is reading Judy Blume's novels.
Last week he discovered that the televised Hercules
isn't just Hercules, but a Theseus-Hercules combination hero.
Tomorrow we may bike to the library to research the Komodo
dragon or renaissance weaponry.
The past ten years have been an opportunity for me to learn all sorts of new things, but without a doubt, the best part of homeschooling is that I get to enjoy my son's company, his wisdom, silliness, frustrations and joys. However, my son is getting older. Soon my role will be a resource and transportation provider, standing back to watch my son decide how to master the subjects he needs for admission to video gaming
college.
[ Go to C.S. Lewis: Fiction Fit For Kids ]
Copyright © 1996, 1997, &
1998 N. S. Gill.
