This is my opportunity to thank you. I am one of 15,000 subscribers, reading you every week with joy. I am so grateful for your work and for the joy you give me sharing it.
I wanted to share my parenting and educational story of the past 5 years. I am a mother of four daughters. The middle ones are twins. I got interested in alternative education when my twin daughters began daycare. I think the interest came with the realization that the usual educational path would not suit them. Through the years of pre-school, we did what we thought all parents do: we followed their lead in finding suitable frameworks for them. When they screamed in their car seats, we got a bike to ride on. When they refused to stay at school for lunch, we shortened their day. With this approach, which – we later learned – is called “accommodations”, they got to school-age without us suspecting that public school would pose special challenges.
Kindergarten was a treasure of knowledge opening to them. They loved it. However, in first grade the school requirements started raising their opposition.From 2nd grade until now, their school story included school-refusal, being restrained, a series of neuro-psychological diagnoses leading to two unsuitable school placements, and finally, being thrown out of school. Now they are joyfully and freely home-schooled, with the support of a farm home-school program, and a self-directed school that permits partial enrollment, and wonderful online classes. They are championing their fields of interest: nature and animals, art, and Rubik’s cubes. We have learned that a self-directed education is not a choice for them, but a necessity.
I now ask myself how come I struggled so much to leave them in the traditional school system. The answer is that given their special challenges, I worried that we would not be able to offer enough support through home-schooling, and that the self-directed educational establishment and communities would not accept our girls.
I have learned the hard way that once in a suitable framework, and with offering suitable support, a lot of the challenges disappear, and my girls are free to leash out their craving to learn.
I believe many families go through the educational roller-coaster we have been through. For us, the reason was mostly that we did not have access to people who had the knowledge concerning, specifically, students who are titled “special-ed”. We came full-circle, back to self-directed education as the best (and maybe only) option for our girls, through a specific Autism profile I came upon, and an online community of parents facing similar struggles, who told of their experiences and solutions.
My strongest conclusion is that, once in a suitable environment, children no longer have a “diagnosis”, but rather a chosen way of fulfilling their craving for learning and passions.
My own passion at the moment is to make this knowledge more readily available to parents in similar situations. I wish there were someone, be it a teacher, therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or friend, who could point us in this direction.Given that it is exactly children like my own, who desperately and crucially need a change in the education system, or the choice to take another path, it is my hope that we can make this knowledge more available for these people.I would love to hear your opinion about this. Warmly and with admiration, Shevi Sperber
