I had to dive into this
Nov 14, 2005 Homeschooling
Wendy said, “[W]hat the bloody hell is so wrong about wanting to be better than everyone else? When did wanting to be the absolute best, not just the best YOU can be but better than anyone else, become such a sin? And why?”
What is wrong with it? Nothing, if it works for you and yours. It’s a value — either you value competition or you don’t or you value it in some contexts or at some times but not others. It doesn’t work for me — competition doesn’t make me happy. I don’t really get how it can make anyone happy but that’s because I’m stuck in my own little head over here.
So let me make something absolutely 100% clear over here — I have no desire to convince anyone who reads my blog to adopt, to homeschool, to write a book, to be Jewish, etc. etc. You do what works for you and I’ll do what works for me.
Now why doesn’t competition work for me? Because I have a problem keeping my eye on my own plate anyway. Because it’s taken a long time for me to understand that really and truly the success and failure of other people has got nothing to do with me. It might be different if I were an athlete (like Wendy’s daughter) and not a writer because being faster than everyone else is a measurable goal that can be achieved by a lucky, talented few (with hard work). Being the best writer is subjective. But I’d rather have my kids running just for the hell of it and not much caring whether or not they’re passing the person next to them because I think that will keep them running happier longer.
I wonder what it’ll be if one of my kids (and I’ll tell you it won’t be Noah if it’s either of them) is a competitive-type. That’ll be hard for me. But I’ll be leaning hard on the grandparents because both the grandpappies are a little more Head of the Class (especially my dad) and they can help be healthy role models around competition (especially Brett’s dad). Me, I’ll just try not to get all Mama Rose about it.
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Tags: homeschool, my dad, Noah
A good question about practice
Nov 14, 2005 Homeschooling
Anon (actually for this entry we will call Anon “Hubert”) Hubert asked, “but how are you making sure that Noah comes out with the stuff you were missing? How will you make sure that he knows about theses and gets practice in math and French (where practice matters, and practice is not always exciting)?”
We’ve found that with Noah he is more than happy to do practice if we make practice interesting (there are lots of math games — traditional and on the computer — ditto for language) and if he can see the big picture result. Also, you need to remember that he’s not practicing everything. For example, he does madlibs to learn the parts of speech. He does not have to do a worksheet where he circles the verbs, crosses out the nouns, and underlines the adjectives. And you know it’s not practice that sucks necessarily; it’s practicing something you already know. The first time you’re handed a worksheet where you’re circling verbs and crossing out nouns and underlining adjectives it might be fun but that wears thin. The second, third or fourth time you do it, it’s excruciating.
Listen, in fifth grade I was diagramming sentences because I thought it was fun. Only my fifth grade teacher made me stop diagramming sentences so I could listen to the class reading out loud (and I’m sure you all remember how painful it is to listen to a slow reader being forced to stumble while the teacher warns the rest of you not to read ahead and if you were the slow reader, I imagine the pain was that much worse). By the time we got to seventh grade when diagramming sentences was on the curriculum, I no longer wanted to do it. It wasn’t fun anymore. Trust me, Noah will learn about writing a thesis statement because at some point he’ll want to communicate his thinking and we’ll be there to say, “Hey, your argument would be much more persuasive if you organized it and this is how that works.”
I think that people have this idea that children are only motivated to learn if there are external rewards. But I think we better serve children when we begin with the assumption that they generally learn because they want to.
Numerous studies have demonstrated how interest drives achievement—ongoing interest in a general topic more than transient interest in a specific activity, and excited interest more than the casual, mild kind. Regardless of age, race, or aptitude, students are more likely to remember and really understand what they’ve read if they find it intriguing. The interest level of the text, in fact, is a much better predictor of what students will get out of it than its difficulty level. (Incidentally, the same general connection between affect and achievement shows up with adults, too. After all, how do we expect to attract and retain good teachers when neither they nor those whom they teach have much occasion to smile?)
from Feel Bad Education by Alfie Kohn (who, by the way, is not necessarily pro-homeschooling but is pro-school reform)
Alfie Kohn is worth reading because he backs up everything he says with a study. This is useful if you’re arguing with someone who needs “proof” before they’ll consider something.
