School orientation
We went to the virtual school orientation last night and I left with the same mixed feelings I had before. Brett is all for it — 100%! — and that’s why I’m going along with it. But if it were all my decision, I’d be skipping the virtual school.
I’ve been flipping through the course materials and it’s the same kind of boring stuff that made us not want to do brick and mortar school. It’s a lot of busy-work and pointless activities. Like this: “Paintings are flat. Artists make them by brushing watercolors, tempera, or other types of paint onto paper or canvas. Look through your prints and books. Find a painting.” And then there’s a parents’ guide so that I can know whether or not Noah correctly chose a painting instead of, say, a sculpture.
But I’m going to make it work for us by skipping all that junk. That’s what struck me at the orientation: Most of the parents don’t understand that they don’t have to do everything exactly the way it’s laid out. And it’s not like the orientation leader can say, “You know, you can always skip stuff” or “You can fudge on your hours; it’s not like we’re going to peek in your window and make sure you did five hours of learning every day.” At one point she said that they can add in hours spent doing other learning activities like if the child is reading on her own or the family visits the zoo and watches a presentation at the bird pavilion. See, homeschoolers are already used to thinking this way but lots of people coming from traditional schools aren’t accustomed to thinking about learning in the everyday world being actual learning.
I’m really not happy with the language arts curriculum, which seems below what Noah’s doing on his own. If anything virtual school is making me feel that much more confident that unschooling was working just fine for him. And you know, this will be way more work for the family because we’re not going to hand him the canned curriculum (I’m positive it’ll turn him off of “school” entirely if we do it straight out of the box), which means that I’m going to have to stay ahead of the lessons and figure out how to get him to each unit assessment with entusiasm intact.
But Brett is happy and excited about it
In K12 you work to “mastery.” If you can prove 80% mastery, you get promoted to the next lesson/unit/grade. There aren’t any grades and kids can retake lessons/units/grades as they need to so it’s very customizable. That I like. What I don’t like is that you have to login to the computer every day and you have to record your hours and you have to click the assessments and report scores. I don’t like having someone looking over my shoulder and I’m perfectly willing to outright lie about everything but the scores. But c’mon, it’s nobody’s business how much time we spend on anything or what days we do things. (One woman was very hung up on this — what if the do something school-related on Saturday? Do they need to change their reporting days or can they add that in someplace else?) You’re supposed to report if you take a sick day or take a vacation, which really bothers me. On the other hand some other virtual schools make you login by a certain time each day, which is worse.
My hope is that we do this and prove that Noah’s fine then quit this thing next year but Brett’s hoping to stick with it. Ultimately it’ll be up to what’s working for Noah. He may love this. We just don’t know yet. But I tell you, unschooling is the bees knees. If I wasn’t sure of it before, I sure am after hitting that orientation.
I was giggling every time I read “but Brett loves it!” because in my house this would mean, “I have my reservations so I’m pinning this one on Daddy.”
I have to say, filtering stuff out is what I’m prepared to do as a traditional schooler, I’d be annoyed to have to do it while homeschooling.
I would have issues with that much… accountability isn’t the word, but it’s close.
I mean, admittedly, Hannah’s only four, but I LIKE that I can say to myself, “She’s playing really creatively right now. Math can wait.”
I know! My mind totally doesn’t work that way! (That anybody else has any business about what my kid is doing and when.) Even filling out the paperwork was annoying!
I have - during those occasional panicked moments of wondering if unschoolish approaches really work - considered doing some sort of umbrella school with my kids. I worry about the loss of freedom, though like you, have no qualms whatsoever with simply skipping the dumb stuff. I will watch with interest to see how this works for Noah (and you!).
You could check your state department of ed’s website for current grade level standards, and use the K12 online stuff in conjunction with those, basically as a supplement.
You may find that your actual “teacher” is pretty laid back about things — I know some people have talked about logging the previous week’s hours on Monday morning. And I suspect the vacation & sick days stuff is only so that the teacher has some defense in case the school district should come investigating — S. went on vacation shortly after we started and I emailed the teacher and she was like, “Oh, great!”. Also, I was basically told to ‘test out’ of whatever I felt was behind him — so if you think the language arts is beneath him, spend a couple days testing out and then ask for the next grade. And I was told they were wanting to see 10-15% progress each month.
I know I was really nervous that they’d be on my back all the time, but it hasn’t been like that. If anything, it seems like it’s a safety net to make sure *I* stay motivated. And S. loved talking to the teacher when she called — they had a long conversation about Harry Potter, and she was able to glean his progress/comprehension from that.
Meira, I am so glad to hear that!!! Thank you for writing it up!!!!!
Hmmm, that’s a good post for me right now. Can you believe I haven’t yet decided what the schooling “fate” of my son will be this year? Of course it’s “only” kindergarten and he’s not even fully fluent in English yet (EXTREMELY articulate and with a great vocabulary in Portuguese) and… we don’t even know where we’re going to live yet!! I’m very wary of cyberschooling for the very reasons you described.
In the one we were checking out apparently one CANNOT take vacations and has to login every single day of the PA school year. So if we went to Brazil I’d have to login and kind of “fake it” or do actual work. Yikes. But I only checked one cyber school, I have to check others.
The other problem is my lack of discipline. I know I can’t do it, only “unschooling”… Well, good luck with Noah and cyber school. I guess if Brett is excited, it may work just fine, especially now that he’s home too.