Editor's note: The story of Jo-Anne Tracy's son who experts called ineducable, dispels many learning myths i.e. there are many lessons to learn from a dropout, you don't need a teacher or a class to learn, you don't need to know phonics to know how to read, ADD/ADHD can be a symptom of school, there's a lot you can learn by doing rather than by sitting and getting inside a classroom, and more. When she escaped the system, he was finally able to learn. I asked her to share his amazing story. Here it is.
This is the story of how my son escaped the system and was given the freedom to learn naturally and exceed all expectations.
The “experts” diagnose my son
My son had been in his new school for only 3 months when the “experts” (a teacher, administrator, and school psychologist) told me, without any doubt in their minds, that I would be foolish to keep thinking that he had what it takes to succeed in any academic field and that he was being placed in a class where ineducable children would taught life skills and a vocation. I, his mother, who had watched him explore and investigate the world for 9 years, knew that they were wrong. However, the school system does little to honor or respect the insights of mere parents who don’t have the “credentials” necessary to properly identify “problem children” like mine. They refused to consider my input and explained they were not giving my son any other options.
When I had faced a situation with my high school-aged daughter that had caused me to question the school’s reasoning, I had been able to find an alternative school within the public school system where she could complete her graduation requirements. However, my son was in elementary school and there was no alternative program available without charge. We were struggling financially and could not afford a private school or an intense tutoring program. I had, recently, heard from my mother that she knew people who homeschooled their kids. Her comments about that situation had not been positive, but at least I knew that it was legal to not send my child to school.
Not send my child to school?
My father would have been horrified. He had dropped out of high school to fight in the war and afterwards had struggled to find a way to become a teacher. Teaching was his natural calling and I had been blessed as a child to grow up in a family where every situation had been a learning situation. However, I also knew that my son was not ineducable. He just needed time. He was diagnosed with ADD, but even with medication he found the classroom distracting. With no viable options for my son within the school, I removed him from the system.
Proving the experts wrong
At first, the plan was to prove “the experts” wrong. I would spend one year teaching him to read and then, perhaps another working with him intensively to bring him to up to the academic level of his peers. The first few weeks were a blur, I had to find a way to teach him to read. Reading had been natural to my older children. They had both read fluently before entering school. I knew in my heart that my son, JAT, was just as bright, but was confused about why he could not read. I searched the internet. I went to the library and took out dozens of books about teaching reading, and at the same time let him choose books to take out. He would not take out picture storybooks. He wanted grownup books, books about geography and mountains, books about South American explorers. However, books were books and I was just happy he had chosen more books than the library would let him take. JAT had argued with the librarian and she finally relented, saying how lucky I was to have such a reader. I knew he just wanted to look at the pictures.
I was wrong.
One day about 3 weeks later, while I was writing to a reading expert, whose work I was reading, JAT came to me and asked me how they knew that Mount Everest was the highest mountain. I told him they had ways of measuring mountains and that we would search to learn more about that as soon as I finished the letter. I continued writing... then I stopped. How did he know that Mount Everest was the highest mountain? I went to find him on the couch looking at a book about Sir Edmund Hillary and his climb. There, under a picture, was a caption telling that Mount Everest was one of the highest mountains in the world. He has understood that piece of information. But yet, he could not identify the difference between the letters H and V. How was this possible?
I did not care how it happened, I knew that he could acquire information. He could reason. He was intelligent. He just did not read as schools said he should. He wanted me to read that book with him so he could learn more. Forget my research, forget my letter writing. We were going to read. And read we did. That winter, we read every book he could find about South America, the Andes Mountains, Climbing Mount Everest. Every once in a while I would bring out the math workbooks and the flash cards. He would do these grudgingly, so that we could get back to reading. I would read to him. I would leave out words and he would look at the book and figure out what it said. But, he still could not read Dolch word flash cards. He could read 4 syllable words that were important. However, the word ‘about’ was beyond him. I was beginning to see that his mind worked differently.
Some months later, when I explained to an online friend about how we were homeschooling, that I did not push math and phonics, that we just read and explored what he wanted to learn about, I was told that we were unschooling. Labeling what we were doing did not matter to me.
