Preparing for virtual school with my sons with ADHD and dyslexia
By: Rosa Walker
Tags: Education, Family, Parenting, Education Reform, Disability Rights

Here is what I learned in the spring & what I will do differently in September

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Emergency online school was a disaster for my two older sons last spring. Matias, age 9, and Tomas, age 7, both have ADHD and some (undiagnosed) anxiety. Matias has an IEP for reading help, as well as for organizational supports related to his ADHD.

Fearless, active, vivo children, my boys are also, conversely, of the orchid category. They thrive on routine and even small, favorable changes (like starting the soccer season) disrupt them deeply for days or even weeks. Now, in a pandemic-induced quarantine, contact with friends and all extracurriculars abruptly halted (choir, chess, robotics and soccer), and a mother moderately sick with COVID 19?

Things were a whole lot worse.

They were understandably volatile, cranky. They had no tolerance for any additional change. They were both revved up and scattered.

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Their whole world just been upturned and I was obsessing on math story problems about kids they didn’t know and apples they didn’t care about.

As a family, we made the hard (but privileged) decision for me to take emergency family leave through the new CARE act so that I could offer my boys my full attention with virtual homeschooling, once I was healthy again. I downloaded assignments, created a color-coded calendar, bought some pencils, glue and lined paper and was raring to go. In a period of such uncertainty, I was ready to offer my boys and myself a constant with school.

My sons’ responses were clear from the get-go, but I took three more weeks to understand.

They rebelled at online math assignments, frustrated with the repetition and lack of context. Zearn, the math platform, had become a bad word. They pushed back at projects that felt disconnected from what they were doing at home: planting tomatoes, jumping on the trampoline, and playing Legos. And without their classmates and teacher to offer context and social motivation, school fell flat.

Trying to move my sons through their school work each day was a vigorous swim upstream — not to mention a logistical nightmare of hopping from one son and his Zoom conference, to another son and his math activity, while a third boy lost interest and wandered off.

What are my priorities for my three creative, biracial, bilingual sons as human beings and learners? Decoding story problems doesn’t even hit the top 20.

Our mutual frustrations came to a head one afternoon as I tried to work with my oldest son, Matias, on his math. He kept twirling on the swing and closing his eyes, and then trying halfheartedly to read the computer screen that I held from the nearby steps of the treehouse, as he swung back. Movement often helps him self-regulate, so the swing was not a problem in of itself. He just couldn’t maintain focus. Reading the multi-sentence story problems off the screen shut him down, so I rewrote them and we tried to read them together, underlining the key words. And then we drew out the apples and children involved in the story. At that point, my youngest son, Gabriel, bounded in to sing loudly and scrawl chalk all over us and the nearby treehouse.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” -Albert Einstein is generally credited

Matias finally stood up and tore his paper in half, shouting, “I can’t do this!” And then he stormed off.

I sat clutching my laptop on knees, reeling.

In my eagerness to show him that he could, indeed, do this, I had communicated exactly the opposite. What ran through my mind as I sat there on the steps of the treehouse, was how many times adults had said to me, as a child with learning disability, “I am not sure how else to teach you this,” and my internalization of: I can’t do this, there is something lacking in me.

My stomach heaved as those words rang clearly through my head. I would never speak them to my son, and yet he had still received the message that the fault was somehow with him.

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In my eagerness to find structure, and to keep gaining ground with reading and writing, I had ran roughshod over my sons’ clear message: online schooling was not working for them. Their whole world just been upturned and I was obsessing on math story problems about kids they didn’t know and apples they didn’t care about.

Over the next couple of days, I took stock.

In talking with both my husband and our sons’ counselor, I realized the sense of urgency driving my focus on my sons’ online schooling. With both older boys “behind” in reading and writing skills, I felt an added responsibility to help them “catch up” with their peers so that September would not be such a hard reentry.

But deeper than all of that, I realized I was letting an old idea of scarcity run me. A panic that there was not enough time for my children to learn. This panic was of course rooted in my own childhood experience of moving through a school system that was not fully able to meet my needs as a child with learning differences.

