More discussion
Dec 15, 2004 Homeschooling
I’m wicked tired because Meagan came to visit and we stayed up until 2am gossiping and gabbing. I had a really good time so the exhaustion is worth it!!!
I don’t think that homeschooling or unschooling are perfect systems. And, too, they are so unique to the families that practice that it’s difficult to make generalizations so understand that I’m speaking only from my own experience and observations. But neither is institutional schooling — in any of its forms — a perfect system. I think that when we weigh our choices, we have to accept that there are trade-offs so it’s a matter of which risks we’re most comfortable taking.
Onwards.
Katie wrote: but i do think it’s extremely important to make sure that there is an element of “wellroundedness” to an education, beyond pursuing simple interests. i worked in the admissions office of a competitive conservatory theater program for three years, and each year we got one or two homeschooled students auditioning or interviewing for our various programs. on more than one occasion, the prospective student would be quite talented in whatever their field was - acting, let’s say - but extremely underprepared in virtually every other capacity. while we were absolutely willing to accept homeschooled students, and often accepted talented theater students who weren’t the best academic prospects, we were unable to accept two students because it was clear they wouldn’t be able to fulfill the very basic academic requirements for the university
My first thought is that there are also traditionally schooled students who are ill-preapred for university demands and who can’t meet basic requirements. But that doesn’t address this valid concern that children who are allowed to follow their passions may neglect other necessary skills in the meanwhile.
Let’s take writing as an example. Writing is a skill that I think almost everyone needs to develop. (That’s my bias, sure, but I’m sticking to it.) A child can develop this skill as part of a her pursuit of another interest and this takes creativity on the part of the parent. I personally like a liberal arts education and so I’d try to find ways to get my kids to use needed skills within the realm of their passion. If I had a child interested in the theater, I would have them read plays and theatrical criticism. I would have them read reviews of local shows in the paper. I would ask them to compare and contrast Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. We might work on a research paper on theatrical history. I would find ways for them to hone their writing skills while still having respect for their interests.
Now there are going to be homeschooled kids who don’t do it this way. Sometimes this has to do with parents who don’t understand that they need to be partners in their child’s schooling. Sometimes this has to do with children who are going to be stubborn about what it is they’re willing to learn. (It happens in regular school, too.) And some of them simply aren’t going to be able to do XYZ because perhaps this is beyond their capability. Which leads us to the main issue I see in Katie’s comment: If a child fails to meet the demands of a specific program, is that always a bad thing? In other words, is the child’s inability to enter that theater program a just reason to judge that child’s schooling a failure?
Katie said, in addressing the issue of kids who couldn’t meet the program requirements:[O]ne girl’s parent was very upset about it, and tried to argue us into accepting her, but eventually gave up after a lengthy conversation about how it wasn’t just academics that were at hand, it was a reflection on how successful she’d be able to be at communicating with people in the future regarding work, and her ability to handle the business end of what she was going into.
There are a lot of assumptions here. The biggest is that the only means of measuring success is entry into this particular program. One could argue that lots of people who work in theater don’t have great educations or much training. Many of them are successful anyway. Many aren’t. Attending a competitive training program is not absolutely correlated with success in that program’s field. It might help her — surely it would help her — but failure to attend won’t necessarily hurt her; it’ll just mean her life will look different than it might have otherwise. Let’s establish that first: This is not a measure of over-all success; it is a measure of a very particular success.
So this young woman wanted to, perhaps, act. (Maybe she was into set design; let’s pretend she’s an actor.) Apparently she wanted the specific experience and training to be had at this competitive program and no other program would do. As we’ve made clear, whether or not this program was going to be valuable for future success (however you define success) is impossible to say. What is improtant is that she wanted that experience, valued that experience, and likely felt it was important to her definition of success. And she failed.
What happened here? Some valuable lessons:
1. She got a new perspective on what other people perceive is real learning.
2. She was made to understand that this perspective is often non-negotiable. (And this is big because she needs to know that whether or not she accepts them, she will be judged by other people’s standards and will need to think about how she wants to handle that. It may not be fair that people will judge you at a job interview for wearing the wrong tie but it’s a fact and if you want the job, you need to wear the right tie. Such is life. Either wear the tie or don’t wear the tie and accept that your chances may be hurt by your decision.)
