So math was ruined for me, right? From a 1st grade loser who couldn’t keep up on a timed math sheet to the worst-in-the-class algebra student in high school. I would never be able to even balance my check book, much less major in anything that required an advanced math class. Better stick with English. At least I got A’s in that.

A few years later I have that teaching degree and it’s not helping so much. I have a child who runs and hides when I pull out the Phonics Pathways book. I’ve already taught one daughter to read, why is this one giving me such a hard time?

Is she doomed in reading like I was in math? Am I doing it wrong, making the same mistakes my 1st grade teacher did?

And, I wondered too, is she just lazy?

Do I back off, wait until she’s ready or press on, don’t let her give up and take the easy way out?

Maybe I should have read this first:

“…we do things backwards. We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed. If we begin by helping children feel that writing and reading are ways of talking to and reaching other people, we will not have to bribe and bully them into acquiring the skills; they will want to do them for what they do with them.”

John Holt, How Children Learn

It seems like children are fully capable of learning on their own until they enter the school years. We don’t get down on all fours and move one leg forward and one hand showing them how to crawl. We don’t show them how to open and close cabinets. We never demonstrate how to unroll a roll of toilet paper. And yet they figure all these things out on their own. Amazingly most children even learn to talk with very little instruction from us. Mostly they just listen and repeat and they do it happily without charts or threats.

So why, once they reach the magical age of five does learning become difficult? Why is there suddenly a time limit to learn certain skills? And why do we trust someone else to set that time limit for those certain skills for our unique child?

I think many of us, me included, never take into account the amount of learning our children do before we decide to teach them. Until we are ready for them to learn we don’t really see what they are doing as learning.

And so we begin kindergarten and from this set time on Monday to this set time on Friday they are learning. The rest of the time they are not.

I think it is exactly this type of ridiculous schedule and the whole notion of school being where you learn and the only place you learn that makes kids stop learning for a while. They decide they don’t like learning. They decide it’s boring or hard, not fun.

And sometimes it’s not until they are grown ups, when they are presented with an opportunity to balance a checkbook or read an interesting book about the Civil War or decide to learn knitting that they actually begin learning again themselves and recognizing that they are learning all without the aid of a teacher or a classroom.

Finally, we revert back to our pre-school years when learning was easy and natural and fun and we learn to learn again.

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?