Posts Tagged ‘children’

  • 24 Feb

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    Being a selfish #homeschool parent

    4

    From the time The Wast was born, he puzzled us. Here was a child who could not go to sleep for the first four months of his life if he wasn’t resting on my chest. As a result, I learnt how to sleep while half-reclining in bed, holding him loosely in my arms as I dozed. It was strange and we didn’t know how to deal with it until we stumbled across the term “attachment parenting”, which is a philosophy that prioritises parent-child bonding above everything else. In fact, you could say that The Wast actually set the pace by demanding attachment parenting from us. He was much more content (and quiet!) if he slept near us, was breastfed on demand, carried about in a baby sling and generally handled more than not.

    Being an attachment parent can be very demanding but The Wast trained us so well that we fell into it again very naturally when Little Dinosaur arrived. It became normal to hold them at every opportunity, to check on them while they slept. Their beds were in our room and we co-slept until our move to Singapore. We eschewed baby monitors, pacifiers (dummies) and commercial baby food. And boy, it was tough. There were days when I was t-h-i-s close to a frazzled nervous breakdown. But we persevered because we had a long-term goal in mind, and that was to bring up children who considered us friends and who would themselves develop into caring, responsible adults.

    When they started “normal” school, J and I hated it, although it took a few years to figure out why. Was it because we didn’t get to see them for the best part of their day? Was it their exhaustion when they finally walked through the door? The hours and homework that ate away at the time they could spend with us? But we kept them at school because that was how we thought it worked. We thought we had to put aside our own reservations for the good of their “education”.

    Then, all the problems started and I won’t repeat them because I’m sure you’ve heard enough about them, and we made the hard choice to homeschool. And it’s turned out that homeschooling is exactly the right choice for us as attachment parents.

    Our children are our friends again, and we share plans and projects with each other. We share our lessons and interests with them (the Byzantium Empire, cooking and publishing) and they share their lessons and interests with us (mathematics, movie-making, and computer animation). This is all apart from the satisfaction we get from crafting an individual educational framework for each of our children, one that’s seeing them move beyond their peers (and kneejerk diagnoses of “autism”, “nervous system disorders”, “severe retardation”, etc.) to achieve at a level a year or two beyond their age group.

    Now, I sit back and wonder how I ever thought of education in any other terms. We’re not religious or dogmatic people. We homeschooled our children at first out of necessity, but are now finding it a joy because, in addition to the academic achievements, we’ve rediscovered our children and they’ve proven themselves to be wonderful, resourceful humans. We know they’ll go and find their own way in life — they must do — but, in the meantime, we’re proud to be sharing part of our life’s journey with them.

    ADDITIONAL: One of the links I’ll be putting here is from a report by Bonnie Rochman, who says:

    As I understand it, attachment parenting puts babies first and mommies and daddies trailing behind in a distinct second/third position.

    While that may be how it looks to an utterly disinterested observer (and let’s not even start on the patronising “mommies and daddies” term! Jesus frickin’ Christ!), that’s not how the dynamic actually works. To me, attachment parenting is about respect. Just because you’re in a position of power over a child (and, as a parent, you are) doesn’t give you the right to dictate particular actions without respecting the child’s opinion or perspective. That’s it in a nutshell for us. And if you can’t do that (respect your child as another growing human being), then don’t have kids.

    To learn more about attachment parenting, try Attachment Parenting International

    You can read the opposing case from Ms. Rochman and Erica Jong at Healthland 

    Can I just say…Jong seems to think that caring for a child 24×7 “shackles” me, as a mother. Yet, not only do I do almost all the cooking at home, as well as homeschooling, ferrying the kids to a lot of their external classes, and seeing to the other domesticated animals, but I also find time to write for a few hours, chew the fat with J over a couple of glasses of alcoholic beverages, watch a movie almost every night, and get some recreational reading in. Not to forget my 8-9 hours of sleep. Admittedly, I couldn’t do all that with toddlers, but kids are only at that stage for a little while. Take it from me, attachment parenting is not a death sentence.

    I’m back to writing BALANCE OF TERROR and am a little over 10% done. 90% to go!

