May 28, 2011
Sending Tanner to school was a tough decision. I’ve “sat on the fence” as a good friend of mine once described me, about whether or not I should send him to public school or homeschool him. This has been a HUGE inner battle for me. Tanner is a sponge. He absorbs anything and everything in the intellectual world. We present a concept to him, and instantly he gets it. The trouble is, in public school, they teach “horizontally”, not vertically. Horizontal is good for the average kid. I’ll be honest, I’m a big fan of horizontal. I’m a horizontal learner myself, but for Tanner, he gets the concept, then gets bored with all the extras. He’s definitely a vertical learner.
They also have 26 kids in a classroom where Tanner goes to school. It is one of two best schools in the district, but that’s too many kids for a teacher to allot much time at all to individual attention. So why did I put him in? I wanted him to be exposed to other kids, cultures, disciplines, and well, the world. I knew he already knew the curriculum, but I could supplement at home at his level with curriculum and he could still benefit from “the social stuff” as we like to call it. That and when he entered Kindergarten I was pregnant with baby number 3 and worried it would be as tough a go as it was having baby number 2.
Tanner went into kindergarten reading at the end of a first grade level. He knew how to add and subtract into the double digits. By the time he left Kindergarten, he was reading at a 4th grade level and doing multiplication and division. Every day Tanner and I would do some sort of education time at home before he went to school. But his behavior at home was tough.
By the time he went into first grade, his behavior was beginning to reflect at school too. Since Tanner doesn’t read my blog, I’ll just say it, but Derek discourages me from using it in front of him: Tanner was BORED!!! I toughed out the first three months knowing that they were doing a lot of review at first and things would hopefully pick up. When they didn’t, I met with his teacher for Parent/Teacher conferences. I asked her to do a specialized test put out by the District called the Math Inventory. This is an exam that tests their math skills beyond the grade level they are enrolled in. I knew Tanner was doing higher than 1st grade math and I wanted us both to know where his skills were. She agreed to meet back in three weeks’ time after she administered the test.
Three weeks later we met up only to find out she administered a different test. It was a test that she had created over the summer and it only evaluated him at a first grade level. I went home and fumed for a few days, then called the Principal. She backed the teacher up whole heartedly until I asked her, “What do you do when you have a child who is reading beyond their grade level?” She said they had a test they give to evaluate the reader’s grade level. “So, what do you do if you have a child who is doing math beyond their grade level?” She confessed, “I don’t know.” So I committed her to finding out about the Math Inventory test. A day later she called me back and said that the test did indeed exist and that it would be administered to Tanner. Progress!
They took another month before they administered the test. When the results came back, I was given a note in Tanner’s backpack that said a third grader would come three times a week to meet one-on-one with Tanner to do THIRD GRADE MATH. This was a turning point for Tanner in his behavior. Though it never completely improved, it was better at school. I was a little disappointed that the School, and/or District didn’t step it up a little more, and I felt like this was all they could think of to appease us, BUT it was something and something is better than nothing at all. Honestly, the District nor the School has much at all by way of flexibility in how they choose to teach children at different learning levels. This was all they had to offer, so we grabbed it and were grateful.
Tanner LOVED his time with his new tutor, Garrett. He idolized him. He, a lowly first grader, got to hang out with a third grader. Seriously amazing stuff!
Tanner was never graded on his math time with Garrett. Neither of them ever received any teacher instruction on how to do the math they were learning. It was understood that Garrett was a smart kid too and this 3rd grade math was easy for him. So all of Tanner’s “instruction” came from Garrett. Tanner was still expected to complete the 1st grade course work given him in class and this is what he was graded on.
At the end of the school year, I caught the two of them and took this picture. Thank you Garrett for taking the time to teach Tanner math. You made his year at school so much better for him!
As for the mother’s fight? Well, the next time I met for Parent/Teacher conferences, the teacher was calling Tanner “gifted”. Little did I know that this one word would completely change Tanner’s life. And since I’m writing this post a year behind, just wait and see what unfolds with my sweet boy! As for my thoughts at the time of this picture: This battle of mine will continue on to the next school. Or maybe I’ll homeschool. But somehow we’ll make things right for him.
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