When you don't want to fight with your child about homework anymore...
When you're tired of hearing, "She can do the work, she just has to apply herself..."
When it seems you've tried every system of organization under the sun, and been defeated each time...
Learning glitches can create a host of secondary resistances to the process of education. When school is extra hard for a child, it's a challenge to their self-esteem.
Ideally, they accept the challenge, and redouble their efforts, even if it seems they have to work twice as hard as their friends to get the same result.
But that's a big ask for a child or adolescent--or for anyone. Add attention and executive function weaknesses to the mix, and it’s even tougher for a student to maintain confidence and motivation.
The temptation can be strong to seek alternate and more immediate satisfactions, like clowning around, getting laughs, distracting the class. Or just zoning out under the radar, going online during “homework time”.
A therapeutic tutor strives to understand an individual’s learning in all its aspects—cognitive, emotional, behavioral, pedagogical—and ally with the student, acknowledging what's difficult, and working through the feelings that get triggered.
Denying or minimizing a child's anger, frustration and even shame won't help any more than will wallowing in those negative feelings. The way forward is to help the student unlearn the habits of avoidance and defeatism that have locked them in a vicious cycle. Students learn to tolerate more of the discomfort that comes with their particular struggles in learning, structure themselves, set manageable goals.
Experiences of mastery, seemingly small at first, lead to progressive improvements in reality-based self-esteem. When sticking with it becomes more rewarding than bailing out, students become increasingly able and willing to take responsibility for their own learning.