  • 16 Dec

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    Do the British even LIKE their children?

    7

    Last year, as we were driving around the neighbourhood, we noticed a banner up at the side of the road advertising Christmas Dinner at a nearby restaurant. With nothing planned for Christmas Eve, we decided to go there. And we did. It was stupendous. There was roast turkey and lamb, smoked salmon and mackerel, pasta, vegetables (including my fav, Brussel Sprouts) and a full range of desserts. Wine was offered at a special two-bottles-for-the-price-of-one, the tables were decorated and the staff were courteous, smiling and helpful. The best thing was, it was a buffet. We didn’t so much waddle, as roll, out the door at night’s end.

    I know this might be construed as racist but, just as the Chinese are generally seen as being industrious, Malays can throw extremely good parties. And even though all the staff were Malay (and thus Muslim), and there were unfortunately no pork products available (ham…sigh), the entire family was made to feel extremely welcome. There was even a Santa Claus (one of the staff) handing out little presents to all the kids who attended. I doubt anyone could have done it better.

    As you can imagine, after that wonderful night, we were waiting with bated breath for this year, hoping that the neighbourhood restaurant would do the same thing. What we forgot was this.

    Since last year, there has been a significant influx of expats into the area. British expats, mostly. And a group of them must have approached the management of the neighbourhood restaurant because, this year, we don’t have the dinner like we had last year. Oh no, this year, we have two parties. A kids’ party and, one and a half hours later, an adults’ party.

    This seems to be a peculiarly British and Australian thing, this division of…well, everything at a social event. (The Americans, from the Californian parties we attended, seem generally, thankfully, free of this kind of WTFery.) If there are Australians at a barbie, they’ll automatically divide into the men’s group and the women’s group, with a no-go area in between. (And, if you’re male and more interested in women, and thus cross the invisible line to go talk to said women, you’ll be regarded as a “poofter”, which is incredibly ironic as “poofter” is a derogatory term for a gay. If you’re a woman and more interested in talking to the men, well of course you’re a “slut”.)

    If you socialise with a bunch of Poms, they’ll inevitably throw an event where the kids have to disappear for hours on end while the adults have some fun. What’s interesting about this is that the Poms won’t organise an alternative to occupy the kids that aren’t supposed to be there, they’re just not supposed to be there, and it appears to be perfectly okay if their (and your) children are walking the streets or panhandling or something, as long as no carousing adult catches sight of one.

    Why I’m particularly bemused this year is that, of all the holidays of all the seasons of all of the year, you’d really expect CHRISTMAS to be a family event, wouldn’t you? I can understand a no-children rule at, say, a Valentine’s Day dinner or New Year’s Eve bash (and we’ve not attended more than a decades’ worth of said parties due to our little petals) but CHRISTMAS???? Good freakin’ grief!

    So there you go, another promising event shot to hell, and it’s all thanks to the British. Even when their colonising armies went home, their mentality obviously didn’t.

  • 25 Nov

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    The reluctant homeschooler, Part IV of IV

    2

    And so here we are. What began as a move of desperation now appears to me to be the only way to properly educate children. I understand that it’s not for everyone for a number of reasons.

    1. It requires that there is only one, maybe one and a half, breadwinners in the family. With the current economic assault on everyone by The Rich, this is becoming more and more difficult to achieve. However, in areas where homeschooling is not such an oasis in the desert as it is here, there may be a way of cobbling together a co-op system with a group of parents with varying skills and experiences.
    2. It requires a major throttling back of unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved in a given amount of time. (That, I believe, is where I went wrong with LD and I readily admit paying the price for my unreasonableness now.) Baby steps first….
    3. It requires an immense sense of confidence, not only in yourself but in your children.
    4. It requires constant adjustments and tweaking. No egos allowed here!

    The fact that those reasons appear contradictory indicates the complexity of mindset and expectations required if you’re going to make homeschooling work.

    Where does that leave the kids? One of the PUKS Masters disparagingly asked us what we were going to do with TW when we’d finished homeschooling him to Senior year/Form Six. “Tell him to go out and get a job, I suppose,” he said. It was only because, at that time, I was still holding hopes of having LD accepted there that I held the inevitable retort of calling him a pretentious, self-righteous, impolite wanker.

