paying attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. –Simone Weil

Although our six-year-old is too young to be diagnosed with ADD, most of the experts he spent his days with last fall were convinced he had it. Not recognizing the boy they described, we asked to see video of a typical classroom scene. The mute, distracted, fidgeting child was not the Elliott we knew. This disheartening visual aid should have been enough for us to pull him out of his self-contained classroom, but I, at least, was still convinced that the experts could probably do a better job coaxing letter recognition and basic math facts out of a brain focused primarily on blankie, Curious George and his best friend Mia. An end-of-the-year conference led by an exasperated teacher who had quite literally given up hope gave us the shove we needed to bring Elliott home. He was clearly a failure at black-and-white printouts.

Since January, we have been homeschooling Elliott. For the most part, I come up with the ideas, and Andrew (and sometimes my mom) executes them. We incorporate art and music, beads and matchbox cars. We've found that Elliott knows far more than his assessments showed. He can identify all his letters and numbers and is even learning to read. He can pay attention to scholastic activities, but he needs a lot of breaks—walks with the dog, sledding, dancing and, yes, an episode here and there of Curious George. Our child's growing mind can only happily endure structured learning in short bursts. We don't see this as a problem.

Elliott is a homebody, a comedian and a deeply intuitive and caring soul. His anxiety over school— the constrictive environment, being away from us (he still regularly and rather mournfully sings to himself the refrain "grownups come back"), enduring a very long six-and-a-half-hour day of direction with one 20-minute recess—was making him difficult to teach. I am sure now that the attention deficit regularly hinted at had more to do with the sheer exhaustion of trying to hold it together.

Early one morning last week, I was scrutinizing my freshly washed face in the bathroom mirror, silently bemoaning the noticeable dark circles and growing collection of wrinkles, when I noticed Elliott standing in the doorway studying me.

"Mom," he said, his sleepy face gleaming. "You look beautiful."

Just because my son can't sit and complete an activity on a piece of paper doesn't mean he's not paying attention. He is one of the best students I know.