2 Hours Of Tutoring

Nancy Plent (NJ) wrote in Unschooler's Network #22:

We mentioned last issue that several families were faced with the problem of having a child who really wanted to go to school.

One mother had extra reason for dragging her feet about saying "yes." She knew her daughter wasn't reading on grade level, and she also knew that the girl would never sit still for the required amount of time Ina classroom. She was sure that within a month her daughter would be begging to get out again. By that time the school would be convinced that they shouldn't let her go because she wasn't up to grade level in reading.

The battle raged for weeks, until the mother got the bright idea of enrolling her daughter in a Sylvan Tutoring Center. (It seems to be a chain). Her main reason was to try and bring her daughter up to grade level before school started so she could minimize at least one of the problems she knew would be coming. (By this time, the girl wouldn't do any school work with her mother, either). But a great thing happened unexpectedly. The two hours a week of tutoring, was all the "school" the girl needed. She had school clothes and books, real school notebooks and homework, school friends (though tutoring classes are very small) and a real school teacher. She was content, the tensions melted, and the demands to go to school stopped! The mother reports that the Sylvan centers say they have a homeschooling family enrolled in almost every branch. It's worth a try!

STRESS OF EARLY SCHOOL

Readers sent us two reports of a conference of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN, held Nov. 14, 1986 in Washington, D. C. The first is a L.A. Times· Washington Post Service story that was reprinted across the country:

Preschools are pushing children too hard and too early to achieve academically, leading to childhood stress, depression, burn-out and learning problems, two major education organizations warned Friday.

The problem of scholastic "force-feeding" of preschoolers has become particularly acute over the past decades, officials from the organizations said.

"Education is being conceived of as a race, and if you start early you'll win that race ... It is stressful for children," said David Elkind, president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Elkind's organization has adopted a strong position urging that preschools reduce their emphasis on teacher-oriented, academic lessons and allow children to learn in a less stressful environment by initiating their own activities, talking to people and solving problems, such as balancing blocks or putting together puzzles.

The group's statement was prompted by a growing body of research on the subject and a doubling of the number of 3-and 4-year-olds in school since 1970. It was released Friday in conjunction with the National Association of Elementary School Principals as part of a conference here on early childhood education, attended by 60,000 educators.

The warning comes at a time when the nation's public schools face increasing pressure to provide all-day kindergarten and preschool programs and when the number of working mothers and single-parent families is creating an additional need for the programs. There also are other forces at work: a growing number of disadvantaged children for whom early education is considered essential to later success, and a wave of "yuppie" parents looking for early academic prowess in their children.

Elkind said these pressures and research from the 1960s stressing the academic potential of young children has led preschools to commonly teach a watered down version of first-, second- and third grade curriculum. 'With increasing numbers of young children being exposed to these inappropriate teaching methods, there is real danger than large numbers of young children will experience learning problems at an age when, in the past, most children were not even in school," said Elkind.

[SS:] About Elkind's phrase "learning problems" - let's be sure to remember who or what caused them, and be careful not to decide that a 3-year-old who reacts unfavorably to the demands of early schooling is "learning disabled" and thus in need of more of the stuff that disabled him in the first place. The other article, an Associated Press story, said in part:

EDUCATORS, EXPERT'S CAUTION AGAINST TEACHING CHILDREN TO READ TOO EARLY. The force feeding of reading, writing and arithmetic on preschoolers often undermines a child's self-confidence and can lead to learning problems in later grades, two education experts said yesterday.

Nearly half of reading problems found in students result "not from starting children too late but from starting them too early," said child psychologist David Elkind. "When children are force fed early on, they become turned off with respect to education," said Samual Sava, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. 'We find it very difficult to turn these youngsters back on" to learning.

'There are preschools that advertise that if your youngster will attend their preschool, he or she will become a little Einstein," Elkind said. 'There is no evidence that this early pressure works, particularly with gifted children. We have to re-educate parents to the fact that education is not a race. There is no finish line. Education is a lifelong process."

