It’s High School class selection time in our house. Ace has to select his courses for freshman year and the first time we sent it in, it came back with some revisions from his guidance counselor. Most people might actually take those selections as helpful, but I don’t have a lot of faith in his guidance counselor. Who has seen my son a total of 3, maybe 4 times, if I’m generous in my estimation, during three years of middle school. Ace is dyslexic and, until this year, has been under an IEP for dyslexia and it seems to me that a guidance counselor should be, oh maybe, COUNSELLING a dyslexic student through middle school. But that isn’t where I wanted this post to go so I’ll get back to ‘splainin why we're the absolute worst parent’s ever.
Why are we the absolute worst parents ever, you ask? (Well, even if you didn’t ask, I’m gonna tell ya!)
Because as his parents we’ve decided that he needs to participate in two Honor’s level classes next year. By his reaction at this announcement, one would have thought we’d told him he was banned from playing sports forever. Or had to surrender his cell phone, which is almost always beeping with incoming text messages. I really wasn’t prepared for his fierce and horrified denial to the suggestion. I mean, I did expect him to grumble and bitch about it, but he damn near had apoplexy.
He snarled, glared, steamed, stomped, shouted some and marched off to sulk in his room. This was after some strenuous lobbying failed to change our minds that he should start out in the Standard English course, but would willingly take an honors math course. He tearfully, and this one was tough for me as he only gets that worked up when he’s really struggling inside, pleaded his case to not take an honors English course. We stood firm, SuperHubby and me. Really, the only reason we continued to insist was to get back at him for all those sleepless nights, not to mention the baby vomit. It’s a parental responsibility to make our kids as miserable as possible. The contract I signed says so.
See, Ace is a smart kid. All the testing he participated in when we were trying to get him support in school and his Dyslexia properly diagnosed, revealed what we already knew. Here is a bright, almost off the charts, kid who absorbs everything going on around him in detail and can do difficult calculations in his head. When he was in first grade, while in a reading recovery program, he memorized every book they gave him by the pictures on each page. The teacher was so surprised by his progress reading that she tried to suggest he didn’t need the help. We had to point out that he wasn’t reading, he had memorized all 20 of her books. She didn’t believe us at first, so we told her to cover the pictures. When she did, and Ace was unable to read most of the words, she was shell-shocked. And this was the reading specialist. Sigh.
His dyslexia makes word recognition and pronouncing unfamiliar words difficult. Taking any details he has learned and then summarizing them is very, very hard. This is also what causes him to struggle in his social studies courses, the need to recap in written form what he has learned. Book reports, summaries and any written assignments are done in multiple stages so he can get the exact details out of his brain and down on paper. When he reads a book, or listens to an audiobook, he has files upon files of details in his head. He can spit those details out one at a time or answer any specific question. Ask him to write a summary and it's like he was pushed off a cliff without a parachute.
We pissed him off with our refusal to budge. But what came through the anger and frustration of being pushed in a direction he wants no part of was a stomach-churning fear. He blurted out that he falls behind when reading in class, that sometimes he looses his place easily and he reads the same line over and over again before he realizes it. He’ll never be able to finish the books in time, he wailed. I promised to buy an audio version of whatever books he needed to read. Surprisingly that didn’t really help the situation, or not so surprisingly. He knows his spelling is poor and it became very clear he is terrified he will fail brilliantly in the honors level. We tried to explain that what we see is so very much the opposite of what he fears. That his efforts thus far have been nothing but a huge success. He was classified for several years and the classroom expectations were lowered. I mean lowered. No correction of his spelling errors in school, ever. Hello! Dyslexic kid here! If his spelling errors are not pointed out, he’s certainly not going to find them. This year, we deliberately had his classification removed. He was expected to step up to the plate and he did, with flying colors. But it’s very hard to get that message through to a teenager in high dudgeon. We think it’s too easy for him and want him to exert some effort in the coming high school years. He doesn’t really see the long-term value of that effort. And really I get that. Ace is a typical 13-year-old boy, whose brain is fueled by baseball, wrestling, video games and his most recent obsession, paintball. I suppose I owe thanks to all that’s holy that girls are just starting to intrude onto his landscape.
And this is why, with our belief in our son’s brain power, his work ethic and our belief he can master anything he applies himself to, we became the absolute worst parents ever for forcing him to take a couple of honors classes. Hey, we just might have ruined his entire high school career, not to mention his life.
To his credit, he never actually said we were the absolute worst parents ever. But the slamming door implied it.
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