We enrolled K-- somewhat against his will—in the honors-level classes to keep him out of trouble and keep him challenged. To say that this has backfired would be an understatement.
K has always fought for what he wanted, from the time he was an infant. It is one of his greatest qualities, but also the hardest one to channel into productivity. I should have expected that the challenge he would find in the honors classes would be the challenge of how to not do your work, how to not gain respect from teachers, and how to not stay out of the office.
K, in other words, has met my honors classes challenge with a C-average, office referrals, and more interest in texting than taking notes in class. He took it up a notch, and starting throwing out argumentative comments in conversation—like how college would be as big a waste of his time as junior high had been and high school would be.
We thought that the option to combine English (a less-enjoyed subject) with History (a more-enjoyed subject) into one advanced seminar would make writing more interesting for him, but the institutional beige room filled with 64 other kids and two overwhelmed teachers has just inspired vigorous bitching from his end. We steered him away from boring business classes and into science and language electives in the hopes of increasing his intellectual curiosity. What we got were endless complaints about the lack of textbooks (seriously—no textbooks in science class?) and hundreds of scribbled vocab note cards.
There’s the small part of me, the whisper-voice in the back of my mind that nags and doubts. “Homeschool?” it whispers, although I have always been an avid detractor of homeschooling. “You could provide the instruction he needs—on his level,” the voice murmurs, “You could do a helluva lot better in preparing him for college, and allow him to pursue his interests.” I fight against it, and I fight against the gifted program, and I fight against the classes they want to send him to at the senior high school. I still have faith in public education and peer-group integration—I just don’t feel that it is inspiring students to learn. I know, personally, that no teacher in that school, to date, has inspired my child to intellectual pursuits; a desire that I think it is important to instill at this time, to help teenage boys overcome the educational apathy that sets in at this stage.
I fight against it because I don’t really think I could do better at home. Then there are his friends and his peers. He needs that too. All the while, K’s grades scream C-average apathy at me.
National History Day was going to fix all of that. Last fall, when he came home and proclaimed that his class was participating in NHD, I jumped up and down and cheered internally. I loved NHD when I was his age. I could actually learn about things that interested me. I could spend hours in the library with minimal supervision, working on my own thing. For an entire unit, there were no vocab tests, no worksheets or busywork, no fill-in-the-blank tests. Also there was the prospect of at least one day out of class, and possibly more, if you made it to regional’s. NHD was going to give him that spark, that freedom to pursue his own thing, that drive to research the world and figure things out on your own terms.
K was not excited. Even when we helped him brainstorm a topic that incorporated music, he required incessant nagging for every single step of the process. At least once a week, for months on end, I had to confront the conflict I hate most in this stage of my parenting.
How much is too much help? How much should I nag, oversee, instruct? It didn’t help that the guidelines were vague or altogether missing in his class—for instance, they required MLA citations and yet provided no examples. Again and again, I found myself in a precarious position. I wanted to inspire him to learn, but how much was too much? How would I know if I had overstepped the bounds?
Tangent—I cannot imagine how parents who are not all up on their citation manuals even did it. It was a stretch for me since I really only learned APA in college. I work at a university—what about parents who don’t grade papers or work with faculty and researchers who write books and journal articles and present conference papers every year?
Back to the conflict—it always comes down to how much I should intervene, and I always come away feeling like I didn’t hit the target. When was it enough? When was it too much? When would it be time to let go and allow him to fail? How could I sit back and watch him falter, trying to find his way on his own?
I was just as frustrated with his teachers as he was. We had made the decision to force him to stay in the class to learn a life-lesson—how to deal with people or situations that you don’t like—and been completely upfront with him about it. I was fighting against being a helicopter mom, and fighting against being unsupportive mom, while K reported home the names of the other kids who had been pulled out of the class by their parents.
And then there were the logistical problems to the project. He couldn’t research at school, given their limited scope of books on his topic, and the school’s internet monitoring system produced useless Google searches. I had to walk the line while teaching him how to find sources and articles, but not selecting them for him. I ordered documentaries up on Netflix and shared a couple of my college textbooks. I bought the music he wanted for his project on iTunes. I was continuously walking the line between assisting and instructing on one hand, and feeling as if I were taking over his project on the other.
Then, with one week left to complete the papers and the exhibits, he came down sick. For as much nagging as I had done in the weeks prior, he had procrastinated to the point that none of those things were done. I chafed while buying supplies for his exhibit, even though his fever was over 102 degrees. I was at my limit.
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