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Thanks guys! Learning disabilities are always tough, and it really isn’t so much a learning issue as a behavior issue making learning tough.
But we’ll get through, if I have to I will home school, but I really think regular school is a challenge he has to rise to, because as an adult he will need to be able to function with others in group settings, and isolating him from that won’t make it easier for him later.
Kyrin
When I was in school I had the exact same problem, I was really sharp but constantly bored, and even acted out in very bad ways. Now that I’m a parent I’m trying to avoid the same problems with my own children. Karate and books as previously mentioned, are very good ideas.
Also however, you might want to consider encouraging direct creative activities. Reading a book is somewhat interesting, WRITING a book even more so. Listening to music can be interesting, COMPOSING music even more so. The nice thing about deeply creative activities is that they stimulate the part of the brain that gets neglected in school, as well as the intellectual side. And they are never too young to start, I started my first novel when I was in second grade, it was about a cat living in ancient Egypt named Sabrina.
There are a ton of different creative activities to choose from as well, to custom suit the individual. In just the area of writing, there is free-form poetry, structured rhyming poetry, essay, short-story, novel and technical writing. If you like music, you can write lyrics, or actual musical scores, or both, in any genre. If you prefer hands on creativity, there is everything from sewing to aromatherapy, to massage, to woodworking, to wood-carving or burning, to scrapbooking, to sketching, to painting (in everything from acrilic to watercolor). And that’s only the stuff that came to the top of my mind while I was typing!
Trust me, this is the only way I stay sane…. art is incredibly thereputic as well as distracting.
Whenever I finished my work early in school I pulled out a book that I had brought to read. The only time I had the teacher take the book away from me was when I was in high school in calculus. The teacher always confused me so rather than listening to him I would read my book then try to figure the problems out at home. He made me come back at the end of the day and gave me a lecture about how I should be paying attention in class since my grades in it weren’t the best. I was the only non AP student in the AP class. I wasn’t going to pay $75/80 to take a test that I knew I wasn’t going to do well enough on to get college credit. The only reason I even took the class was because my mom wanted me to. At the end of the school year she said she was sorry she made me take the class because it brought my GPA down. The year after I graduated they added a second teacher in for Calculus and the grades for students in his class were better than the ones for the teacher I had. I would have liked to have the other teacher better. I had him for Pre-Cal and he made everything so clear.
pegasi1978 wrote:Whenever I finished my work early in school I pulled out a book that I had brought to read. The only time I had the teacher take the book away from me was when I was in high school in calculus. The teacher always confused me so rather than listening to him I would read my book then try to figure the problems out at home. He made me come back at the end of the day and gave me a lecture about how I should be paying attention in class since my grades in it weren’t the best. I was the only non AP student in the AP class. I wasn’t going to pay $75/80 to take a test that I knew I wasn’t going to do well enough on to get college credit. The only reason I even took the class was because my mom wanted me to. At the end of the school year she said she was sorry she made me take the class because it brought my GPA down. The year after I graduated they added a second teacher in for Calculus and the grades for students in his class were better than the ones for the teacher I had. I would have liked to have the other teacher better. I had him for Pre-Cal and he made everything so clear.
My opinion in regards to teachers is this, if a number of their students are failing or doing poorly, then the teacher is failing. I had one english instructor in college who took pride in the fact that he failed more than half of his students. I told him point blank, that he should be ashamed of it, not proud, for it meant that he was a rotten teacher, he didn’t like me much.
Only reason he was still there was cause he was tenured and really didn’t give a flying. He would write all over your paper how crappy it was, but not tell you any specifics about what was wrong or how to fix it, if asked he’d tell you to look it up in the book. Because of him I didn’t take any kind of writing class for nearly 3 years after that. When I finally did, I lucked out and discovered that I CAN write, what do you know!
I got A’s and B’s on everything I’ve written ever since. And for 3 years I thought I sucked, but it wasn’t me, it was him, which I knew, but I had still managed to get sucked into the belief that I was a failure as a writer.
Poor teachers can really do some serious damage to one’s self esteem and abilities.
Kyrin
Oh I totally agree that a teacher is failing to do their job if their students aren’t passing the class. My calculus teacher wasn’t the only bad one I encountered in high school. My high school chemistry teacher was even worse. She was still using worksheets that she had used 10 years before when teaching with a different text book (found that out from class mates who had much older siblings that had the same teacher). If you asked a question she would reply “Ask the walls, they listen to me more than my students do.” 😯 Could she do anything more to undermine a student’s confidence in science? When I got to college I ended up taking a slower approach to chemistry (the normal class split over two grading periods rather all in one) because I wasn’t sure if I could handle it after her.
Calculus! *shivers* The teacher absolutely makes a difference. So many of us need calc to get our BS degree (haha) and so many of us were just plain lost. Our prof used to let us write papers on famous mathematicians and math history for extra credit. God bless Father Costa…we would have put him up for Sainthood if we could have. 😆
Okay, now you guys are giving me nightmares!!! Calculus!!! 😯 (shivers) That was one math I was happy to put behind me. 😉
I was lucky in Calculus: I had good teachers. Statistics, on the other hand . . . drove me nuts! Hated the subject. If I hadn’t been notetaker for the class (and needing that paycheck!) I would probably have flunked it. But I had to produce notes that other people could learn the material from. I spent hours agonizing over each lecture, re-reading the textbook, struggling with the topics. I passed the class, but the stuff sure didn’t stick with me. 😕
My statistics prof was a cool old guy. He allowed crib notes on an index card (if I remember correctly)….anything you could fit on it, you could use on the tests. We learned to write very small! 😆
My physics professor let us do that too!! And you right, it’s amazing how small you can write when you need too!!! 😆
Here he is, this isn’t the best photo, but at least he’s partially in the sun, and you can see some of the sparklies in the paint on his shoulder. I will take some full sunlight pics once the weather gets warmer, and a photo shoot doesn’t mean getting frostbite to do it.
This is the gorgous sketch Melody did for me to accompany him, I love it! It was a good thing they forgot to send his COA with him, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to ask Melody for a sketch, so I’m glad they forgot it initially.
I’ll be posting the sketch in the COA thread too.
Kyrin
Oh, that sketch is beautiful!
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