The Education of Brian, I

So life has been interesting with respect to Brian, and I am addicted to blogging everything. This doesn't have much to do with foster care, but I decided to write about it here anyway.

Brian, as I mentioned recently, has had a tough time of life recently. He has always missed a lot of school from stomach aches and other symptoms that go away when he gets home. I have never thought that his symptoms were faked, although I did think they had their roots in anxiety. We've done a number of things to address that, but I won't bore you about them here.

We decided recently that it would be best to take him out of school. We talked about home schooling, but how do you do that when you both work outside the home?

We settled on going to school half days and taking some Internet classes to make up for the other ones. There are a couple of options for the Internet classes. My state participates in a virtual academy, but enrollment is closed for the year and it really is intended for full-time home-schoolers. The state also has another virtual education site that offers individual courses. Mostly it is intended as a supplement to regular schooling. Though in theory you could do all of your education from 7th through 12th grade there, in practice we hear it is difficult to get all the classes you need. It is perfect for us though.

Well, except for the fact that the current session is well under way and the next doesn't start until March.

So right now he is taking a class from yet another on-line educator. The class is 7th grade science, 2nd semester. It is self-paced and we are hoping that he will finish it this month. That should not be difficult.

So his current educational plan is:

Take Reading, Social Studies, and Band at the middle school. Do an on-line course in Science this month. Do on-line courses in Health and Math starting in March. He is also supposed to write us one page a day in his journal. That can be on anything he wants.

Yesterday was his first day. His journal entry was all about how if he were allowed to have a W*rld of W*rcraft account he would only play a little while every day, and not get in trouble for being on it too much like his big brother does.

He is very excited about the whole educational program. Yesterday afternoon he read through and did two of the six assignments for Science.

Sounds good, huh?

Except that he just read through the material and failed both assignments. I called customer service. He can retake them, but it will cost $10 for each assignment.

I told him he had to detail my car.