Parenting Really IS Not for Wimps

Never tell yourself, "wow, things have finally settled down and I can just enjoy life for a little bit." If you do that, you are guaranteed to have some huge issue raise its head.

And now the supposedly dead issue of Beccano's academic troubles is back. He has had trouble with math and history all year. He has nearly failed one or the other every grading period (and there seems to be one every week--they have "progress reports" at 3-week intervals that really compound the info. He is really stressed out, because he seems to be doing his best and still not succeeding. Of course, his reaction to being overwhelmed is to withdraw, which looks to teachers like "not trying."

I worry about him, mainly because he just does not seem to "get" math and never has. He has the issue I always had (making small errors even while doing it mostly correctly) but much worse. And the text books don't help. I can't ever understand what he is supposed to do in the history class. I have never read such ambiguous instructions in my life. They ask questions about maps and charts, asking for things not spelled out on the chart or map, for example. I think they want the kids to make inferences, but some of them they have to pull out of their butts.

I am working to get him some tutoring from home schooling friends, and hope that will help. I am a bit hampered in that I never had really bad issues in school. Even though math was hard for me, I managed to make As and Bs in it, and everything else was just no trouble at all. The most experience I had was trying to help my high school boyfriend get through Algebra 2 and the GRE math exam. He was much like Beccano with math. It just didn't happen for him, even though he was brilliant with words. It's so frustrating to have a gap like that when you are otherwise very intelligent (and Beccano IS very intelligent--you know it when you talk to him).

Well, I just don't want him to base his entire self-esteem on this one area. He can slip into that, just like I can, so I understand. And he gets so upset that he can't sleep at night, making it even harder to do math in the mornings. A downward spiral, as Stephen Wolfram used to say. You just hate to see your children down.

I'll write more on this later. Just needed to get it off my chest. All else is fine. Work is going OK, home is good other than Beccano. Trying to settle down. Then I will make a better plan for finding some friends. I hope the new church tarot group will help with that--of course, I'd need to announce it in order for that to happen. Go me.