We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in small children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards - gold stars or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards or honor rolls or Dean’s lists or Phi Beta Kappa keys - in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else. We encourage them to feel that the end and aim of all we do in school is nothing more than to get a good mark on a test, or to impress someone with what they seem to know. We kill, not only their curiosity but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that at the age of ten most of them will not ask questions and will show a good deal of scorn for those who do.
a quote by John Holt in Homeschooling and John Holt’s vision
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling, Noah
You guys post a lot
Nov 14, 2005 Homeschooling
I’m totally behind on my blog reading. Totally. The rss feeds are just piling up like crazy.
My book project got a little stalled last week because for one, I missed Noah’s Hebrew class for some reason. Why was that? I can’t remember now but it was for a good reason. Maybe I had a deadline. Maybe I had a date with someone. I wish I could remember. Anyway so there was that and then I had this idea of what I was going to find and as it turns out, I’m finding something different, which means I’m trying to reorganize my thoughts.
My book idea is related to education and so of course I’m going back and thinking about my own education. I’m realizing how cemented I am in homeschooling and I find it both reassuring (it is what it is) and horrifying (what about my options??).
I realized that I will never ever ever be a good school mom. I have way way too many issues with traditional education. I own these — I have no desire to pin these issues on other people who feel differently. I am not an evangelical homeschooler by any means. I am more than willing to say, “Yeah, I might be wrong,” but I will never be able to wrap my head around so much of it.
I’m going to try really hard to talk about *my* experiences and not get critical about school for any other living person, ok? I know that many of you had positive experiences, that your kids are having positive experiences and that in a different school with different teachers it might all have been good for me, too. I’m trying to specifically talk about why there is something in me that makes me a poor school parent. I just don’t want anyone to feel defensive so I’m laying this all out right up front.
As long-time readers might know, my mom was really really really unhappy with the school experiences of myself and my siblings. As a family we went to four different elementary schools (Erica = 4, Me = 3, Justin = 1) and she faced the same battles in every single one. I remember her coming home frustrated and near tears many times. And I also remember the click-click of her high heels when I would see her coming down the hall (so beautiful — I had the prettiest mother of anyone!) when I was on my way to class. Surprise! There she was, heading back from another meeting with the principal or the teacher trying to get us what she felt we needed.
I also remember how exhausted she got and how she got too tired to fight anymore. At that point (I’d say fifth or sixth grade) she said very clearly that we needed to learn how to play the school game and yes, she understood how bored we were and how inconsequential the rules seemed but that’s how it was. We had to have respect for our teachers, she told us, they had hard jobs. Maybe sometimes it wasn’t easy to have respect for the person but we should at least have respect for the position they held.
My mom never made us do homework. I used to do mine on the bus until I realized that I could manage without. It got to be a race for me — to see how little work I could do in class and then pull it out for a test. I never ever ever studied and it was a point of pride for me. I would scan the chapter before a quiz while the teacher was handing out the tests. Mostly I did ok. Not so much in math though or French.
I got away with too much in school. No one ever taught me how to write a paper. Junior year I wrote my term paper in the study hall before class. I’d been reading books on the subject and I just faked it and I knew I’d get an A because I always got an A whenever there was writing involved. To tell you the truth, I think some of my teachers gave me an A just because they figured it was easier than arguing with me if they tried to slip me something lower. I argued with everybody.
I told my seventh grade English teacher that someone ought to revoke her license. (She told the ending to a book and I figured that was a sure way to guarantee that nobody was going to read it and it was a book I loved so I wanted everybody to read it.)
I told my ninth grade math teacher that he was a chauvinist pig. (He was.)
I told the principal in eleventh grade that he was discriminating against AP English students because the AP math students could take classes at the university and we couldn’t.
I hated school. I hated it. I hated the politics. I hated the cliques. I hated the teachers who played into cliques. I hated that the poor kids mostly disappeared from the gifted classes come middle school and were replaced with rich kids. The classes were so boring that I would zone out and write (unless I could get away with reading under my desk). I fought with teachers just for the excitement.*
When I got to college, I was totally unprepared. I didn’t know how to write a thesis statement. I didn’t know what a thesis statement was. I didn’t know how to study, I didn’t know how to do homework. I still have nightmares where I suddenly realize that I’m 35 years old and have missed more than a decade of math classes and that they’re going to come take my degree away. I also didn’t know how to ask for help and I was still picking fights with my teachers.
