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My Mom, My Teacher
Home-schooling Can Be a Viable Option for Special Needs Kids By Debora Geary
Molly's StoryFor Annette Marshall, of Placerville, Calif., home-schooling her daughter, Molly, was natural, something she had done with all her older children. "She seemed like a late bloomer, so home-schooling did seem like it would be even more important for her in allowing her to work in her own natural time frame,"Marshall says. However, after two years, as they began to move on to first grade work, it was clear to Marshall that they were dealing with more than a 'late bloomer'. Even Marshall's most creative teaching could not help Molly learn the alphabet in order or remember whether to call 911 or 119 or 191 in an emergency.
At this point, Marshall was worried that she couldn't meet Molly's special learning needs and sent her to a small, very accommodating private school with a wonderful teacher. Even with all this support, however, Molly struggled to keep up. When she came home one day and confessed to "cheating" on a spelling test (looking at her neighbor's paper to see how they were spelling the words), Marshall's heart broke.
After this escalated into Molly crying every day, begging not to go back to school, Marshall switched back to home-schooling and took Molly for testing. The diagnoses of dyslexia, ADD and a host of other issues made it clear to Marshall that she hadn't been a bad teacher and that Molly had been struggling to learn against huge odds.
Even for an experienced home-schooling mom, helping Molly learn can be exhausting. "I am finishing up my 11th year home-schooling some conglomeration of my four kids, and home-schooling Molly is by far the most time consuming, the most frustrating, the most rewarding, the most scary, the most fun experience of my life," Marshall says. Home-schooling allows Marshall the freedom to work with Molly's learning diferences and to nurture her self-esteem instead of watching it erode in the constant pressure to keep up with her peers.