He was learning.
Never looking back
My son never did return to school. He never expressed an interest. He read in the mornings until I returned from work about 10 am. He helped me begin a catering business and learned to make an excellent Shepherd’s Pie. At 12, he attended a local Sea Cadet program, and was selected to attend a 3 week camp, 1000 km from home.
Others worried that he would not adjust to working with a group. But, off he went with 5 other friends to this camp. I did not hear from him for days. He did call me after 2 weeks to ask me to send more spending money. He did just fine . . . No, better than fine. An adult leader at that camp told me that he had been one of the only ones who was not homesick, who did not argue about taking part in any activities. I no longer worried about socialization.
Providing home learning options even when both parents work
We moved 3000 km away, to a remote northern Manitoba community. There were jobs there. My husband had recently lost his and we needed to move. I would need to work, at least part time. He was 13 and could spend time alone. I arranged to work split shifts. I could be home from 10:30 am - 2:45 pm. So off I went. On days I was needed to work through the day, my employer let him come and help out, stocking shelves and sit in the office discussing how to run a small business. He showed him how to repair a computer that needed a new power supply. He offered to help him build a computer if he could get the needed supplies. So, my son collected broken down computers from any source he could. Then, together my boss and my son built a computer that worked. What better computer lesson could a 13 yr old learn? This started a 16 month long passion with computers. He asked questions, learned more and soon he was fixing friends’ computers.
We were living in an apartment building at that time. The apartment manager offered him any computer he found abandoned in apartments, if he would help him out around the building. He learned to install doors and and caulk windows. He learned to patch drywall and lay tiles. He was becoming quite the handyman.
An unlikely tutor
During this time, I had been offered a chance to run the store in the owner’s absence, but I would have to work full-time. I could not afford a qualified tutor, but I knew that at 14 he could not spend everyday alone in the house. He needed some social interaction. A very shy friend, a young female high school drop out offered to stay with him. She was intrigued that he could learn what he wanted when he wanted. But, she wanted ideas on what they could do, when they were bored.
I started to develop list of fun learning resources. I challenged them to learn history from songs and poems. They did. They learned about the Battle of New Orleans, thanks to Johnny Horton and they learned about the Crimean War through Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. That was the beginning of JAT’s 'passionate about history' period. He had always been passionate about history, but now it was the focus of almost everything he did.
We were moving again. We had an offer to take over a store about 1000 miles closer to home and closer to his brother who was in university. He had to leave behind his drop-out tutor, who had discovered herself that learning could be fun. She promised that she would find a way to continue to advance her knowledge. And we were off to a new life.
Real Life Apprenticeship
The position came with a house, but it needed work. The contractor asked my son to give him a hand. Together they renovated the bathroom and installed new fixtures, and my son decided that plumbing was a profession that he did not want to pursue in the future. He learned to use power tools from an expert. He learned the proper way to measure and check measurements. Somewhere along the line, he had learned enough about fractions to understand that 3/32” add to ⅜” was 15/32”. I have never determined where he learned about fractions. He had used them a bit with me when we had run our catering business, in the first years he had been at home, but he could add them and multiply them, what more could matter. He had asked questions and observed well enough that he was able to build himself bedroom furniture, including a desk and display shelves for his large Star Wars collection. He worked off and on with the contractor over the next 3 years. When we built our new store, he worked part-time with the contractor and was now proficient with tools.
Discovering life passion
We were living in Canada’s richest gold mine community and where he was meeting geologists and talking about new strikes and other shop talk. This reawakened JAT’s interest in earth and geological science. He also developed a passion for space science. One day, he came to me and told me that he wanted to be a NASA planetary geologist. We discussed that it would take more than four years of university. He said he was willing to do the work. He researched and discovered he needed math including calculus, chemistry & physics. He also realized that he would need to improve his writing skills. Writing had never been easy for him, either the physical act of hold a pencil and forming letters or spelling words. However, he knew what he wanted to do and he was prepared to get it done. He was 15 and knew that his peers would be in grade 10. He had never worked much at math, other than what he used daily at home and at work. He had completed many science inquiries and experiments through the years, but had never learned any theory.
