Mamarati

So, I’m sitting out here in the living room… my boyfriend is still asleep. He’s going in late today. He was going to go in at 10, but decided that sleep was a better option.

I’m out here drinking coffee and facebooking, even though I’m not even in school right now. WTH?

I am trying to get school stuff lined up again, figure it all out. Figure out where the money is going to come from… the time…

I went to UMA and even though I applied there a few years ago, they still had me in the system, so I could enroll there if I wanted to and had the cash. Kinda nice to know. And nice to know that I don’t have to wrangle my old school first over the bogus parking charges to get my transcript.

In other news, I am trying to absorb everything that has happened over the past couple of days or this week…

I am picking Jacob up from school now and it is going good. I went on a hunt for the perfect binder for him and found the Five Star TruLock. Well, I found it online, but then when I went out to find it at stores, it was nowhere to be found. I went to Office Depot and they were out, Target, Wal*Mart, etc. and no luck. Finally, I was about to pick him up and there’s a Walgreens by his school, so I thought, what the hell? I’ll stop in there. Lo and behold, they had it. I bought two. Just in case.

The deal with the binders is… he breaks them. The rings. We’re on binder #4 and it’s only the second week of school. They get misaligned and they are hard for him to open and close and so what happens is… he just doesn’t use it. Not very helpful for him, because he is, bar none, the most unorganized child on planet earth. So, I knew I had to find something for him that he would actually use.

(Sidenote: TabbyHeadKittyBoy is inside the house right now and Buttercup is freaking out, watching him like a hawk. He’s climbing up to all her special places and she’s got this indignant look on her face. She keeps looking at me like, “How can you do this to me???? This is my house!”)

So, yes, I had to find one he would actually use and one that wouldn’t break. I considered trying to find a 1980s Trapper Keeper… the ones with the white plastic rings that snap in individually… found some on eBay but then thought the designs were a little emo for him. Who knows? Maybe that vintage thing would catch on and all the kids would think it was cool.

At any rate, the thing with the TruLock is, the rings are made of some special durable plastic (we shall see) and they slide closed with this little slider thing at the bottom. It just pulls out really easily and then slides back and clicks locked. Very simple and easy to pull the slider thing.

So, first day using it and low and behold, all of his assignments are actually in the farkin’ binder as opposed to shoved in his bag like so much trash. They were even behind the right divider tabs and none of the holes had ripped out of the papers. That’s the other thing… the divider tabs can’t be the thick paper ones with him. Two weeks of school and he’d already ripped the holes on three sets of dividers… So I got him these plastic ones, which are really cool because they are kind of see-through, and I didn’t even think about that, but he was like, “this is cool because I can see if there’s paper behind the tab and so I know if I haven’t turned in some homework.” YAY. Function. Function. Function. I’m all about things that work, people. Also, the actual tabs on these are kind of rounded, so it looks groovy and they are easy to grab and flip. Color coded, of course, which is also good, because I can associate colors with subjects (He’s like, green, I definitely think of green when I think of science…)

So I got him Starfox Command for the DS as an incentive. I want three things from him…

• Try to complete more work at school (the only homework that they give in fifth grade is whatever classwork you didn’t finish at school).
• All your work should be in the binder so we can find it.
• Write all your assignments in your planner, even if it’s your own crazy shorthand, as long as you know what it says.

Seems pretty simple, but this is Jacob we’re talking about. Jacob whose organization system for everything is like…

1. make a pile
2. put the most important things on the bottom of the pile so that the pile will have to be disrupted and scattered every time important things are needed
3. if it’s extremely important then just leave it somewhere obscure around the house where a search would take no less than an hour or it will just never be found
4. if it requires a signature or is time sensitive material then just wad it up in a pocket so it will go through the washer
5. all chapstick must go through the washer

But, Starfox is a pretty serious motivator… So yesterday his stuff was organized and he only had two sheets and a paragraph to write… And everything was written down, with the teacher’s help (this is another story… we had a bit of a conference at school… it’s long, but I will try and condense it.) So I was thrilled.

I told him that if he keeps this up, then at the end of this grading period he can have the game. (I think that’s two weeks away, so not too bad.)