    “No,” I replied instead. “During that time, I’ll be preparing him for pre-University exams. I believe those are independent of schools.”

    I believe, if I have planned this right, that TW will be ready to take his pre-U exams when he’s 15. And, if so, it will mean that he would have spent no more than four and a half years in a formal school system.

    As for LD…well, we’re waiting. There was something that sparked in TW and he blossomed. Could the same happen with her? I see flashes of it every now and then. TW is living proof of the plasticity of intelligence and we are hoping for something similar with our daughter. But, in case that doesn’t happen, we still have the flexible system that she’s currently schooling under and that we’re constantly adjusting. There’s no way a traditional school system can hope to match the nimbleness of our current framework and, at this stage, I’m not even willing to put her back there to try.

    And so that’s the tale of the atheist homeschooler. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

  • 18 Nov

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    The reluctant homeschooler, Part III of IV

    4

    We are now in the third quarter of 2011, by my retelling. Our overwhelming feeling is that our kids have been treated as nothing more than guinea pigs by people who had boasted to us about their years and experience in education. Years that we readily admitted we didn’t have. We fell for their spiel to “trust them”. And, by turns (with the one notable exception of Boon Lay), our children were ignored, assaulted, bullied, insulted and yelled out by people who were in positions of authority over them.

    I don’t know if I can adequately explain the sense of burning rage I still feel as I type these words, and that anger has not diminished. But still, despite all that, we had hopes for Prestigious UK School (PUKS for short). We went along and had several meetings with them.

    I pause now so I can give you some context. Our son? TW? The one who was “severely retarded”? He’s two years ahead of his age in English and at least one year ahead in Maths and Science. Putting him in a regular school, we thought, would actually stunt him at this stage. PUKS told us that school would begin at 8:30am and that kids would get home by 5:15pm. That was the equivalent of a full working day, plus homework on top of that. That would leave no time for TW to indulge in his other passions of movie-making, game design and learning graphics and computer animation (all of which he currently does outside homeschool hours).

    LD was another issue. There’s an old adage that says you should treat your children equally. Bullshit. Children are individuals and that means tailoring your demands to their personalities. However I was teaching was working with TW but was causing major tissue avalanches with LD. After some enquiries, I discovered a tuition system that was Kumon-like and close by. Encouraging independent working, they would take LD through Maths and English twice a week. But was this enough? We enrolled LD for those twice-weekly classes while we considered PUKS.

    Tbh, I considered PUKS the superior choice. I could work on TW at home and LD, a really sweet and caring kid, could do what was so important to her and develop relationships outside the family circle.

    I so wanted PUKS to be the answer. And then they turned out to be like everyone else we’d encountered. We heard the same old statements we’d heard before. “We have values that all children must adhere to….” “Our years of experience in education….” “You understand that, during the Primary years, we won’t be concentrating on academic performance at all….” “We have an excellent Sports programme….”

    There were two death knells. The first came when we couldn’t even get a provisional place for LD. Oh, they went on about what a wonderful child she is, based on a one-on-one interview they conducted with her, but they wouldn’t even give us a tentative answer as to whether she’d be accepted in PUKS. They would have to wait for a Psychologist’s Report and — and these are my words — how much work they would need to exert before they could give us their final decision. They had already told us that they were over-subscribed and so not every child would get in. And, once more, we felt we were being set up for a fall. (We’re still going through with the psychological assessment, but that will be for our own benefit.)

    The second was when the Head told us quite baldly at the end of our last discussion that we couldn’t expect their system (even with a given that there going to be a Learning Support component added) to cater to LD.

    And it was like a lightbulb exploding in my head. Hold on a sec, I thought. Right now, I do have a system that specifically caters to LD. To my surprise, she was really taking to the outside tuition classes and, in the alternate days when I was schooling her, I was seeing improvements in her attitude and the quality of her work. I was also working on other, multi-sensory methods to help her with Maths and, to a lesser extent because she doesn’t seem to need it so much, English. Add violin, Wushu, Dance, and UK-accredited Speech & Drama classes, and I was still spending less than RM6,000 a year and getting out of it (I thought) a pretty well-rounded child.

