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Sport and Competition
Your Slow Learner
Advice for parents of academic strugglers
Posted December 22, 2019 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Despite getting your child special help, s/he still struggles academically. Now what?
If I had such a child, and moderate help yielded little progress, I would not do what so many parents do: add tons of tutoring, summer school, plus maximum nagging: Did you do your homework? Let’s go over your homework. Do that again, Johnny.
Nor would I do what some parents, who are driven at least in part by a misplaced sense of guilt that the problem is their fault, fight with the school district, even hiring an attorney to get yet more on top of the special ed services the school already provided, even demanding private school at taxpayer expense.
I would do as I do with myself and with my adult clients: build on strengths. Sure, I want my child to have functional reading, writing, and math skills. But rather than obsess on maximizing his or her test scores, let alone drill on the now widely mandated Common Core standards (See the example at the end of this article), at the earliest age, perhaps as early as first grade, I would do the following:
Talk with him. Especially if I sensed my child was feeling bad about the academic weakness, I’d have one or more conversations with my child such as the following:
Of course, you’re not great at reading and other academic stuff but that’s just one part of a person. We’re all composed of many parts, and in real life, academics isn't the most important part. Are you kind? (Kid says yes.) Are you organized? (Kid says yes.) Are you good at helping your dad build and fix things? (Kid says yes.) You are a good kid. Period.
Yes, I want you to learn to read better but we’re not going to go nuts about it. We’ll look for a school and teacher that values your strengths. Hey, you wouldn’t send a football player to ballet school, would you? Actually they do to improve their footwork! But you get my point. Sweetie, honestly, does this make sense? Ask me a question, tell me something. (I’d wait, listen, continue the conversation if my child does, and at the end, give a big hug and say that I love him or her just the way s/he is.)
An appropriate school and teacher
I would try to have my not-academic child attend a school and classes that de-emphasize academics in favor of my child's strengths, whether the arts, sports,fix-it/build it, whatever. There are such public schools, often called magnet schools. If not, I would look into private schools. Sufficient financial aid is sometimes available.
Outside of class
My child and I would collaboratively select after-school and vacation activities that built on strengths and preferences. Of course, I’d enroll my my artistic child in art classes. my athletic kid on sports teams s/he’d like, We might try music lessons, learning to play by ear, but if s/he didn’t have the talent, we’d drop it fast. Few things are more painful to a child than laborious, talent-free practicing. And it's no fun for parents to have to listen to that. (School orchestra teachers deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.)
I would try my child in a children’s theatre program: It teaches reading, poise, public speaking, teamwork, and the lessons of literature in a fun and exciting way. Few things excite a child as much as being in a play that will be viewed by parents and friends.
And I would leave a reasonable amount of unscheduled time. As a child, I spent such pleasurable hours watching cars go by, leaves fall, snowflakes light on my window, cloud scud by, and listening to music, all supposed fritterings of time, yet I didn’t turn out to be a total slug.
The takeaway
It makes me sad to see how schools devastate kids. Educators proclaim to celebrate diversity but insist that everyone learn, starting in elementary school(!) algebra, history, chemistry, and foreign language, and worse, in lockstep. Those school factories turn out millions of kids year after year who know little of real-world value and who feel worse about themselves. Especially if you have an academically slow learner, it falls on you to help your child realize his or her strengths and to develop self-esteem based on things far more important than what’s mandated by the Common Core. For example, this is just one of the hundreds of required objectives for 5th graders:
CCSS.Math.Content.5.OA.B.3 :
Generate two numerical patterns using two given rules. Identify apparent relationships between corresponding terms. Form ordered pairs consisting of corresponding terms from the two patterns, and graph the ordered pairs on a coordinate plane. For example, given the rule "Add 3" and the starting number 0, and given the rule "Add 6" and the starting number 0, generate terms in the resulting sequences, and observe that the terms in one sequence are twice the corresponding terms in the other sequence. Explain informally why this is so.
Is that what all kids should be learning, even kids who struggle to learn what's important?
I read this aloud on YouTube.
