Odd
Jun 5, 2006 Homeschooling
Sometimes if you put a homeschooler next to a not-homeschooler the homeschooler comes off looking a little odd. Or at least that’s what I hear. So far I’ve never seen Noah look odd when he’s in a group of not-homeschooled kids (he’s the only homeschooler on his baseball team, for example, and in his religious school) although he is certainly odd at home often enough. Thing is, I’m pretty sure the other kids are probably secretly odd at home, too.
But I’ll agree that homeschoolers can look — but don’t always look — strange compared to their schooled peers and I think there are a couple of reasons for that:
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Tags: Brett, homeschool, Homeschooling, Noah
Carnival of homeschooling is up!
Jan 18, 2006 Homeschooling
An exhaustive A to Z list is over at Why Homeschool: The Carnival of Homeschooling: week 3
I don’t think I’m going to get a chance to make it through the whole alphabet but I’m certainly going to browse!
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling
A typical day
Dec 9, 2005 Homeschooling
Someone asked me to give a rough idea of how a typical homeschooling day looks for us so I thought I’d give it a try. I’ve got to preface this effort, however, by noting that there is no typical day really and rather than a schedule we have a rhythm we follow.
Generally Noah pays attention to whatever has captured his fancy that week for a couple of hours every morning. Sometimes that’s reading, sometimes that’s a computer game, sometimes that’s a construction project, sometimes that’s a comic book he’s writing. Today it’s been playing in the snow. But I do notice that when he’s into something, he wants to get to it first thing. It can be hard to get him to eat breakfast when he’s anxious to start working on a project so most days he wants to eat something he can have in hand instead of sitting down and eating. So he grabs a banana, a muffin — for awhile I had him on smoothies but the novelty paled.
Throughout the morning, he’ll take breaks from whatever he’s doing. He’ll come talk to me about what I’m doing or he’ll watch Madison for me or he’ll want to play with her.
The day after his Hebrew class, he usually wants to get his homework done although not always. (He always does his Hebrew homework without any reminders from me.) When we first moved here he always wanted to be outside first thing and would do tricks on his scooter/skateboard the whole morning.
While he’s doing his thing I’m trying to get chores out of the way. Clearing breakfast, starting the bread machine, laundry, what-have-you. I try to sit down and do some focused playing with Madison every morning but truth be told, it depends on what I’ve got on my to-do list. Sometimes the best I can do is set her up with playdough or let her bang on pots and pans while I step over her on my way to do something.
I answer email in the morning while I eat breakfast and if there’s work that’s piled up overnight, I’ll be anxious to get to it. I hate hate hate having to leave a work-related thing to sit since they pay me to work at home and I want to get things done in a timely manner. Also the way my job is, issues get bigger when left alone.
Ok, so eventually it’s lunch. Most times Noah is the one who reminds me, which makes sense since he usually has the least for breakfast. Sometimes I fix lunch, sometimes Noah does. The kids eat sitting at the table most of the time (rarely Noah will eat it while continuing whatever he’s doing but if he’s pretty fixated on something I try to be accomodating). I eat standing up while I catch up on chores way too often but I do try to sit with them. Also this is when we all talk about what we still need to get done and how we’ll do it.
That takes us to the afternoon. Madison takes a nap fairly soon after lunch and when she naps it’s my chance to really focus on whatever I have to get done and can’t do with her around. Sometimes Noah helps, sometimes he just keeps me company, sometimes he’s off doing whatever it is he’s doing. When Madison wakes up it’s generally around the time Noah is allowed to watch his shows (PBS). He gets two hours a day, which is more than I’d like but less than he’d like. While they eat a snack, I start thinking about dinner.
When I write it down it makes even less sense than it does in real life and it sounds like we spend less face-to-face time than we do in real life. We’re actually pretty involved with each other. Madison is at the age where she needs constant supervision. Both Noah and I really live our days around her and try to give room to each other to get done whatever we need to get done. He’s good about coming out of his room to watch her so I can run downstairs to switch out the laundry. We do argue about it somedays but mostly we try to be nice to each other because we recognize that having a toddler in the house is time consuming and that this is nobody’s fault.
Ok, so that’s the day-to-day kind of thing but then there’s our week-to-week schedule.
Noah has gym one morning a week, Hebrew classes one evening a week, and self-defense one afternoon a week. He also has other classes that come and go but those are the three we can count on throughout the “school year.” There’s also grocery shopping, at least one playdate for him (sometimes one for Madison but really for me) and we make sure to get to the library every week. (Oh and he has religious school on Sundays.) Then we have broader projects to get done. Right now we’re working on presents for the relatives and Noah can only work on those when Madison is asleep or otherwise occupied. He and Brett do formal math lessons on Monday nights (soon to happen on an additonal night as well). Brett gives him assignments to do throughout the week but Noah is responsible for figuring out when to get this done. That’s about to ramp up as well (Brett’s wanting to see him do more focused work that way) and hopefully Noah won’t be too grouchy about it. Also we’ve been talking about his continued interest in learning Spanish and likely we’ll start scheduling time for him to work on that with his Rosetta Stone program.
