Not Getting It

I was at my doctor's office late the other night. Very late, but that's a whole different post. As she was putting in the needles for my acupuncture - including extras for my recovering from cold and flu, she was expressing frustration over her 8 year old's progress in school and admiration for our homeschooling.

The needles were left in for an hour, so I had a lot of time to think about our conversation. First, she was under the impression that homeschooling parents have a lot of patience and superhuman ability to teach their children everything necessary. A product of the educational system with three children in the midst of it, she equated teaching with learning in a way that most homeschoolers don't. I told her several times that I am not all that patient, but that I am able to figure out ways that my children learn differently and work to their own particular strength if their struggles warrant intervention.

She asked for help with her 8 year old's math problems. I told her how we played a lot of math games before ever starting anything approaching a curriculum. She said she had tried games with her child, but that by the time school is out and homework is done, the last this the kid wants to do is play a game. This lead to a tangent about how school seems to be about crowd control and how mindless all the homework seems to be. She talked on about the frustrations and how her child just doesn't "get it" with math and asked for some resources.

As I was with the needles, I wondered why the obvious didn't occur. Maybe her child just isn't ready to learn whatever part of math was causing the stress. Homeschoolers can pull back and rest in their comfort zone when this happens, move on to different topics and come back when they are ready.

My own daughter is doing this now with fast addition reverse. She was easily frustrated with this topic on her on-line program, so I suggested just "fiddling around" with different topics until she was ready to do more in division. She's been happily learning bar graphs, simple geometry, word problems, rounding and estimating for the past week or so. She's learning the math she's ready to incorporate, while not creating a mental block about the topic she was stuck on.

I suggested this to my doctor, that her child may just be not ready to get it, whatever it may be. She was baffled at this, the class moves on even when the child isn't ready, it teaches to the mean. There must be something wrong with the child, not with the system. Homeschoolers have the flexibility to adjust to their children's needs and interests.

Reason number 2,378 to rejoice in homeschooling.