Three Plus Two

St. Ignatius' Prayer for Generosity

St. Ignatius' Prayer for Generosity

 

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve;
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

 

I used to have this prayer on my refrigerator.  I don't know where it came from, but it appeared at a time when Gareth's Tourette Syndrome related problems were at their height.  He's come a long way since those days, but I find myself wishing that this prayer was still on my refrigerator door.  I went looking for it today, and thought I would send it out to other mothers of kids with behavioral disabilities.  I said a prayer for you today, too.

Children and adults with Tourette Syndrome speak out

If you know someone who has been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, you may wonder what it's like.  If that someone is close to you, the disorder may baffle or exhaust you.  Reflections: An anthology of poetry and writings about life with Tourette's Syndrome is a free e-book composed of writings by children and adults who have been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome.  It's worth reading.  I think I'll share it with Gareth, too.

(Please note, however, that even though it's free, you still need the author's permission to reproduce it!)

Navigating the Special Needs Maze

This morning I looked at my kitchen table, which was covered with paperwork from various medical and educational specialists, and I thought, I am going to take a picture of this and post it on my blog, because this is just ridiculous.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to snap a shot before we had to run out the door on the way to see one of those specialists -- a developmental optometrist.

Now, Gareth has worn glasses since he was five years old because of a mild astigmatism.  The pediatric optamologist we saw in September didn't even think he needed glasses at all.  (This was after a little speech in which she made sure that I knew that some people are good at math, and some people are good at reading, and probably what he needed was a reading tutor... and was I really going to homeschool all five of them?  "I can't even imagine," she said.)  But when this developmental optometrist said, "It looks as if he doesn't use his peripheral vision at all.  Kids like this usually bump into things a lot, they're tense, they're not risk-takers, they appear to be clumsy, they have problems with motor-planning..."

Well, I could have kissed the ground he walked on. 

"Yes!" I said.  "Yes, exactly!  That's him!"

The doctor smiled.  "Well, we can probably fix this, but it's going to take a lot of work."

A lot of work?  Who cares!  You mean, he'll be able to relax because he'll know that someone is walking up beside him?  You mean maybe he'll learn to ride a bike?  You mean he'll be able to copy his own problems from a math book, and writing won't wear him out because he has to refocus every couple minutes, and he won't get frustrated and overwhelmed and have a meltdown because he has to sort through too much information on the page?

I tell you, I would have kissed his shoes if that hadn't, you know, been frowned on.

Gareth's visual problems aren't everything, of course, but the optometrist did say that often with this kind of therapy ADHD symptoms and even the frequency and severity of tics improve, because it peels back a level of stress. Gareth still has fine motor problems -- those are neurological, too, and are often experienced by kids diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome.  He may have auditory processing problems, which is the next test we're supposed to subject him to.

Sometimes -- often -- I am reluctant to put him through another test, to bring him to see another specialist.  I worry that he's going to be reduced to a string of letters instead of being viewed as an individual worthy of dignity and respect.  I worry that we're going to cause him a lot of stress for nothing.

But today at least we got a little closer to the end of the maze.

***For information on learning difficulties and vision problems, visit the Optometrist's Network.

   

Down a Helen Keller Rabbit Trail

Sometimes a google hit on your site turns out to be really helpful.  For instance, my site turns up on a google search for "James Garfield's Follow My Leader+ lesson plans," even though the book only shows up in my sidebar.  A much more helpful hit on the search results, however, is this bibliography of children's books dealing with blindness and other visual impairments. 

Although we've already started our study of farming (this one was sort of a natural for us), Katydid and Gareth have requested that we keep on reading books about blindness.  We were led in this direction after I read Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson one rainy Saturday lunchtime.  (Technically this book is supposed to be a Sonlight Core 4 Reader, but we tend not to follow the instructor's guide.)  That book only whetted the kids' (and my) appetite for more information.  So we went on to read biographies of Annie Sullivan and Louis Braille, to watch the Signing Time DVDs and learn a little sign language, and now we are reading Follow My Leader, which is the fictional story of an eleven year old boy blinded in a fireworks accident and the ways in which he learns to be independent again -- with the help of his friends, family, and a dog named Leader.  (Technically, this book is supposed to be a Sonlight Core K Read Aloud, but it's been sitting on our shelf until our interests came round to it.) 