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OK, so then we had a conference with all his teachers, the principal, the diagnostician for the school district and me and Ness and D.

And we were trying to see what kind of help we could get for Jacob… for all this diagnosisisises. ODD. ADHD. PDD-NOS. Aphakia. Nystagmus. Micropthalmia. So on. So forth. Alphabet soup.

They had our mountain of paperwork. I was fully ready to flip out and call lawyers. Like I have money for lawyers, but whatever. (I could call Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer, right? He fights for me. Call him. Right now.)

And so it starts… the teachers, one by one, start talking about Jacob and they say stuff like…

He’s so smart.

He’s very interested in science.

He’s very good at math.

He doesn’t like writing, does he?

He loves history and is very good with all the mapwork.

His grades are good, As and Bs.

He makes careless mistakes because he’s in a hurry, but it’s clear he knows the right answers and knows the material.

He demonstrates that he understands the concepts even if he doesn’t put them in writing.

He’s easily distracted so he doesn’t do much work in class.

Every little thing distracts him.

So on and so forth. I know all these things. Sort of. They like Jacob. They don’t have any problems with him or his behavior so far. They’ve noted that he gets frustrated easily and that he has a very short fuse. All true.

So, then we start talking about (I’m going to try to keep this short, because I’ve gone over it a hundred times in my mind…) what to do to help him.

My main thing is… I don’t want him to hate school. I don’t want him to hate learning. I don’t want him to turn off because of the frustration of doing all the work that he stops learning. Because quite frankly, and I don’t really give a crap about what people say or what the conventional wisdom is about school… I feel like the important part isn’t about the work, the papers, the homework, the assignments. It’s about the information.

See, I’m not going to raise a child that works in corporate America and sits all day in an office putting covers on TPS reports. Some people are suited to that and they like it, find it enjoyable, whatever. I spent time living that life myself and it wasn’t unbearable. But I know that’s not him… he’s going to do something different in life. And I don’t know what that something is, but I know it’s going to involve creative things that erupt from his mind in a frenzy and lead to much hustle and bustle. That’s how he is… And you know, I’m not saying that if he goes and works in some corporate cubicle farm that I’m going to be unhappy, I just know that isn’t his path, so I’m trying to find his path and let him walk it instead of sending him down everyone else’s well-worn path.

The problem in the past has been that no one else in the education system, public or private, can see his path. All they can see is the big, wide, well-worn one that most of the other kids are on. Or the one that they want all the kids to be on. I know this gets better with age… meaning, in high school there are more paths to choose from or create… but my kid needs his own path NOW. Otherwise he will be going down a very dark and disturbing path later on.

He can’t hate school. He loves information too much. He loves learning too much.

So… they start asking us all these questions. He has a really hard time copying dictionary definitions, they say. I say, well, yes… he is left handed and has no vision in his left eye. He has nystagmus which causes his eyes to shake and so he loses his place often and it’s frustrating. The text is very small. The contrast of the lines on his page is very light and hard to distinguish for him…

And then they do something that other teachers and administrators have never before done in all the time we’ve had these conferences and such:

They ask what can *they* do to help with that sort of thing.

WHAT?

HUH?

I’m sorry… you want to.. HELP my child? Are you feeling feverish? Is this a joke? Where is Ed McMahon, because I’m sure the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Van rolling up and giving me a million dollars is a more likely scenario than the one I’m in right now.

So I say… well, it’s not that Jacob doesn’t like words. If you’ve talked to him, you probably already know that his vocabulary is insanely large. And he loves all the shades of meaning that words can have… He loves adding new words to his repertoire, since it means that he is more accurate and he can make his meaning more clear to others.

So, I say… if you tell him to look up a word, and you give him a dictionary where the print is big enough… or you let him look it up on the computer… then you can have him read the definition and write what he thinks it means IN HIS OWN WORDS. He will do that. Or you can have him come tell you what it means. Because he won’t forget. Once he reads it, uses it in a sentence, figures out what it means to him… he will never forget it. It will be incorporated into his vocabulary forever more.

And they say… GET THIS… They say… OK. That’s a good idea. Not a problem. We will do that.

