Down with school
Aug 28, 2007 Homeschooling
I’m still having trouble getting my head around virtual school. Brett is helping me wrench the curriculum around so that it’s not totally running up against my heart and soul, god love him.
This particular virtual school has you work to mastery of each unit so theoretically you can skip every damn lesson as long as you can prove mastery. So we’ve decided to skip a bunch of damn lessons. Like all of the busy work. All. Of. It. But even reading the busy work makes my stomach hurt.
I have school issues. Read through the archives if you don’t believe me.
I feel really lucky that Brett — although more conservative than I am or else we sure as hell wouldn’t be doing virtual school — is at least radical enough about school that we can live with each other.
I would be the worst brick and mortal school parent EVER because I think school is for the birds. I usually don’t totally bitch about school because people take it personally (hey — I don’t think YOU ought to hate school because I hate school so please don’t argue with me about it — you’re unlikely to change my mind) but I think institutional school sucks. We moved here because of the alternative high school and everything I’ve heard about that makes me think it doesn’t suck although I’m sure No Child Left Behind imparted a bunch of suckiness to it. But if Noah did end up going to middle school (and god forbid — if Madison ends up in elementary school) it would be really hard for me because my head doesn’t work that way. He’d be like, “This homework is stupid!” And I’d go, “I know! To hell with it! Tell your teacher she’s insane!” And poor Brett would be saying, “Hey, let’s just try it first, ‘kay guys?” Brett would be an awesome, reasonable, thoughtful school parent. I’d just show up at parent/teacher conferences with a big ol’ chip on my shoulder humming Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” under my breath. (You know — “we don’t need no education/ we don’t need no thought control…”)
I have a bad attitude but I came by it honestly.
(This rant brought to you by my frustration trying to figure out which lessons are worth doing and which are totally busy work that would only get assigned in the real world if the teacher was trying to keep half the class busy so they could catch the other half up and doesn’t serve any real learning purpose whatsoever.)
August 28th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Ugh. I’m *this close* to enrolling Rebecca in a charter school. It seems pretty fabulous, but I still have reservations about just the whole “school” thing in general. We’re not radical unschoolers. I wanted us to be, but we’re just not. I’d like to have a very very loose schooling. The charter school I’m looking at doesn’t have a set curriculum at all, they give you money and you can pick pretty much anything you want. They’re even open to unschooling, they’ll help you figure out how to translate your kids’ learning into something that satisfies the very minimal record-keeping necessary. I’m considering a Waldorf homeschool curriculum, and the rest of the money ($1700/year, more for high school kids) we can use for things like magazine subscriptions, different sorts of lessons (the homeschool choir we’re interested in would qualify), whatever we can justify as part of our “school.” The only real hoop we’d have to jump through is one crappy lame awful stupid standardized test per school year (required for the school’s state and federal funding). I thought I’d wait until she was older to do this, but given her personality, and mine, I think earlier might be better, without a little structure, we’re chaos! Good luck navigating this stuff, Dawn. What does Noah think of it?
August 28th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Amen for knowing yourself. It is so, so, so hard to be anti-busy work and have kids in school. And my kids attend an “alternative” public school (which, yeah, has been massively suckified by NCLB, despite its humble hippy beginnings more than 30 years ago.) I’m lucky in that my kids are not terribly resistant to homework, and that if they just get it done, it only takes them a few minutes.
I know people whose children, in lower elementary grades, take more than an hour a night to do homework. I can’t imagine enforcing that; getting through a worksheet or two with my math-whiz kiddos is hard enough, because my mindset is that the school has them all freakin’ day, the least they can do is let me have my children for a few hours at night. I fail to see what is so crucial for a seven and nine year old who get their work done in class that they need to continue working at home. It’s akin to bringing work home with you while working at Taco Bell.
And don’t even get me started on the nightly reading sheets for third grade last year; I told the teacher that my children read or are read to every night (except when they’re at their dad’s house), and I wasn’t going to mess that up by turning it into a book report. I made the notes on what we read and Noah’s questions/thoughts myself. The teacher was fine with that, but then she was a radical, anti-busy work hippy, too
August 28th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Aimee, were you looking at the Enki curriculum? That looks FABULOUS! I had a friend using that a few years ago and the materials were so nifty!!! And what does Noah think? He’s annoyed by it but loves having his own computer and does like testing himself (some of the assessments).
August 28th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Enki does look really great, but yow, the cost!
August 28th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I wish you could check out our school. THere really is no busywork…http://www.mcds.org/ HAve never had a day when the kids didn’t want to go. (2 of my kids graduated).
Enjoy your blog, thanks.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
You know I really should skip all your homeschooling posts- they give me too many ideas.
Our kids are little still but I’m so tempted to homeschool in the future. The thing is, I actually *loved* school until I was out of it and realized all that I could have learned and done outside of it’s confines. Now, when I imagine sending my darling brilliant babies I get a premonition of this too: “I’d just show up at parent/teacher conferences with a big ol’ chip on my shoulder humming Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall†under my breath.”
Keep rockin’ the homeschooling!