Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Motivation, and lack thereof....

Okay, friends, I need your help.  Best tricks for motivating an older student????

My oldest, The Writer (15/9th grade) is a wonderful student. Very self-driven, a bit of a perfectionist, works hard, does well, really a dream student.

Except for art. Which he's required to take, more or less. The state of Texas, in which we do not reside but will soon(ish) be moving to, requires one year of a Fine Arts credit for all high school students. Faced with that, he chose between Art, Drama or Music, and landed on Art.

His perfectionist tendencies collide with the course requirements, such that most projects take him a bit longer than they should, which in turn completely zaps all motivation for working on the projects.

Case in point: a multi-step project which has been "in progress" for roughly a month now; he's on the final step, with a small fraction left to go, and there it sits, unworked on, day after day after day.

In all his other classes, he's motivated. A self-starter. Diligent. Really a model student.

Just not with art.

The work he does turn out? It's pretty good. Not art scholarship good, but not bad, either. So it's not a quality thing, just a "how do I get this kid moving" thing.

Which brings me back to the question --- best tips for motivating an unmotivated older kid?

How have you dealt with this in your home school? Or even in other tasks, if you are not a homeschooler?

I'd love any suggestions you might have!

Thursday, May 16, 2013

One Week Later.....


We took him for pizza to celebrate. I still get happy tears when I watch this...yes, we've a long way yet to go, but look how far we've come already. Wow.

Sorry the quality is bad; I had to shrink it to get it to upload. You'll want your speakers on full blast, as his voice is soft.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Seven Words

Hope. Excitement. Encouraging. Fear. Worry. Cautious joy.

Those are the seven words I'm feeling right now, because of these seven words:  cat, bat, rat, mat, sat, hat, pat.

My Adventurer read those seven words to me today. He didn't realize that's what he was doing, but he did it.

We reviewed letter sounds first. He again, still, said that the letter h makes the sound /j/, and that the letter d makes the sound /p/ or else /b/ or maybe /g/ as in girl. And that the letter l makes the sound /j/, except, no, wait, it makes /l/ as in lollipop.

He noticed, apparently for the first time for him, that both g and j make the sound /j/.

He spent a few moments after each letter repeating the sound over and over again, just to cement it in his mind before we moved on to the next letter.

Because he was doing so very well, I decided to try something. To show him that just as he can point to or touch individual tokens, or tap out the separate sounds of a word (such as pointer finger, middle finger, ring finger, each tapping the table in turn as you say the separate sounds of the word "cat" -- /c/ - /a/ - /t/), so too we could point to letters as we said the sounds.

We (I) laid out all the letter tiles, in order, a to z. Then I pulled down b, a, t. On purpose, because he has those letter sounds down pat, and because it would allow me to swap just that beginning letter and make lots of new words.

No sooner did I put b-a-t in front of him did he say, "/b/-/a/-/t/; /bat/"

"Yes! exactly!" I said. "And look, if we swap the b for a c, now what?"

"/cat/. Duh...."

Right! Now what?, I asked, as I swapped the c for an m.

Mat, dummy.

Exactly!

And so it went, all the way through all seven words, me swapping out just the one letter, correcting him for calling me names, him calling out the word almost before I moved my finger away from it.

I asked him, at the end, "Do you know what you just did? You read. Seven whole words. You read them!"

I forgot that he absolutely detests praise, particularly for things he is self conscious about.

He declared he didn't really do it; I told him the sounds. He argued that it was supposed to be impossible to teach him how to read. He defiantly protested that he didn't do anything, I told him the answer; and that all I did was tell him the sound, he could have, did, figure it out on his own and he didn't need me. He boasted he could have done it blindfolded, without my help. He spewed anger as he said if he did, in fact, read, then he already knew how and always had. That he didn't need me. And that it was impossible to teach him how to read.

Round and round in circles his protests chased one another, from pride & joy in his success, to embarrassment over the fact we were cheering such a seemingly small thing, to insecurity as he wondered if it was a valid success, since I did prompt him with the sounds of some of the initial letters, to fear over whether he really had done it, and whether it would still be easy tomorrow or if it would keep getting harder, back to wanting to feel joy for reading, and unsure if it counted, since I helped.

No, he didn't say any of that. He ranted and protested and down played and belittled, his usual defense mechanism when something like this happens. So I let him rant, and quietly said I as proud of him, and we moved on to math, and I moved on to the other seven words.

Hopeful. Excited. Encouraged. Fearful. Worried. Cautiously  joyful.

And these: Careful to let him see only the hope and joy and excitement; careful to only encourage. Today, he read seven words, and I will celebrate that, holding at bay the worry and fear over whether or not he'll still be able to read those same words tomorrow.

