Yeah, Lin doesn't like it.
Turns out the other students in that 2nd hour of English are all boys. 4 boys, to be exact. 4 boys in 6th grade, leading Lin to believe (somewhat jokingly) that she must be stupid if she's the only 7th grader in a special English class with 6th graders.
I keep pinching myself, wondering how long can this possibly last... I have a 13-year-old daughter who wants school to be harder! She doesn't want two hours of special English! She wants to be in regular English! She actually wants to be thrown in the water with the rest of the 7th grade and be forced to swim her way out. She is trying to refuse the small life jacket we and the school are attempting to provide. (Like my metaphor?)
So, what to do? I guess our first step is to contact her English teacher and find out exactly where Lin is in her English skills. Does she need two hours a day? Could she keep up if she attempted another regular class like 7th grade English or Social Studies?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
All this talk of Lin's education here in America reminds me that I never did tell a story I alluded to in a post several months ago. I think now is the time, as it greatly explains Lin's determination in school.
As many of you may know, Lin was born with a severe heart defect known as Tetralogy of Fallot (ToF). She had life-saving surgery at two years old in Shanghai. She lived in the Shanghai Children's Home from the time of her surgery until we came to bring her home 10 years later.
We'd gotten some information that Lin spent quite a bit of time in the hospital as a young child, years after the surgery. When we asked Lin about it she swore up and down that it wasn't true, she'd never spent time in the hospital. We were confused, but we let it go. As adoptive parents, we learn to accept the fact that much of our children's lives before they came to be our children will always be a mystery.
Back in the spring Lin and I were talking, I don't even remember what we were talking about now. But Lin was talking about China. And she told me how she had had to live with "sick kids" from time to time. I immediately realized she was talking about the so-called hospital stays we had been told about. According to Lin, she wasn't in the hospital, just in another section of the Children's Home. And while she was with the "sick kids" she could not attend school. She spent months living with the sick kids, missing out on her education.
Then she told me a story about how she had an opportunity to go to public school, school outside the Children's Home. I don't know how old she would have been but I'm guessing around 7 or 8. She told me that only the smartest kids could go to public school, and she knew that she was smart enough to go.
She told me how she wrote her name down, or maybe a teacher wrote her name, on the list of kids who were going to go to school.
And then she told me how, on the morning of the first day of school, she was ready and waiting to go, and her name was not called. She watched as all the other kids went off to public school and she did not. She blames it on "being sick."
Can you even imagine?
It explains so very much about her hatred of doctors and all things medical, and her sheer determination to make the most of public school here.
What a great, brave kid I've got, huh?
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