O hai—

[tblue37]

13. We make kids start school at a certain age,

Last edited Mon May 28, 2012, 11:01 PM - Edit history (1)

whether they are ready or not, and we expect them all to learn the same things according to the same schedule, grade by grade, even though they might mature differently.

The younger someone is, the more difference a few weeks or months can make in his development and his readiness to master certain skills. A kid whose birthday is August 31 is actually a whole year younger than one whose birthday is September 2, yet they will be in the same grade.

On top of the age differences in a single class, which can be weeks, months, or nearly a whole year, each child's rate of neurological and muscular development will vary. We start kids in school on the basis of average development, but many kids who fall above or below that average line go into the calculations about what constitutes "average." Thus a child who is not ready to read until he is, say, 8 years old is made to feel stupid because he is in a class with kids who might be months older than he is and whose neurological development makes them ready for reading (or math, or some other subject) sooner than he is, even when they are closer to the same age.

I ran a home daycare for 18 years, and many of the kids I helped raise had learning differences. One boy who came to me at age 7 successfully hid from his teachers (and, for a while, even from me) the fact that he could not do his math or reading assignments. I found out about his math difficulties when he asked me for help with his homework about 15 minutes before he had to be in school (right across the street from me).

As I worked with him, I discovered that his reason for never doing his homework was not laziness, but total lack of comprehension. I called the school and said I was keeping him home with me for a while, because he needed tutoring in math. (Fortunately, the school worked with me, since I had been sitting for many of their students over the years, and they knew how I dealt with them--and that their parents wanted me to have control.)

As for reading, he really couldn't read at all (this was second grade), and though I worked with him for some time, it was years before he became even slightly comfortable reading, though we did keep plugging away at it.

One thing I did was get him interested in Dungeons and Dragons. I would buy him the books for the Dungeon Masters or for the various classes of characters. At first he would just use them to get ideas for his drawings (he was a pretty talented little artist). But he wanted to read those books so much that it motivated him to keep working at it, even though reading was still slow and painful for him. I also bought him superhero comic books, which he loved, even though he had trouble reading them.

He left my daycare at age 12, but we remained close friends, and he often came by to visit and talk.

Then one day, soon after he turned 16, he stopped by to see me. He was so excited that he could hardly calm down enough to tell me what had lit that fire under him.

He'd had trouble sleeping the night before (having drunk too much Pepsi before bed), and after trying to sleep and failing, he went downstairs and started browsing the titles in his mother's small bookshelf. To his surprise, reading the titles and the words on the inside flaps of the book jackets was a smoother, easier process than he was used to, so he opened one and started reading. Not the way he usually read, mind you, but easily, comfortably, with full comprehension!

He could read--really read, not just struggle painfully syllable by syllable, and word by word. He stayed up all night reading, and then raced over to see me as soon as he was sure I would be up. (It was a Saturday.) Not only did he come to tell me about his "miracle," but also to borrow some books to read.

The thing is, if he had been allowed to just give up on reading and math when he could not do them according to the standard schedule, he would have been a 16-year-old who could not read or do math, and he probably would have dropped out of school--or been passed through school to get a worthless diploma, with no hope of any sort of real job in the future.

In other words, if he had not been in my daycare--and if I had not caught him soon enough and continued working with him--he would have started his lifetime of failure by second grade, and the relentless labeling of him as a failure would have damaged him permanently. For him, reading was so alien an activity, that his brain did not develop to the point that it could actually read comfortably until he was 16 years old, but by the time it did, he had several years worth of consistent practice and instruction geared toward his particular needs (including his particular interests) behind him, so a strong foundation had been laid for success when his neurological development finally caught up. Imagine how many kids like him fall through the mile-wide cracks in our educational system, though. So many. So, so many. For sure our system is not going to wait patiently, continuing to work with such kids until they reach age 12, 13, 14, 15, or--as with this boy--16 years of age. No, those kids are not cost effective in a mass educational system, so they are simply left by the wayside.

Even that isn't all the damage being done to them, though. In addition to being left behind, these kids are also being told constantly--sometimes subtly, but often directly and in so many words--that they are dumb, dumb, dumb.