For years I dreaded back-to-school time. For my elementary-school-aged daughter, it meant another year of teasing, frustration and a constant sense of defeat.

I first realized that something was wrong during her kindergarten year. Try as we might, with songs, games and repetition, she couldn’t learn the alphabet. After first grade, my husband and I had her tested. She scored between the fifth and tenth percentiles in reading - as if she’d never been to school.

In the classroom and on the playground, my daughter endured misery. She was always an outsider, feeling stupid. Often, her teachers didn’t comprehend the nature of her difficulties, or thought she wasn’t trying.

“Learning to read at school was like trying to run through mud,” she says now. “You struggle so hard, but you never seem to get anywhere.” 

Learning disability

My daughter, now 22, has a learning disability. The umbrella term is dyslexia — unusual difficulty with reading. But she also has difficulties with math and sequential memory.

We had her in four schools over five years. Though we encountered several dedicated special-education teachers, we never found a school with a clear, coordinated plan for poor readers. Progress seemed to depend on the luck of the draw - would she get an effective teacher or not? But a half-hour a week with a specialist made little difference anyway.

I used to wake up at 3:00 a.m. and gaze sadly out the window thinking, “She’ll never read a novel; she’ll never go to college.”

At the end of fourth grade, I got a note from my daughter’s teacher, who said she was “regressing.” We were at a crossroads. With more failure, we could see an attitude of defeatism becoming a permanent mark on her character. Public and private schools seemed to offer only bits and pieces of what she needed. With time and options running out, we made the decision to teach her at home.

Sitting in my kitchen that July, I searched catalogues and the Internet, poring over sample curricula and rejecting faddish programs. I knew my daughter needed a systematic, step-by-step approach to reading instruction that would spell out the rules that most people just intuit.

A discovery

I found it in “Megawords,” an eight-volume series from Educators Publishing Service. (I combined that program with other aids, such as the Dolch “sight word” list - 220 high-frequency words, many of which can’t be phonetically sounded out.) Each day, my daughter had contests with herself, trying to beat her time reading the Megawords word lists. Slowly she began to master the “decoding” skills she hadn’t been able to learn piecemeal in school.

As time went on, I discovered that my initial instructional strategy - just explaining things again in a louder voice - didn’t work. We needed to identify learning techniques that would act as keys to unlock her memory and unleash her abilities.

I discovered that my daughter had an excellent memory for pictures and spoken words. By sketching pictures that she could associate with facts or names, she could remember history and science lessons that would otherwise slip her mind. Rhyming and acting-out concepts also helped. She learned all the states and capitals perfectly after we composed rhyming sentences for each one.

Slowly I began to see how much my daughter was capable of. Teachers had often assumed that because she struggled with reading, she needed dumbed-down history, literature and science. We got challenging books such as “Little Women” on tape from the library, and studied King Arthur and Homer’s “Iliad.” She memorized Shakespeare poems and recited them to the rest of the family.

As defeatism faded, my daughter developed a new love of learning. Our mother-daughter bond deepened as we went over her accomplishments at the end of each day.

After three years at home, she had vaulted ahead and was ready to go back to school. We found a unique academic program that offered both special help and high standards. Tested again, she read at over the 90th percentile.

Though she still needs accommodations, she’s now a college senior with a scholarship and a top grade-point average.

Home-schooling isn’t for everyone. But all parents can make their home a powerful educational resource. Often, that means more than supervising homework or calling a teacher when difficulties arise. It can mean searching for books that fire a child’s imagination, probing for techniques that make learning easier and crafting ways to make “math facts” fun rather than tedious.

Sometimes it takes the patience, persistence and love that only a parent can give to make a daughter bloom.

Last week we learned the names of the 53 outstanding Minnesota high school seniors who won 2007 $2,500 National Merit Scholarships, arguably the top academic honor in the nation. More than 20,000 Minnesota students took the test that begins the intense competition, and the 53 winners emerged at the end.

National Merit Scholars are often the product of our state’s most elite private and public high schools. But as I stopped by the school of one winner, John Molitor of White Bear Lake, I saw no gleaming laboratories or cutting-edge computer labs. John’s teacher opened the door. She’s also the school’s principal, lunch lady and head janitor. She’s Joyce Molitor, John’s mother.

During the past 10 years, an increasing number of home-schoolers like John have won National Merit awards, according to Eileen Artemakis of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.

Nationally, John may be a stand-out student. But at the Molitor home school, he’s just one of the crowd. Joyce and Paul Molitor have homeschooled all eight of their children, ages 24 to 5.

The oldest, Ruth, now holds a master’s degree in linguistics. David, 22, will head to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall to start a Ph.D. in economics. Rebecca, 20, is a piano performance major at Northwestern College in Roseville.

So the Molitor genes are remarkable, right? Maybe, but so is the Molitor education system. The family doesn’t rely on breakthrough curricula designed by teams of educational consultants. Instead, John credits curricula such as Rod and Staff, a Mennonite textbook series, with giving him a vital edge. A lot of modern grammar and composition books skimp on fundamentals, he says. But Rod and Staff”s English texts go deep, illuminating the mysteries of dangling participles, moods of verbs and sentence diagramming. Thanks to Rod and Staff, says John, “I understand how the English language is really built.” As a result, he now has the background he needs to master foreign languages, which he plans to focus on — along with music — at Northwestern University in the fall.

What about socialization, that bugaboo of home-schoolers? “Some kids say, ‘Oh, man, you must be so socially inept if you’re a homeschooler,” John says. His grin makes clear what he thinks of this stereotype.

“I’ve noticed that while most kids get a lot of socialization, it’s in a very narrow age band,” says Paul Molitor, John’s father and a sales representative with a St. Paul company. The Molitor kids socialize with friends, neighbors and other home-schoolers. They also spend hours each week in north Minneapolis, where they teach Sunday school, go on outings with local kids, and visit the homes of families they work with.

The Molitor brood has also developed impressive entrepreneurial skills. They run a lawn care business, and raise and sell guinea pigs. Last year, Joseph and Daniel, 12 and 9, made $150 selling their homemade Christmas ornaments door to door.

But the best socialization of all comes from sitting around the dinner table, says John. “When you belong to a family of 10,” he said with a smile, “you learn to relate to all kinds of personalities.” John describes his siblings, even 5-year-old Tim, as his “best friends.”

The Molitors know a lot about the virtues of togetherness. Until 2003 they lived in a 900-square-foot house in Lauderdale, where all five boys slept in one bedroom. “It was hilarious,” their father says. “We had to shuffle kids around, move them from the bedroom to the kitchen when the little ones needed naps. We called it ‘nomadic homeschooling.’ ”

In the 1980s, when homeschooling began to grow, families that embraced it had a reputation of being reclusive and exceptionally religious. But the movement has rapidly expanded and diversified. Today, 18,374 Minnesota K-12 students are educated at home, according to the Minnesota Department of Education.

It’s not surprising that colleges are seeing a growing number of top-notch home-schooled applicants like John. Stanford University is one elite institution that is eager to attract them. Stanford assigns home school applications to an admissions officer who specializes in evaluating prospective students who don’t have standard transcripts.

Why is Stanford interested in home-schoolers? “Admissions officers sum it up in two words: intellectual vitality,” according to an article in the university’s alumni magazine several years ago. “It’s the spark, the passion, that sets the truly exceptional student — the one driven to pursue independent research and explore difficult concepts from a very early age — apart from your typical bright kid.”

Stanford, says the article, wants “more of those special minds. “