This post is a long time coming. In fact, I doubt anyone ever reads this anymore because I've been sporadic - at best. But my "hit or miss" posts are chronicle our lives, and someday my kids might care. So, I post. Randomly.
I like California.
I am not such a big fan of typical public schools. Oddly, this surprises me. It shouldn't, but it does. This opinion is an old one, well formed, researched and entrenched. It began before I graduated from college while still in the Department of Education at CU. I did my practicums in middle schools and the Juvenile Justice Center and I saw things. These things disturbed me and kept me up at night. Mostly, I discovered that, while school was okay for lots of kids, many, many others suffered there. Literally, suffered. Anyone who fell outside one standard divination of the bell curve was well and truly marginalized. Gifted. Learning Disabled. Short. Chubby. Physically handicapped. Clutzy. Poor. Doesn't matter what the metric for normalcy is; kids outside of it suffer.
Actually, my own public school experience was kinda sucky. So, maybe my opinions started far before college, and were formed in Kindergarten, when I fell outside the norms. If people had been in to diagnosing ADHD then I might have received the label. But I was ADD before it was trendy, and I was a girl. I was well behaved. I just struggled. I felt stupid through high school, and it wasn't until college that I realized that I was actually smarter than most of my peers. Luckily, I had a really stable home life and my parents made some good moves to help me negotiate the war zone. I survived public schools, and even have a few fond memories. Yet for me, on a very basic pimal level public schools = scary and unsafe.
Now things have changed since I was a kindergartner, and even since I was an undergraduate. Policy has sifted. No Child Left Behind rules the day. Standardized Testing guides the classroom. Now kids on the margins shouldn't fall through the cracks. But they do. Oh, but they do. School isn't a good place to be something other than Standard.
Before, these opinions were largely academic. Here and now it has become deeply personal.
I have a child on the margins, and I watch him suffer.
Last year Caleb was a first grader, and a homeschool kid. We home schooled that year out of necessity, not from a place of joy. Basically, I brought the curriculum my kids were using at school home, and we did school at home. (Which, if you are a homeschooler you know, is not the same as homeschool, but that is a post for another day). Anyway, I watched Caleb progress slowly. I kept telling Eddie, "Something is not right here." But Caleb was basically content. By the second semester I knew I needed a shift. I started moving back to true homeschool (or at least true to me homeschool) and I had Caleb evaluated for ADHD. We put him on stimulants and watched his academic performance excellerate rapidly. Unfortuantely, the meds had sidefeffects that were intollerable. Caleb couldn't sleep. His eye began to twitch, which I later discovered was "ticking" and often a precursor to the onset of true Tourettes syndrome. Anyway, we took him off the meds, and hoped that we would find solutions and relief at the Gifted Charter school he would begin as a second grader.
Westgate (the Charter school) is a school based on universal design and employs the best practices of both gifted education and special education in the typical classroom. And, um, there were a lot of quirky kids there. Basically, it was a school for kids on the margins. Quirky was cool, or at least very acceptable. Caleb was doing okay there even without the meds -kinda.
Then we moved, and put Caleb in Public School.
And within a week we saw him flounder, fail, and begin to sink. He developed headaches, stomach aches, nightmares, and serious school anxiety. He was really, really behind and confused. I watch him walk around in a fog. Actually, thinking back, I remember the fog. it's a feeling I haven't had since my own public school days. Phychologists call it disassociating. Basically, I checked out. My body was there, but my mind and heart were elsewhere. School sucked, and though I physically had to be there I could choose to be elsewhere too. On those days I lived my life in 3rd person. I have seen my son do the same, and I remember the pain that was the precursor to the fog. And I am determined, my son will not live a life in 3rd person, he will not be a person of the fog.
So we've looked back into medication. And we've found a med that works for ADHD that is a non-stimulant and doesn't lower the threshold for ticking. For now, Tourettes is held at bay. And the new med is working. We're seeing slow and real progress in Caleb's ability to attend.
We've also had him evaluated by an audiologist and found that he does have a real auditory processing struggle. The sound of school is a challenge for him - it's a jungle of noise. For now, he has no guide book, compass or map through it. The school has been responsive, in their slow and beauracratic way, but they teeter on gray legal area, and they are a machine that will not be deterred. They are a locomotive on the tracks of standardization and policy, and my son might be a casualty.
I am faced with 2 options.
A - Hop on the train, like a ho-bo. And use my influence to direct the choices of the school. But like a train it has mass and inertia that is not easily influenced.
B- Get off the tracks, and help my son without the resources or policies of "THE DISTRICT".
And it's decision time...
Friday, December 23, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
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