    PUKS was telling me that they were unable to be all things to all children and expected us to shell out RM60,000 for that first year of schooling (almost twice the average annual wage). Plus uniforms plus food plus extra-curricular activities plus a four-figure non-refundable registration fee, and so on.

    Why would I give up a totally personalised, completely customised, eminently flexible, lightweight system that was working, for one that was rigid, inflexible, ponderous, with no guarantees, at TEN TIMES THE PRICE???

  • 04 Nov

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    The reluctant homeschooler, Part II of IV

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    When I finally got my hands on the kids, and put them through their paces, I was appalled. We had been paying high school fees and I discovered that both kids had actually regressed. LD, at the age of eight, couldn’t even repeat the alphabet!

    But we had an advantage. Being foreigners, we fell straight through the cracks of local federal regulations. Thus, if I wanted to, I could teach or not teach my children however I pleased.

    J and I sat and discussed our options. There were a number of schools being built in our area. We would wait until one was open and enrol the kids there. In the meantime, I would homeschool. And that’s how it began. It was a move of desperation and we always thought that the time would come when we’d fold our children back into the traditional schooling mix.

    The first six months were the worst, as I well admit. Per an old blog post:

    Well, I had the kind of super-obsessive, “Asian tiger” parents that I detest but I have to admit they did a good job on brainwashing me. So I had to get rid of all that “it’s A’s or it’s nothing” shit (including the classic “you only got 99% for that exam; I refuse to talk to you for the entire day”) that made my own childhood such a misery. Forming new disciplinary pathways in my brain took months, to be honest. Months to relax into the kind of attitude that put comprehension, fostering an air of exploration, and questioning above 100-question drills on how to add mixed numbers. (Not that I don’t do that, but that’s usually at the end when the kids can do all that in their sleep!)

    And when I started to relax, I branched out a bit, searching out resources on the Net. (There are no local homeschoolers to talk to.) LD looked like she was suffering from both dyslexia and dyscalculia, but there were also flashes of brilliance that made me catch my breath.

    I totalled the amount of money that we had spent on school fees and told J that I was funnelling that amount into homeschooling. He readily agreed. I bought workbooks, reading books, learning systems and DVD courses. I set up a smartboard system to use at home. We bought the kids new laptops. We enrolled them in some external classes. And do you know what? With all that expense (and I spent money on whatever looked promising, figuring we’d assess its worth once we started using it) I still wasn’t spending a fifth of what we’d thrown down the drain at the local private school.

    That made us think. What exactly were we paying for in a private school?

    I would spend half a day teaching the kids, test them, and still give them enough remaining time for them to indulge in their own interests (which, increasingly, seem to encompass making their own movies and games). Given the choice, without any kind of persuasion on my part, our children would prefer to storyboard a short movie than sit down and watch TV.

    But how could this be? Weren’t we told that the “best” system was the public/private schooling system? That homeschooling parents were somehow “cheating” their children out of much-needed social and cognitive development? Yet, when I watched our own kids, that wasn’t what I was seeing at all.

    Something wasn’t gelling.

    As these heretical thoughts swirled around in my brain, two things happened. One very prestigious UK-based school announced that it was opening a campus ten minutes away from us. And LD started to burst into tears the moment she tackled any difficult problem.

  • 28 Oct

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    The reluctant homeschooler, Part I of IV

    2

    Let me get one thing straight before I begin. J and I loved school. (I may not have liked what went on around school, like the bullying and the name-calling, but school itself…brilliant!) We were very good students ourselves. And, until fairly recently, were gung-ho proponents  of yer basic, federally-supervised, school system.

    Our story actually started back in Australia, when The Wast was at the beginning of his schooling career. Now, TW has always been a bit of a “different” child…shy, a bit obsessive and stubborn. But, as parents, we could always see the intelligence lurking under that shield of obstinate near-silence. In our ignorance, we expected teachers (i.e. people with actual degrees in Education) to be able to discern part of that too. They didn’t. What the teachers proved to us was that they were super-quick to jump to conclusions, even after admitting they had no training in pedagogy or child psychology, and we have the reports on our “severely retarded” and “highly autistic” son to prove it.

