Homeschooling ADHD kids without lowering the bar

When you sign up for Arbor we ask you one question. What's the hardest part?

About one in four of you answer the same way. A kid who learns differently, and eight years of school built for somebody else's brain. More of you say that than say curriculum and money put together.

So if that's your house, you are in very ordinary company, and I want to start somewhere other than where most advice starts.

You have met this kid. He might be yours. He can tell you how a jet engine works, at dinner, unprompted, in more detail than you wanted. He cannot reliably spell because. Somewhere there is a form about him with the words not applying himself written on it by somebody who had thirty other children to think about.

The room was doing a lot of the damage

A teacher with thirty children has to aim at the middle. That is arithmetic. She is not doing anything wrong. And a kid who needs to stand up every ten minutes, or who reads slowly but thinks in whole pictures, or who cannot stop hearing the lights, spends six hours a day being quietly asked to be somebody else.

Take away the room and most of that goes with it. You did not become a specialist overnight. You just removed the thing that was causing it.

Change the road, and leave the destination alone

Here is where I part company with a lot of kind, well-meant advice.

When a child struggles, everyone's instinct is to lower the bar. Shorter books, easier problems, expect less and be gentle about it. It feels like compassion, and it is usually the thing that does the harm.

A dyslexic ten-year-old is ten. His reading is behind and his thinking is not, and he can tell the difference faster than you can. Hand him work built for a seven-year-old and you have told him what you think of him without opening your mouth. Some kids stop trying right there, and that quitting takes years to undo. The reading gap was never the hard part.

So keep the work where it belongs and change how it gets to him. Read the chapter out loud, then argue about it like two adults. Let him answer while you hold the pencil. Let him type, or record himself, or draw it. Give him four problems instead of twenty and make all four the hard kind.

He is still doing fourth grade. He is doing it by a different road, which is the entire reason you took him out of a class of thirty.

Twenty minutes is a real lesson

Twenty focused minutes beats ninety miserable ones and it is not close. If you are grinding through an hour because an hour sounds like school, most of that hour is teaching him that this is something to be endured.

Say the other thing out loud, often

Kids who are behind in one place are frequently strange and brilliant in another, and a classroom has no time to notice. You have all the time there is. The boy who cannot spell might take the lawnmower apart and put it back together. The one who will not sit down might be the only person in the house who understands where the water goes.

Tell him. Specifically, and more often than feels necessary. A child who has spent three years knowing he is the slow one needs to hear from you what he is quick at, and he needs to hear it about something real, not something you invented to be nice. Quite often it turns out to be what he does for a living.

What I can't promise you

Homeschooling does not make it go away. Dyslexia at your kitchen table is still dyslexia. There will be a Wednesday in February when you sit in the car outside the grocery store and wonder whether you have wrecked something you cannot fix.

What changes is that nobody is measuring him against twenty-nine other people while he works it out, and the person choosing what he does tomorrow is the one who loves him. That turns out to be worth more than any program.

You are allowed to have a bad week and still be the right person for this.