I can trace my problems with educational authority back to kindergarten when Mrs. Frink made me read to the class while she took a smoke break. I knew it wasn’t fair especially because I wasn’t allowed to read at any other time during class. She was teaching us the alphabet and so I sat while she taught the alphabet. Unless she needed a smoke break and then she sat me up on a stool to keep the class busy for her. It wasn’t fair but then, I learned, school is not fair.
Again, I’m not saying all schools are like this or that my experiences are particularly unique (they’re not — I know) but there you go. I came out of that experience with a low disregard for worksheets, curriculum and blackboards. There is simply no way I could tell Noah, “Show your work,” when I hated having to show my work. (And I hated doing it in pencil because I never liked the feel of writing with a pencil.) I couldn’t say to Madison, “You should listen to your teacher,” if I thought the teacher was being ridiculous. And I think it would be incredibly unfair of me to send my kids to school and then disrespect their lives there. I think that would be bullshit.
There are so many stupid vestiges of all of this in my regular life. I love trainings but I distrust almost every trainer for the first ten minutes of any lecture. I have a hard time listening when I’m sitting with a group of people and there’s one person out front talking. I mean, I can do it but the first fifteen or twenty minutes are hard. I have to have a notebook, like a talisman. I can’t explain it. It’s ridiculous.
I know it’s insane. I know that I’m way too emotional about this. (I’m still mad. I’m still angry about my school experiences. I still get teary about it — it’s dumb, I know.) But there you go — it’s one reason I homeschool. I couldn’t risk that happening to my kids. I couldn’t get past my yucky feelings enough to support them. I have no faith — none — in the system. Zero. Zilch. I don’t believe in grades or standardized testing so how could I encourage my kids to get As or score 100? He’d say, “But I don’t feel like doing my homework,” and I’d say, “Yeah, no kidding. Let’s blow it off and read a book.” If I sent Noah to school, I’d be a hypocrite.
So I started reading some of these education-related books thinking that I would find out that I was/am indeed ridiculous and instead what I found out is how incredibly common my experiences were and — more importantly — how incredibly common it is to have these same, silly knee-jerk reactions, which is to say maybe it’s not so silly. Says one of the researchers, being bored is a form of torture. There’s brain chemistry that gets screwed with when you’re bored. And goddamn but I was really fucking bored in school every single day. And what kills me is how so many teachers want you to stay bored: Don’t read ahead. Do every problem. Show your work. Don’t ask so many questions. No extra credit.
Brett got migraines in elementary school because he was so unhappy. Is it any wonder that we’re keeping our kids home now? Not that we don’t question it but whenever we do talk about sending them we say, “Yeah, but it’s school.”
Noah is never bored at home. If he says he is, it’s actually code for “Hey, Mom, can I borrow your computer?” He’s always busy. He always has a project. He stayed up ’til midnight to read his book and then woke up and started reading again. He came home from my sister’s house yesterday with an idea for a story and then sat down and made the longest book he’s written so far. No one ever tells him to slow down and wait for the rest of the class or tells him that if he’s done with that page then he can do another. If he gets a concept, he can move right along to the next one. If he knows how to do a problem he doesn’t have to prove it twelve more times.
Like I said, I know it can be different for people. My old therapist said that I shouldn’t force my own experiences on my kids but I don’t see how I could do otherwise. Whose experiences should I be using to inform my decisions? Brett’s? He’s coming to the same conclusions. My distrust of formal primary and secondary education goes way, way too deep. The more I realize that about myself, the more I know that we’ll be homeschooling for as long as we, the adults, are making the decision. It’s really our only choice.
But this book project — I don’t know. It’s really not turning out like I thought and I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it.
*My brother was a lot like me. When he showed up in high school with combat boots and a black mohawk and the same last name the teachers just sighed. When my half-sisters showed up a few years later, the teachers sighed again.