3. She was offered a new way to look at skills that she previously felt were unimportant.
4. She was given the opportunity to reexamine her past choices from this new perspective and consider making changes.
Maybe the program was never going to happen even is she promised to make good and study hard. Maybe she was too late, too far behind, too old to try again. Was it a failure? Yes. Was it a pointless failure? Not necessarily — that part is up to her. Was it an indication of how the rest of her life would work? Nope.
Part of homeschooling, as I see it, is giving your kids a heads up about the rest of the world. Do you want to go to college? Why? What does college have to offer? What can you get there that you can get no place else? Are you really committed to what college can give you? Well, then you better start thinking about how to meet their requirements.
Right now my father is freaking about because my youngest sister, who is a senior in high school, isn’t sure about college. Heck. She’s 17. Who’s sure about anything at 17? He’s worried that if she doesn’t go to school now, she’ll never go. He’s got his eyes on a path for her and he’s afraid that if she veers off she’ll never get back on. And you know what? She might not. She might miss out on the traditional college experience. I did. I dropped out after two years and then didn’t go back for another three. Then when I did go back, I switched majors and had to attend three years to get my BS. I didn’t live in the dorms. I always worked full-time. In short, I didn’t have a traditional college experience. Did I miss out? Absolutely. I missed out on a very culturally specific way of going to college. But then one could argue that someone who does it the traditional way — who graduates from high school, goes to the dorms, graduates after four years — misses out on my less traditional school experience. I can’t regret my past decisions without devaluing what I gained from doing things the way I did. Perhaps my littlest sister will never go to college. She may be like my oldest sister and discover that she can have what she wants from her life without going on to school. Is that so bad? There are lots and lots of ways to live and all of them can be valuable.
My little sister, from what I gather, felt like she was on a conveyer belt that didn’t demand that much of her. She was in high school, she was taking college prep classes, and her parents assumed that college was in her future. She wasn’t asked to really examine why college might make good sense to her. She wasn’t given the opportunity to explore the idea of college because it was a given: College = Future Success. Now she feels kind of panicked. She doesn’t feel prepared for more schooling and she’s not sure how interested she is either. But her future is inexorably upon her and she’s not really capable of thinking critically about her choices. She may end up going to school — living in a dorm, graduating in four years — but she may still not be able to meet her own measure of success. She’s never been asked to even start thinking about her own measure of success. (This happened to Brett — those four years leading to a business degree were a waste of time and money.)
The way that we homeschool makes a very big demand of ourselves and our children; it expects us to wrestle our values from societal ones and think critically about what we really feel is important. This is part of our ongoing family discussion. It should, of course, be part of every family discussion however the family chooses to educate the kids. Again, this isn’t unique to homeschooling — any of us can benefit from thinking about our decisions. Homeschoolers don’t have a lock on thoughtful education — not by a long shot. They also aren’t the only ones to do a bad job of educating their kids. We’ve all got pitfalls to watch out for but often we’re defining them differently.
Wait, there was another couple of questions from achormic:
But deslexia runs in my part of the family and I have always worried in the back of my mind, what my child had dislexia and I didn’t even know it? I mean you don’t really start to see dislexia until reading, writing and arthmitic begins and like most people we tend to as children go to great lenghts to “hide” what is wrong. So my question I guess is two fold, 1) how do you know if your child has a learning problem? 2) would having a learning problem make you turn to the pulic school for help?
Especially if there was a family history of any kind of learning disorder, I’d be keeping an extra-sharp eye on my kids. Then, too, I think it’s just responsible of parents to have a basic idea of child development and learning development. Some of you may recall that there was some concern on my blog that since Noah wasn’t reading much beyond the first set of Bob Books at six, that this was indicative of a learning disorder. Hey, it crossed my mind, too, which is why I took it upon myself to do some research. As it turns out, this wasn’t an issue for Noah but I read the research to make sure that taking a wait-and-see approach was the safe thing to do.
