I Was Forced into Homeschooling!

It started with a phone call from the principal.

"Mrs. Gautreau, we need you to get your daughter to speak to us... in English."

She didn't know any other languages.

"She won't respond to us with anything but barks and growls," the principal explained.

She was pretending to be a wolf. She was building a den out of rugs and chairs, and reading her books in the little cave. The teacher told her to come out, she barked back. The counselor tried, she only growled. They all brought her to principal. Still barks and growls.

She was in the third grade.

The third grade.

Way too old for this behavior.

She loved wolves and was extremely imaginative, but this was not her normal behavior. This was her stressed-out-beyond-belief behavior.

Now I said it started with the phone call, but it really started way earlier. I remembered a teacher assessment from kindergarten. She had gotten the first half 100% correct. Then her answers turned into "I don't know"s. I was pretty sure she knew the answers. So I sneakily asked:

"Hey girl, mommy's trying to draw a triangle. But I forget, how many sides are there?"

And she goes, "URGH! Three, okay? The teacher kept asking me questions and I just wanted it to be over!"

She was always like that. She played by her own rules. She would get tired and stop performing. She was scary-smart, and she got bored easily because of it.

I would later learn that she was twice exceptional, meaning that she is proficient and ahead of her age group in some categories - like math and reading - and delayed in other areas - a strange soup of Sensory Processing Disorder, ADD, anxiety, and possibly autism. Which all explained how she could be failing reading comprehension, but acting out the entire plot to the classic novel, White Fang, in our living room.

All that meant that school was torture. And she was acting out because of it.

And not just her, my other daughter, my Sloth, was internalizing her own stress - like a classic middle child.

 

Sloth would wake up every single morning with a belly ache, she would "feel hot and cold at the same time," and her legs would feel "like jelly."

Every.
Single.
Morning.

Sloth would cooperate, but she was breaking down. I could see it in her glossy eyes, in her drooping shoulders, and hanging head.

After trying many different things, medications, 504s, meditation, psychologist visits, I felt called to homeschool.

We tried it out for Spring Break, as an experiment. Suddenly Sloth was waking up cheerful and healthy every morning. And Wolf was actually pleasant to be around!

And Monkey? Well Monkey doesn't care what's going on, so long as she is having fun.

But for the other two, every symptom, every problem evaporated... Only to return in full force that Sunday evening, before their return to school.

That week became our last week.

Not that all our problems were solved by homeschooling, (we are still seeking therapy for all of our issues,) but 95% of our problems WERE solved. I would be okay if they wanted to return to traditional school someday, and I hope to get them resilient enough to handle it well.

But in the words of Wolf herself, "I am NEVER going back to school EH-VER AGAIN!"

So I guess you could say it's going well?