elephant and baby steps

Today, I took two steps with my aspie teen. One caused major anxiety, the other was only minor. Three months ago when T turned 15, I felt a sudden urgency to focus on his future. He suddenly seemed so far from independence compared with his chronology, and the amount of time left before adulthood is quickly shrinking. Truly, I don't want mere independence. T has so many gifts that I feel a deep need to figure out how exactly to tap his potential to share with the outside world.

Part of this is guilt inspired. I have spent so much time on the needs of DD since she's been with us these last six and a half years, and now that she's graduated high school, it seems like it should be his turn for awhile. Anyway, today was our appointment with the gifted education program that is a satellite of T's cyber school. I asked if they could please help me evaluate whether or not their program was a good fit, because I really don't have a good sense of it. If he gets in, and we decide to accept, it will be his first formal schooling outside of the home since he was in pre school.

There is a large push by the Home School Legal Defense Association to try to convince their constituent members that home schooling all the way through high school is a good idea, and that more and more universities and other post high school institutions are starting to turn a favorable eye towards home schooled graduates. This is a faith based organization, and I agree with their philosophy to a point, but know that this is a hard sell. I have noticed in my home school groups a large attrition during the high school years as either parents feel like it's just too difficult or that they need the "easy" accreditation of an established traditional school to pave the way to college admission. I was never concerned about either of those challenges until recently when it became obvious that my son is smarter than me. Or at least more motivated.

I am neither too modest or a braggart. I simply feel that I might not be the best or sole resource to continue T's education. I already took on extra help through the means of a publicly funded cyber school program. But now I think I need even more. There are few educational qualifications or programs for being a stay at home schooling mom, but I felt reasonably capable when I started. My high school gpa was fine, graduated in the top ten percent of my class at a supposedly superior high school (although how great could a public school be in California?), did reasonably well on my college entrance exams, and graduated with just over a B average from a state university in a competitive program. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't rocket science either.

So what's my point? If people in my home school group with high school diplomas could educate their children, why shouldn't I be able to? I mean, I might have been trained to make money instead of teaching, but taking care of my own kids seemed like something I should be able to do alright. I read lots of books on that too, and I had some basic biological instincts. I began home schooling with reasonable confidence, and added resources when I thought I needed to as I went along. I always felt that if I wanted more help, well then my husband, my stepmother, father, brothers and father in law (who are ALL engineers, talk about being the odd one out) could chime in whenever I asked. My mother in law was a school teacher. There are a lot of teachers in my side of the family also; it should be in my genes, right? The longer I kept with it, the more I felt it was a really good idea. Spiritually, it felt really right. It certainly fit his learning style in his younger years. In fact, if you ask him now, he still wishes he could go back to it.

But as soon as I saw that he wasn't developing "evenly," I reconsidered a bit. I didn't feel like it was anything I was doing wrong exactly, it just bothered me that a child so obviously bright was taking a long time to learn to read, and an even longer time to write. Well some of it was my ignorance, though it would have been the same problem with teaching methods at traditional schools. T has a definite learning preference for the right side of the brain, and as soon as I gave up on phonics and let him learn by site reading, he took off like a racecar. He still can't write. But guess what, the traditional curriculum, though delivered by a cyber platform, didn't fix that problem either. So it's definitely not all me, those deficits exist with or without mom's teaching methods. But what to do about them?

And now, what to do about the areas in which he excels? This child has been almost completely self taught in math, all the way up to beginning algebra. Granted many 15 year olds are beyond algebra if they are in gifted programs, but how many of them were self taught? I have lent a guiding hand once in a blue moon, when he gets stuck on something, but a small assist and he is off and running again. He can spend hours everyday drawing in tedious detail, and he DOES spend hours everyday reading. He loves creating stories, and he has spent countless hours teaching himself spanish and german. I still can't play chess, and he picked it up in a couple of hours.

So today he spent three hours testing at the gifted program, and I spent even more than that filling out the paperwork and gathering documents. This was the third time I had been at the physical location of the school, and even though it seems outstanding, I still have absolutely no idea if I'm doing the right thing. I really just don't know. At one point the director of the program who was acting as proctor came out and asked me if T could diagram sentences, because when she asked him to spell a word that she used in a sentence, he asked her if the usage was as a direct object or indirect object. I laughed because I had no idea what he was talking about, and then told her I really didn't know if he ever had diagrammed sentences. I was pretty sure he could pick it up relatively quickly though. I asked T on our drive home if he really needed to know the answer to his question in order to do the spelling test, and he said no, he was just trying to translate the sentence into german in his head.

So I have to do something, that's obvious, he's definitely beyond me, and our financial means (you won't see any private tutors at this house), but WHAT. Lots of prayer will be helpful. If we decide it's a good fit, then there is a huge transportation hurdle to overcome. Prayer will be good for that too. If this program doesn't work out, there are a couple others to shoot for, but who knows if they're right, and if not, we are going to run out of options fast in podunk. I know I need to rely on god for everything, but I just don't always hear what he's saying.

Later this evening, I took T to a vacation bible school program, one of many that abound in this area like wild rabbits, and again, I handed him off to a man in a closed room with several other teenage boys and hoped that bible man wouldn't try an indoctrination that I'm uncomfortable with, because T is a long way from discernment. But he will never develop discernment without positive social experiences with other godly people. I can tell you that the class leader of 3-7 year olds was completely over the head of my 6 year old aspie. I'm glad too, because I believe god should be presented as joy and love, especially at that age. I heard a story full of vengeance and punishment, in a vocabulary meant for much older kids. Then we got to hear all about sin and the blood of jesus. I'm so glad he couldn't possibly have understood it, so the nightmares to which the other kids will most likely be subjected will be avoided at our house.

But beyond my critisms of that particular church, or church member, in addition to developing the boys academic skills, it's really time to step it up spiritually. Despite DD abject terror of the church, it's time to at least go back with the other kids, even if it means we leave her at home. At least the boys seemed to have a really good time a church tonight, it's a small victory. The more I get T out into the world, the more he is going to need to be fortified with the armor of god. He's led kind of a charmed life up until now, though he probably wouldn't see it that way. I know he feels like life has never been as good since we moved from the west coast to the east coast, but that mostly has to do with the arrival of his little brother, and less attention, which would have happened on either coast.

And he needs me too much. He would be happy if I could just be his almost everything, but I can't, and I shouldn't. I need to help him prepare to leave the nest, gently, without crashing and burning. It's always about finding that fine line and walking it. I want him to know the joys of being able to stand on your own two feet, and maybe even a wife and children, if that's possible. Well I know it's possible, but I mean in a positive way instead of a negative. With god all things are possible, if they're meant to be, and I really hope they are.