Seeing Through the Cracks

Chapter 13

After Jake's year of being homeschooled, I was discussing my concerns with a friend about whether Jake was going to be Grade Two ready. I was also concerned because Jake continued saying that he didn't want to go back to school. Had I taught him enough and had he learned enough to be ready for the next grade? At this time, my friend suggested that I take Jake to be tested by a professional outside of the school.

I did my research and found a psychologist who did intellectual and educational testing. I booked an appointment for Jake for the following week. This kindly gentleman spent a couple of hours with my son, putting him through various exercises before he emerged from the office and invited Brian and I in to discuss his findings.

He said that many times throughout the testing Jake had asked him if what he was asking was a trick question, and he found that quite amusing coming from a seven-year-old boy. He also informed us that he found that Jake was of gifted intelligence, with a high IQ, and that he would eventually need to be placed in a gifted program in school to challenge him. He would otherwise become bored in school if he remained in a core program. This news came as quite a relief to my husband and I. Although we felt that Jake was a smart little boy, the issues we'd experienced in school thus far had made us question a lot of things. Jake had really struggled in grade one, but we weren't sure if it was as a result of the duress he felt with the teacher, or if there was some sort of learning disability. This was good news. We left the meeting feeling satisfied, and ready to enrol Jake back into school. We then explained to him, in simple terms that he would understand that the psychologist had found him to be very smart.

A couple weeks later, while in the car, from the back seat I heard Jake say to me, "Mommy, I want to go back to school now."

This surprised me, and so I asked him, "What changed your mind about school?"

And Jake replied, "Because now I know that I am smart."

I was left with two distinct feelings. One was relief, as I felt that returning to school would be beneficial for Jake. The second feeling was one of sadness. All of those months of homeschooling I had told Jake on so many occasions what a smart child he was, and yet he never believed me. He had somehow equated his awful experience in Grade One and possibly nursery school with not being smart. It took the psychologist and the results of his test for Jake to finally believe he was clever. His school experience had left him without confidence, and no amount of praise from me had changed that. I suddenly felt enormous sadness for the many children before Jake who had a teacher inadvertently leave them feeling dumb, and that without this sort of testing or intervention, they might go through their entire school career, and perhaps even their lives, believing that they were not smart. All of that potential lost; these intelligent children falling through the cracks in the school system due to one early negative experience. I felt heartbroken. And at the same time, I felt grateful again that Jake was caught before he fell further.

This didn't mean that Jake would return to school and have it easy. With his high IQ he was an intellectual minority and didn't fit into the mould that the school system constructed for him. Jake was not a typical visual or audio learner either; his learning style was found, through further testing, to be tactile/kinaesthetic, and therefore sitting for long periods of time at a desk was not an ideal method for having him take in and retain information. He needed to be able to move to learn, and be in a setting where hands-on sensory experience would be offered. Jake's school success would be built on ongoing parent-teacher meetings, parental advocacy, and modifications to his learning. As his mother and in charge of much of his care, I had my work cut out for me.

Grade school required a great deal of focus for both Jake and I. His challenge was due to the difficult task of learning in an environment not always conducive to his needs, while mine was in observing where and when my input was needed to help. I recognized that it was not easy to teach a class of twenty-five or more children who have different needs and learning styles, and so I was careful not to hover and become overly-protective. I assessed each situation that arose and did what I could to support both the teachers and Jake. I had, after all, spent Grade One teaching Jake from home, and knew it took a very different approach; he was not the easiest student. He wasn't disruptive nor did he behave badly in school, but despite his intelligence, learning could be somewhat burdensome for him. It didn't always come easy like it had for his older brother. Reading was one of Jake's biggest challenges. If given a large chunk of reading at once, he would become so overwhelmed that he'd freeze and stop trying to read at all. He began to hate reading. I wanted him to have a love of books, so I decided, at home, to give Jake a different type of genre to read, one that was broken down into smaller bits and included more pictures. I started with comic books. I loved Gary Larson's Far Side humour, and had on occasion shared his cartoons with Jake and Nick. They both understood and loved his farcical cartoons. So, I provided Jake with one of his books, and rather than reading pages at a time, he could read one funny frame at a time. This worked, and then we moved onto the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon series, at the suggestion of a friend. Eventually Jake learned to like reading, and developed quite a sense of humour, as well. It was never easy and I needed to be both patient and imaginative. Beyond the classroom work, there was Jake's immense struggle with doing homework assignments. Often he found them tedious, unnecessary, boring and time-consuming. He had better things to do. In all honesty there were assignments that were nonsensical to me, and I had no rational explanation as to what purpose they served. I understood that sometimes one just had to grind through to completion even what one didn't enjoy. Learning wasn't always going to be fun for Jake, and I eventually found myself repeating the same mantra to him: "Just play the game, and do the work."