To Each His (and Her) Own

I began working on reading with M last year, when he was five. He was not especially interested in reading, and I didn't think I was feeling impatient to work on reading, but somehow one of us came up with the idea of me tickling him if he'd read to me, which he absolutely loved. We just did simple, phonetic, mostly 3-letter words, and he made steady progress. A year later, he's made definite progress, but reading is hard and he would still be considered a beginning reader. Somewhere along the way the tickling dropped off, and then we hit a low point last week. 

He was supposed to be reading aloud to me while I was making dinner, a simple book designed for beginning readers, but nevertheless a little harder than what he was ready for. After a few minutes of reading, with lots of struggling, he was quiet. I looked over after a minute or so and saw his head bowed, hands covering his face, crying quietly. I sat down next to him and he just cried and cried. He was so deeply discouraged it absolutely broke my heart. Poor little guy, he is so bright and happy and capable, and his steady progress shows me that reading is something he will learn in his own time without special intervention. I know he'll ask for the help he needs, when he wants it. I just can't see anything helpful right now in pushing him to read any more than he naturally wants to. I'm so glad he doesn't go to school and has to be faced with this kind of discouragement and pressure five days per week. I can just see it crushing the love and life out of this sweet little guy. There is so much to be learned without reading, and he embraces it all with enthusiasm and with no need for me to push anything on him.

On the other hand, almost-11-year-old A spent this evening exploring with me the possibility of doing some full-on rigorous academic schoolwork. She said she want to be pushed more, to use her brain more. She wants to have hours of work that she is supposed to do every day. She wants to write essays and do grammar and harder math. I showed her my notebook on a Charlotte Mason-based curriculum that I got from Ambleside Online and she was so excited at the prospect of doing a spoken foreign language and latin and all the other language arts stuff. "But this says history once a week? That can't be right. And mom, maybe you could buy a few different math programs and I could do them all and see which one I like best, and then we can stick to that one next year". 

I love that she feels such ownership of her education. This was my first reason for homeschooling, and it is working! She wants to do more writing, and she has been networking with her friends (and having me network with her friend's mother) to get a writing group started back up that she used to be involved in. She is thinking about what she did and didn't like in the Ambleside curriculum when we were doing more of it this fall, and how she thinks we should do it this time around. A's schoolwork isn't just drudgery that she's doing for someone else, but it's what she wants to be doing; it's work that is meaningful for her. It is truly wonderful to see things like this fall into place.

I'm not expecting that she'll really want to do hours of schoolwork indefinitely. It seems very natural for a person to want to challenge herself in one way for a while, then grow in other ways at other times. When you can follow your natural inclinations, you can make the very most of what you do. You can learn a ton in a short time if you're truly interested in what you are doing.  For however long it lasts, it will be great to see the focus on academics. When she's ready to use her brain in a different way, her brain will be different because of this period of focused academic work. I really believe that whatever she moves on to will surely be just the thing she needs, to keep her academic, emotional, and social needs in balance.