Homeschoolers like to comfort each other with the wisdom that kids do learn, no matter what we do. When a parent at a homeschool support group says that they’re concerned that they’re not doing a good enough job, more often than not at least one other parent in a group — probably all of the group — will say something supportive and reassuring. You very often hear the phrase “trust the process.”
Although I am naturally suspicious of the process, I must admit, I’ve seen what they’re talking about in action many times. Lately, it’s been in watching my daughter’s growth in two areas: one we’re working on and one we weren’t.
Her handwriting has been a problem since the day she picked up a chapter book and started reading. It’s really, really hard for parents of precocious children to remind themselves that children’s brain may be able to teach itself to read at four, but they have the hands and the eyes and the feet of their years on this planet.
More often than not, early readers “lag behind” in handwriting. Why? Well, first of all, there is no way a three- or four-year-old can develop the fine motor skills of a twelve-year-old, no matter if they read like the twelve-year-old or not. So if you compare their reading skill to their handwriting skill, you’re going to be sorely disappointed in their handwriting.
Second, kids who learn to read early and fast are likely to find handwriting slow and tiring. They’re going to resist practicing it because, frankly, learning to read was so easy they don’t know how to work on something yet. So handwriting turns into insta-battle in the homeschool (and school) environment.
No surprise that my daughter, after initially loving learning letters and making huge pictures with all sorts of crazy-spelled words on them, started to scream at me if I put a piece of lined paper in front of her. First, my expectations (even though she was my second child and I should have known better) were clearly too high, and second, her expectations of how easy it would be to become proficient at handwriting were way too high. On top of that, she’s someone who works fast. And handwriting is just not fast for six-year-old hands.
So last year I made a conscious decision to ignore her atrocious handwriting and focus on other things. This year we ignored it till about a month ago, when I brought it up with her occupational therapist, thinking that perhaps a cheerful, young blonde person could do what a nagging ol’ redhead mommy couldn’t. Her OT did a test and said that yes, she was behind her age in her ability to produce the alphabet, and that she had spacing problems that pointed toward needing some more focused work in that area.
Inside, I dreaded it, but that week I cheerfully announced that she would be doing one handwriting sheet of her choosing a week. I left some of the choice up to her. She absolutely loves making up silly sentences on this handwriting sheet application, so we do that, and she likes the idea of manuscript-style writing (D’Nealian) because it’s prettier, so we’re doing that.
What was like pulling teeth last year is going smoothly. Well, I do admit that I pulled out the chocolate chip reward once in the last month, but that’s beside the point. I waited until she was ready — I trusted the process — and now she’s improving in leaps and bounds.
Another area that causes clashes is math. She actually likes math, though she won’t admit it, and she has an easy understanding of numbers that she showed early on. But I haven’t quite hit a stride with how to teach her math, and we have to pull out the chocolate chip system more often. This year she agreed to go to a math class that one of the teachers in her homeschool program was doing, and she had fun with it.
But then we had a schedule conflict and had to drop the class, and I thought I should, well, teach her something, right? Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? On the plane back from the east coast, I got out my computer and went into the graphing program, which she likes because you can plug in lots of crazy formulas and see what weird patterns and shapes each makes. As we were doing that, I thought, well, I could teacher her the basics of graphing. So we went back into the two-dimensional graphing program and I asked her what the graph would do if I put in x=y. She traced a 45 degree line up from the center point. “That,” she said. Well, what would it do if we put in 2x=y? She thought for a minute, then started tracing a steep line, because y would rise 2x faster than x.
OK, so I failed again. I cannot teach this child anything! I never know what to teach her. She learns when she’s ready to learn, and there’s apparently not much I can do about it but stay out of her way and toss out tantalizing ideas — graphing software and handwriting worksheets that say “Poopie peepee puppy” — so that she thinks that it’s something she discovered, not something I’m teaching her.
I failed, but the Process? It succeeded again.
The usual postscript: Kids all learn at different rates. This is natural and, I would emphasize, good. So your kids may not be doing what she’s doing at seven. But I think that every parent and especially every teacher can take something away from this: As long as we don’t make them hate it, every kid can and will learn. We can trust the process for a girl whose development has been completely out of sync with what is expected, and we can also trust the process for a normally developing child who just isn’t ready to read until he’s seven. In either case, it’s the rich environment and the love of learning that are important. Standards and achievement tests and all that are just guides — they’re meant to be part of a process, not the product!