    When we moved to Singapore, and TW joined an International School (a move I was dead against, btw, because I had attended an International School and saw them as nothing more than social clubs for children), things didn’t improve. Again, he was accused of being developmentally challenged. When we paid for tests and got the results that said that he was “normal” (whatever that means), the school still didn’t believe it.

    With, we thought, nothing left to lose, we put TW in a publicly-funded Singaporean school. (Hi there, Boon Lay Garden Primary School!) And, for whatever reason, he thrived! He became one of the class monitors and started scoring straight As in his subjects. It was as if a light switch had been clicked on. We still don’t know what, why or how it happened.

    When we moved to Malaysia, we reluctantly made the decision to school the kids locally, and here’s where I start the tale of our second child, Little Dinosaur.

    Both children were emergency, premature births, but LD spent a month in the hospital’s Special Unit that TW didn’t. We were warned that her complicated birth would have ramifications, and the ramifications came home to roost while we were switching from Singapore to Malaysia.

    We put the kids in the top private school in Johor state at that time. And then, over the space of two years, we started to notice a deterioration in both our children’s performance. TW was bored and LD was being ignored in classrooms of 36 and 37 students. If you add the Great Tuition Scam, then it was a travesty.

    All the school seemed interested in was making as much money out of status-conscious parents as it could. But, if we wanted our children to be educated in English, it appeared we had no choice. We had to stick to private schools.

    The breaking point finally came when a repeat offender younger boy stabbed my daughter in the thigh with a pencil. The school actually forced LD, in front of the principal, vice-principal, her class teacher and the boy’s teacher, to say she “forgave” him and the school considered the matter closed. To my mind, that was coercion of the worst kind (where do I begin?) and there was only one solution: pull the kids out of school.

  • 02 Sep

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    At the coal-face with the children

    0

    As you know, stalwart reader, I’m homeschooling the kids. Part of their curriculum includes the use of technology and the concept of blogging. For their very first blog, I asked the kids to write a short post on anything that took their fancy. This is Little Dinosaur’s 9yo effort. After she came up with a title, being about herself (yes, she’s a vain little thing), she goes on to say:

    I wake up in the morning to eat my breakfast.

    If there is noting to do on my computer then I go up stairs to watch TV[.]

    I watch Animal planet, Mhtbusters [sic] and and TVIQ so that[']s what I watch.

    Okay, we’re working on her punctuation and a bit of her spelling. Ahem. You’ll notice she doesn’t say anything about school though! In any case, here is her 11yo brother’s comment to her post:

    The whole family knows what you are doing. It’s not like we don[']t pay attention.

    They have wonderful arguments and all J and I can do is try to stifle our laughter as we listen to them. Ah, kids. I know I keep threatening to sell them but I think I’ll hang onto them for a little while longer. Hope your weekend is an entertaining and I’ll catch you next week.

  • 22 Jul

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    WAR GAMES ready for 1 August release! / Society-FAIL

    1

    Well, it’s been a long haul so far…and it isn’t over yet. BUT, I can tell you that WAR GAMES is on schedule for official release on Monday, 1 August. And the fully-edited Prologue is up at my site for your reading pleasure.

    Cover for War GamesThe main problem with telling you that it’ll be released on the first of August, however, is that it takes time for the uploads to propagate to various etailer sites, so I wouldn’t go looking for the book on the Monday, if I were you. Best to leave it a couple of days.

    By now, stalwart reader, you would know the history of this novel. It’s been more than two years in the making. The book has gone through increases and decreases and now seems to be settled happily at almost the 90,000 word mark. I’ve taken out scenes and fleshed out others and I’m pleased with the result.

    WAR GAMES is also important because it’s my first self-published title and the first release for my own micro-press, so I had to dot many more “i”s and cross many more “t”s to ensure that things fitted together well. But we’re not done. There are still other plans in the works, other books, other offers, other enhancements. I am the ultimate tinkerer.