Taking ownership of learning
He started with the Annenburg media video courses. He watched every one that was of interest. He watched every Nova movie and every TV show he could. We found chemistry courses online, starting with Chalkbored and MITs free courseware. He purchased an interactive physics program, complete with labs. He asked for more challenges like those I had given to him and his tutor a few years before. Together we designed more than 400 that he could choose from to show he had a well rounded education. He made a pinhole camera, studied ancient man in-depth and learned to play the flute. He studied grammar for 15 minutes a day. ALEKS, a unique online learning program allowed him to move from preAlgebra to preCalculus in just 19 months. He moved on to open courseware in Astronomy and Physics from Yale. I was learning that nothing was impossible when a student is determined.
I was still unsure about his writing skills. It was the year that he should be applying to universities, and I was concerned that he was not ready for essay writing. He had never written more than the one essay about ancient man. I suggested he take a university preparation course in essay writing. His results amazed me. This young man, who had been written off by the school system, received a 92% on his first essay. His average going into the exam was 84%, but he still faced his toughest challenge. He had to hand write his final exam. Until this point, all his written work had been completed using a keyboard and word processor. His handwriting still looked like a that of a young child. JAT could print, but not use cursive. He practiced for weeks, without improvement. He wrote to his tutor and expressed his concern. The tutor told him just to do his best. As long as he achieved 60% on the written exam, he would still get a B grade. The exam came and went. After 3 weeks the marks were available. They were very long weeks. When the day finally arrived, JAT called me excitedly. He had a final grade of 76%. Not bad, for the teen called ineducable at 9 years old by the school system.
My son was ready for university. He was also ready for life. JAT chose to remain at home and study through distance education, since the nearest university was 6 hours from home.. He wanted the support that the community, his friends and family could give him. He knows that he will have to complete his last year away from home. But he will be ready. He knows how to learn. He is not ineducable. The system was wrong. The system had failed.
Jo-Anne Tracey was a classroom mother who became a passion-led learning advocate, when the school system decided her 9 year old son did not have the ability to learn to read and write. So, the Tracey family left traditional schooling behind and became homeschoolers. After 9 years of a passion-led, unschool education, her son is now studying geoscience at university.
Jo-Anne, now advocates for passion-led learning. Recently, she created an online learning community, Discovery Portal Active Learning Community, www.discoveryportalalc.com offering homeschoolers the active learning challenge program that she designed with her son and other virtual learning opportunities.
When I had faced a situation with my high school-aged daughter that had caused me to question the school’s reasoning, I had been able to find an alternative school within the public school system where she could complete her graduation requirements. However, my son was in elementary school and there was no alternative program available without charge. We were struggling financially and could not afford a private school or an intense tutoring program. I had, recently, heard from my mother that she knew people who homeschooled their kids. Her comments about that situation had not been positive, but at least I knew that it was legal to not send my child to school.
Not send my child to school?
My father would have been horrified. He had dropped out of high school to fight in the war and afterwards had struggled to find a way to become a teacher. Teaching was his natural calling and I had been blessed as a child to grow up in a family where every situation had been a learning situation. However, I also knew that my son was not ineducable. He just needed time. He was diagnosed with ADD, but even with medication he found the classroom distracting. With no viable options for my son within the school, I removed him from the system.
Proving the experts wrong
At first, the plan was to prove “the experts” wrong. I would spend one year teaching him to read and then, perhaps another working with him intensively to bring him to up to the academic level of his peers. The first few weeks were a blur, I had to find a way to teach him to read. Reading had been natural to my older children. They had both read fluently before entering school. I knew in my heart that my son, JAT, was just as bright, but was confused about why he could not read. I searched the internet. I went to the library and took out dozens of books about teaching reading, and at the same time let him choose books to take out. He would not take out picture storybooks. He wanted grownup books, books about geography and mountains, books about South American explorers. However, books were books and I was just happy he had chosen more books than the library would let him take. JAT had argued with the librarian and she finally relented, saying how lucky I was to have such a reader. I knew he just wanted to look at the pictures.