SCHOOL HURTS READING

From North Carolina:

Five years ago, we enrolled Jessie in our church school for first grade. At the end of the school year, a note came home asking me to work with Jessie on her "reading expression" during the summer. This one, I couldn't believe. This was the child who read to 3-year-old Joshua every day, and no child his age will sit through a boring reader! Confused, I asked her to read as she read in school. She proceeded to read in the choppiest fashion and in a monotone voice. When I asked her why she read that way, she said it was so the other kids wouldn't get mad at her. I spoke with her teacher about this. She admitted that at the beginning of the year, Jessie had known all the words, and she had encouraged Jessie to pretend the reading was harder for her, so as not to hurt the other children's feelings.

By August, I knew Jessie would not be returning to school...

READING AT 10

From Claudia Barber (Germany):

On late readers - David is just 10 and just beginning to really read -as opposed to asking me nine out of ten words - and to enjoy it. His older brother taught himself to read, somehow; when he was 5 ½, we discovered that he could read a second grade reader (though he only read one story in it, preferring more interesting stuff! If we hadn't had Daniel's teaching himself as proof that kids can do it, and if we hadn't had all those reassuring accounts of late readers in GWS to read and reread, I'm sure we would have done what many parents do: panic. We might have put David in school and demanded special help for him. At the very least, we would have hired a reading teacher for him. And how long would it have been till he'd have been labeled LD, especially since he reverses letters when he writes?

David had insisted for a long time that he wanted to read and wanted us to help him learn, but whenever we tried it was useless. Patience is not my strong suit, and I would sometimes yell, scream, hit, give up in disgust - not actions destined to buildup someone's self-confidence.

But two weeks ago, I told him I knew he was ready and I wanted him to start reading. He worked alone on it off and on, but said it was too hard. Then Sunday, on a hunch, I told him that it didn't matter how well his brother Dan read and how poorly he did, or that Dan read at 5 and he at IO, that they weren't competing for anything, that when he grew up and needed to read things, how well Dan read would have nothing to do with how well he read, that when and how he learned to read, how well he read, and how much he enjoyed it were all up to him.

He read seven books that day! And read them well, needing to be told only a few words in each. Six were "easy readers," maybe first grade level. The other was A House is a House For Me. Since then, he's read several more, including two chapters of Whitey Takes a Trip. He spends an hour or so a day on it, and I don't encourage him to do more, partly because it's his business, partly because I want him to stay enthused, and partly because I want to avoid any vision problems. When he's read too long, I suddenly notice that he's asking me to tell him almost all the words, including ones he'd been reading easily only a page before. But he is absolutely delighted, so proud of himself, and can't wait to read all the books he's wanted to for years.

ANOTHER OLDER READER

From Gretchen Spicer (WI):

"Late Reader Tests High" (GWS #50) -we also had a late reader. Seth was almost 10 when he taught himself to read entirely on his own initiative from the Tin-Tin books. My early attempts to "teach" Seth to read had ended in frustration for both of us. Finally, I got brave and left him alone. The year Seth was 10, his father ordered two Tin -Tin books for him, and he spent hours poring over them. Two months later he was reading anything and everything. At 13 he is a skilled and voracious reader.

SIMPLE METHOD

From Marla Clark (KY):

Elena (7) is reading fluently now. The "method" (which I realize may not work for everyone, as the way Elena was toilet-trained did not work for her brother Benedict) was simplicity itself. She read aloud and I supplied the words she didn't know. At first that was almost all of them. Now it is almost none. Only a few times did I make her sound out words or say, 'You should know that one by now." I think that is important, because it made reading more fun for her, instead of a chore she had to perform for me. And she did learn the words eventually. But I must stress that it took a lot of time for both of us (though not nearly as much time as she would have spent learning to read in school. "A lot of time" means three or four hours a week, maybe.) I didn't just tell her what "doll" was once and then she had it forever. I had to tell her many times. Gradually, the most common words stuck, and then she used short words to build the longer ones, and now she uses phonics and the words she already knows to figure out new words. Phonics is a sometime thing for us because there are too many exceptions for me to tell her in good faith that there are rules. Some words she learned because of their peculiarity, such as "have" and "give" and "beautiful." Right now she is reading Nancy Drew books and Little Women. I don't know how she would test, but it wouldn't be too low.