I also wonder — I have no research anecdotal or otherwise to back this up — but I wonder if it would be less common to hide a learning problem if a kid isn’t asked to perform on command? In school, you know pretty quickly whether or not you’re “smart.” They’re tracking kids in in kindergarten nowadays so it’s starting even younger than when I was in school. If learning could be done in a way that didn’t feel threatening — without grades or star charts — maybe it would be easier to recognize that learning ability is neutral. I mean, Noah doesn’t really know where he is in most of his learning. (He’s figured out that not all of his friends can read and that some read better — I’m not sure that he cares though.) When he had trouble with a math concept recently, he didn’t feel like he was failing. In fact, he felt like I was doing a bad job of explaining it to him. As his main teacher, I think it’s my job to find out the best way to get information to him and part of this means that I need to evaluate where he is developmentally. (If I’m having trouble, I need to find someone who can help me.) But it’s neutral; it’s not like his ability or inability to learn something means anything more than that he’s learning or not learning something. Does this make sense?
If either of my children did have a learning problem, I probably wouldn’t go to the schools for help as my first choice. I likely would turn to someone privately if my budget allowed. It’s good to know that the schools are a resource but I would want to find someone who was willing to have an open-mind about learning environments and processes. Also, I would have to think long and hard about entering into an IEP (individualized education plan) since it’s much harder to get out of one than it is to get into one. Personally, I wouldn’t want to admit bureaucracy into my family’s education in this way but if I really needed some help, that might be our best option. I guess basically it’s impossible to make any generalizations about how I’d handle it.
December 15th, 2004 at 6:20 pm
“think critically about what we really feel is important. This is part of our ongoing family discussion. It should, of course, be part of every family discussion however the family chooses to educate the kids.”
So true.
December 16th, 2004 at 12:03 am
i definitely don’t think the program we offered was any arbiter of success - and we emphasized to each and every student that our program wasn’t right for anyone. it was more rigorous, more focused - definitely NOT for a well-rounded student, in fact.
and i am quite certain that the handful of homeschooled students we ran into problems with were not indicative of much of anything. i just wanted to throw out there, though, the other extreme of unschooling, or pure interest guided learning … particularly when the parent involved isn’t as thoughtful and attentive. the concern we had (and i want to emphasize that us, as an admissions office, was basically four people who got to know all applicants on a personal level - not some bureacratic monstrosity working simply off of test scores & stats) is that we honestly couldn’t conceive how this girl would ever operate outside of her parents’ home - her verbal and math abilities were just that low.
i have very mixed feelings about traditional schooling, public in particular. the system has major flaws and i have enormous problems with how my schooling worked out. on the other hand i realize now that there are certain areas that i never would have pursued on my own - math being one of them - that are in fact helpful to me later on in ways i never would have realized. i took up knitting just over a year ago and my algebra & geometry skills have been indispensable in figuring out sizing and construction and designing. etc etc etc.
but again i do think what you’re doing with noah is fantastic. it does remind me in many ways of how my mother helped me to learn - though in that case it was parallel to public schooling. being in classes and subjects that i didn’t care for helped me to learn, with her help, how to adapt to less than ideal situations and how to manipulate them to fit my wants. tedious freshman writing class got me down, because i was already a skilled writer? take that as a wide open opportunity, then, to use that time to pursue my own interest for the required research paper. in hindsight, some of my most memorable & constructive learning experiences were in those then-unbearable classes.
December 16th, 2004 at 1:13 am
Hi Dawn, we knew each some years ago on a parenting after infertility email list.
My son is in a public school now after starting out in a Montessori preschool that didn’t work out for him or us.
I didn’t intend to go down the mainstream education road, (though I never intended to homseschool at any stage) but now that we’re on it, I find that most of my ideas of what we’re aiming for or seeking or what we’d call ’success’ have changed a lot. I think that we do most of what you describe, ie homeschooling, as well as sending him out to school. And what he primarily gets from school, at the age of 5-6, is a social group, a friendship group. Sure he learns how to read and write there, in a systematic way which is maybe not my preferred way but which I don’t think damages him, but he also learns a great deal about other people, other kids, and who he is in relation to other kids (a range of kids that we would not know in our lives). Given that he has lesbian mothers, it feels important to let him have his own world, apart from us, not just the world we make for him. Of course, we entrust him to a school which is as progressive as they come, but no school or community is guaranteed 100% progressive.