He read. Seven whole words. And I could not be more proud.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

A Peek on the Inside

This is a little peek at what I think goes on in the head of my Adventurer when he's doing school with me, based on actual quotes he's made over the time we've been doing this. 

Bottom line is, learning frustrates him. He's not lazy. He's not a quitter. He's not impatient or inattentive; learning is hard. Scratch that, learning is HARD for him. And he gets frustrated, because he knows enough to realize that he doesn't know all the things a kid his age usually knows. And because, he wants to know.

That last bit, that's important. Sometimes, people on the outside think that a kid with learning challenges could get it, would make faster progress, "if he really wanted to....."  That if you gave him some kind of motivator or reward system or something, he'd do better. That he quits because he just doesn't want to do it.

I am here to tell you, through quotes from my son, that is not the case. He wants to learn. Desperately. But it is exhausting, and so he can only manage it in small bits at a time.  Allow me one example, and I think you'll see what I mean.

It was actually a frustrating day for me, because I pulled out an aid that I thought would help, and instead, it just aggravated things.

As part of the evaluation we initially had done, the EduPsych wrote up a thorough report complete with suggestions for curriculum, what aids we should use for him, what assistive technologies, etc. One of those things was a calculator; specifically one that displays the entire problem (so he can see he's typed it in correctly). 

I hadn't been using it yet, because he was doing okay with math. His math skills are....ummm, interesting. He grasps some things that seem advanced, while at the same time he struggles with things that seem really basic. So we use a lot of manipulatives, such as Cuisenaire Rods, a 100s chart, a simple abacus, counting bears or other counting tokens -- anything you can think of. And they help. A lot.

Until they didn't, and I pulled out the calculator.

We were staring at a page of adding with regrouping. That's the new term for carrying, where you take 16 + 8 and realize that 16 + 4 would make 20, and that 8 is made up of two 4s, so 16 + 8 is 24. It makes more sense when you see drawings of little objects and some circled and some not.

Except, The Adventurer was not getting it. So, the calculator. Which showed him the answer, but did not help the frustration, and is when he said the thing that proves to me that he wants to learn:  "But I don't get it! That doesn't make sense, because 4 is less than 8. It should get bigger!" 

I tried to explain. We counted up, together, from 16 to 24. With no visual, this didn't really help. Being able to count, for him, is a little like being able to recite the ABC song without putting the names together with what the letters look like. So, I switched gears.  I got out the cuisenaire rods. If you aren't familiar, these are little blocks that increase in size in regular increments. So the "one block" is half the size of the "two block" and the two block is half the size of the four block, and a 2 block + a 1 block = the size of a 3 block, and so forth and so on.

I laid out a 10 rod. Below that, a 6 rod. I showed The Adventurer, see, we have 16 to start with.

Then I counted out 8 one rods. I showed him, "Now we are going to add 8 to it."  Starting from the right hand side, beneath the empty space next to the 6-rod, I began laying out, one by one, the 8 one-rods, until all 8 were there. I showed him how, if we just slid these 4 one-rods up into the empty space next to the 6-rod, we'd have another 10, so instead of 16, we now had 20. And below that, we had 4 left over from the 8, and so we had 24.

He agreed with me all the way through, until having four left, when he said, "But we added 8. We should have 28." 

I reminded him that we used part of the 8 to make the 16 into a 20. He did not, does not, get it. And it frustrates him.

I suggested we go back to the calculator; we did. Same thing, problem after problem. What's 27 + 6?  He types it in, sees 33 and says, "But I don't get it! That doesn't make sense! How does the 2 turn into a 3??" So we count up. We use the rods. He remains perplexed, confused, and frustrated.

Because having the answer is not enough for him; he wants to understand why that is the answer. He wants to learn. Learning is hard. He gets frustrated. He, or I, put things away and move on, because a frustrated boy is not a good learner. I know that we will have lots and lots of days and weeks and months and years for him to master this new concept. He wants to learn, and that motivation will carry him through the days and weeks and months and maybe even years of frustration that lie before him.

He might sometimes stop in frustration on a given day and refuse to do math anymore at that moment. Because learning is HARD, and HARD is exhausting. He might shout at me, "Why do I have to do school?! This is dumb! I won't learn it anyway, I'll just forget!!"  I don't take it personally, because I know it comes from a place deep inside that hurts when, where other kids celebrate small victories, or take learning for granted, he suffers defeat, daily, as he tries to understand these seemingly simple things.

That might seem like quitting, but it's not. Because he returns to math the next day, and the next, and the next, facing those frustrations over and over and over and over again, because his motivation is bigger than the hardness of it all: He wants to learn.

He wants to learn. Challenges and all, he wants to learn. And though it tears him up inside when he struggles, when he feels like he can't learn, I will not let it tear him down.