What I like about this particular unit/rabbit trail is that it models persistence.  Annie Sullivan was a wild, poor, blind orphan no one wanted.  She threw spectacular temper tantrums and seemed doomed to the poorhouse.  But her past made her the perfect teacher for another wild, obstinate, and gifted blind and deaf girl -- Helen Keller.  Louis Braille spent years perfecting the system of raised dots that would later bear his name, persisting in spite of tuberculosis and the continual rejection of the world.  All the books that he painstakingly Brailled by hand were at one point burned.  (I must confess that when I came to this point in the book I stopped because I couldn't go on.)

In addition to teaching persistence, a character trait from which we can all benefit, the books about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan have also been helpful to our family in another respect.  Both Helen and Annie had to learn to control their rages in order to accomplish anything.  Rages often accompany TS.  If TS was only a tic disorder, it would be a piece of cake.  But it isn't usually.  TS is a hydra.  Tics are its central characteristic, but it can grow any number of other heads -- rages, ADHD and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (these two occur with TS so often that a debate about whether or not to include them in the definition of the syndrome is currently ongoing), sensory integration issues, other motor problems, learning disabilities, most often involving handwriting, spelling, and math... Gareth may not be blind or deaf, but it was easy to see that he could identify with both Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.  And now when I talk to him about his behavior, or about some of the challenges he faces, I can say, "Do you remember when Helen used to eat breakfast off everyone else's plate?  Do you remember when Annie broke the doll?"  And I think it helps him to think that he is not the only one who has ever had to deal with these issues, and that Helen and Annie both grew up to be great people because of the way they dealt with their challenges -- not in spite of them.

Not to mention that it also helps his mom.   

Last Year at This Time...

I was waffling again about our homeschooling philosophy and trying to create a system which did not depend on me.  (But this is a little like trying to set up your kitchen so that anyone can use it.  It may function, but it will not really work for anyone who uses.  Kids, like kitchens, need the individual differences every adult brings to them.  We shouldn't ignore or devalue our own uniqueness anymore than we should ignore or devalue our children's.)  What this meant, in effect, was that we went with a (mostly) workbook approach, because I thought -- foolishly -- that it would be easier on everyone.

It wasn't.

Last fall was a tough time for us.  I was hugely pregnant with the babies, expecting to be put on some sort of bedrest at any time.  Gareth's TS was waxing, but we didn't have a diagnosis yet and had very little idea of what was going on beyond the fact that there were a few more tics present and that he was suddenly suffering from attacks of rage again.  Our move(s), overall, had introduced us to levels of stress we never thought possible.  An emergency room visit for Katydid (a kidney infection almost misdiagnosed as appendicitis) the day after our furniture was delivered to our rental place; a ride in an ambulance for Farmerboy after he had a febrile seizure while eating a chocolate chip cookie; a couple of late-night trips to the hospital for me with too many contractions; a house contract that fell through... it was not really what you would call an "auspicious beginning."  I am the kind of person who has to work to be cheerful, and by last August, I had begun to lose the battle against depression -- an ongoing battle, to be sure, but one I had been winning (on the balance) since Gareth was born.

So I can only blame the cocktail of depression, exhaustion, and super-charged-twin-fueled pregnancy hormones for some of the decisions I made regarding our homeschooling last fall.  Which is to say, I look back now and say, What were you thinking???

For instance, last fall I was terrified that I would be put on bedrest or --worse -- that I would go into premature labor and be put on hospital bedrest, and then someone else would have to take care of my kids until the babies were born.  I wrote out lists of books (largely never used) for my husband and mother-inlaw to read to the kids.  I acquired workbooks for math, spelling, grammar -- mostly those recommended in The Well-Trained Mind.  I wrote out what pages of the workbooks were to be covered each day.  I made up a log template for each kid that relied heavily on the use of checkmarks (I'd always kept journals before, or used Homeschool Tracker). 

