Highs and Lows of Past School Years (Post #2)

As I mentioned in my first post, my husband and I have decided to homeschool our youngest child through his high school years. He is presently finishing up his 8th grade year at a small public school.

Our son attended the public school up the road from us through 5th grade. We opted not to continue his education in the middle school in our district due to it's size. We open enrolled him in a smaller school in the district next door. I had once worked at this school as a spec ed aide and really liked how that dept. was organized.  All in all, we believe our son has received a decent education at this school, as well as the other schools he has attended for early childhood and then K-5th. As with any school, time, staff and resources can be limited.

I could make a list of the frustrations we felt through these years, and elaborate on them,but let me see if I can sum them up, because who wants to read through a long post?

I guess one thing that sticks in my memory is that we felt he was given work that was beyond his capability and we helped him so much at home that we wondered what he truly gained from the experience.  Is education for actual learning or for doing work and simply handing in work to get a grade...or completing a test just to get a grade?  When you have a child who has special learning challenges you see things differently when it comes to homework....you question the goal of the assignment....atleast as it pertains to your child. There were times our son worked so hard simply to write the answers (which was a great feat for awhile) that all of his energy was spent doing that and no learning took place. If the goal of the assignment was practicing his penmanship, then I guess the goal was met....but as you can guess, that was not the goal.

He often times was given study guides for tests that were not modified, and I know his tests would be...so there we were wondering what on this study guide would he actually be tested. There were nights when the frustration level was very high...not ony mine but our son's as well.

I also feel quite a bit of time was wasted in re-teaching our son subjects...let me clarify....because inclusion is the way to go in the school system, our son would sit in a regular class, and then have to be re-taught the subject when he was in the learning center. Our son learns best 1:1 at a slower pace...due to his language comprehension challenge.  This is where I am hoping homeschooling will be the biggest advantage.

The positives of his schooling years have been the wonderful dedicated teachers and wonderful speech therapists. We can't thank them enough for all their hard work.   Our son has done well socially as well in the school system, which is an area we will have to really work on when homeschooling. Thankfully there are quite a few homeschooling groups in our area.

That's enough for now.