Learned Helplessness

One of my favorite quotes, and I can't remember or find who said it, is that to best educate a child, you should give him a book and get out of the way. I have found that to be great advice with Daughter #1, who is homeschooled. Schools are not set up for gifted dyslexics, and I finally stopped fighting and pulled her out. She neither wants nor requires much of my help. She takes a couple of enrichment classes, uses an algebra text with DVD lectures if she needs it, learns history through novels, and is reading lots of short stories. She also spends a lot of time investigating her interests of the moment: classic rock, photography, forensic psychiatry, sewing, harmonica, drama. She is truly an independent learner.

It's harder with D#2, who struggles with anxiety and has also missed a lot of school over the years. I find myself sitting with her as she does her homework, helping her through math problems that have her extremely frustrated. Part of it is due to an excessively wordy math text which makes things much more complicated than they need to be. But this week, her class is joining with other classes across with country in a math challenge, where the student does on-line math problems and earns points for her class for correct answers to problems that get progressively more difficult. There is very little explanation, but the student has the chance to try again on similar problems after being told the correct answer. Tonight, she sat for two hours doing math by herself. Occasionally she'd ask for help, but after I explained it once, she'd send me off, saying. "I can do it now." I had to bribe her with pie to get her to quit.

What an empowering experience for a child who is "bad at math"! It is so easy for those of us with special needs kids to push them into the trap of learned helplessness, with the very best intentions of course. Letting a child make his own mistakes and learn from them, letting him know you consider him a capable learner, and setting up situations where he can succeed on his own are incredible gifts to a child. Far too often we—teachers, tutors, and parents—rescue a child and end up doing it for him. As a teacher, I often saw homework, projects, and papers clearly done by the parents. That tells the student that he is not capable of doing quality work. Allowing mistakes and having reasonable expectations make a child feel he is able to do what is asked of him.

I am very grateful to D#2's teachers for setting my child up for success with this math program. She can't wait to get up and start in on math tomorrow. It also reminds me that I need to help her make homework more HER job and less OUR job whenever possible. She will always need more of my help than D#1 in academics, but her pride in her math performance tonight makes me think she needs less than she is getting.