The numbers, they hurt me

I have an issue with numbers. They have always seemed like a foreign language to me. If I work hard and concentrate--a challenge in itself-- I can make them behave, but I don't enjoy it and it wears me out. In college, after struggling through calculus at my first school, I was delighted to discover that UW would let me use symbolic logic to fulfill a math requirement. I got to do math with words and pictures! (Yes, I was the weird kid who loved proofs in geometry class.)

 I also don't like to deal with financial things. I like to spend money, and I'm happy to earn it, but I don't really like to think about it too much.


So, of course, I'm our church treasurer. And I do a good job. As long as everything goes along as expected, it's only moderately painful. A former church secretary with an accounting background set up our system, and it works very well unless something changes, but it is complicated. Because of some changes, I have run up against a convoluted accounting issue that has had me pulling out my hair. I thought that I had a solution, provided by someone else with more knowledge than I have, but that solution only twisted things up more.

Yesterday I figured out why. And in that moment was grateful for my one semester of accounting and the fact that I understood--kind of--how different accounts work and why things were messed up. But knowing--intellectually--what the issue is and knowing how to fix it are two different things.

Last night I talked the issue through--out loud--with my mom and then with Bethany and made some headway. One idea that I came up with while I was talking to my mom is to draw some pictures, so that's today's plan. I'm going to draw a "map" of what the stupid numbers mean and I'm going to hope that it gets me to my destination.

Why rush it?

Elephant's Child has a great post about waiting on formal math instruction.

SATs or life-long learning?

This morning I got up early, made coffee and an egg sandwich for Patrick, and helped him make sure that he had his pencils, calculator, water bottle, etc., for taking the SAT. His weeks of test prep culminate in four hours of test-taking. In a few weeks the scores will arrived and we'll know how ready he is for college. We'll know whether homeschooling has worked. Right?

Wrong. So wrong.

We'll know how well prepared he is for a particular standardized test on this particular day. Sure, there will be some tangible proof that he has excellent reading skills and vocabulary. (Anyone who has read my blog for long, or knows us, can imagine the smile this brings to my face.) We'll know if he's taking it again. (He has set a minimum goal for his score that is very ambitious.) If his score is high enough we can be certain that he will receive the same full-tuition scholarship that Bethany received.

But we absolutely will not know, from this test, how much he has learned. We won't know if he's ready for college, or how well he'll do when he gets there. I may have a pretty good idea about these things already, but that is from spending almost every day with him for almost eighteen years, not from a four hour test. We won't know that he loves to discuss the strategic strengths and weaknesses of historic military leaders. We won't know his love of good literature or his ability to find out almost anything he wants to know.

The essay portion is new to the test since Bethany took it. He is supposed to write a well-formed 400 word essay in 25 minutes. He is going to be evaluated on a number of criteria, but what I found interesting is that the kind of examples he uses to support his thesis don't matter. An example from personal experience or opinion counts just as much as an example drawn from knowledge of philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, or--as Patrick's often are--from history.

I'd take real knowledge over opinion and love of learning over a high score on a standardized test. But the world looks to these results, so we jump through their hoops, wasting hours of productivity to learn the test.

Help! My son is nine and he can't read!

(Originally posted January 2006, edited slightly)

I've posted before about why we started homeschooling and about some of the difficulties we faced, but the reading issue was a huge problem for us. Patrick couldn't read when he was six. Or seven. Or eight. Or nine.

My oldest child had been reading since she was four. When she was in school, she had a hard time getting them to let her check books out of the library that she wanted to read, because the librarians didn't believe she could read them. Add to that the fact that my husband and I both come from families that have a lot of teachers and are very conventional. Kids are supposed to read in first grade. End of story.

So we started trying when he was six. But he absolutely could not read phonetically. He had to learn all words by sight. He would "learn" a word one day and the next he wouldn't remember it at all. It was frustrating for both of us.

Our family had been dubious about homeschooling anyway, and I think that all of them, except for my mom, were sure that I was in WAY over my head. But I knew that he was going to read and read well. He was a very bright little boy. He was fabulous at math, had a huge vocabulary, and a fantastic memory.

Then I read a book, that led me to another, and another that began to give me hope. There are a lot of kids, especially boys, whose brains are just not ready at the age of six or seven or even nine or ten for the kind of processing that reading requires. I started talking to other moms who had boys with reading difficulties and had overcome them.

I quit trying to teach him to read when he was almost seven. But that doesn't mean we forgot about books. If anything I read to him more. Sometimes he'd sit by me and follow along with a picture book, but more often we read really good interesting books for the whole family and he would just listen. Every once in a while he'd pick up a book and try to read. He also had several books memorzied that he would "read" to his little brothers. He would spend hours poring over the DK Cross Sections Book that he bought with his own money.

At nine-and-a-half he was still barely reading. It was getting harder to convince friends and family that things were okay, but for some reason I still felt confident. Shortly before his tenth birthday, many people in our homeschool group were in an uproar over the first Harry Potter book. A group of them even burned it. Well, that convinced me that I needed to read it. Patrick's best friend read it and Patrick really wanted to read it, too. We bought it and Bethany made short work of it, pronounced it "good" and then passed it on to Patrick. I didn't think a lot about it, but a couple of days later I realized that he was carrying the book around everywhere and was actually making progress. And he finished the book. After that, he just picked up speed.

And now, at 17, he reads whatever he wants with good speed and excellent comprehension and retention.He has read many of the great works of western literature. He has read things that I haven't tackled.

What worked for him may not work for everyone, but I think it is vital as parents that we trust our instincts. I knew that Patrick was smart, but already in kindergarten he was being pigeonholed as being behind. It would have only gotten worse. I feel sorry for kids who are in school and labeled. All three of my boys would be wearing a closetful of labels if they were in school. But our goal isn't to keep our kids up to some arbitrary school schedule, it is to produce human beings who love learning. For that we don't need labels.