What My Terrible Old School Taught Me About Supporting Kids With Learning Struggles
Last Tuesday, I found my 10-year-old son hunched over the kitchen table, crumpling his third math worksheet in 10 minutes. His eraser had rubbed a hole through the paper, and when I sat down next to him, he mumbled that he was stupid and shouldn’t even try. That’s when I was 12 again, standing outside the principal’s office at my old elementary school, waiting to get yelled at for forgetting my homework for the third time that month.
My old K-8 school was a strict, inner-city public institution in the early 2000s, built on the idea that rules are rules, and any exception makes you soft. I had undiagnosed ADHD back then, a label no one bothered to test for because I was smart enough to pass tests when I tried, so every little quirk got labeled as defiance. I tapped my pencil when I thought, so my 7th grade teacher made me stand in the back of the room for an entire month, no chair. I grew three inches in 6 months one year, and my mom couldn’t afford a new uniform tunic until payday, so I got sent home for being out of dress code three times. Each time, my mom had to leave her waitressing shift early, losing hours she couldn’t make up, and we’d fight the whole way home, both of us angry and stressed over a pair of too-short hems.
The only thing I looked forward to all week was art club, which met after school on Wednesdays. If I had any uncompleted detentions that week, I couldn’t go. I almost never got to go. By 8th grade, I was skipping half my classes, sitting in the park across the street eating a candy bar for lunch, because I was convinced I was just a bad student, exactly what all the notes home said I was. The school didn’t suck because the teachers were evil – most of them were overworked and just following the district’s rules – but it sucked because it prioritized compliance over every single other thing that matters for a kid.
Back at my kitchen table, I didn’t tell my son “no you’re not stupid” like all the parenting books say you should. I just nodded, and thought through all the things that system got wrong, and what I do differently now because of it.
The first big thing I learned is that small mistakes are almost never intentional misbehavior. When I forgot my homework, my old school assumed I just didn’t care, and gave me a zero. Now, when my son forgets his folder once a month or so, we worked out a simple fix with his teacher: he keeps an extra set of all core worksheets in his desk, and I just shoot the teacher a quick text to let her know it was an accident. No zero, no detention, no lecture. For any parent or teacher reading this, if your kid gets in trouble for something small, stop and ask them what was going on before you punish or judge. Last month my son got a referral for talking during silent reading, and I almost grounded him before I asked why. It turned out his deskmate forgot his insulin and was starting to have a reaction, and he was trying to get the kid to ask for help. We got the referral thrown out, and it never would have happened if I just took the school’s side at face value.
The second thing is that breaks aren’t a reward – they’re a basic need. My old school made us sit still for 90-minute block periods, and if you got up to sharpen your pencil more than once, you got a warning. When my son gets frustrated enough to crumple a worksheet, I don’t make him push through it. I say “let’s go throw the frisbee around the block for 8 minutes, then we’ll come back.” Eight minutes is long enough to reset, not long enough to lose all momentum. If you’re a teacher, keep a stack of blank break passes on your desk – each kid gets one a day, they can use it to go get a drink or walk around the hall for a minute, no explanation needed. It takes almost no extra work, and it cuts down on most of the small behavior issues people end up wasting time on.
Third, don’t take away the thing a kid cares about to teach a lesson. My old school took art club from me every time I messed up, and all it taught me was that school would take whatever I loved if I wasn’t perfect, so I stopped caring about anything. Now, if my son has a missing assignment, we don’t cancel his weekend soccer game. We just wake up 20 minutes early on Saturday to finish it together, or do it after the game when he’s relaxed. Taking away the thing he looks forward to doesn’t teach responsibility – it just teaches him to hate school and hate me.
It doesn’t work every time. Last month we still had a 40-minute fight over a diorama that I wanted to throw in the trash, and I still catch myself flinching when my son brings home a bad test grade, that old shame creeping in from when I was that kid. I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t know if I’m raising a perfect student. But right now, putting my kid’s comfort ahead of the rulebook works more often than not. I know what it feels like when a school doesn’t care about you as anything more than a rule-follower, and I’ll never let that happen to him, not if I can help it.
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