From School to Homeschool: Should You Homeschool Your Child?

By Suki Wessling

Sometimes school just doesn’t work and homeschooling is the answer—particularly for gifted children. From School to Homeschool guides parents through the process of considering homeschool options and educational alternatives. The book is filled with practical information and loaded with resources that will get parents off to a good start as they begin their homeschooling journey with their children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gifted Unlimited
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781935067313

Book preview

Dedication

To my children, for giving me the gift of homeschooling

Introduction

The Making of a Reluctant Homeschooler

When my two children were preschoolers, I thought of the first day of kindergarten for the younger one as the beginning of my real life. Yes, of course, I loved staying home with my kids, taking them to music classes, going to the park, and doing fun, messy projects at home. But I spent my few free hours during preschool chomping at the bit to get back to my writing. I was looking forward to having more hours to myself.

My husband and I had no illusions—we knew our children were different. Our eldest, a son, was shy, bookish, and obsessed with computers. In other words, he was pretty much a classic, introverted gifted kid.

Our daughter, younger than her brother by four years, was something completely different. It was clear from a very young age that she was insatiably intellectually curious and strong willed, but in no way was she quiet, shy, or interested in any activity that cut her off from human interaction and tactile experience. Her willful behavior caused problems at preschool.

With the help of a skilled family therapist, we were able to get through her preschool years, during which she displayed an emotional range from intense tantrums to moments of pure brilliance. Unlike her brother, she was a clear extravert, acting outward both in joy and frustration.

She also showed an intense tactile excitability. I’ll never forget the day she saw a new bottle of blue-colored children’s shampoo sitting right next to a box of Chanukah ornaments. She apparently couldn’t resist decorating the ornaments with the good-smelling, shiny, oozy substance. While other preschoolers liked to paint, our daughter reveled in the feel of paint and experimented with paint on every kind of surface. Other preschoolers would pick their mothers a flower; ours would make a bouquet of every posy in the garden. It seemed that whatever our daughter did, she did it to the extreme.

Amidst the frustrations of raising a child who never seemed to stop, we were also impressed by her quick intelligence and remarkable problem-solving abilities. When she was learning to crawl, she would rock back and forth and scream in frustration. Finally one day she realized that she could scoot along on her bottom with no problem. The screaming diminished markedly, and that became her preferred mode of locomotion. Then the very first day she started walking, she got herself out of the library, down the steps, and almost into the parking lot before another mom scooped her up as I ran to catch her.

Unlike her similarly precocious brother, our daughter wasn’t bored with baby toys—she just found new ways to use them. She used a set of plastic links for years after she stopped teething on them, attaching them to toys and using them in her play kitchen as ingredients for her soup. We started to notice that she’d never get a shape sorter or puzzle right; instead of choosing the obvious answer—of course the sphere goes through the circular hole—she’d try every other possibility first, apparently to make sure the laws of physics still hadn’t changed. She was a scientist from the get-go.

Parenting our daughter was a challenge that we had to rise to meet. Teaching her was going to be another thing altogether.

We’d been fortunate to have a truly wonderful preschool teacher, who had previously worked with our son, to guide our daughter through some of her time in preschool. But when that teacher was laid off, we started to see the possible consequences of working with merely fine, but not brilliant or creative, teachers. Fine teachers were up to the task of working with our son, but we needed a virtuoso teacher to get our daughter through even half a day in a classroom. One day the teacher told me in exasperation that my daughter had spent all morning cutting up scratch paper with scissors, an exciting new tool she’d discovered. When I said that self-soothing tactile activities like cutting paper were fine with me, the teacher replied, "That is not my philosophy. I held my tongue, but the response I wanted to give was, I don’t have a philosophy—I have a child."

With the help of a family therapist and her former teacher, we decided that our daughter was simply not going to succeed in public kindergarten. Because her birthday missed the cut-off by a few days, she would have to wait another year to enroll. She was large, aggressive, and smart. The idea that she’d start school with children on the cusp of five years old when she was almost six, already reading, and displaying leadership qualities (i.e., bossy) was clearly not a good idea.