Now, all of this doesn't sound too awful when I write it down like this.  After all, lots of people make checklists, use workbooks for spelling, math, and grammar, and keep lists of read-alouds.  But this approach didn't work for us.  And this is why.

The babies were due November 3. In mid-September, I was put on modified bed rest, which basically meant I was confined to a recliner all day.  My husband took a week off, then his mother flew up from Memphis to help out, so he could go back to work.  (With a special needs 8 year old and an active 2 year old, the house would not run unless I could get up out of that chair and lumber around.)  Instead of gathering my children to me for the reading of many, many books in the family room, I focused on the workbooks.  And I let my mother-inlaw and my husband deal with that.

Gareth (age 8 at the time), who had not been too crazy about the workbook idea in the first place, staged a flat out rebellion.  When Gareth did his Rod and Staff grammar with me, we often breezed through most of it orally, skipped sections he obviously already knew, and required minimal writing.  Grandma -- bless her heart -- was trying to do a good job, though, and she followed every instruction in that grammar book to the letter.  Writing three sentences would take an hour as he fumed, complained, whined, and finally wrote something.  Katydid (then age 6), who liked math and was pretty good at it, regressed into simple addition and subtraction flashcards, and became convinced she couldn't work harder problems.  Spelling Workout worked for nobody, although Katydid enjoyed it for a while.  The kids bickered.  They slept till 10 AM.  I slept till 10 AM.  Grandma was completely worn out.  I can't even remember the books we read.  Did we read any?  We must have read a few.  I can't imagine life in our house without read-alouds.  The TV was on all evening, as Grandma liked to watch TV, but at least we did keep our habit of watching NOVA on Tuesday nights.

For my part, I sat on the couch and did cross-stitch -- one bright spot, as Katydid became very interested in what I was doing, and I was able to teach her a little about the only sewing skill I have.  Or I lay in bed counting contractions and reading homeschooling books -- trying to decide how to solve our problems.  (Problems which, unfortunately, tended to recur with less severity every time I paniced about what the kids didn't know how to do.) 

What I now realize is that I caused a lot of our "problems" by trying to impress upon my kids a learning system which was not ours.  This fall I can say with confidence that we are classical Charlotte Mason Montessori unschoolers, laugh about how ridiculous that sounds, but know that what it means is that I will never transfer my responsibility to educate my children to workbooks again, nor will I try to force others to do so.  Real books are the core of our learning, and they will always remain so.  Interest-driven, hands-on, relaxed learning, in which the kids have as much input into the how and what as possible, is what works best for us, even if it does result in unconventional timelines for the acquisition of skills. 

I'm a lot more confident in our learning this fall.  And we're all a lot happier.      

Inspired to Write

Without a computer during the day, I find myself writing many blog entries in my head all day long.  But when I can actually sit down at the computer, all the words seem to have found good hidey holes and refuse to come out.  This also may be my problem with fiction at the moment.  (But only if it's a very loooong moment...) 

Writing has been on my mind this week in particular because I was privileged to witness its birth in two of my children, ages 9 and 7.  It was a sweet moment, mainly because my eldest has had such a rocky road getting to this point. 