I was wrong.
One day about 3 weeks later, while I was writing to a reading expert, whose work I was reading, JAT came to me and asked me how they knew that Mount Everest was the highest mountain. I told him they had ways of measuring mountains and that we would search to learn more about that as soon as I finished the letter. I continued writing... then I stopped. How did he know that Mount Everest was the highest mountain? I went to find him on the couch looking at a book about Sir Edmund Hillary and his climb. There, under a picture, was a caption telling that Mount Everest was one of the highest mountains in the world. He has understood that piece of information. But yet, he could not identify the difference between the letters H and V. How was this possible?
I did not care how it happened, I knew that he could acquire information. He could reason. He was intelligent. He just did not read as schools said he should. He wanted me to read that book with him so he could learn more. Forget my research, forget my letter writing. We were going to read. And read we did. That winter, we read every book he could find about South America, the Andes Mountains, Climbing Mount Everest. Every once in a while I would bring out the math workbooks and the flash cards. He would do these grudgingly, so that we could get back to reading. I would read to him. I would leave out words and he would look at the book and figure out what it said. But, he still could not read Dolch word flash cards. He could read 4 syllable words that were important. However, the word ‘about’ was beyond him. I was beginning to see that his mind worked differently.
Some months later, when I explained to an online friend about how we were homeschooling, that I did not push math and phonics, that we just read and explored what he wanted to learn about, I was told that we were unschooling. Labeling what we were doing did not matter to me.
He was learning.
Never looking back
My son never did return to school. He never expressed an interest. He read in the mornings until I returned from work about 10 am. He helped me begin a catering business and learned to make an excellent Shepherd’s Pie. At 12, he attended a local Sea Cadet program, and was selected to attend a 3 week camp, 1000 km from home.
Others worried that he would not adjust to working with a group. But, off he went with 5 other friends to this camp. I did not hear from him for days. He did call me after 2 weeks to ask me to send more spending money. He did just fine . . . No, better than fine. An adult leader at that camp told me that he had been one of the only ones who was not homesick, who did not argue about taking part in any activities. I no longer worried about socialization.
"We have to rethink what learning means. When my son has learned something, he has mastered it for life, not just for next week's test. That is knowledge." - Jo-Anne Tracey
Providing home learning options even when both parents work
We moved 3000 km away, to a remote northern Manitoba community. There were jobs there. My husband had recently lost his and we needed to move. I would need to work, at least part time. He was 13 and could spend time alone. I arranged to work split shifts. I could be home from 10:30 am - 2:45 pm. So off I went. On days I was needed to work through the day, my employer let him come and help out, stocking shelves and sit in the office discussing how to run a small business. He showed him how to repair a computer that needed a new power supply. He offered to help him build a computer if he could get the needed supplies. So, my son collected broken down computers from any source he could. Then, together my boss and my son built a computer that worked. What better computer lesson could a 13 yr old learn? This started a 16 month long passion with computers. He asked questions, learned more and soon he was fixing friends’ computers.
We were living in an apartment building at that time. The apartment manager offered him any computer he found abandoned in apartments, if he would help him out around the building. He learned to install doors and and caulk windows. He learned to patch drywall and lay tiles. He was becoming quite the handyman.
An unlikely tutor
During this time, I had been offered a chance to run the store in the owner’s absence, but I would have to work full-time. I could not afford a qualified tutor, but I knew that at 14 he could not spend everyday alone in the house. He needed some social interaction. A very shy friend, a young female high school drop out offered to stay with him. She was intrigued that he could learn what he wanted when he wanted. But, she wanted ideas on what they could do, when they were bored.
I started to develop list of fun learning resources. I challenged them to learn history from songs and poems. They did. They learned about the Battle of New Orleans, thanks to Johnny Horton and they learned about the Crimean War through Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. That was the beginning of JAT’s 'passionate about history' period. He had always been passionate about history, but now it was the focus of almost everything he did.
We were moving again. We had an offer to take over a store about 1000 miles closer to home and closer to his brother who was in university. He had to leave behind his drop-out tutor, who had discovered herself that learning could be fun. She promised that she would find a way to continue to advance her knowledge. And we were off to a new life.