We decided to enroll her in a private kindergarten, a class of 12 children in a fairytale setting: a small cottage in the middle of a redwood forest. If any school would suit our challenging child, we thought this surely would be the one. Also, we’d been advised that the Montessori method, which this school used, was excellent for gifted children.

Our daughter’s difficulties navigating the kindergarten social scene showed up immediately. She had trouble negotiating the higher social expectations of kindergarten, and for the first time, we began to realize that she was having trouble understanding social cues. In one of her turned-around attempts at making friends with a girl she liked, she pushed the girl and nearly knocked her down a steep redwood hillside.

Her extraversion made for difficulties as well. Unlike the typical gifted child, who recedes inward in times of stress, our daughter acted out. Her teacher reported that she threw the beads used as math manipulatives, was not able to stand quietly in line when waiting to go to the playground, and refused to sit down and put the three letters C-A-T together.

I tried to work with the situation. I informed the teacher that our daughter had been reading—and hiding her ability—since sometime after her third birthday. At home at this point, she was entranced by the Rainbow Fairies chapter books. Of course she had no interest in C-A-T! Could she be given some more challenging words? Could she just skip that part of the curriculum?

The teacher informed me that since our daughter had not demonstrated her reading skills in school, she would need to stay at the pre-reading level in the materials that she was being introduced to. Similarly, she was not allowed to progress in math, though at home she’d clearly shown mastery of kindergarten concepts such as simple arithmetic, sorting and sequencing, money, and measurement.

Soon our daughter started to show more serious signs of stress, wetting her pants and drawing pictures of herself with labels like bad and sad. I noticed a huge discrepancy between her abilities at home and at school. At home, she drew confidently and colored within the lines. At school, she scribbled on coloring pages until they wore through. At home, she had an insatiable curiosity about everything. At school, all she wanted to do was get to the playground.

It was at this point that the school asked me to get an aide for our daughter, which I tried to do. After two failed attempts to find the right person who would work at the wage we could afford, I started to attend school with her.

At the time, I also was writing articles for a local parenting magazine. The editor assigned me a story about a new educational toy lending library that a mom had recently opened in our town. I sheepishly informed my interviewee that I was going to have to bring my daughter along, and she cheerfully agreed.

It turned out that this mom was a homeschooler and was used to kids hanging around and interrupting her work. She had an amazing ability to talk about her business and her philosophies while keeping my daughter fully engaged with some math manipulatives on the floor. I watched this, and it hit me that I had two daughters—my daughter at school and my daughter elsewhere—and they were like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. What was going on here?

I remember saying as I left the interview to go back to school: Back to trying to pound my square peg into that round hole! I said it cheerfully, but I think I knew that a seed had been planted and that pretty soon I would see that we were on the wrong path altogether.

Our daughter continued to show unusual intellectual growth, even though her social/emotional growth sometimes seemed to be regressing. At age five, she had an elaborate made-up world she called Africa, which apparently was entirely contained inside a neighbor’s fenced yard. She was fascinated with the number googol, and she told everyone that she was a doctor—not, mind you, that she was going to be a doctor. She could explain the functions of various systems in the body with correct vocabulary and charming grammar.

With the help of our therapist, we decided not to pursue an IEP (Individualized Education Plan—which most public schools use to spell out goals for children with special needs), which would have gotten free services for our daughter but also would have locked her into a system in which her unusual development would be seen as a handicapping condition to be remediated rather than just an unusual developmental pathway for a very bright, unusual child.

During this time, we also sought the advice of a child psychiatrist, hoping she’d shed some light on our daughter’s developmental and neurological differences. The psychiatrist, after looking at questionnaires filled out by me and her teacher, wanted to start discussing several possible diagnoses—ADHD, early onset bipolar disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder—and the drugs that went along with them. She had hardly looked at the brilliant little girl playing at her feet. We decided not to continue down that path.