I guess what I am getting at is that his ‘learning’ - what he learns, why he learns it, how he learns it - doesn’t seem the most important thing to me. His social identity, his social/relationship learning, does. Maybe this will all change when he’s at a later developmental stage. I ended up thinking that our particular Montessori school almost fetishised the life of the mind - learning, in the intellectual sense - over play. And play isn’t just about learning, but about the simple joy of being onself and being with others.
December 16th, 2004 at 1:27 am
Dawn– what thoughtful discourse! Noah & Madison are so lucky to have you as a teacher.
I thought I’d pipe in with my different experience of public schools, though:
I didn’t go to schools that were considered “good,” but I had more than a few fabulous teachers (in addition to plenty of quality school time spent daydreaming, or surreptitiously reading novels under my desk) and together with an intense social education, experiences that I value highly and don’t think could be easily replicated outside a school setting.
For instance, the whole idea of assigned reading lists– I was a voracious reader and formal education per se made no difference in that regard, but there were things that my teachers assigned, that I didn’t want to read and on my own wouldn’t have read (especially foreign literature, and poetry) that I still carry with me today, they made that much difference. Or foreign language, which I took because I heard colleges wanted to see lots of years of (having independently researched college requirements because our school had no colleged counselors and my parents certainly didn’t worry about that kind of thing), the early learning of which I hated because it didn’t come easily (our teacher had an almost completely aural class, in which non-traditional learners thrived but which was a major challenge for written-word-bound me), but which I stuck with cause I had a crush on a guy, plus the teacher was nice and funny– and given my lack of language aptitude, if I hadn’t had those 4 years of Russian, I could never have made it through to my college Russian lit classes and fallen in love with Russian poetry. I don’t necessarily have a point other than it is easy to look back at our own education, how ever it came, and think: how lucky I am that this made me who I am! Yes, a more individualized education would have had me learning Russian out of a book, but it doesn’t seem worth it to me.
My questions (for anyone still reading) are, how do you know ahead of time a child is someone for whom school will really click, the way it did for me? I’m pretty sure I would have loved unschooling– I can think of nothing better than to read what I want, when I want. And I would have found the kids at my “inner city” (by midwestern standards– we’re not talking South Central here) school much scarier had I not grown up with them. But I think for me, the extra bit of “well-roundedness” I got in public schools has been a real saving grace (having gone on to much snottier schools & institutions since).
Also, assuming we are anti-test, how can we differentiate between the schools that are genuinely life-sucking and the schools like the ones I went to that, while not “good,” are places where very good things are happening? Everytime I hear someone talking about how “rough” or “bad” the schools I went to as a kid are, I cringe– how many fabulous teachers and students are being written off?
(In the interest of full disclosure of other persional biases, my husband is a high school physics teacher who I think is showing his students an exciting and rigorous way to approach science that they couldn’t get from most parents or tutors.)
I apologize for this novella. Thanks for a fabulous and thought-provoking blog! –Anna
December 16th, 2004 at 9:22 am
My son took a homeschool theater class this past fall. Sitting around and chatting with the other moms, I was amazed to find out how many of our kids had ld’s. Turns out there are a lot of folks who, like me, decided to homeschool because the schools weren’t adequatley addressing their child’s special needs. Besides that, our children’s self perceptions were terribly damaged in school. These were a bunch of really nice and happy kids. They all had so much fun and got along well. But I remember one day a group of us talking about how our children hadn’t been that friendly or happy back when they were in school. One woman’s son wouldn’t look anyone in the eye back when he was in school, another told me her chatty daughter (diagnosed with aspergers) had become almost non-verbal by the time they took her out of school. Many of us had kids who, before they homechooled, didn’t ever want to do anything involving groups of kids (my own son would even cross the street if he saw kids coming in his direction) and our children had developed all sorts of odd personas as a means of self protection. But since homeschooling, they’d been allowed to blossom into themselves.