And the principal says, as long as he knows the concepts, we can cut out a lot of the writing that he does. And she says, you know, with technology increasing, he’s not going to have to write out a lot of things in his life longhand… he’ll be typing so much. It’s a skill he needs to have, being able to write longhand, but it’s not the most important thing.

And the teachers agree. And I say, yes, I think that typing will be second nature to him soon. He’s been working on it at home and at school, he’s typing about 14wpm and once he crosses that line… where he types fast enough to get his thoughts out, I know that will be a breakthrough for him. I know he will find a lot of the writing exercises easier and he will not only excel at writing, but he will enjoy it. He will make the fonts the size that is comfortable for him, etc.

And they agree… they say that he can turn in a lot of assignments typed, no problem. They say that they will alter his assignments so that he can demonstrate the skill orally or with proofing marks rather than rewriting the whole sentence out. So on and so forth.

And you know, that is what I wanted to hear. Because really, here’s what I don’t care about… I don’t care about my kid staying “busy” at school… or working the whole time he’s there. I don’t care if he daydreams. I don’t care if he stares out the window. I don’t care if he reads. thinks. zones out. relaxes. takes a break. stops for a minute. or ten. As long as he shows that he knows what they are doing. As long as he’s listening when the teachers are talking, instructing, teaching (which he does… being visually impaired, he LISTENS and HEARS a lot… even when you think he doesn’t… it’s in there in that head of his.) As long as he can get a good grade on his tests and quizzes and show that yes, even though he didn’t sit doing a hundred worksheets on this, he knows what it’s all about… then I am OK with him “wasting time” in class…

If he’s quiet and not distracting others, then his own little world is a perfect place for him to be. It’s very interesting in there, and crazy thing is, most of the time he’s taking everything he’s heard the teachers say and he’s rolling it around in his head. He’s excited in there, and he’s taking it and comparing it to all the other knowledge he has on that topic and he’s assimilating it. And he’s making sense of it. And he’s finding his own gaps in coverage. And I know this, because when we get in the car after school and I say, tell me what you heard about today… he tells me. And he asks me… and he says, my teacher said… or we read about x and y and I was thinking about it (when were you thinking about it??? During all the time that you weren’t writing out lots of arbitrary crap??) and I don’t understand how x can be like y when I saw on Discovery that x is like z. And then I say, oh, they haven’t gotten to it yet… z and y and x are all related like this… see the connection now? They’ll get to it later. And then maybe we’ll check out a book or something about it or google it when we get home… so his curiousity will be satisfied.

That is how he works. And if you take his time away with all that pedantic busy work, then he doesn’t have time to make those connections and dream about what he’s learning. And I don’t want that kind of misery for him. His mind is busy enough.

And I’m not saying that all the writing and worksheets are not OK for most kids. I mean, I’m one of those visual learners. I loved worksheets and all that. Writing was never a chore for me as a kid (like it is now, when I have to do it for work. hahaha) and I learned that way. Practice made me perfect in a lot of ways. The more chances I got to circle the words with the long O sound, the better. It was fun. It wasn’t misery. I wasn’t screaming in my head, “OH FOR PETE’S SAKE I KNOW WHAT THE LONG O SOUND IS DAMMIT.”

But that’s what my kid is screaming.

Well, without the Pete’s sake part. I’m not so sure about the dammit part, though.

At any rate, the thing about the meeting was, for the first time, EVAR, it wasn’t me against the world. It wasn’t me saying my kid needs some things changed up and the rest of the people in the room telling me that my kid needs to conform and obey like some damn automatron.

When I told them about my “theory” of handwriting for instance… I have an early childhood background and so if there’s one thing you walk away with after working with NAEYC criteria, working with kids, taking the classes… you walk away knowing that developmentally appropriate practice is the foundation of it all. You don’t make kids do things they aren’t ready for and you give them lots of things that they are ready for. You don’t ask a kid to skip sitting up, crawling and walking and force them to run. There’s a sequence to it all, Piaget. And so I said (fully expecting laughter or dismissal) he was just learning to write manuscript in first grade when he went to private school in second grade. They didn’t teach manuscript writing. In fact, from kindergarten they taught the kids to write in cursive. So by second grade all the kids were using cursive and all their assignments had to be turned in that way, etc. Jacob was completely lost in space. Vision issues and being left-handed compounded the problem. He lost out on a lot of other learning because he had to focus so hard on penmanship.