NOT YET READING AT 8

From Tootsie Weier (WI):

I thought it interesting that Jane Reid (MA) found the BALL-STICK-BIRD to be wonderful (GWS #54). I also sent for the books after reading about them in GWS #51, and I had exactly the opposite opinion. Having an 8- year-old who is not yet reading, a husband who is worried about it, and a mother-in-law who is sick about it, gave me reason to send for the BALL-STICK-BIRD books. Actually it was quite expensive for me to begin with and when I received word that my check didn't cover expenses, I decided to return the books and my money was promptly refunded. Dr. Fuller certainly does provide wonderful service, but I did learn a lesson in that I should LOOK before I buy.

As far as Horizon Blue not yet reading, as often as I can, I just close my ears to all the nonsense about how he "should" be reading at his age. As far as I'm concerned he just isn't interested enough to bother with reading- and I love the comment in GWS #44 that John Holt said he made to parents whose children were not yet reading: 'The chances of your child growing up illiterate are about the same as the chances of her or him turning into a crocodile."

GWS 76

Older Readers

These writers are responding to the letter from Moira Nobles in GWS #74, “Son has Trouble With Reading”:

Overcame Difficulty

From Barbara Gauthier (Ont):

If I had read Moira Nobles’ letter six months ago I would have said to myself, “there is a boy who, like my Simon (11), is having a hard time reading.” However, over the last six months Simon has become a reader.

A couple of years ago I sat down with him a few times and tried to show him how some simple words sounded and how the sounds change when one letter of the word changes – e.g. hat, cat, sat. He would tense up and fidgit – something he never does in other situations. Anyhow, it didn’t work. He read words backwards, and numbers as well. He could see the same word many times and still not recognize it.

He was beginning to notice how well other children could read and he felt he was stupid because he couldn’t read. He said that if he could have one wish, he would wish he could read.

I began to worry a little and started asking around about dyslexia. (Simon’s father struggled through school and read his first book at age 31; he still has a lot of trouble reading.) Meanwhile the time for Simon to visit the Special Ed coordinator for his testing was approaching, so I suggested that he read to me a bit. he didn’t want to so I picked up a book at the library that had some pictures, lots of words but good spacing between the lines, and a good mystery to it. I read it to his younger brother, and the next thing I knew, Simon told me that he had read the whole book. He took that book to the testing and his reading was up to grade level (grade 5 – his previous result had been early grade 2).

He now is reading a much more advanced book with hardly any pictures and lines closer together. He says the words tend to get blurry if the light isn’t good and if he has to look at a word for a long time. I find this interesting because one of the women I talked to about dyslexia, who has done extensive reading and has attended lectures as well, said that in some cases a vision problem appears and that a regular eye examination usually does not detect this since it takes 20 – 30 seconds for the vision to blur. In a non-dyslexic person, their eyes have moved on to other words by this time.

Simon still has to work hard at his reading and realizes that reading doesn’t come easily to him as it does to his older brother, who was reading Tom Swift and Hardy Boys at age 9. However, Simon excels at math whereas his older brother has to struggle there, so I think we have all learned to accept that each of us has our strong points and each has to work harder on some things.

Simon eventually found a way to make reading work for him. With love and support, my expressing confidence in the fact that one day he would read, and my acknowledgement that it is hard for him, he got through the period that was difficult for him, when others could read and he couldn’t.

Poor Reader Loves to Read

From a longer letter Kathy Szymanski of Minnesota wrote to Moira:

My personal experience is with JJ, now 11 ½. He has a classic case of dyslexia, according to the experts. What I know is that he doesn’t learn reading, writing, spelling, etc, the way many others do. It requires much more effort, energy, and concentration. When he was younger, till about 9 or 10, I let it all go by, assuming he was a late bloomer and all that. he was reading some, but he had many of the typical dyslexia problems, and writing and spelling problems (nearly illegible printing and very poor spelling – even invented spellings didn’t have much rhyme or reason). State law changed and we would have to submit to annual testing, which I was quite concerned about. So we tried to hit the books (this is when he was 10 ½) and encountered a lot of anger, frustration, and battling.