What are my priorities for my three creative, biracial, bilingual sons as human beings and learners?

Decoding story problems doesn’t even hit the top 20.

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I want them to trust the flow of their own curiosity as they explore the world around them, because this will sustain them far more than doing a task because an adult asked them to do so. I want them to own their learning process without apology and to ask confidently for that they need: whether that be the option to dictate an essay, or a checklist to help keep them organized. I want them to value their own strengths, and their fearless, innovative, biracial and bilingual selves.

I want them to be kind humans who will steward this planet, and respect every animal, plant and human they encounter.

With that in mind, we sat down and talked as a family (well, walked and talked because movement always helps us communicate better) about what to do.

We decided to unplug from online learning and completely follow the boys’ interests for most of the day. Each afternoon, we would write or read, but the boys would have total control over what. They could write a letter, recipe, or translate song lyrics from Spanish to English. They could read weird Shel Silverstein poems, graphic novels, comics, or listen to chapter books. With the boys’ input, we did decide to keep the “extra” reading support classes by Zoom as the boys were working hard and enjoying the contact with their peers and teachers in this context. They were also making gains.

Deciding to completely trust my children as active agents capable of learning on their own terms, in the context of a pandemic with so many other uncertain elements, terrified me a bit.

But after day one, I knew we had made the right choice.

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In those final three weeks before summer, my sons explored break dancing (thank you dancers on YouTube for sharing your craft), origami, and delved deeper into strategy games: Othello, chess and Go. They created multi-course, Japanese-Chilean fusion meals flavored with umeboshi, or fermented, salted plum paste, celery and lemon.

They created, directed and performed an elaborate puppet show. They also made flan for their dad’s birthday, seeking advice from family members in Chile by WhatsApp over how to best caramelize the sugar (under my watchful eye).

My oldest son had been so inspired by the craft of the new graphic novels we were reading — Hilo, Amulet, Witch Boy and Zita the Space Girl to name a few — that he spent hours creating character sketches and storylines in his own notebook.

And all boys spent the mornings with our new chicks: learning their personalities, how their chirps would change when stressed, calm, or calling for their sisters, and what bugs they preferred to eat. I watched my oldest son once follow our four chicks for hours (in full chick mode), imitating their chirps, offering them bugs, and just observing them intently.

Taking stock in September

After a week delay due to devastating wildfires in our area, virtual school is starting again this Monday. Time to take stock yet again.

After an endless, atypical Summer, we are all hungry for some routine, predictable peer contact, and fresh ideas.

School will be more streamlined and synchronous (Zoom conferences with teacher and small/large groups of peers). Both sons already know and feel rapport with their new teachers.

My husband and I will take turns supporting the boys with virtual schooling between our works schedules (my husband will work weekends to make this possible). This will offer my husband and boys a chance to spend more time together, and to work on reading, writing and speaking in Spanish in the afternoons.

For visual aids, we have created together — after much trial and error — a visual, magnetic calendar with drawings on wooden, magnetic pieces that the boys can move around to build their daily and monthly schedule. This is our most interactive, accessible schedule yet (and it's in Spanish too, which is best for my husband, and another literacy opportunity for our boys).

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But more important than any of these factors is that I have learned to truly trust my boys’ learning process. The onus is not on them to strain and fit the normative learning style. The onus is not on them to be a tidy constant in a messy, variable, pandemic-fraught world.

If anything, current events (political strife, fires exacerbated by climate change, a pandemic) have underscored to me the importance of nurturing my sons’ innovative, fearless approach to learning and life.

Our planet will need all of their creative forces.

Here is my vow to my sons for the coming months (or year) of virtual learning:

I will listen to your questions and ideas.

I will respect your learning process and I will find you role models who excel in the world as different learners.

I will inspire you to work hard and think deeply — for the sake of learning itself.

I will stand beside you and stand up for you whenever you need.

We will make it through this year together: let's see where we end up.

Here is more of my work you may enjoy. Thank you for your comments, feedback and thoughts, which I always appreciate.