    For now, though, looking towards the end of the month, it all appears doable. And, for that, I’m very happy.

     

    ***

     

    I don’t always do this. In fact, I can’t remember ever putting a section break in my blog posts, but I had to share something with you. I was taking The Wast through English and he had to pick the appropriate verb in order to satisfy subject-verb agreement. (That is, single subject, singular form of verb; multiple subjects, plural form of verb, that kind of thing.) I won’t go through the exercise with you but I do want to share the output. A case of English-pass but Society-fail, if you will.

    Darren told Alan, “Walking is a good form of exercise. We have to exercise to stay healthy.”
    “You have been telling me that for a long time,” replied Alan, who is used to other activities like playing football. “Jenny and Liza were out walking yesterday when they were robbed. It’s really not safe to walk on your own.”
    Darren said, “They were foolish. They chose to walk at night. Plus, they were not paying attention to what was going on round them. And it’s not like they don’t know about safety measures. Whatever it is, everyone is responsible for his and her own safety. They should have been more careful.” *

    Of course Malaysia can’t be described as libertarian-leaning by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m sure the average Malaysian knows just how, um, hard-working the local police are. They are paid for with public money but, as you can see from the above passage, they are absolutely NOT responsible for public safety.

    I’m not sure what revolts me more about this passage:

    (A) The fact that women’s safety is so easily glossed over
    (B) The “blame the victim” mentality inherent in the piece
    (C) The absolution of police from any kind of behaviour to protect the public
    (D) The fact that two out of three authors of this Guide are women (see below)
    (E) The inculcation of contempt for women being woven into education from a tender age
    (F) The complete incomprehension of locals to the heinous nature of this drivel
    (G) All of the above

    With this in mind, I hope you have a  better weekend than me and I’ll catch you next week.

    * Taken from “Longman Essential English Form 2 Revision Guide” (2011) by Sheela Prabhakaran, Doreen Da Costa, K. N. Vasanthy

  • 01 Jul

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    By George, I think she’s got it!

    1

    I’ll be honest and say I thought it was a long shot.

    You’ll remember that, when discussing Little Dinosaur’s dyscalculia, I related that I had tried everything I could think of—writing, reciting, standing and reciting, standing and writing, writing and reciting—to get LD to remember her times table. All to no avail.

    Then, in a Learning Aids email, I read that:

    Traditional methods just won’t work for these kids, so put your flashcards up. Remember about the right-brain dominant student? This child needs pictures and color to learn and remember. Also, I have found these kids to be weak in visual memory skills.

    What is visual memory? It is simply the ability to hold a picture in your mind. I find it odd that these kids are weak in visual memory but still need pictures and color to learn.

    However, I have found that if you add color and a picture to a math fact as well as a tactile substance such as shaving cream, then the student has a better chance at holding this information in long term memory.

    With no other strategies in place, I decided to give it a go. For the two times table, I got LD to use a tube of toothpaste (hoping to also riff off “two” and “too”-thpaste) as her tactile stimulus. J wondered what his toothpaste was doing in the library, blinked a few times when I explained what I was trying to do, and let us get on with it.

    I told LD to feel the toothpaste between her fingers, smell it, even lick it if need be, while reading through her two times table, written in blue on orange paper. After doing this for three days, I then gave her a pop quiz in the car while we were coming back from shopping. She answered. Every. Blasted. Question. Correctly! So, right about now, I feel rather like Professor Higgins here:

    Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

  • 17 Jun

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    On homeschooling and learning difficulties

    0

    Last week, I updated you a little on our homeschooling activities but added that it hasn’t been all beer and skittles. Read on….

    We had a problem. Little Dinosaur is a whiz at maths. She can be playing with her dolls, colouring in a picture, essentially not paying attention to the teacher. But, when the teacher asks her a question, she’ll answer it. That was the surprised revelation from one of her pre-primary teachers. The woman didn’t want to believe it, but had to admit that LD’s mathematical ability was above average.

