sozobe wrote: Say that he is taken out of school -- will he be homeschooled/ unschooled straight through to high school? If no, at what point would he be going back to school? Will the issues be resolved by then or will they just be more entrenched and more difficult to deal with?
I don't know, so the best I can do is share experiences from my own family, which I do know something about. When me or my sisters were sick, it was my mothers policy to have friends bring over the homework. She would then work through the textbook covering the material we needed to do the homework, and had us write it, just as we would have if we hadn't been sick. My grandmother had the same policy when my mother was sick. Because of post-World-War-II malnutrition, that was often a significant part of the school year, in one case the greater part of it. In all four cases -- me, my sisters, and my mother -- the pedagogical result of this was that we returned to school ahead of our class.
How does this apply to Boomerang? I'm not sure. But based on my impresson of Boomer on this board, she seems to have much in common with my mother and my grandmother, and nothing with the scary religious fanatics who give homeschooling a bad name.
Sozobe wrote:And if the plan is to teach him straight through to college, what about then? Will he go to college, and face these issues there? Will he skip college, and face the issues when he works? Will he not work at all...?
In my experience, college is a much better environment than high school for not being "one of the boys" in. There is cliquishness and mobbing there, too, but it's much easier to drop out of the clique system and find friends on your own terms. I would expect that socializing problems are easier to face there. As for work, it tends to bring you together with people you share interests with. (You can choose your job, but you can't choose your school or your class in school.) Also, you have the option to work freelance, where issues of fitting in are again much easier to face than in the command-and-control environment conventional schools depend on.
Sozobe wrote:I don't have enough information, so I can't tell, but it seems like Mo is at some risk of not having nearly the skills that you (Thomas) or boomer have -- which would impact him in many, many ways.
That cuts both ways though, in terms of leaving him in his current school or taking him out.
Sozobe wrote:Mo has a fabulous advocate in boomer and I know she's just in research mode now -- I'm confident that she will figure out the best direction for Mo, whatever it may be.
Now this is a point we fully agree on. And for what it's worth, you don't seem out of your depth at all. I don't think anyone has the final answers here, including professionals, and the best we can do for boomer is give her as many perspectives and gut-feelings as we have so she can puzzle a picture together on her own.