The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing, Genius, and Autism

I just finished this book and wow!  It blew me away.  The outcome for this story could have been so different if the mother had not been willing to break the mold of society, and more importantly allow her son to break the mold.

First off, every parent should read this book.  It is a wonderful story about standing up for your children and allowing them to pursue their dreams and passions.  Once you give them the tools the need to learn the things they are interested in learning any other subjects will fall into place and be brought along for the ride.

I think it speaks so clearly about the need to home school so that kids can have the freedom to follow their passions and learn the things they are interested in learning at the pace they want to learn it. There are much better ways to meet social needs than by segregating children by age, and forcing them to learn the exact same things together. Every child has different needs, different interests, different learning styles, and when you put them together with other people who have a common interest they will be social because they have a common ground to talk about.  Jake's mother was amazed by how little the difference in age mattered when her son was making friends with college students and professors at age eleven.  Having a common ground to talk about made it easier for him to be social than it ever was as a genius kid board to death in a regular elementary school classroom.
The difference between those who believe in compulsive education and those of us who do not is that we who do not believe in it can see that children just naturally love to learn things.  All they need are the tools and encouragement to learn what they have a passion for.  Ultimately what it all comes down to is what is "The Spark" that ignites a love of learning in your child?  Once you find that the possibilities are endless.

Favorite Quote from the book, "If God has a job for you, He's going to give you everything you need to get that job done."

Remedial classes and why my kids will never know they exist

While visiting with my sister and brother-in-law last week the conversation on home school was of course unavoidable (me being a home school newbie and them being 5 year veterans).  But somewhere in it all we ended up talking about a remedial reading class I was dumped into when I was in 7th grade and what I "learned" from it.

I was a slow reader, but I was smart.  I just took longer to get my work done than other students did.  So when I had to take a TIMED reading comprehension test of course I failed it because I could not complete enough of the test within the time limit.  I was in a K-12 charter school, and this remedial reading class was all the 7-12 grade students that had a problem with reading or English.  I was about the only one there that you couldn't just look at and see that they were a goof off.  No one was in the class for the whole year except for me.  We were tested monthly and if we passed we got to go to whatever class all our peers were in.  The other students would come and go as they had a problem and then tested well enough to go back to their regularly scheduled English/literature class.  I on the other hand never passed the test till the end of the year (when I had taken it so many times that I had the first half memorized and I was finally able to move on and get part of the second half done within the time limit), which saved me from being stuck in the same useless class another year.  I told the teacher that I knew all the answers from the first half because I took it so many times, and she brushed it off and said it didn't matter.  I still passed.

The teacher never really taught anything, she just assigned worksheets for our level of where we were at, and whatever problems we were working to overcome.  I learned NOTHING from this class....at least nothing it was designed to teach me.  Actually I learned a lot of things.  I learned that being slow at something is just as bad as being stupid.  I learned that I am even more stupid than the goof off kids who tested out of the class faster than I did.  I learned that sometimes cheating is the only way to get ahead especially if the system is flawed.  (I thought that was what I did by memorizing the answers to the first half of the test.) 

I still wonder why my parents didn't stand up for me and have me go to the regular class.  I became alienated from my friends I'd made in sixth grade, and never did gain the confidence to try to be their friends again.  That year they would talk about the cool things they were learning in their English class about Greek gods and myths, and I sure wasn't learning anything fun like that in my remedial reading class.  I never seemed to consider myself on the same level as them again.

So how did I do in future classes?  Pretty much the same as I did before being stuck in the remedial class.  I got my work done, I did a good job on it, but I took longer to do it than the other kids in my class.  I actually had to work at it. But it was okay that I took so long on my homework that I had no time for anything else because I had no friends to do anything else with anyway.

My kids will definitely be better off at home.  My reading struggles can be traced back to the stupid reader books I was forced to read in second grade. In sixth grade I was starting to feel confident and think I might be a good reader some day after all the struggles I'd had through elementary school, but the seventh grade remedial reading class reassured me I really was stupid after all.  The cure isn't found till somewhere in college when I was allowed to choose to read books that actually interested me.  There is something very powerful about letting someone choose their education.  Why does our society wait till adulthood when a hate for learning is already well established to allow people the freedom to choose their interests and educational goals?  It's a very counter productive philosophy. 

I still don't particularly enjoy reading and whenever I get a non-fiction book about a topic I need to learn about for one reason or another I find myself very impatient with the authors.  I never want to know their story or how they researched and learned about the topic.  I just want them to get to the point as fast as humanly possible without compromising the information I need to learn from them.  I am slowly getting over this, and learning to enjoy learning about new things and accepting the role that reading plays in my learning process.  But this is after years have already been wasted with ineffective learning and damaging self beliefs that have taken work to unlearn and overcome.  Now I find myself trying to make up for lost time at the same time as raising babies, toddlers, and now my first homeschooler.

I hope your road through compulsary education was better than mine was, but if not, lets work to give a better choice to our children.