Robert's First Hobby :)

Just ran across this.  Mrs. Valarie Wallace is Robert's other mom, his school mom.  She worked with him all day at school for 3 yrs from the start.  Then we moved away for 4 years. When we moved back to GA, we tried putting Robert in the middle school.  That only lasted a week and a half.  So then I tried homeschooling him.  We were driving each other crazy.  Mrs. Wallace had had to retire from working at the school to take care of her husband who has MS.  She had volunteered to help tutor Robert.  So she started helping me a few days a week with Robert's school.  Now she has taught him for 2 1/2 years, 4 days a week, 5-6 hrs a day and she still loves it.  I honestly think that we were meant to live in this house so that we would only be two neighborhoods from her.  She's our angel.  We owe half of Robert's education to her.  We couldn't have done it without her.


This is what he wrote in class with her.


        "When I started school, I was different from other students in my kindergarten class.  The school was filled with children and teachers that want kids to be in line.  This was the first time I was away from my mother in an unfamiliar environment.  I was startled to see my mom leave me alone, although it wasn't hard to get used to being at school.  I couldn't speak very well at first, but it took me less than a year for me to learn to speak like a first grader.  I also had a phobia of heights, and I was relieved to see there was no stairs.  I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome without knowing that I had it.  Here is the story about the first thing I got interested in.

      While other boys had fun with action figures or video games, I enjoyed learning about stars and planets from books about space.  It started when my teacher, Mrs. Wallace, saw a beautiful poster showing the names and pictures of each planet, from Mercury to Pluto, and read them out loud to me.  Each day, on the way to the library, she would repeat the process until I quickly memorized each planet.  It didn't take me long to get interested in the planets and stars.  After that, I collected lots of books, big and small, about space for many years.

     Over the years, I began to replace my hobby for astronomy with the interest in dogs and gardening, since dogs are adorable and gardening is beautiful and healthy.  Even so, I still like to remember the time I got my first hobby.  Whenever I see Mrs. Wallace she often tells me stories about times when I asked about galaxies and black holes although she did not know anything on those subjects she would take me to the library and look them up.  She often would read from a six grade level to a kindergartener and I would understand almost all of the books about space.  I love to learn!"