![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Failure is an option
Nov. 26th, 2009 01:24 pmMy poor little guy is having a sad day, and so am I. We've been talking about dropping French and Spanish permanently. He tries really hard, but after three years of trying to learn both, he is still unable to remember that "nous" is "us" in French, or "yo" means "I" in Spanish. He can, with great difficulty, learn a set of words for one week, sort of. But if he doesn't review them for a week, they are gone, almost as if they'd never been memorized in the first place.
He has a terrible, terrible long-term memory. We had him assessed by a psychologist, who told us that although his English skills are beyond the 99th percentile for his age, and his reasoning and math skills were extremely high - all high enough that she strongly recommended having him in a gifted program if he ended up going to regular school - his long-term memory was around the 25th percentile. Whatever goes in may go in quickly enough, but without constant repetition it quickly disappears.
This is frustrating almost beyond belief in classes like math, where he has learned how to multiply large numbers and do long division at least five times each, but thankfully he's pretty quick to pick up and once he's learned the skills, he is able to use them fairly well. Ditto science; he gets it, though he may forget facts a week after they are taught. Ditto history. Ditto music, though, again, it's intensely frustrating to have to teach him that the lower set of bars is for the left hand and the upper is for the right hand over and over again.
But learning languages, though it does consist of some rules regarding how to put words together, is almost entirely made up of words that have to be memorized. And it doesn't do him a bit of good to be able to grasp that French uses double negatives (je ne peux pas lire le livre) if he cannot remember what peux, lire, and livre - or even je mean.
He's tried so hard. He wants so much to speak other languages, particularly considering that I speak three fairly fluently and can piece together bits of a fourth, and Daniel is reading French and Spanish with relative ease. But it's not happening, and I think it's time to concede defeat. He had a long cry about it with me this morning, then went outside and cried some more. He also suggested we make chocolate chip cookies to make himself feel better.
He has a terrible, terrible long-term memory. We had him assessed by a psychologist, who told us that although his English skills are beyond the 99th percentile for his age, and his reasoning and math skills were extremely high - all high enough that she strongly recommended having him in a gifted program if he ended up going to regular school - his long-term memory was around the 25th percentile. Whatever goes in may go in quickly enough, but without constant repetition it quickly disappears.
This is frustrating almost beyond belief in classes like math, where he has learned how to multiply large numbers and do long division at least five times each, but thankfully he's pretty quick to pick up and once he's learned the skills, he is able to use them fairly well. Ditto science; he gets it, though he may forget facts a week after they are taught. Ditto history. Ditto music, though, again, it's intensely frustrating to have to teach him that the lower set of bars is for the left hand and the upper is for the right hand over and over again.
But learning languages, though it does consist of some rules regarding how to put words together, is almost entirely made up of words that have to be memorized. And it doesn't do him a bit of good to be able to grasp that French uses double negatives (je ne peux pas lire le livre) if he cannot remember what peux, lire, and livre - or even je mean.
He's tried so hard. He wants so much to speak other languages, particularly considering that I speak three fairly fluently and can piece together bits of a fourth, and Daniel is reading French and Spanish with relative ease. But it's not happening, and I think it's time to concede defeat. He had a long cry about it with me this morning, then went outside and cried some more. He also suggested we make chocolate chip cookies to make himself feel better.
