The Learning Umbrella

I’ve been supervising my sister’s school work for over a year now, providing some of the first structured schooling she’s ever had (apart from math).  It’s been a lot of struggle to keep her on track, as her time management and follow through were pretty poor.  At the beginning of last year, she had a huge amount of trouble writing and dragged her feet just getting a paragraph put together.  She didn’t know how to do research, write a report, etc.

My mom and I have both pulled our hair out at times, and felt guilty that we didn’t notice all these problems earlier.  It’s been frustrating and seemed hopeless (”it’s just too late to make a difference”).  But we’ve kept chipping away, making her do homework all weekend long to catch up, grounding her every time she gets behind on her work, sending her to stay with me for intensive catch-up sessions when she was really far behind, putting incompletes on transcripts, and adapting our assignments and teachings to try and find what works for her.

She just got her first school vacation in over a year.  She would have had others, but she was always behind and had to use them to catch up.  But this Christmas, she was ready for a real break.  She’d finished all her assignments on time!  I thought that was amazing enough, but now she’s come back from that vacation and been ready to get back to work.  This week she’s actually got up out of bed on time and cruised through her assignments before lunch.  Instead of getting a call around 3pm to explain why she couldn’t get something done, I’ve been getting a call around 11:30 to say that she was almost done for the day.  This is some real progress!