Real Life Apprenticeship
The position came with a house, but it needed work. The contractor asked my son to give him a hand. Together they renovated the bathroom and installed new fixtures, and my son decided that plumbing was a profession that he did not want to pursue in the future. He learned to use power tools from an expert. He learned the proper way to measure and check measurements. Somewhere along the line, he had learned enough about fractions to understand that 3/32” add to ⅜” was 15/32”. I have never determined where he learned about fractions. He had used them a bit with me when we had run our catering business, in the first years he had been at home, but he could add them and multiply them, what more could matter. He had asked questions and observed well enough that he was able to build himself bedroom furniture, including a desk and display shelves for his large Star Wars collection. He worked off and on with the contractor over the next 3 years. When we built our new store, he worked part-time with the contractor and was now proficient with tools.
Discovering life passion
We were living in Canada’s richest gold mine community and where he was meeting geologists and talking about new strikes and other shop talk. This reawakened JAT’s interest in earth and geological science. He also developed a passion for space science. One day, he came to me and told me that he wanted to be a NASA planetary geologist. We discussed that it would take more than four years of university. He said he was willing to do the work. He researched and discovered he needed math including calculus, chemistry & physics. He also realized that he would need to improve his writing skills. Writing had never been easy for him, either the physical act of hold a pencil and forming letters or spelling words. However, he knew what he wanted to do and he was prepared to get it done. He was 15 and knew that his peers would be in grade 10. He had never worked much at math, other than what he used daily at home and at work. He had completed many science inquiries and experiments through the years, but had never learned any theory.
Taking ownership of learning
He started with the Annenburg media video courses. He watched every one that was of interest. He watched every Nova movie and every TV show he could. We found chemistry courses online, starting with Chalkbored and MITs free courseware. He purchased an interactive physics program, complete with labs. He asked for more challenges like those I had given to him and his tutor a few years before. Together we designed more than 400 that he could choose from to show he had a well rounded education. He made a pinhole camera, studied ancient man in-depth and learned to play the flute. He studied grammar for 15 minutes a day. ALEKS, a unique online learning program allowed him to move from preAlgebra to preCalculus in just 19 months. He moved on to open courseware in Astronomy and Physics from Yale. I was learning that nothing was impossible when a student is determined.
I was still unsure about his writing skills. It was the year that he should be applying to universities, and I was concerned that he was not ready for essay writing. He had never written more than the one essay about ancient man. I suggested he take a university preparation course in essay writing. His results amazed me. This young man, who had been written off by the school system, received a 92% on his first essay. His average going into the exam was 84%, but he still faced his toughest challenge. He had to hand write his final exam. Until this point, all his written work had been completed using a keyboard and word processor. His handwriting still looked like a that of a young child. JAT could print, but not use cursive. He practiced for weeks, without improvement. He wrote to his tutor and expressed his concern. The tutor told him just to do his best. As long as he achieved 60% on the written exam, he would still get a B grade. The exam came and went. After 3 weeks the marks were available. They were very long weeks. When the day finally arrived, JAT called me excitedly. He had a final grade of 76%. Not bad, for the teen called ineducable at 9 years old by the school system.
My son was ready for university. He was also ready for life. JAT chose to remain at home and study through distance education, since the nearest university was 6 hours from home.. He wanted the support that the community, his friends and family could give him. He knows that he will have to complete his last year away from home. But he will be ready. He knows how to learn. He is not ineducable. The system was wrong. The system had failed.
Jo-Anne Tracey was a classroom mother who became a passion-led learning advocate, when the school system decided her 9 year old son did not have the ability to learn to read and write. So, the Tracey family left traditional schooling behind and became homeschoolers. After 9 years of a passion-led, unschool education, her son is now studying geoscience at university.
Jo-Anne, now advocates for passion-led learning. Recently, she created an online learning community, Discovery Portal Active Learning Community, www.discoveryportalalc.com offering homeschoolers the active learning challenge program that she designed with her son and other virtual learning opportunities.
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