How we’re thinking of handling the new lesson responsibilities is that I’m going to make him a weekly schedule that I’ll put up so he can access it easily. It’ll have all of our plans for the week — the activities he has scheduled — and also the “to-do” list we’re asking of him like the math and the 20-minutes of Spanish. He’ll have sole responsible for getting it done. If he needs help, we’ll help him. I was telling him this today and I told him I wouldn’t nag but I’d likely ask where he is on what he’s doing. He’s better with interference if he’s given fair warning.
Yesterday someone asked me what we’d do if he doesn’t do the things on the list — just flat out refuses. I don’t know for sure. The math thing is something Brett feels strongly about and I’ll back him up on this although I don’t share his concern (heck, it can’t hurt Noah and Brett might be right besides which I think it’s good for Noah to have parents who have different ways of doing things as long as they’re complementary and not contradictory). If Noah really feels put-upon about doing it, I guess I’ll try to help him come up with a way to make it not suck for himself. Although the thing is with Noah, if he’s given a lot of control over a task he’s much more likely to do it even if he chooses to complain along the way.
Noah being Noah, his school experience has thus far been very independent. He’s always been a private person and I’ve found the best way for him to learn is to respect that and respect his need for space. At the same time, the nature of homeschooling demands that our lives be very integrated. Even before Madison arrived, I relied on Noah quite a bit to help me keep our domestic life moving. He helps grocery shop and clean (although as I am, frankly, a lousy housekeeper, he doesn’t do as much of this as he might if he lived in another family). He’s a big help getting laundry sorted and put away. He’s also responsible for the dog’s care. I would like to see him do more cooking with me but the truth is at this point I see my time in the kitchen before dinner as an oasis in a sea of caregiving. I just don’t really have the energy to bring him into it more. Pre-Madison he helped bake every week but he doesn’t do that now either since he’s likely keeping Madison out of my hair when I bake.
I don’t think this was a very good answer to the original request. Can I answer any specific questions?
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling, Madison, Noah
Morning by Morning
Dec 5, 2005 Homeschooling, Race
That’s the title of the book I’m reading by Paula Penn-Nabrit. (Here is a thorough review of the book.)
The author is a mother who raised her sons here in Columbus and began homeschooling after they were kicked out of a prestigious prep school (she doesn’t name it but if you live here, you know which one she’s talking about) for questionable reasons. (She and her husband began reaching out to other black parents at the school by having a picnic where only the black families were invited. The school kicked them out for not paying the dues on time although this hadn’t been an issue at any other time since they had an unwritten agreement the Nabrit’s could pay the $20,000 annual fee in installments.)
Anyway, I have been trying to work out what I’m going to need to do to give Madison the best, most postive homeschooling experience possible and this includes thinking about how I can find her a black community. I’ve also been readying myself to defend our decision to homeschool instead of sending Madison to a school where she could meet other black kids. Given that all she sees at home are white faces, is it fair to keep her here? Would she be better off in an integrated school setting? My gut tells me no — aside from my personal beliefs about institutional schooling, I feel that if we work hard to give her social opportunities and educational opportunities with black people that home will actually be a better place to be. Penn-Habrit is helping me articulate this. Here she discusses her extended family’s concern that homeschooling will not give her sons the tools they need to overcome institutional racism:
My generation and my children’s generation face a different set of challenges, and while things are certainly easier in terms of access, the potential for damage is still profound. When racism is overt and it adversely affects academic evaluations, the victim, even as a child, knows and can identify the problem.
…
[W]hen racism is covert, when it’s subtle and insiduous, how does a child process that? There’s no yelling, no screaming, no name-calling. Everybody’s being very “nice,” But there’s always some problem — and the problem seems to be you. There’s nothing really wrong with your work — it’s good, in fact — it’s just not quite good enough. No one can tell you why it’s not good enough, or how it can be improved; but really, what’s wrong with a B? How can a child (or even an adult, for that matter) fail to internalize such behavior.
I was discussing our decision to homeschool with a couple of (white) friends awhile back who were struggling to understand why we would keep Madison in the mostly white homeschooling community instead of taking advantage of our integrated school system. I pointed out, in part, that two kids in our old LLL playgroup came home from the first week of kindergarten complaining about “those bad brown-skinned boys” they were meeting. And at least one said, “I don’t like brown-skinned boys.”
I didn’t observe these classrooms so I can’t say if the black boys really were more poorly behaved or if this was a perception brought about by cultural differences or a teacher’s racism coming out by making those boys targets. Penn-Nabrit writes about something similar her son experienced when another black child (they were the only two black boys in the class) began acting up and was targeted by the teacher as a discipline problem. Penn-Nabrit’s son, Evan, tells his mother that the other boy acts “really black,” which she translates as “not an assimilated, middle-class, suburban black kid” and he says the teacher is picking on the boy. “While Evan was too young to articulate why,” writes Penn-Nabrit. “he saw that this boy was treated differently [than white kids with similar behavior issues] and he worried that the same thing could happen to him.
