An Unrelenting Push Forward

unrelenting

1.

not relenting; not yielding or swerving in determination or resolution, as of or from opinions, convictions, ambitions, ideals, etc.; inflexible: an unrelenting opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment.

2.

not easing or slackening in severity: an unrelenting rain.

3.

maintaining speed, effort, vigor, intensity, rate of advance, etc.: an unrelenting attack.

Reading the stories these last weeks, I'm astounded by the unrelenting speed and intensity with which all things modern transformed this country: within the span of a few decades, homes and cities were illuminated by light bulbs; roads, train tracks and a variety of wires crisscrossed the landscape; women got the vote; the White House got a telephone; New York City got the Statue of Liberty and millions of immigrants who came with new ideas, old world know-how, and the will to work hard; Texas found oil and with it fueled airplanes that went up in the air and stayed there, and cars and trucks that could get from here to there lickety split.

These last weeks Simon has found a new word: technological. All things great and wonderful are technological: youtube, computers, TVs, Legos, cellphones, anything made by Nintedo. He welcomes and celebrates every new invention and innovation we read about, understanding intuitively that electricity, oil wells, telephone wires and light bulbs have everything to do with the joy he takes in all things technological and, preferably, vaguely inappropriate. In his mind, technological and fun are linked, as are old-fashioned and lame.

I, in turn, find myself thinking of the word unrelenting. All that change came at the expense of unrelenting industriousness. The innovators changed paradigms, and then the muscle, sweat and blood of millions made those paradigms real, pushing and prodding the nation into the modern age. Nameless somebodies laid train tracks, planted telephone poles, dug ditches and road beds--a nameless multitude.

Something to think about. All that hard work. No slackers there.

I've been trying to get Simon to understand that. I've told him about my grandmother. Although of limited means and education, she had a snappy aphorism for every situation. "Von garnichts kommt garnichts," she would say in a thick Berlin accent--from nothing comes nothing. Modernity doesn't just happen. Youtube and TVs and cars and electricity don't just happen. They are the result of work--unrelenting work.

We're in that place in the school year where you assess your child's progress and begin to make plans for the next academic year. Have your child's skills improved enough? Will he be prepared for next year's demands? It hit me hard a few weeks ago: Simon is not reading well enough--for me. He gets through grade level reading comprehension assignments, as well as stories and chapter books, if I demand it or sit by his side; however, he does not do any sustained reading on his own. And it shows.

He spends hours looking at illustrated history encyclopedias and listening to audiobooks, but he's not independently picking up Harry Potter, or something much easier like The Time Warp Trio. There have been a few exceptions, a fifth-grade biography of Lincoln for example, but no matter what we bring home from the library, he will not repeat the accomplishment. He carefully looks at the chapter headings, illustrations, photograph captions, and learns a lot just from doing that, but he does not read the books all the way through.

So I did what only a homeschooling parent can do: I revamped the curriculum--from now on he has to read to me at least three hours a day, whole chapters at a time. From now until further notice no more spelling, grammar, paragraph editing, reading comprehension, science and geography. From now until further notice this child will primarily read . He will read and then, with the exception of a few subjects, he will read some more. Besides all the history assignments, he will read all five volumes of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians out loud to me. It will take a few months, but it will fix the problem.

When presented with the change of plans, Simon wasn't happy.

"That's not fair! You know I don't like reading. Reading is hard for me. I love audiobooks. Audiobooks are technological. Audiobooks are modern. Books are old-fashioned and lame."

We talked for a long time. I told him that I know he learns very easily listening to audiobooks and that reading does not come that easy to him. I told him that like Percy Jackson, Simon has a touch of dyslexia. Here and there he switches letters, or suddenly reads from right to left, or transposes b and d. Welcome to the club--Mom and Dad also transpose and switch to this day. But the only way reading will get easier is practice--unrelenting hard work. From nothing comes nothing. And by choosing not to read except when he has to, he isn't getting enough practice. He's going into sixth grade next year.

He complained for a few days. It wasn't fair. It was too hard. Anxious and angry, his reading deteriorated. I wondered if I had made the wrong decision, if I was being unreasonable, unrelenting. But then Percy kills the minotaur and suddenly Simon was having fun, reading with much greater ease--he's listened to the series repeatedly on CD.

"I love this chapter, Mom. Isn't it great?"

And then technology came to our rescue. I'd done some editing work last year for a friend who surprised me over the holidays with an e-reader, a Kindle. I was delighted and bought some Alice Munro but then found I wasn't using it that much. A week ago, I paid $4.40 for a Kindle copy of Book I of Percy Jackson's adventures. I blew the text up to the max, forty words to the page, and handed it to Simon. 300% improvement. No kidding. And every day I notice it gets easier. There's greater fluency, fewer mistakes. Feeling more relaxed he tries to entertain me, doing voices, imitating the talented readers he's heard on CD. Yesterday he asked me if we can get all the books for sixth grade on the Kindle.

"This thing is very technological, Mom."

We're having fun, working hard, moving forward.