It has been a tough couple of weeks for me parenting Word Boy, because of his anxiety. I've handled it really well, but this morning I broke down crying talking to Raider about how I just couldn't face homeschooling. Yesterday was a very challenging day that left both me and Word Boy (and possibly also his therapist) exhausted, and he's doing better today but it's a pretty thin veneer. His perfectionism leads him to have anxiety attacks when he makes a mistake in math or doesn't understand something immediately, and it has been a challenge to me to be disciplined enough to make him do math anyway. A friend who studies behaviorism says that parents are very motivated by negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus--in other words, when a parent will do anything to avoid dealing with a tantrum, that's negative reinforcement. It's not easy for me to sit down to math with Word Boy when the likelihood is high that I'll have to spend half an hour dealing with an anxiety attack in order to get through what should be 10 minutes worth of math. He's behind grade level in math primarily because I have been negatively reinforced not to do math with him.
I've been doing a good job dealing with his anxiety-fueled behaviors during the last couple of weeks, which have feature not only yesterday's epic two-hour meltdown at the therapist's office but a four-day anxiety attack the other weekend. But I'm worn out. And the idea of trying to do homeschooling with him today when his equilibrium is so fragile just felt like too much.
And, honestly, I don't know why I bother "homeschooling" this kid. He and I decided to go the library, and on the way there, he asked about an errand I ran earlier, to renew the tags on our cars. I ended up explaining vehicle registration as well as automobile and homeowners insurance. He asked about the flood we had in our basement some years ago, which led to a conversation about sump pumps and the water table. From there, he gave me an impressive run-down of the causes and stages of a tsunami, which, like so many things, I have no idea where he picked up.
By this time, we were at the library, where, in a characteristic absent-minded professor slapstick, we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to open the unlocked door.
Once we were in, we browsed his favorite section, Juvenile Non-Fiction. He found a book on the Arctic and Antarctic; I found him a book on predictions people in the past have made about the future, which interestingly enough is something he had asked me about recently, so he was pretty thrilled. He found a Calvin & Hobbes collection he hadn't read. I found a book on Ideas that Changed the World that I decided to bring home just in case anybody wanted to look through it, and a book on teeth I bet Word Boy will like eventually. I found a book called Real-Size Animal Babies to show the Tiny Tornado, and then I slipped around to fiction and grabbed some Beverly Cleary for bedtime reading, because TT is all about the chapter books these days.
At this point, Word Boy, who is excessively conscientious, began to be concerned that we were checking out too many books. "Do you know how many things I'm allowed to check out on my card?" I asked him. "Fifty. And you could get your own card, and also check out fifty things. And the Lego Savant could get his own card, and then we could check out..."
"A hundred and fifty things," Word Boy said. "That would be a lot to carry."
He seemed reassured, but said again as we walked toward the circulation desk, "I don't know, it just seems like an awful lot of books." I spotted the librarian, who was just finishing up a conversation, so I hauled him over to her. "Librarian," I said, "This is Word Boy. Word Boy, this is the Librarian."
"Hello, Word Boy," said the Librarian. "It's nice to meet you."
I said, "Word Boy is concerned that we are checking out too many books."
The Librarian looked at him and said, "I don't think there's any such thing."
We ran our stack through the self check-out and hauled it to the car (Word Boy: "I have an idea for a new workout...it involves putting a strap around all of your books and then carrying them around.").In the car on the way home, he started reading about Antarctica, reading aloud little tidbits that interested him. "Did you know that the largest animal that lives on land year-round in Antarctica is a tiny insect? Did you know that there is evidence that Antarctica had a subtropical climate 70 million years ago, suggesting that the land that is now Antarctica used to be located near the equator?"
I kept saying, "I didn't know that. Wow, really? That is interesting." Finally, I said, "Ha, I guess it's your day to homeschool me."
Word Boy said, "Mom, I'm just reading stuff out of a book to you!"
I said, "How do you think I do it most days?"
He's reading in the big recliner now, having dealt with the perennial post-library problem of which book to read first.
I actually bought him a curriculum this year, because with me being in school it was very hard for me to keep up with homeschool planning last year, and things really fell apart somewhere around March. I was willing to pay someone to do my planning for me. It's been a mixed thing. I bought him a fifth-grade curriculum, and much of it is focused around grammar, spelling, and vocabulary lessons he doesn't need, so we don't waste our time on that. He finds the assigned books very interesting, but they're short and he goes through them quickly. This week, to try to address that, I assigned him a book that was supposed to be two weeks' worth of reading. He finished it Monday morning. Over breakfast. And then went on to read the next book, which was supposed to be for the next two weeks. And then read half of a biography of Alexander that is part of his big brother's curriculum and that happened to be in the stack on the table. I wanted to be able to hand the reins over to a curriculum. But this curriculum is not running the show the way I hoped it would. Word Boy's insatiable curiosity and drive for knowledge is. He's a fast horse galloping ahead at full speed; I'm doing my best to keep up; and our curriculum thinks maybe he's ready to learn a genteel trot.
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