Sometime in December of our daughter’s kindergarten year, spurred by a memory of something I’d read, I typed these words into Google: difficult gifted child. I found the website of the organization Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted (SENG), and I started to read. I found articles and lists of books. I read the book A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children,[1] and I felt like it was the operating manual I’d needed—but had not found—for the last nine years. Reading about Dabrowski’s theories (see Chapter 1) and realizing that my children’s unusual behaviors were, in fact, not so unusual after all helped me to see that a shift in my point of view would help much more than another school or a classroom aide.

Soon after, we hired a gifted educational consultant who told us that she couldn’t imagine any school environment that would serve our daughter’s needs. She said that our daughter was a highly gifted, visual-spatial learner and that her acting out at school was a direct result of her boredom and frustration, as well as asynchronous (uneven) development—common among gifted children who are often advanced in some areas while being behind or even just average in others. The consultant recommended occupational therapy to work with fine-motor control and self-regulation issues, and she suggested that once we provided a more appropriate educational environment, we’d see a shift toward a happier child, if not a more normal one.

She was right.

I won’t tell you that my daughter has become any less strong-willed, passionate, or prone to exaggerated emotional responses. That’s the person she is. However, she has grown immensely in homeschool, both personally and academically. She largely gets to determine the direction of her learning (see Chapter 8 for details), and she isn’t forced daily into social situations that she can’t handle. We continually evaluate and reevaluate, offering her more and more challenging opportunities, both socially and academically. My goal is that she be equipped to live as the person she is, spell out her own goals, and engineer an adult life that works for her. I don’t feel that there’s any benefit to putting a child like her into distressing environments—she doesn’t need toughening up. What she needs is support, encouragement, and the opportunity to grow and learn.

She gets all of that through homeschooling.

My own history with the G-word (gifted, of course!) is fraught with difficulty. No one had ever used that word for me as a student in my fiercely democratic school system, where tracking was taboo and where I’d spent many a class sitting in the corner reading a book because the teacher no longer knew what to do with me.

So when I started to see the word gifted and hear it from parents, it sounded, frankly, elitist to me. I was never designated gifted, and I survived public school, right? My husband’s parents had also resisted the gifted label and sent him to public school as well.

Like many parents, I was sure that my kids would do just fine in school as long as they were willing to suffer some boredom and the teachers were willing to include some material now and then that would challenge them. For my son, I’d chosen a parent-participation public charter school, which I had hoped would work for my daughter as well.

But once I’d started reading about gifted children and learned that schools are often ill-equipped to meet their academic needs, it was like I suddenly realized something I knew but had been denying. My daughter was not going to fit in at a school that couldn’t make accommodations for her academic ability or her asynchronous development. Our local public schools were strapped for cash and mired in a system of serving the test and teaching to the test instead of serving the child.

Homeschooling was initially very difficult. My son, age nine, was still in school, and my five-year-old daughter and I spent our time at home angry and resentful of each other. I didn’t know other homeschoolers at that time, and no one I knew reacted positively to the G-word. By that spring, I was desperate. I emailed the woman I had interviewed at the educational lending library with a simple plea: Help me!

Reaching out to other homeschoolers was the first step toward finding out what my daughter needed. We joined a public homeschool program, where we met the most accepting and committed group of parents I’d ever come across. Though I couldn’t use the G-word there without fear of getting into one of those all children are gifted discussions, I could expect that the other parents would be accepting and supportive. For the first time, my daughter and I were included in activities. People started to mention her brilliance, her joyous personality, and her creativity instead of her disruptive behavior and their fear that it would somehow rub off on their kids.

The second step I took was getting involved in organizations that advocated for gifted children. At first I found them only online, the refuge of all of us who do not live in urban centers. Later I found out that there was a very active organization of gifted homeschoolers the next county over from ours, and though we don’t often physically attend their events, that community’s support is very valuable to me. I also began to attend both gifted and homeschooling conferences, where I met with my two separate tribes—including a few families that overlap into both groups.

Everything seemed to be coming together nicely, and I was comfortable telling people that although I homeschooled my daughter, my son needed school as his refuge. He’s good at school, I’d say. Little did I know that I was about to open a new chapter in my homeschooling journey.

In fifth grade, my son attended a fine private school. The public charter school had been too much of a strain