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Tags: Erica, high school, homeschool, Homeschooling, Justin, Madison, my mom, ninth grade, Noah
Domesticity
Oct 18, 2005 Homeschooling
Happy Sukkot!
Brett has the day off and he’s grading the yard around our house. Madison played in the pile of dirt this morning but now she’s dozing in the backpack carried by Brett.
Noah had his eyes dilated this morning, much to his unhappiness. Now he’s making posters of superheroes as dogs (the Avengers, the Fantastic Four and the X-men) while we listen to “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”
I’ve got our daily bread kneading in the bread machine (I’m going to make tiny twisted breadsticks, I think, with one loaf’s worth) and just made tonight’s dinner. I spooned the rest of the pintos (crockpot yesterday) into freezer bags and now I’m trying to decide which to make first: date bars or cheddar cheese mini-muffins. This is part of my quest to find snacks for the kids that aren’t pretzals.
I’m thinking that I need to devote one evening a week to work on my book idea or I will NEVER EVER get it done. Which night? That’s the problem. Maybe one night a week Brett could take the kids to the rec center to swim (our membership is about to run out — I need to remember that) and I could work then. I’ll ask Brett which night works for him. Monday nights he does math with Noah… Hmmmmm.
I found the third grade proficiency test for Ohio online for math and reading. I’m confident Noah wouldn’t have problem with the reading part and we’re eyeing the math part just to see what concepts he’ll need that he doesn’t have. Most of it looks like graphing — reading, interpreting and creating them. I think he’d enjoy making charts so maybe we’ll figure out something fun to graph. I was thinking that once Thanksgiving comes that we can graph how many houses on our street put up holiday lights. Our street is only two blocks so even if the weather is lousy it wouldn’t be hard to make a quick trip on foot ever evening to write it up. Then we can make note of different things. Like we could do a pie chart that shows how many decorated houses have icicles and how many have inflatable santas or something.
Now I need to go find my pumpkin soup recipe.
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This is a good article
Oct 3, 2005 Homeschooling
Salon.com Life | Endless summer
It’s about unschooling and I think it does a good job of saying what it is and what it isn’t. The best line is this one: “The real problem most people have,” says Francoise, her face serious, “is that doing this requires too much faith in kids, too much work on the parents’ part — and no guarantees.”
It’s true. It’s a weird balance between neglect and over-involvement. I’ve seen a couple of unschoolers get absolutely burned out because it’s really really really easy to feel like you have to (ironically) micromanage kids’ lives. Like if they say, “Hey, that Mozart guy — I dig his tunes.” And suddenly you’re booking flights to Vienna and pulling out the old wooden recorder and drizzling syrup in the shape of a treble clef. And god forbid they child lose interest after that one statement because the tickets are non-refundable.
It’s so much on you, the parent to tune in to your kid’s interests and also their learning style, their needs. It’s hard. And if you have more than one kid or other things going on (a new baby, what-have-you) AND if you need the reassurance of measured learning, well, it might not be a good fit. I totally understand this. I don’t know if I could do it if my kids were closer in age. Heck, sometimes even now I don’t know if I can do it although lately we’ve been in a really good space about it.
Different kids want different things about of unschooling. Some of them want workbooks (workbooks aren’t anti-unschool; forcing kids to work them is) and some want classes (most are willing to be “schooled” if that’s the best way to get the information that they want) and some just want to run around like maniacs all day.
Now there are some things I do as an unschooler that is controversial in the unschool community. (Not that other unschoolers don’t do this, but it’s the kind of thing that can get discussion heated.) My biggest is that I limit screen time. Noah can binge on computer games one day and that’s ok but not every day. And he watches tv but we limit it. Other unschoolers let their kids make decisions about screen time and others limit it even more than we do but my thing is that I want Noah to have some access (he needs to learn how to manage the addictive qualities of screens) and some help understanding his limits. (So what we do is say, what kind of exercise have you had today? How’s your head feeling? Do you need to move? Do you need to do something quiet? That kind of thing.)
Anyway, I’m blathering and the baby is done with her grapes and is demanding more. (Noah is outside scootering as usual.)
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Tags: Noah, unschool, unschooling