    As you can imagine, as a result of this, we were feeling pretty confident putting her in school. Then her Maths marks started to drop. And drop. And we were facing a cliff. We didn’t pull our kids out of traditional school because of this, but for other reasons. And when I took over LD’s math instruction, I found something horrifying. At the age of eight, she didn’t even know her two times table.

    I queried her more closely about what happened at school and discovered that (a) even in exams, she used to copy answers from a friend of hers, and (b) the teacher ignored a whole swathe of the class, concentrating instead on the brightest students. With no attention and no motivation, LD just stopped caring about a subject that she was having difficulties with anyway.

    The first six months of homeschooling were filled with drills. Multiplication tables written down, recited out loud, five times, ten times. She’d be able to do complex long division and then, one week later, not even know what three times two equals. It was driving me insane! Until J intervened one morning, pointed out that our little girl was not doing this just to get a rise out of me, and suggested I do a bit of research to get to the bottom of the problem. And so I did.

    The problem, as far as I can ascertain, is dyscalculia and we should’ve seen it coming. LD was born two months premature and was in Intensive Care for a month. The doctors constantly told us that she might face developmental problems when she got older. Seems they were right.

    Just as dyslexia is a learning difficulty associated with language, dyscalculia is a learning difficulty associated with mathematics. Although there can be a genetic component to the disorder, J and I have ruled that out because we both come from families with strong mathematical abilities. We think there’s a physical, neurological deficiency in LD’s brain that’s causing the problem, linked to lack of long-term retention of core mathematical concepts.

    Let me speak plainly. Education in Asia is primitive, geared to mountains of rote learning and resistant to innovative paradigms. Within that environment, if you’re not smart, you’re “stupid” and the school’s Maths teacher plainly regarded LD as being “stupid” and, therefore, not worthy of his attention. This is a prevalent attitude in Asia. I’m glad we pulled LD out of school because she would never have been correctly diagnosed in such a rigid learning environment. The thing that really bites though is, once she’s mastered a maths skill (whether it’s adding improper fractions, long division, rounding), she aces the tests. She takes real pride in being able to complete the questions accurately and quickly. Yet, two weeks later, and she’s lost it all, not even remembering what the long division symbol is supposed to look like.

    So what are we doing about it? We’re trying several strategies, with several more waiting in the wings.

    I’ve given LD her “back-up brain” (BUB for short). Because she likes the colour pink, it’s a big pink notebook. Every time we do something new in Maths, she has to explain it to herself in her BUB, using colouring pencils. At the front of the book are all the times tables, because I don’t think she should be forced to remember them AND whatever she’s learning.

    J is buying more games for us to play as a family, so look out for reviews of Mille Bournes, Dixit, A La Carte, and others in the future. We also play mah-jongg (Malaysian rules) regularly. In this way, we’re hoping to stimulate LD’s maths sense through other paths in a fun, yet slightly competitive, way.

    LD is learning violin (her choice of instrument) because there’s a strong link between maths and music. Again, we see this as a way of stimulating the neural pathways and boosting her self-confidence. And, speaking of self-confidence, both kids also take part in Wushu classes. (Wushu is like a martial arts ballet.)

    Still on my list are neuro-sensory therapies, although it appears I inadvertently stumbled across part of them when instructing LD to write in her BUB with colouring pencils.

    And lastly, in class, I use a smartboard (more on that in another post) and different colour pens to illustrate mathematical concepts. The kids love the technology and they laugh at Sausage (aka The Teacher’s Assistant) who dutifully watches every movement of the cursor projected onto the wall and barks if nothing moves for a few minutes. Anything that makes learning fun, even if it’s taking time out to watch Sausage chase the laser pen, is a plus in my book.

    I am pained by LD’s difficulty. I love maths, I believe “God is Mathematics”, so this one bites particularly hard. But, with luck, effort and hard work, I’m hopeful that we’ll get through this.

    UPDATE: I found a site called Learning Link Technologies and am exploring it at the moment to see if it’ll help. If anyone has any experiences with this site and their products, I’d be most grateful for some feedback.

    I have also joined the Dyscalculia forum in an effort to find more things I can do to help LD with her difficulties. If you’re there as well, please say hi!

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