I don’t think schools address ld’s all that well. At least not in my experience or that of my friends. And in school your child get’s stuck being the “special” kid. At home they are just themselves.
December 16th, 2004 at 11:18 am
My kids go to a public charter school. A liberal, progressive charter school.(Our kids elected Nader president in 2000, LOL). We have a project based curriculum, Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound. We have heavy parental involvement. No text books. We still have to take standardized tests, because we arent’ a public school. However in no way do we teach to them. We spend the day before showing the kids how the computer program works. Thats it. We score above our district , state and national average. We have a heavy emphasis on critical thinking, and its working.
We don’t give grades. We get a fifteen page document twice a year on exactly what our kid has mastered, what they are progressing on, and what they could use extra attention on.
My daughter started jr hi this year, she had grades for the first time, straight A’s. While I don’t think grades matter, it is nice to know the educational philosophy of our school translates well to traditional education. She was happy,but only spent 30 seconds talking about it. She knows its more important to do her best, rather than be judged by the standards of others.
There are E.L.O.B. all over the country if anyone is interested. Google it.
We have about 10% of our students who were former homeschoolers. They seem to fit in well with us.
I am not attentive enough to homeschool. Plus I don’t have the interest or desire. I would let so much slide out of my own laziness. I admire people who can do it. I do wish I had more hours with my kids sometimes. I am one of those moms who loves breaks and summer. I am always sad when school starts again. Though my kids love September and getting back into it.
Rambles…
December 16th, 2004 at 11:59 am
That should have read we take standardized tests because we ARE a public school. typos.
December 16th, 2004 at 1:02 pm
I haven’t read all of your long and detailed answers (and will sometime). But, in reading your “unschooling”/homeschooling examples (and I’ll admit, I detest home schooling, but I like that you take the time to give detailed answers about why you like it). It’s one of the reasons I like this whole blogging phenomenon — you get to know people’s reasoning beyond the label. You’re giving me an education in homeschooling (which isn’t likely to change my mind, but at least it’ll be reasoned).
But, my main problem with homeschooling (which you might have addressed) is one that you talked about when you said that you do try to expose Noah to other kids and other adults. I believe that the main point of school is to allow kids a place to separate from their parents. My goal for my children (who both go to preschool) is that their world not be limited by my own imagination. I want them to be exposed to other people’s way of thinking, creating, writing, seeing. I don’t see any way of making this happen, other than having them spending time in places where I am not controlling the environment.
Yes, we need to pick the envirnoment (for example, I’m not sending my kids to a war zone so that they’ll “experience” something different from what they get at home. But I absolutely love it that I can see th effects of others in my daughter. For example, I have always sang tuneless nonsense songs. It’s very satisfying that my daughter also sings nonsense songs, but I love it that she sings them a bit more tunefully than I.
I’m interested in hearing how and how much time you think Noah spends with others. And, how do you think this will evolve as he grows older? Do you think he’ll want more separation from you?
BTW, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, too. We lived in a little enclave off of Kenny road (near the University) that looks like it’s in Upper Arlington, but is really in Columbus.
bj
December 16th, 2004 at 7:27 pm
Thanks for answering my question. I guess I had heard some story (of course this is in urban myth region) of people who homeschooled until high school and then when they took their kid to high school the child tested well below the high school level and other test reveled things like dislexia to be the culprit. I often think about because my own dislexia was not treated early on and instead I was deemed “stupid” by my elemtery school teachers. It was only after I still couldn’t read by 3rd grade that someone started to get a clue. Of course some of the emotional damage was done…. I hated school with a passion that has never ended. Not only that but there are several ways of teaching a dislexic to do things that were not shown to me until the last two years of HS when my mother was able to seucre a loan to send me to a private school and get me some help. As you can see by this unspellchecked post there are probably lots of mistakes, but I can’t even see them. Learning the tricks late in life instead of early on made it harder for things to come naturally to me. I always wondered what real parents do that choose to homeschool, not just some story that has been around the mill and always happens to someone else.