Then we attended the Christian Center for Educational Development’s week-long seminar (Rt 4 Box 300, Owatonna MN 55060; 507-451-8502) which, for us, took off some of the pressure of testing. (In other words, even if he didn’t do so well on the test, it would be clear that we were doing something about his “problem.”) Even though he was 11 by this time, we essentially started over with reading. Reading aloud is usually a disaster, so he doesn’t do much of that. Sometimes I’ll give him a reading assignment of reading to his 6-7ear-old sister, which he doesn’t seem to mind as much, probably because she doesn’t ever correct him and isn’t bored by slowness. He tends to read what fits rather than what’s written (for example, if the sentence is, “Mike played with his new top,” he’ll read “toy” for “top”).

It’s very interesting, however, that this poor reader loves to read. He’ll check out 100-200 books weekly from the library. Many of these are easy readers, but some are non-fiction and novels. Every book does not get read through cover to cover and I know that he misreads many of the words, but he continually pages through them. Occasionally I test to see if he’s really reading, and he can tell me most of what a story is about. I suspect this love of reading comes from having a lot of books around and a mother who has her nose in a book quite often. Plus, he’s never had anything but encouragement – never been belittled for choosing “kiddie books.”

Learning at 10

From Pat Williams (KY):

Moira Nobles’ son Chris sounds very much like my son Cam, who is now 10 ½. After years of our being patient and trying to help/teach him to read in numerous ways, he is finally having some success.

Cam gets frustrated very easily about anything that does not come to him quickly. He blows up about seemingly unimportant things, and never gives himself a chance to learn anything that seems difficult at first. He’s also poor at following verbal instructions, and is easily distracted. He does not want anyone in the room (except someone who is helping him) when he is doing anything difficult (like reading), even if they are quiet. I don’t think he would ever be able to concentrate in a classroom.

Cam reversed letters and numbers for a long time (and still does occasionally), but his biggest problem with reading seems to be remembering words. By last fall, he had learned the basic sounds of most of the consonants (most of the time), and he knew some of the vowels, so he could sound out simple words, but he couldn’t remember the words from one sentence to the next. It took a very long time for him to read even the simplest story, and by the time he was done he didn’t remember what it was about. No wonder he hated to read; it was all pain with no rewards.

Names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates, days of the week, nursery rhymes, etc. do not stick with Cam. On the other hand, his general memory is excellent. He can remember all kinds of events vividly, and his understanding and memory for concepts (real thinking rather than regurgitating) surprises me sometimes. He has a very difficult time with arithmetic facts, but he picks up mathematical concepts with ease. I love “real” math, so we enjoy learning about the more abstract portions of math together, and do very little of the conventional adding, subtracting, multiplying, etc. he has learned how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in the conventional manner as long as he can use a table for the facts. He also enjoys playing computer games that challenge his speed and skill at math facts, and these have helped a lot. “Math Castle,” a shareware game for IBM PCs, is our favourite, because it lets the player progress at a very slow speed.

This fall we started using a series of reading books called Programmed Reading (sold by Phoenix Learning Resource, Inc., 468 Park Avenue South, New York NY 10016). Using this series, Cam has progressed, in the past nine months, from only being able to sound out a few of the simplest words to actually reading quite complicated stories. And he enjoys it! There are 23 workbooks in all and they are not inexpensive (almost $9 each), but to us it is worth it.

Cam is still not reading at all fluently, and seldom reads other books, but now he doesn’t hesitate to at least TRY to read signs, catalogs, computer game instructions, titles of articles, etc. He now thinks that he is going to be able to read, because he CAN read some things.

Would Cam have learned to read, say by age 12 or 15, if we had just left him entirely alone? I’m not sure he would have ever tried; it was just too frustrating for him. I don’t think I could have left him alone forever, either. I don’t like the term “learning disabilities,” but Cam definitely has difficulty learning certain things that other children seem to pick up with little effort. On the other hand, he is very good with his hands; he loves to play with mechanical objects, building sets, electronics, computer games, etc. He has never considered himself stupid, but he is very glad that he is finally learning to read.

