Homework might have been boring in the past, in my childhood. It might have been a burden, something I did only because I had to. But I have never truly hated homework until now. How painful it is to haul out the stack of papers and sit with a child who wiggles and fusses, eyes darting everywhere, insisting that she must color, her boo-boo hurts, that the light hurts her eyes. She grabs the pencil and begins to scribble, not waiting for directions.
She groans at the instructions. Each word she writes is a jumble of consonants, a short vowel word written right to left and spelled backwards, or just the first letter of the word. She writes, "I L sme," and I know she loves our dog, Sammy. Her favorite animal is a G-O-D, written right to left D-O-G. She writes letters backwards, common for a first grader, but the letters are sometimes stacked vertically on their sides in a Tower of Babel.
This is a bright child who is struggling to learn to read, to count to twenty without skipping a number. This is a child who has been sent home from school twice for vomiting her breakfast under the strain of learning in a special education classroom. In a strange way, I am grateful to her. She won't fly under the radar and fall through the cracks. But can she learn?
I believe she can learn. I have faith that she can learn well and thrive in the right academic environment. I just have to find the right place and the right tools to help her.
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