When Teaching Meets Resistance

Posted by Melissa | 0 comments

I’m no pushover. Anyone who knows me can confirm this. And although my kids whine and complain, it doesn’t sway me to excuse them from hard work. Whether it’s chores or math, there’s no getting out of your work at my house.

As steady of a taskmaster as I think I am though, I learned something about myself this year that was not helping my children’s education. When my kids balked at the work assigned to them, I still required them to do it, but I just wasn’t getting around to it as often as need be. Even though I persevered in the moment, their resistance was affecting my desire to regularly require them to do it. The whining and complaining was working indirectly and it was wearing down my resolve. Their hard learning thing became my hard teaching thing.

I often blamed it on the curriculum. Maybe we just needed something else to teach multiplication facts or cursive, I’d tell myself. Perhaps this child just wasn’t ready for outlining a chapter. Maybe that curriculum is not well written or easy to use. Excuses aside, I was starting to see some gaps that I had to take responsibility for and plow through the resistance behind it.

What I realized is that my children each have areas in which they excel and things tend to come easily in those areas. However, in the subjects they really need to improve on, it’s hard work no matter how we slice it. They don’t have a knack for it and they resist the work and my teaching big-time. They complain and cry and whine and argue. So rather than skip the work in these areas, I saw that I needed to focus even more on building these skills. A solid foundation requires that we build on all educational disciplines, not just the ones we enjoy and excel at.

It’s really a brain thing. When those neurons are working hard to make new connections, it’s faint and fuzzy at first. I know how I feel when I’m learning something new. There’s insecurity and uncertainty. I’d rather jump over to the part of my brain that makes connections faster than high speed internet. But no, it’s as spotty as dial-up when new pathways are forming and it requires repeated practice. With regular work, however, those connections get a little quicker and more stable over time.

Of course, as the teacher, you’ve got to know when pushing through the resistance is the right thing to do, because sometimes it’s not. There are other reasons a child might be resistant to learning a subject. Perhaps they aren’t developmentally ready for it. Asking a 2nd grade boy to write a paragraph is going to get resistance because it’s just beyond his abilities in both fine-motor skills and writing ability. Sometimes a curriculum is just not well-suited to your child’s style of learning or is too rigorous.

Other times, there are some hidden learning challenges or delays going on that might need further examination by a doctor, occupational therapist, or other learning specialist. My son was having an incredibly hard time learning to read and could not sit still when we did it. I knew he wasn’t ADD, but there was something going on. After being seen by an OT trained in vision therapy, we learned that his eyes weren’t tracking together (sadly, this is something that most optometrists do not check for). No wonder reading was torture for this little guy. Therapy has helped him tremendously. I’m so glad I didn’t push in this area. It really takes prayer to ask the Lord to show you the source of your child’s resistance. The Holy Spirit is always your best educational consultant. Start with Him.

If you’ve determined, however, that it’s just old-fashioned resistance, here are some tools to help you help them get through it.

Go Slow and Steady
For subjects that aren’t clicking with your child, you need to slow way down until they grasp the material. Pitch the standard lesson plans and just focus on the child getting the concept. If it takes months to learn long division, then so be it. Work at it everyday. It’s more important to build a strong foundation than it is to finish the book.

Take Small Bites
You’ve heard the old adage about the best way to eat an elephant—one bite at a time. The same is true for anything that seems big and overwhelming to your child. You need to break the material into small bites. Work at gaining mastery in little steps along the way, and their confidence will soar once they finally grasp the concept. With my handwriting-hating child, I ditched the lengthy copywork and just let her write one word really well several times.

Find New Resources
If your child is struggling with a topic within your curriculum, you don’t need to get rid of the book for good, but rather take a break from it and look for additional resources to aid in teaching. There are websites that might explain it another way that they understand better or workbooks that focus on that specific skill in a fun way. Even games can help solidify concepts that are sketchy in their minds. Or perhaps there are some manipulatives you can use that will help things make sense.

Tune into Their Learning Style
We can’t promise everything in a child’s education will be delivered in their favored learning style, but when they’re struggling, try getting into the brain through this preferred mode. If your child is auditory, then he might need someone to explain things verbally several ways rather than just read about it. If you have a kinesthetic learner, giving them something to manipulate and move with can help them make connections. And for visual learners, use pictures and charts to help them visualize what you are saying. Employing multi-sensory methods will only aid in learning.

Give Praise; Get Patience
Children thrive on praise, so give lots of it as they make progress. Find something positive in their work to praise. It’s so important that they don’t feel like something is wrong with them because they don’t naturally possess a particular skill. You will need to go out of your way to encourage them. You’ll also need to pray for supernatural patience as you teach and re-teach the same concept over and over and over again. They will sense your frustration otherwise.

Don’t Neglect Their Strengths
It’s easy to hone in on a weak subject with determination to get past the hurdles and in the process, neglect their strong suits. Don’t do this. For one, it won’t help their confidence to always be working at stuff they don’t like and aren’t skilled at. They need the reminder that they are smart and have abilities. Also, you don’t want to them to fall behind in other areas while you wait for learning to level out. Kids (and adults too) learn at various paces across the curricula. If your 3rd grader is doing 1st grade math and 4th grade reading, it’s OK. Just keep at it. Get your eyes off the grade levels and focus on skill levels. It doesn’t mean they’ll always be behind. Do your best to protect them from thinking they aren’t at grade level. This won’t help achieve your goals or be edifying to them.

When resistance comes up, it should be a sign to look for the source of the problem. But if you determine it’s nothing out of the ordinary, then gird your homeschooling loins and get ready for some work. It will payoff with a child who not only gets over this hurdle with your patient help, but also learns a lesson in perseverance that will serve him a lifetime.

Melissa Morgner is a happy wife of 17 years to her college sweetheart and mother to six loud, but lovable children ranging in age from 14 down to three. After ten years of homeschooling and sampling way too much curriculum, she takes an eclectic approach in their little schoolroom, choosing resources that best suit the children and the teacher. Her busy household puts her gifts of juggling and winging it to the test each day. She steals moments here and there to write on her blog, Half Dozen Mama, about the lessons she’s learning from the Lord in the routine but privileged tasks of mothering and homeschooling.