Concentrating on Two Things

From a longer letter that Jane Pearia (HI) sent to Moira:

Anthony can write letters and numbers perfectly when that’s what he is concentrating on. When he is doing something new like challenging math problems or writing words he has never written before, that’s when he reverses letters. Just today, I’ve accepted the idea that for now, he can’t concentrate on composing, spelling, and handwriting at the same time, but that it will all come together with time. While typing this, I realized a similar thing about myself. I thought I’d learn how to use the “windows” on our word processing program, in order to find a quick way to rearrange something. I tried several things that didn’t work before I realized I was risking forgetting what I meant to say. I decided I’d experiment with the “windows” another time. It certainly doesn’t mean I have “dyscomputia.”

Outside Pressures

From Stacy Miller of North Carolina:

Karina is 9 ½ and we are in our first year of homeschooling. I never wanted to homeschool – I always felt my daughter and I were too tightly entwined/entangled already and I needed the separation school affords. (The friend who introduced me to GWS helped me to see that Karina probably interpreted the situation differently.) I sent by barely-3-year-old daughter to a cooperative preschool – a gentle transition from home, I reasoned – and later to a Waldorf school. When her class disbanded for a number of reasons, at the end of second grade, we found ourselves with an educational crisis: we couldn’t afford another private school, and Karina was not prepared for public school third grade. Homeschooling appeared like the proverbial light bulb in my head. All of a sudden my husband, daughter, and I saw it as an exciting solution to our problems, although we figured it would be tough.

Whew – we were right! For one thing, the schedule has been difficult for all of us. Karina and I would “school” in the morning, then I would take her to a friend’s house for the afternoon while I went to work. My husband would pick her up on his way home from work at 5:30. I would get home around 8:00. By the time I ate some dinner and read bedtime stories to Karina I, for one, was exhausted. She was often wound up and not the least bit interested in going to sleep!

More important, I knew she needed more unscheduled at-home time, to build, sew, play, and daydream. So I changed jobs – now I work at home, and while we have less money, we have more freedom. Reading GWS has helped me understand that unstructured time is as important, if not more important, than whatever structured school time we may have.

I needed to read about Moira Nobles’ son Chris, and about the 8 ½-year-old perfectionist. By the time I finished reading those two letters in GWS #74, I was sobbing. Why? It has something to do with my own struggle with my daughter. At 9 ½, she’s only beginning to read – in a family and community that both overvalue reading and academic achievement. A turning point came a couple of months ago, on Monday morning, when Karina ended up sobbing on her bed out of frustration, “Why am I different? Why do I have this problem? Why can’t I read?” An hour later, however, she was playing violin beautifully at her lesson, playing with a natural ease and musicality. In Their Own Way, by Thomas Armstrong, has helped me understand such a disparity in Karina’s skills, and appreciate her strengths. I also saw that while it might be OK with me (at least on some levels_ that Karina was not reading yet, it was not OK with her. Our solution has been simple and affordable and fun for Karina: weekly she meets with a tutor, to work on reading and spelling. The tutor is not doing anything that I couldn’t do, except that she, not I, is doing it. It seems important to Karina to work on this one herself, with help from someone other than Mom. Her reading, her attitude, and her confidence level have all improved.

Interestingly, I see that in a way, Karina at 9 1/1 is being taught to read prematurely. Outside pressures – which, admittedly, include me – have pushed her to want to read because she feels uncomfortable not being able to do what most kids her age can do. Yet in a holistic and organic way, she’s not ready. We’re forcing the bud to bloom.

Reading in GWS about the phenomenon of perfectionism has helped me to see this trait in my own child. Her slowness to reach certain milestones may be at least partially due to her need for things to be right – from toileting to walking to reading to writing and spelling. Only as her confidence level has risen has she been willing to risk some “personal spelling,” rather than having everything literally spelled out for her, for example.