Please excuse me for the month of September my Star 9 test ate my homeschooler. I have a type of immune deficiency. I have no immunities to fight off criticism (mostly from myself) and comparison is my allergic trigger. That is why I did not want to have my kids take the Star 9 test last year. My husband (who has a strong immune system) did however, and in a weak moment I decided to compromise so he would let me get a pony or a frappucino or something. That is why 2 weeks before the test I tried to start preparing (up to that point I was in denial and in rehearsals with my children for a musical they were starring in). That is also why the night before the test I was cranky and mean as I sat with my kids who pretended not to understand the difference between contractions, possessives, quotations and plural possessives. I knew they were just being difficult after all, I had explained it once and there was no reason they should be confused even if we had spent the earlier part of the evening covering geometrical terms, basic algebra and analogies. This was NOT too much to expect, not from MY geniuses.
Surprisingly my kids enjoyed the test taking. They got to eat Jack in the Box for breakfast every day (they told us to feed the kids a big breakfast and since I am a night person, this was the best I could do). They were not affected in the least by my stress over this test, in fact, my son declared that he had decided just to guess on the long division because it would have taken too long to work it out and he was tired of working on the test at that point. There were no contractions etc.... in fact, much of what I drilled into their heads was not even on the test. So, it should have been no surprise to me that my kids missed a couple. Actually both did quite well for any normal mother's kids. They were advanced and proficient and got a few 100's. But I am NOT a normal mother. THAT was NOT good enough for me. "What about the GEOMETRY? What about the WRITING STRATEGIES?! I am a failure!!" They will not get to be in the gifted program if I ever put them in public school which I don't plan on doing but that is NOT the point... I FAILED THEM!
My oldest boy was in public school until 5th grade. He was diagnosed as gifted. In Indiana where we lived, it took several days and tests and professional recommendations to determine that. He missed 1 on the whole standardized test every year that he took it. He also used to tie all the furniture together in the house with yarn and would often forget to sign his name on his Weekly Readers and receive no credit for the homework. Today he is an 18 year old. No one cares if he is gifted or not. It doesn't come up. He does amazing things with computers and forgets to put toilet seat lids down. He knows a lot about a lot of stuff but not a lot about where stuff goes when he is done using it. He thinks outside the box as is evidenced when he leaves things out of the box he is supposed to put them back into. He is learning to drive and can not just figure it out intuitively, as he found that out the 2nd time he failed his permit test. He has to study and practice, even though he is gifted. Traffic cops don't care if you are gifted or not.
As a freshman, he is learning about love, loss, responsibility and whom to trust. He is knocking on doors and having some slammed in his face. He is challenging everything and his brilliant mind leads him into all kinds of terrifying theories as far as I am concerned. But he is not my pupil anymore. The world is teaching him now, there are no standardardized tests from the world, all of us get different versions even when they are the same testing circumstances.
Just for the record. I was labeled gifted too. Unfortunately, the areas I am gifted in do nothing to compensate for the areas I am NOT gifted in. I can not sing my way out of a bounced check. My creative powers are helpful in coming up with excuses or probing deeply into my complex psyche to explain why I am disorganized, disheveled and late but they don't protect me from the consequences of such a state. I guess gifted is as gifted does.
I was not thinking of any of this when the school year started. This is the thinking of someone in their right mind. I was in someone else's mind (the left mind which is a dangerous place to be when you are right brained). I just kept looking at my kids as some how defective, cruelly neglected at the hands of their punctuation hating mother. Like a person who looks at her donut and says, "Where is this middle part?" I was ready to send my kids straight to public school to learn how to be a hole human being. To make it worse, everywhere I turned people were reading John Holt or debating Saxon while all I could do was clutch myself in a star 9 induced paralysis of all my curriculum muscles. (Mess-schooler Dystrophy I think is the medical term for what I had). It was grueling to read all the TVE posts chattering with enthusiasm about the pre-school Russian group and the sentence diagramming club while I looked in horror, as if for the first time really seeing, my tremendously disadvantaged children who are lacking in geometric proportions and have been algebraically disfigured by their simple equation minded mother.
Then one night, while singing my children to sleep with the solos from Pirates of Penzance after having created an elaborate (and if I don't say so myself, funny) story with a moral applicable to a hard relationship issue, it hit me; we are NOT all the same. Unlike a lot of kids in school, most grown ups in life get away with being less than in some places and more than in others. I forgot this while preparing for the standardized test. (I should have realized that something with "standard" in the title was going to be a challenge for me). I was trying so hard to be all the things that "they" said I needed to be to make my kids the kind of kids who will grow up with "that" kind of mother, that I was not being "my" kind of mother. So the net result was that they had a mediocre other kind of mother (cause I could not pull off being just any mother) instead of a brilliant my kind of mother (cause everyone is brilliant when they are a kind mother and it is easy to be a kind mother when you are not trying to be some other kind of mother).
So now we are back on track. I spend some time each week on readin'/writin'/rithmaticin' and some time on the stuff they really love to do and lots of time in my car driving them to distractions and driving us all a little crazy and back. I pray and hope for the best and try not to succumb to my allergic response whenever I hear or see someone else doing something amazing or standard and/or thinking we should be doing the same. It is hard to be doing the same when we are doing differently. As my friend First wife would say, "Viva le difference"!
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