What trying hard looks like

I’ve been doing homeschool math experiments all summer with my older son. I started division in April, when I realized it’s a third-grade topic that his third-grade classroom was not going to get to. At this point, we’ve been doing long division for six months and he still can’t do it.

I’ve sat next to him for every long division problem. We used Kumon, and School Zone and random downloads. Nothing works. Today I slammed my hand on the desk and said, “Focus on what you’re doing! You just did this yesterday!”

I broke a lot of blood vessels in my fingers. Not all of them, but just enough so that all day I have this bruised feeling on my hand.

This seems like a good time to tell you that my first job out of college was at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I was an arbitrage clerk and I used hand signals to tell traders on phones what prices were trading in the open-outcry pits. I did not get the job for any skill; traders in the pit wanted someone good to look at.

So I flashed numbers with my fingers for about three months, and then the Berlin Wall came down. The markets went up and down so fast and I couldn’t remember if numbers were higher or lower than previous numbers.

That day I was fired, and that day I realized that I had a disability. People who struck me as uneducated and stupid were able to keep track of what numbers meant in a market going up and down.

Today my son did the same long-division routine over and over again and he could not see he was learning a system to solve a problem. And everything came back to me. My own math gap, the Wall falling, and the teachers who told me I wasn’t trying my hardest and left me bruised.

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Social skills workaround

I have no business teaching any kid social skills. I have terrible social skills, and my younger son, the one who does not have Asperger’s Syndrome, just amazes me when he can make conversation with anyone. My younger son should be giving us all lessons in social skills. But the truth is that I’m not even sure someone with Asperger’s will learn, because we don’t care. We are fine just not talking.

So I know my son is not going to learn anything about being socially competent at home with me all school year. But I wonder, why does everyone talk so much about social skills in homeschooling?

Maybe really all we need our kids to have is self-knowledge. I understand that my social skills suck and that everyone else wants friends but I am not like that. I understand that I have to be careful what I say to peoples’ faces because people feel uncomfortable around me.

But what about all the people who have careers they hate? How come we are not panicking about that? Are you teaching your kid to deal with having to earn money? Are you teaching your kid that someone is going to tell them what to do every day at work? Because only about ten percent of adults can support a family working for themselves.

Adult life is full of tradeoffs and disappointments, and the people who do the best are those who are forced to learn what they are great at and focus on that, because adults who have the most flexibility in their lives and control over their lives are people who do that. This is the real opportunity for a homeschooling parent.

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The math tutor I love. Or hate

In a moment of great math self-doubt and great faith in my ability to earn money, I called a very expensive math tutor in Washington DC to see if she could tutor my son online.

He is six and doing third-grade math, but I have no genes for math skills and neither does his dad, so I’m convinced that the only reason he’s doing third-grade math is that I inadvertently skipped things I can’t bear to teach. Like measurement. I hate that. I mean, look, I’ve gotten through my whole life not knowing metric conversions, so I don’t think we need to teach them since it’s clear that most people don’t know them and they still live happy, fulfilling lives. Or, really, even if they are not fulfilling, I have never heard anyone lament their inability to measure by the meter.

But I’m the only one who can’t measure metrically. This is what the consultant made me think. Because apparently, math is linear, and you learn step by step, and there are standards that kids need to meet before they go on.

I imagined the math corollary of putting a kid in front of a stack of Newbery Award Winners and telling him to read. But there is not that. I mean, there is no best-of for math problems.

So the tutor says my son needs to learn math according to math standards. And you know what? I’m really hopeful that maybe we do not really need rigid math standards and he could be a free-thinking math kid. But maybe the tutor couldn’t say this because she is certified to national standards.

I’m just not sure what to think, or what to do. Today, when my son asked what his math problems are, I gave him a painting by Miro and asked him to do a graph of triangles, squares and circles.

He thinks the assignment was BS. He likes multiplication drills, so I gave him a peppermint for each circle. Am I an unschooler if I use conventional bribery?

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What if the mom is the problem?

Now that I have this blog I have talked with tons of parents who homeschool in groups rather than on their own. I can tell it is the way to avoid making my social son into a socially awkward homeschooled kid. But look: I hate talking to people. I have Asperger Syndrome and I’m awkward, and while I’m very articulate on this blog, and you probably like reading it because I’ll say things other people don’t say, that is fun for a blog and very bad for a dinner party. Or a homeschool group.

So I don’t want to have to be social to do homeschooling well. In fact, I love the idea of never having to talk to anyone at school again. And, by the way, a lot of people who have Asperger’s are also face blind, which I am. So all those people I see every day at school during drop off and pickup and arguments about my older son’s IEP? All those people are people who I don’t recognize when I see them. So of course I’m elated at the thought of never having to go back to the school: the place is a sensory integration nightmare.

So I worry that my son will not have a rich enough social life as a homeschooler. Not because of any inherent problem with homeschooling. But due to an inherent problem with me.

When I look around at everyone else in the world, I can see each person’s worst personality trait after talking with them for just a minute. I think I have savant syndrome for peoples’ shortcomings.  And I think, what do all the other parents do, who have personality deficits way more unappealing than mine (at least to me)? What do they do when their kids are stuck in a house with them all week long? When there is no forest but just sort of a small grove of a few saplings, the acorn probably falls too close to the tree.

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Keeping up with the Joneses

Suzuki camp. Again. I am by the pool. Next to a mom.

There is a girl who is a great swimmer. She is doing butterfly across the length of the pool. With straight arms and perfect double-kicking toes. I say to her mom, “She’s a great swimmer.”

