I was trying to read Teach Your Own, only few pages had been turned, only a few words absorbed as I kept one eye on Tess who was sitting on my hooter hider, a make-shift pallet on the floor of the office waiting room, when the doctor walked in.

He looked down at Tess and smiled then at me and said, “I’ve got a question for you.”

“Ok,” I said.

“What do you do with a kid that’s just lazy? She doesn’t want to do her work, her teacher’s telling her mother that she’s not paying attention in class and she’s getting zeros on her homework.”

This particular doctor has known me for about 17 years. He knew me when I taught at a real school and he knows that I now homeschool my kids. And, I have to tell you, my mind immediately flashed to one of my own kids. One that hid under the tables when it was time for phonics.

It wasn’t until I was soaking in the bathtub later that night that I picked up Teach Your Own again and started thinking more about that doctor’s question.

Have you ever seen a lazy baby? I have seen a curious baby, a busy baby, but I have never seen a lazy baby.

I started wondering why we are so quick to categorize children as lazy when they won’t do what we want them to do.

Whenever I am out and about with my 4 children, I am constantly hearing this phrase from older adults, “I wish I had half the energy they do.”

But they don’t hear them when they tell me they are “too tired” to pick up their toys.

Where is that laziness when we are out in public?

In first grade I learned to hate math. I struggled to finish what I saw as an endless page of addition and subtraction problems. The teacher put us on a timer and I never finished before the timer went off. Fear gripped me every time I saw a page of math problems. I felt humiliation. I felt failure. I became very bad at math. I stopped putting in any effort in learning it. I decided I couldn’t do it and I was content with a barely passing grade.

By the time I was in high school algebra, I tuned out the math lectures, snuck in a library book and read sometimes two books a week hidden inside my math text.

Was I lazy?

So, “What do you do with a kid that’s just lazy?” How would you have answered that question?