Gareth didn't come wired for handwriting.  Many kids with TS don't.  Problems with motor planning are common, and Gareth, unfortunately, is no exception.  He still holds his crayons in one of the oddest grips I have ever seen, though after three or four years of work, he now holds a pencil correctly most of the time.  The muscle tone in his hands and arms is low. Until recently he tired quickly, and when Gareth gets tired, his very low threshold for frustration is breached.  It doesn't take much, and once anything gets over that low wall, nothing productive can be accomplished until equilibrium is established again.  In the past re-establishing the equilibrium demolished by the act of merely copying a sentence or two exhausted all of us to the point at which we often just gave up.  (This applied to math and reading, too, all the subjects he initially found difficult or boring).  I would retreat into my homeschooling books, devouring one after the other in a search for some approach that would help my child not feel as if basic skills were a battle that he was losing.  The unschooling books told me that he would start writing eventually if we just provided the right environment.  The books on encouraging your child to write told me the same thing.  But I was a writer, and my kids often saw me writing, on the computer and by hand, and talked to me about my writing, and yet my son had absolutely no desire to write anything down for himself, or to dictate anything for me to write down for him, or, well -- anything to do with words, if it didn't involve me reading to him.

This was very discouraging to me.  I figured that I was the only writer in the universe who had no clue how to go about teaching writing.  I knew how I had started writing my stories: one day I was sitting in my grandparents' living room and I had nothing to do.  So I picked up one of my grandfather's cheap thrillers (I was twelve years old at the time) and started reading it.  The book was called The Takers, and thankfully, it is out of print because it was terrible, and I immediately thought, you know, this book wasn't born; somebody actually wrote it. 

(I'd like to say I was inspired to write by all the great books I had read, and in a way maybe that was true because at least I recognized schlock when I read it, but, although I was a voracious reader as a child, my reading was pretty spotty.  My parents gave me the run of our (small) rural library, and I was allowed to buy a book whenever we visited a bookstore, which, in those days, wasn't terribly often.  But nobody was there to really guide me through literature, to hand me a book and say, I think you will really like this one, or have you read this?, or simply to leave me books on the kitchen table, the way I do with my kids.  As a result, I missed some important titles, which I am only now rediscovering as my husband and I read them aloud.  The Little House books and Anne of Green Gables are two examples.  As a bona fide tomboy, I never read these books because they were too "girly".  I stuck with my beloved Trixie Belden mysteries and Black Stallion books instead.)

In any case, I sat down the next day with a notebook and a pencil, and I started writing a book.  It began, "The morning stillness was shattered by the hooves of a hundred horses racing across the desert..."  because I really did love those Black Stallion books.  I studied grammar in school, of course, and occasionally I wrote a report in science or social studies, but I can't remember any of my teachers ever attempting to teach us to write.  So when I approached writing as a homeschooler, all I knew was that the writing had fallen out of me one day, and that before I had started writing, I had drawn a great deal, and made up lots of stories with my best friend as we rode our bikes. 

This information was and was not helpful when I approached writing with my son.  I never had to overcome the physical difficulties he has had to deal with, for instance, and words have always been my strong point.  I have always been a pretty good speller, and grammar comes fairly naturally as well, although I do suffer from an over-fondness for commas and a penchant for very long sentences.  (As you, dear reader, have no doubt noticed already.)

Gareth, however, also didn't come wired for spelling.  We have now worked through a number of spelling approaches (including Spelling Workout, Spelling Power, straight memorization, and leaving him alone and hoping for the best, and none of them seemed to help very much.  (We are now about to try AVKO, so cross your fingers.) When you have words in your head that you can't spell and are hard to write, I imagine that it is very frustrating being asked to put them on paper.  Last year I tried to get him started typing, but that effort fizzled as well.

What Gareth is wired for, however, is creativity.  He has spent the last year creating a detailed universe in his brain, drawing many of its denizens in at least a dozen sketchbooks, and telling his sister their stories at night.  (And, oh, the fights I have broken up because he gave her the role of "enemy" whenever he was feeling particularly peeved at her.)  This universe began as part of the Star Wars universe, but now it is all his own.  His sister has been lured into the act as well, and each of them have their own planets with their own histories and characters. 

And on our way home from Vermont last week they began writing those stories down.

