Addled or Genius?

“If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they’ll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform.” ~John Taylor Gatto, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher”

I know you.  Your child is struggling in school.  It’s become a battle.  You’re lurking around the edges of homeschooling groups, trying to decide if you want to homeschool.  You’re terrified.  Then there’s a meme about Thomas Edison that comes by on your FB feed.  It’s not an accurate story, about his mother getting a note from the school that he was addled, and hiding it from him as she homeschooled him.  In the internet story, he finds the note after her death and declares, “Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the century.”

But the story is grounded in reality.

In the biography, Thomas Alva Edison: Great American Inventor, Louise Betts tells the story:

For a boy who was used to learning things his own way and to playing outside by himself all day long, sitting still in a one-room schoolhouse was pure misery. Tom did not like school one bit. His teacher, the Reverend G. Engle, and his wife made the children learn by memorizing their lessons and repeating them out loud. When a child forgot an answer, or had not studied well enough, Reverend Engle whipped the unfortunate pupil with a leather strap! Mrs. Engle also heartily approved of using the whip as a way of teaching students better study habits. her whippings were often worse than her husband’s!

Tom was confused by Reverend Engle’s way of teaching. He could not learn through fear. Nor could he just sit and memorize. He liked to see things for himself and ask questions. But Reverend Engle grew as exasperated by Tom’s questions as Mr. Edison did. For that reason, Tom Learned very little in his first few months, and his grades were bad. 

Years later, Tom would say of his school experience, “I remember I used to never be able to get along at school. I was always at the foot (bottom) of the class. I used to feel that the teachers did not sympathize with me, and that my father thought I was stupid.”

Then, after Thomas Edison told his mother that his teacher had referred to him as addled, the two of them went to the school in search of an apology, according to his biography:

“My son is not backward!” declared Mrs. Edison, adding, “and I believe I ought to know. I taught children once myself!” Despite her efforts, neither the Reverend nor Mrs. Engle would change their opinion of young Tom Edison. But Mrs. Edison was equally strong in her opinion. Finally, she realized what she had to do. 

“All right, Mrs. Edison said, “I am hereby taking my son out of your school.” Tom could hardly believe his ears! “I’ll instruct him at home myself,” he heard her say.

Tom looked up at his mother, this wonderful woman who believed in him. He promised himself that he would make his mother proud of him.

Later in life, Edison said, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me: and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”

There’s not anyone in this world who loves your kid more than you do.  No one.  You cannot mess up your kid any faster than the school would have.  You can’t.  You’d have to set out with that as your goal — and you’d probably still fail at it.

It’s toxic for a kid to stay in an environment where *he is continually told, every day, in a hundred little ways, that *he’s stupid, *he’s not keeping up, *he’s a bad kid.  If that was an environment you had to spend 40 hours a week in, you’d wake up with a stomach ache, head ache, general malaise every day, too.  Simply getting your kidlet out of the environment will relieve the burden of those labels.

Your kid is going to rise or fall to the level of expectation set for h**.   Bring h** home — set a new expectation.

~Jen GS