Ink Paper Words' Profile

My photo
Pacific Northwest, United States
In elementary school, I desperately wanted my mother to order books for me from those flyers Scholastic hands out to kids. She refused, citing the "perfectly good library down the street." I exacted revenge by becoming a card-carrying ALA accredited reference librarian. Ha! Take that!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

GED Follies!

My son with Type I diabetes and ADHD has had problems staying on task in school since he was in the first grade. He is now 15½ and somehow has managed not to be held back despite constantly disrupting class, never doing homework and multiple suspensions. I guess he has the opposite of test anxiety, because standardized California tests always put him at acceptable or higher competencies.

His attention problems continued this year, naturally. The school was in the process of referring him to the alternative school for troublemakers, which I did not see as an improvement in his situation. My opinion was that in such a setting he would only learn more anti-social behavior. So instead, I opted to home school him.

I have always believed that some jobs are better left to the professionals and teaching is certainly one of those. OTOH, I figured I couldn't do any worse than the professionals have with him. And besides, it's hard to ditch, vandalize or disrupt the class when you're the only student and Mom is the teacher, janitor and principal.

We went to the library and got a couple different GED study guides. To get a baseline idea of where he was academically and see what the weak spots were, I had him take one of the sample tests. Lo and behold, if the test he took had been a real one (which he can't take for another 6 months) he would have passed. A passing score is an average of 450 across the 5 sections, with no one section being lower than 410. He got an average of 574 and the lowest was 450.

I really admire his obvious intelligence. I just wish he could find a positive way to channel it. ;(

No comments:

Post a Comment