With so many adopted children you can probably imagine that I’m teaching quite a wide range of educational abilities. At one end of the educational spectrum is my son who is currently fourteen. He’s been homeschooled his entire school career and has also participated in 4-H, AWANA, a traveling floor hockey team, mission’s trips and summer camps. I’m certain that he would have never survived public school without wearing out a path to the principal’s office and frequent detentions.

You see he has ADHD. Medication does help him to concentrate, but he doesn’t take medication because: Adderal makes his head feel fuzzy and it takes away his appetite which is a problem because he’s so skinny, Concerta makes him just plain mean to the point that no one can stand to be near him, and our HMO won’t pay for Focalin.

In order to teach him in elementary I had to let him do two or three things at once to keep him occupied enough to learn. He would sit and play with legos or a puzzle while I read his assignments to him. He needed frequent breaks between subjects to run and play. It wasn’t uncommon during recess to find him scaling the side of the silo determined to get to the top, or ready to jump on the back of one of the cows, or catching snakes to play with, or attempting to start a fire somewhere. I clearly remember wondering if poison control kept track of how many times I called and at what point they might refer me to child protective services.

As he got a little older I could set the kitchen timer and make his school work a race to beat his best time. He could go a couple of days without being able to concentrate and not completing any work, to finishing an entire subject in a one day marathon session. We knew that he was really smart, but we didn’t know how smart until a few days after he turned thirteen.

He was complaining again about having to do his language arts assignments. He was really beginning to wear me down as this was a frequent gripe of his. “Why do I have to keep doing language, I already know what a noun, a verb, and a phrase is, I see no logical reason to need to know what a dangling participle is.” That’s when those fateful words came out of my mouth. “Well then, I’ll take you to the college and you can CLEP freshman composition, and if you get the college credit, you won’t have to take any more English.” The local community college gave him six credits for his CLEP score. So he took their entrance exam called the COMPASS and scored 97 out of 99 on comprehension and 98 out of 99 on punctuation, me and my big mouth.

That is why he is taking a full load of college classes at the age of fourteen and will have his associate degree by the time he is fifteen. I’m afraid that if he had attended public school he would have been labeled a behavior problem and sent off to an EI class or something.