The teacher has trouble understanding why this other boy’s behavior has anything at all to do with Evan. The standard line that Penn-Nabrit heard from teachers about her sons went like this: “But Evan is so adorable, we all love him, we don’t even think of him as black.” At the conference, Penn-Nabrit struggles to make the teacher understand why the teacher’s issues with another child are Evan’s issues, too.
How did the experience of the other black boy have an impact on Evan’s experience at school? I finally asked her if she had ever had been the only white person at a group function. She had not. I then asked her if she could imagine such an occurrence. She could. I then asked her how she would feel if another white person joined the group, but was castigated continually for behavior regularly accepted when displayed by the majority members of the group.
This story reassured me that my gut is right on this.
My two friends who wanted to know why we wouldn’t send Madison to school said (truly, they said this, and they are nice lovely smart people so don’t judge them by this statement) that Madison would get a “free ride” as the black child of white parents. Madison is a bright, excited, energetic child and I think that her exuberance coupled with her skin color could make her a target of discipline that might not come up were she white. So let’s say I’m wrong about this — let’s say Madison would get a “free ride.” Isn’t acknowledging the free ride an acknowledgment of the institutional racism in the school that was the target of our discussion? And if Madison does get that free ride (and I don’t believe she will because I think this assumes that a teacher’s racism is generally a thought-out reaction instead of a knee-jerk one), does this somehow protect her from that racism? Of course not.
I also think it will be easier to find her black educational mentors out of school than it would be in it. The Penn-Nabrit’s make the decision to seek out African and African American male educators for their sons as a supplement to their homeschooling and given that Ohio State University is right here, they have no trouble finding people to work with their boys. (She compares this to the prep school and their uniformly white faculty because the administrators say they are unable to find qualified black teachers.)
Like Penn-Nabrit, I feel that Madison needs to have a strong foundation of self-confidence and self-understanding to effectively deal with the inevitable racism that will be a part of her life. I don’t think she should have to spend her elementary years trying to overcome other people’s racism or that she should have to worry about being evaluated fairly. I believe that she will be better equipped if she’s given time to simply grow and blossom as her own perfect self so that she can truly recognize when she is being evaluated fairly and when she is not.
I feel inspired by this book even though our educational and religious values are very different than those of the Nabrit family. As white parents raising a black daughter, we lack a strong support group who recognizes our struggles. There’s a tendency among well-meaning white people (friends and family) to say, “Don’t make such a big deal about all of this.”
That’s another big issue. Many well-meaning white people so badly want to believe that the only racism is overt (because it’s easy to avoid being an overt racist) that they dismiss the more insidious forms of racism. I think I have this tendency, too, and so I worry about my ability to recognize when race is a factor in Madison’s life. Yet another reason to keep Madison home; can I be an effective advocate for her if so much of instutional racism is invisible to me? Better that we spend the early years at home all of us learning together how to best effectively parent our black daughter in a racist world and building up a community who will mentor us and mentor Madison.
(One more encouragement to interested parties: The book is extremely well written and so is lovely to read. You can get a sense of this in the interview linked to in the first paragraph of this entry.)
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Tags: Erica, homeschool, Homeschooling, Madison
Now that was anti-climactic
Nov 15, 2005 Homeschooling
I went to Noah’s Hebrew school parent-teacher conference all excited because the one downer so far about homeschooling is no parent-teacher conference. (I like to talk about my kid.) The teacher said he’s great, doing fine, a wonderful student, a terrific listener. His contributions in class are “outstanding.” I just glowed.
“So is he also a good student at school?” the retired schoolteacher slash Hebrew teacher asked.
“Well, he’s homeschooled and yes, I would say he’s a good student,” I answered.
“Oh!”
His Hebrew teacher is a nice woman; I like her. It was awkward for a moment and I hate that.
“Oh!” she said again. “And how long until you stop doing that?”
I told her what I tell everybody and what is true. That it’s a year to year decision. That we evaluate a host of factors as we make our decisions. That it’s impossible to tell what decision we might make in the future but for now we are very happy homeschooling and it’s working well for our family and for Noah. I smile. She smiles.
“In high school,” she started. “Well, in high school it would be very challenging to teach them all that they need to know so that would be a good time to send him.”
I smiled back. I didn’t really say anything. I actually think that homeschooling a high schooler would be easier because they can audit courses at this or that college and it would be easier to find them mentors and they can get jobs related to their interests or at the very least volunteer. But I understood what she was saying and like I’ve said, I don’t really care to try to convince people to see our side of things as long as they’re respectful and she’s a very nice woman, likes Noah and is a good teacher. I’m sure, in fact, that she was one of those teachers who made school better for a lot of kids and inspired others to reach for their full potential.
I did say that I thought that maybe the reason was one of the more enthusiastic kids in the class was that he’s the only one who’s not coming off of a long day at school already. He likes the novelty of his classes and is excited to do his twice weekly assignments (one for religious school and one for Hebrew school). When he was taking his science class (it ended last week), he was always in the front row acting like Horshack whenever the teacher asked a question.
Ok, baby needs a diaper change. Maybe I’ll update again later.
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Tags: high school, homeschool, Homeschooling, Noah