“She’s on a swim team.”

“How many days a week does she swim?”

“Four.”

“And she plays violin? How does she have the time?”

“We homeschool.”

“Oh. I’m going to homeschool too. We’re starting this fall.”

There it is. Just like that. I decide that I’m doing not just one kid, but both. Because that girl is great at violin and at swimming and I think maybe that is all you need to be in order to have a fulfilling childhood.

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My big decision

I get a report from my nine-year-old son’s overnight camp that he is largely unable to read the nonverbal responses kids have to his humor. And, unfortunately, those responses are very negative. And, unfortunately, this is a camp for kids with Asperger’s so the bar was not very high to begin with.

I am sad.

I have been through school districts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Madison, WI. I have hired lawyers, I have spent tons of money to win everything I want. I have been through enough hearings to know that in our current school district I would have to spend loads of money to enforce my son’s IEP and then I’d win and then everyone in our town would hate me.

Being right is not as important as being a good mom. So I decide the first kid I’m taking out of the schools is my nine-year-old who needs special services and it’s easier for me to spend my time earning the money to pay for services than to spend my time fighting the school systems to get services for free.

I am nervous about telling my son. I am worried he has already been sold on the idea of school by the school. I plan out what I will say and I rehearse. I worry he will not trust me to teach him. Or he will miss his current teachers. I worry he’ll call my bluff on the whole idea that you can learn from home.

At the end of dinner I say to my son, “We are going to do school at home this year. No going to school in the mornings for you anymore.”

He says, “What will we do for recess?”

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Idea: Off-label pharmaceuticals

I wonder if among homeschooling parents there is a thriving black market for off-label pharmaceuticals.

Xanax is so nice, but it takes away my drive to get my making-money work done during the day. But if my sole work during the day was to make sure my kids were doing self-directed learning, well, I think I could do that on Xanax. And Xanax might make that a little more interesting.

Also, on Xanax I would not feel the draw of the Internet all day long. What do homeschooling parents do who are addicted to their blog stats? It would be so difficult to focus on long-division when I know someone big just linked to me. I like to watch the page views minute by minute. How do homeschooling parents nurse their own obsessions during the day? I think a Xanax would do the trick for me. For a bit.

I think Adderall might be good on days when we have to do stuff like soccer and violin and swimming. Because I don’t like those days, but maybe with Adderall I would. Would Percocet make swimming as relaxing for me as it is for the kids?

Please, do not tell me I’m selfish and unable to focus on my kids long enough to homeschool them. I am trying. I’m just wondering: How do other people handle these issues?

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Suzuki cello camp kills me

I am at Suzuki cello camp. Again. Somehow I gave birth to a child who loves being with people. I don’t think there are any genes for this on either side of his family. For generations. But still, I am trying to address his needs, and he loves getting together with swarms of young kids playing string instruments.

I want to tell you that he is gifted. He is. Who else has a six-year-old who practices cello extra each day, on his own? But what I also want to tell you is that I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I hate talking to the other parents. I hate the stress of looking at the bow holds of prodigies and thinking: I’m not doing enough for my son. I always forget to check his bow hold before he plays Minuet.

I know I’ve done a good job of helping him to find something he loves. But I don’t know how long I can keep it up. He should go to group lessons but he doesn’t. I don’t want to drive the two hours each way for the extra lesson. If I don’t want to do that, should we just stop lessons? Should someone else drive him? Should I stop worrying so much?

Yes. Of course, the answer is to stop worrying. But how do you homeschool your kid and not worry? Because you homeschool by turning your back on the team effort of the whole school system. It’s just you: making a fresh, new, maybe-bad decision every day of the week.

Read more about cello camp here. 

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Seeking bad attitudes

Where are the blogs with posts about homeschool drama? How can homeschool be as sunny as it appears on homeschooling blogs? It seems inevitable that these are some under-reported conflicts in homschooling families:

  • Men who think their wives are too scattered to homeschool but are scared to say so.
  • Moms who are insanely bored teaching addition but the kid can’t learn it on his own.
  • Moms who would rather be at the gym than at piano lessons.

Why don’t we hear about personal drama that must accompany such a huge commitment as homeschooling?

Where are the blogs about homeschool angst, turmoil and failure?

Or maybe there is just a general gap in honest writing like that because social media overemphasizes happiness.

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Not interested in fixing schools

Public education is a complete mess in the US. A deep, structural, crisis kind of mess. Anyone who does not see this is totally out to lunch. Fortunately there are a lot of very smart, very well funded people working on that issue.

In the meantime, I don’t want my kids to be part of the fixing process. I want my kids to do the best thing for them right now. This is not a new approach to schools. Bill Clinton took this approach when he ran for President on a very liberal platform and then sent his daughter, Chelsea, to a very elite school in Washington DC. The same elite private school that the Obama girls attend now.

It’s not that I don’t care about fixing public schools in the US. But I care about it like I care about ending the war in Afghanistan. Both are really important issues and lots of peoples’ lives are being ruined but I don’t want it to affect my kids’ day-to-day life if I can help it. And being a parent activist definitely takes it’s toll on family life (these people actually quit their jobs to do it).

Remember the opening scene of Sex, Lies and Videotape? The woman is talking to her psychiatrist about world hunger or world garbage or some other world problem, and she sounds like a nutcase because she’s not taking care of the problems that are close to her.

I think that’s what parents sound like when they talk about school reform. We should just take care of our kids. Right now, today, is it better for your kids to be at home learning or in your particular school learning? That’s the issue that interesting because that’s the issue we can really act on.

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