What went wrong with school?\u00a0 It would be easier to say what went right…. not much!\u00a0 But let’s start with goal number 1, which was that Antonia should learn French.\u00a0 Maybe we started too late for her, as she was a very precocious English-speaker.\u00a0 Being in French-speaking environments bothered her from the age of 18 months, and she said so.\u00a0 Not many 18 month olds do that, I guess.<\/p>\n
At the end of her second year in school, I was very concerned, because she still could not put together even fragmented sentences.\u00a0 She did not know the names of items she used everyday.\u00a0 She appeared not to understand simple, common sentences.\u00a0 She would not answer questions from adults under any circumstances. \u00a0 She would not play with French-speaking children, and at the age of four her social development was suffering.\u00a0 Meanwhile her English was pretty much that of an adult and she was friendly and outgoing to all and sundry.\u00a0 Some brief, intensive sessions with a speech therapist helped to build up her confidence in French, but as soon as the sessions came to an end, she regressed.<\/p>\n
Goal 2 was that she should have a nice time.\u00a0 She didn’t.\u00a0 Not ever, really.\u00a0 But things got worse rather than better.\u00a0 At the age of 2, she would throw screaming fits at the nursery if she was dissatisfied, but she was actually rather pleased with herself when she got home.\u00a0 At the age of 3, she would say that she supposed she had to go to school because Mummy and Daddy had to work and were too busy to look after her.\u00a0 She cried every time she forgot that we would prefer her not to.\u00a0 When she was 4, all hell broke loose.\u00a0 She cried morning and night over school, and was generally depressed all the time.\u00a0 I spent my evenings cuddling her, and my days trying to think of ways to make things nice for her. My weekends and holidays revolved around getting her in a fit state to go back again.\u00a0 I think our only choices were to remove her from school or take her to a child psychologist.\u00a0 The latter option seems to be extremely common around here, but we chose the former.<\/p>\n
Now, it makes sense to wonder what happened at school that was soooo terrible.\u00a0 What did she do there?\u00a0 It would appear that she sat in corners making scribbles, which was strange, because at home she was making quite complicated figurative drawings.\u00a0 She broke glasses or plates at every mealtime, though at home she rarely broke anything.\u00a0 She declined to learn anything in school, including French words for concepts she already knew like colours and numbers.\u00a0\u00a0 But she was very demanding of intellectual stimulation at home.\u00a0 She learned to read English at home but apparently “did not know her letters” at school.\u00a0 By then, I was starting to realise that she was good at abstractions, but had to be virtually bribed to handle physical objects.\u00a0 Montessori didn’t seem like a very good match for her, or maybe her hatred of the school contributed to making her that way.<\/p>\n
She also got upset on a daily basis because she got knocked around by other kids, some of whom had behavioural issues, and some of whom had behavioural issues combined with mental handicaps.\u00a0 She still has a scar on her face to prove that it got pretty rough in there at times.\u00a0 Her worst memory at this point is of the noise levels.\u00a0 She spent two years out of the three (the first and last), trying to hang out with the two English-speaking kids in the school who were rather older than her, and getting upset when they wanted to play with someone else. She spent the middle-year in a class with much younger children, many of whom were pre-verbal, because that appeared to the teachers to be the best class for someone who scribbled and didn’t talk yet.\u00a0 She was very clingy to the adults.\u00a0 She learned to hide in corners in the playground instead of playing, so that her physical development began to suffer too.\u00a0 Since she wouldn’t talk, she used clothes as a form of communication.\u00a0 That’s when she became very, very, interested in her appearance.\u00a0 She would enter the classroom with her dress held out to show the teacher, as a substitute for saying “Bonjour”.<\/p>\n
What did we do during this time?\u00a0 We spent our time trying to communicate our concerns to the school, wondering most of the time whether we were crazy of they were!\u00a0 I think they felt the same way about us.\u00a0 Pretty often, we wondered whether it could even be our child they were talking about.\u00a0 But then, when I observed her in the school environment, I saw that she had a completely different personality from at home. \u00a0 I didn’t consider any of the traits I saw her developing there to be in her best interest.\u00a0 I am so, so glad we got her out.<\/p>\n
And why didn’t we do it sooner?\u00a0 Well, I would have tried something else at the end of the first year.\u00a0 But the fact is that my husband and I had to come to an agreement and that was not easy.\u00a0 It only happened because I applied rather more pressure than I am comfortable with.\u00a0 He had loved the Montessori school he went to and wanted to give his child the same opportunity.\u00a0 It wasn’t easy for him to realise that it wasn’t suiting her the way it suited him. \u00a0 Also, I remember very well when I first met him that he and I commiserated over the horrible times we had at school, socially and academically.\u00a0 But somehow, between then and him becoming a parent, those memories evaporated into a rosy haze of happy children playing together in their own little community! And he was the one who cared deeply about us being an English-speaking household.\u00a0 That was obviously going to be thrown into question if we homeschooled.\u00a0 We looked into every possible school, before we were both convinced that it would be more of the same, or worse!<\/p>\n
It didn’t help that I was the one on the receiving end of our daughter’s unhappiness and he wasn’t.\u00a0 In fact their relations were rather distant at this time.\u00a0 The clash between school schedule and his work schedule meant that he spent very little time with her.\u00a0 When he did, he took her over to play at friends’ houses and chatted with other adults.\u00a0 She was glued to me literally at every opportunity, and was pretty direct in expressing her preference.\u00a0 I know it was upsetting for him.\u00a0 He was the number one beneficiary of her switch to homeschooling.\u00a0 Within weeks, she started admitting to liking him, and now she loves us both equally.\u00a0 But still, somehow, homeschooling ‘feels wrong’ to him.\u00a0 We get to keep on doing it for as long as he is outvoted, 2 to 1!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What went wrong with school?\u00a0 It would be easier to say what went right…. not much!\u00a0 But let’s start with goal number 1, which was that Antonia should learn French.\u00a0 Maybe we started too late for her, as she was a very precocious English-speaker.\u00a0 Being in French-speaking environments bothered her from the age of 18 … Continue reading Why we homeschool – Part 2 is about why we left school behind<\/span>