I did not expect this development, and it was like unwrapping a gift to find it contained a diamond ring (I mean, if I wore jewelry, which I don't, but it was like that.)  It's not that I want my kids to be just like me, although I do think it's kind of funny and nice that they have chosen to start with science fiction.  It's more that I could see all these ideas bottled up inside them with nowhere to go.  And now they have somewhere to go, and the kids are bubbling over with excitement.  They've each written over ten pages in less than a week -- my son who a year ago would scream about writing one sentence, who would throw his pencil down in disgust, who hated the act of writing, who -- until even more recently -- still reversed many of his letters and seemed unable to make his hand move in the loops and swirls required by cursive -- my son has now written ten pages of a story that is obviously not a short story, but a novel.

Who cares if none of it is spelled right, if the letters stagger one into another.  Spelling is mechanics, and mechanics can be fixed, just like punctuation and grammar.  As a writer, I know that having those basic skills is necessary to effective communication, and yet... all those absolutely necessary skills seem like such small potatoes compared to the thrill of hearing a nine year old boy in the backseat reading aloud to his sister the words he has just written himself: "Spaceships howled across the sky, and the Vulgan fell before the exotic weapons of their enemies..."

Paperwork #2: Interest Inventory

I spoke too soon about having no paperwork to complete.

Yesterday I sent off the quarterly reports, annual assessments, and our letter of intent to homeschool for next year.  Then we ran Daddy up to the airport for an overnight trip, drove back home through a deluge, and I remembered that we needed to fill out a packet of forms before Gareth's appointment with a counselor this summer.

What a huge pile of forms it is.  And Gareth has his own to do.  Fortunately, his are mostly not boring.  In fact, he had fun last night with the interest inventory, and I realized that I had not been keeping up with him at all.

This is not unusual.  In order to pick up changes in interest around here, I sometimes feel like a dog continually sniffing the wind.  Which direction is it blowing from now?  What's that unfamiliar scent?  Sometimes Gareth isn't really quite sure what his interest is either, but it's my job to make sure he has the books and materials to find out.

If I could define my role as a homeschooler, that would be it.  I am the facilitator.

According to his interest inventory, I have not been facilitating his interest in mythology nearly enough.  I'm lagging behind in computer programming and robotics as well.  And I'm really huffing when it comes to movie making.

(That's okay.  The other day Katydid announced her desire to learn how to stuff dead birds.  "You want to what?" I said, a little nervously.  "Stuff dead birds," she replied.  "So I can touch them and see what they feel like.")

Although this pile of paperwork is going to take a while to wade through, I'm excited about bringing Gareth to this counselor.  We found her through the Hoagies Gifted Page, I like her, and I'm hopeful that she will help him work through some of the issues related to his TS, as well as helping me figure out how to handle some of his learning difficulties while also providing him enough challenge for that intellect in hyperdrive.

Summer Schedules, or King Routine

Several people have asked me lately if we will be taking a "break" this summer.  (At coop you can tell that all the moms really want to pick each other's brains about the nitty gritty of their day-to-day lives but are too polite to say, "Sit down and tell me everything.  But first let me get a pen and paper."  The physical therapist just wanted to know if we had school every day from 8-3, and if so, weren't we going to take a break from that?  I hope she wasn't discouraged by the look of horror on my face when I contemplated a seven hour "school" day!)

My answer to "will you be taking a break this summer" usually runs like this:

"Well, my kids don't consider a lot of the stuff we do to be "school".  I read aloud to the kids a lot, and of course we keep that up year round.  And my kids are always involved in lots of projects of their own, which they don't consider "school" either.  As far as more formal academics go, we might not work on them as intensively as we do other times of the year, but my kids really need their routine.  And they don't like having to go back and review things because they've forgotten them over a break."

What I don't have time to explain to people in a thirty second sound byte is that when I say the kids really need their routine, what I mean is, a change in our routine can really make Gareth fall apart.  And when Gareth falls apart, our house can be a very unhappy place.