The principal looked at me with her mouth agape… interrupted me… and she says, I am an early childhood person and I can tell you that’s a problem! They’re not ready for that!

And I’m like, OMG! Yes, I know. They don’t have mastery over their motor skills enough that young and if they haven’t mastered manuscript it’s hard to grasp the concepts of cursive… especially if the manuscript they were learning wasn’t D’Nealian (which is very curvy).

She was like, what school was this????

I was so relieved at just that. At just that… understanding. Everyone else I’ve ever told that theory, including Ness and D just think I’m crazy and that it’s not that big of a deal.

And I cannot tell you how disturbing it was for me to walk down the halls of that school, his old private school, and see all the essays and papers hung up on the walls and bulletin boards. It was like Stepford writing. You couldn’t look up there and tell your child’s paper from any other child’s because the writing was so uniform. You HAD to look at the names at the top. Except my kid of course. I could always tell his papers.

And when I was teaching… I never had to look at the names on papers after the first few weeks of school. I knew my kids by their writing. Because it was all different. Because already, even at the tender ages of 5, 6 and 7, their personalities were starting to emerge through their hands. I could see it.

Anyway, there was lots of other stuff said.

The big thing that was said was… Jacob doesn’t stand out and he doesn’t need special services.

WHAT THE ?

Excuse me?

You might think that “Jacob doesn’t stand out” would be an insult or a bad thing… but it was like music to my ears. After five years of my child standing out so much for his behavior, his distraction, his defiance, his will, his… everything bad and wrong and horrible and you have to do something about this crazy child of yours… after five years of that… to hear that his behavior is “typical of any 10-year-old” and that he is “doing fine” and “adjusting well” and “not a problem” and so on and so forth… it’s a dream come true.

To hear that, given the information we had provided them, they expected that he would be this wild child who would have challenges learning things, would be a major discipline problem, would not be able to keep up, etc. and then to find that they thought he was none of these things… I thought I was going to wet myself.

So, they were like, we don’t want to take him out of the classroom or set him apart in any way, but we want to make changes in the classroom that will help him. We will let him do oral stuff. We will let him type. We will let him put things in his own words. We will help him get all his assignments written down. We will be here after school every day in case he forgets papers or text books. We will lessen the amount of writing he has to do and will let him demonstrate his knowledge of concepts in the ways that work for him. I mean, it went on and on. They were like, whatever it takes, just let us know. We want what is best for him.

And for the first time, I could hear “we want what’s best for him” as something positive. Not a thinly veiled way of saying “we want what’s best for the whole class” or “we want what’s best for the teachers” or “this is what I’m supposed to say to make you shut up and think I really care about YOUR INDIVIDUAL CHILD” or any of those things. It was like, these teachers are there because they care about children. As people. As humans. Not as a collective group that is one thing. But each one, on their own.

Refreshing.

And so, I said, where does he fit, on the scale of all children in the fifth grade, in terms of organization and behavior and such… and they said, he’s perfectly fine. He’s not out of the ordinary in those terms. We have lots of kids who don’t have the hang of handling papers and books and pencils and changing classes. We have plenty of kids who get into some trouble now and then. It’s all perfectly fine. They’re learning. That’s what fifth grade is all about.

I wanted to cry.

Actually I did cry quite a lot during the meeting. Because I’m a sappy mom like that, and this IS MY BABY PEOPLE!!!!

And so I said, do I just need to relax then? Do I just need to keep helping him and keep working with him and chill out and take some of the pressure off and just calm down? And they were like… totally. Relax. It’s all fine. He’s fine. We’re fine. We’re fine with him. We like him. We think he’s great and already he’s adjusted to so much of what we do. He’s doing great.

So, I need to just relax.

And I’m going to.

Congratulations Jacob. We have found your place and you are free to be in it. Let’s all relax and just learn stuff now, shall we? Let’s just love school and stop making such a big deal of everything.

Let me just stop writing now since I need to charge my battery… but I do still want to talk about the break from medicine… and the other component to school… peers. Next entry… peers and drugs.

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