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.