This isn't to say that the rest of us don't benefit from the routine.  I have seen homes without routine, and I wouldn't want to live in them.  People of all ages and dispositions like to know when meals are, for instance.  We all benefit from having a regular bedtime and a quiet time in the afternoon.  But Gareth is one of those children termed "chronically inflexible".  For him a fairly unchangeable routine is the lifeline that gets him through his days.  A change in plans can be frustrating even for those of us with more laidback temperaments.  But for children for whom even the slightest bit of frustration can be overwhelming, a change in plans can be a catastrophe.

Unfortunately, it is easier to slip out of a routine than to get one going.  In case I didn't already know it, I learned it again this week when I forgot that the kids were supposed to do their chores right after lunch before going outside.  It was one of the first warm, sunny days in weeks, and my stated goal all day was just to get the kids out the door.  But as they ran outside to play, I looked around at all the dirty dishes lying on the table and realized I had made a mistake.  I couldn't do the dishes or wipe out the sinks or get the laundry myself because I had to feed the babies, and I wanted to get them outside, too.  And I knew it was going to be really, really hard to get the kids to do chores at 2:30 when they were used to having a rest in their rooms.

The real trouble, however, didn't show up until the next day, when Gareth wanted to go outside right after lunch.  "No," I said.  "It was too hard yesterday.  Do your chores now.  It will take thirty minutes and you'll be able to spend a longer time outside."

But the routine had been broken, and the next thirty minutes was taken up by stomping and shouting (and unfortunately, not all of it was Gareth's.)  The next day was a repeat, and the next.  By the fourth day, we had an uneasy truce about chore time again, but if I hadn't thoughtlessly broken the routine, none of those battles would have been fought.

So that's why we don't really break for the summer.  On the one hand, if you were to tell my kids that we weren't going to have read aloud time in the morning because it's "school", they would wonder what horrible thing they had done to deserve such a punishment.  And on the other hand, Gareth and I would be faced with a battle come fall when we tried to get back into math and cursive. 

Of course, our routine does change a little with the seasons.  (It's too cold here during the other seasons of the year for us not to take advantage of summer!)  But if we don't retain the underpinnings, the whole structure has a tendency to fall apart.

Name Change

I'm changing boyDragon's blog name.

When I started this blog, it was really hard to decide on a name for him.  He's an immersion learner, and that means that for weeks or months or even years he is totally dedicated to one, all-consuming interest.  When he was just four, it was clocks.  By four and a half, it was flowers.  (When we went to the Botanical Gardens that year, he startled some of the volunteers working a plant sale by rushing in, arms outstretched and shouting, "Solidago!" -- the Latin name for goldenrod.)  Then came houses and buildings, in which he taught himself to read house plans and developed a passion for Victorian houses and HGTV; Impressionist painting, when he threw a fit in the middle of the St. Louis Museum of Art because their Impressionist exhibit was closed (he was 5); tall ships (I would have called him Horatio then); ancient history; and dinosaurs.  Trying to name him according to interest is like trying to call the kaleidoscope by one of its colors. 

When I decided to call him boyDragon, it wasn't really because of the way he sometimes rages like a dragon, or because of his interest in dragons (although that's there, too.)  It was because I sometimes thought that he'd rather be a dragon.  Because of his TS and his other alphabet soup symptoms (ADHD?  ODD?  I am glad our psychiatrist has never really pinned him down), his behavior is so often out of his control that it's easy to see why one of his favorite games is playing dragon, and roaring around the house and yard.  Dragons are large and powerful and in control.  Even the good ones.

But I am not sure that the name really sums up my son, anymore than naming him "Solidago" or "Horatio" or "Caesar" might have.  It's just one aspect of a complicated and fascinating personality, one which I love to watch grow and change. 

So I am not going to call him boyDragon anymore.  Instead, I am going to call him Gareth. Sir Gareth was a knight of the Round Table, a knight of whom I have always been particularly fond.  I can't say exactly why I'm calling him this, because then I might give away his real name.  But if you know the story, maybe you'll be able to tell a few of my reasons.   

National Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month

May 15 - June 15 is National Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month.

Why didn't they pick a real month?  Maybe they wanted to be just as baffling as the disorder.

(Thanks to Christine for the tip!)