this woman’s work

He wants to do K12 again next year. I know! He’s crazy. He likes all the busy work and random inane quizzes. He is so not me. But that’s the paradox of unschooling Noah — if I believe he knows his own way then I’m gonna let him do it his own way even though I chose unschooling in part to get him out of that kind of stuff. But he likes it now that he and Brett have figured out how to work it.

He does it in chunks and some of it he skips entirely. So he and Brett did all the math at the beginning of the year. Noah decided to finish spelling (because he loves spelling) by guzzling it down all before the holidays. Now he’s rushing through the reading. And they’re doing science in a chunk. Stuff he’s skipping? Well, he read the history books but decided not to answer the questions. And the art and music he skipped because they were lame. Also he’s into the stuff he’s getting tested on because my son, dear Noah, loves to be evaluated.

(Think of the horror of his kindergarten through fourth grade years when he was utterly without evaluation! Merely learning that which interested him at his own pace! Poor child!)

The other day we all went on a walk to the ice cream parlour and Madison had to run back with Brett in an emergency potty situation so Noah and I were standing around by the old graveyard talking about dead bodies and somehow that led to school. Oh yes, I remember why. Because the graveyard is across from the middle school. I asked him if he ever thinks about going and he said yes. I told him that I thought he might like it because he likes a lot of the things about virtual school that are in regular school. And I said I noticed that he was a lot more peer oriented than he was when he was little so maybe he would really like making new friends. He thought on it and brought it up again a few days ago. He still doesn’t want to do school but he wants to do K12 again so he can get his fair share of worksheets and grades. But no school. He thinks it’d be too much if he had to do it all day so he’d rather skip it. Which is fine. More than fine, really.

I did tell him that if he wanted to try school that he could. We’d ask him to commit a reasonable amount of time to trying it (I have no idea what might be reasonable) but we wouldn’t make him stay if he was miserable. Basically it’s a risk-free proposition. Next year would be his last chance to try out the elementary school across the way from us so if he is going to try I think it’d be a good time to do it. We’ll see how he feels as we get through summer.

This is what so many folks outside of unschooling don’t get about the whole thing. It’s not about sticking your kid in some program — even a non-program program. It’s about doing whatever you think your kid needs to thrive. I don’t like institutional schooling; Noah does. It pained me terrifically (I cannot tell you how much) to commit to K12. I hate it. I hate having some stranger’s nose in my kid’s educational business. But it’s not about me. In Noah’s case, unschooling seems to be schooling right now. Who knows. That might change somewhere down the line. He might want more school and head to a building. He might want less and quit virtual school. I don’t know. But he continues to thrive emotionally and academically and socially so we must be doing something right. The kid is kinda awesome. Mouthy, sure, but awesome.

“Will Noah get a say about whether he continues the program?”

Yes and no. Because if he had more of a say, he would have quit after the first month.

If he did like it, we’d stick with it but instead it’s making Brett crazy to not only have the bother of the program bureaucracy, which is considerable, but also have to harass Noah to do the work.

They’ve figured it out though. Brett cut way back on the busy work and Noah quit complaining (as much). He likes to do Study Island because he likes to get things right and see that he got them right so Brett will just say, “Do X amount of Study Island today” and Noah will do it. That’s how they work other things pretty much, too. And since he likes Study Island we could always get quiz programs to supplement. Heck, you can get the practice proficiency tests from the library so he can evaluate his little heart out next year if it pleases him.

Next year Brett is thinking he’ll keep the formal math and continue to ask Noah to do stuff but he won’t have to worry about filling out the attendance and hours spent in school and marking work done. That’s the big headache about it, especially since we’re not doing the work as assigned so it demands some creative thinking on Brett’s part to record it all.

Yesterday at homeschool gym I sat with three other moms who use or have used K12 and we bonded over how much we hate it. Apparently the curriculum has gotten less flexible because of No Child Left Behind (I’ll be very interested to see what the new administration does with that, lemme tell you). They are very much teaching to the test — they told us this early on — and we think the reason our supervising teacher hasn’t harassed us about Noah’s busy work is that he does Study Island all of the time. (Plus he kicks ass in his virtual conferences with her.*) Because if Noah flunks out it doesn’t matter to their funding as long as he does well on the 5th grade proficiency test. And if he DID flunk (because of work), he could still do sixth grade there next year as long as he tested into it. Which just goes to show you that even to the k12 people, the busy work is bunk.

* This has been a new thing this year for Noah. He has never known where he is in relation to other kids — except that he knows he’s a good reader since he reads more and more quickly than his friends — and never seemed to care. But now because of the k12 conferences and the email reports they send out, he has a better idea that he’s bright and he’s gotten pretty smug about it. It’s not that he never worked with other kids and doesn’t know that some don’t read as well and others do math better or whatever, it’s just that in the homeschooling activities we’ve done the kids all take it for granted that you are where you are and no worries. So in his book discussion group some of the kids have trouble reading and it doesn’t matter because the emphasis is on the discussion. It’s mixed age anyway so the kids expect to be at different levels. But now he’s getting on the purple star chart or whatever and he’s also sitting in on these conferences where he consistently gets praised and the other kids get corrected.

But small Madison knocked it down. Noah was furious (Noah built it) and Madison got a bit of a lecture. She felt terribly guilty when she learned that Noah had built it to show Brett.

“But I’m just a little girl,” she said, crying. “It’s hard to wait sometimes!”

Evidentially Noah told her they could knock it down after Daddy came home and she took it upon herself to tackle it before this happened.

But she did take responsibility by apologizing to Noah and asking for a hug and then she decided to give Daddy a coaster that happened to be sitting on the end table to make up for the loss of seeing the snowman.

Jess asked about how Noah’s school is going. Ummm, it’s kinda going. Whatever. That’s how we feel about it around here. No one is liking K12 anymore, least of all Brett who was originally the most enthusiastic. Although I think it’s been good for us. It helped me see how unschool-y I am at heart. It helped Noah see that he could stretch a little. It helped Brett confront some of his assumptions about education. All good things but I’d quit if I were in charge. Brett is grimly determined to finish the year. And when I see grimly I mean with gritted teeth, furrowed brow and an ulcer.

Not that Noah is doing the work as listed. We’re marking him done on stuff left and right. Listen, the kid is going to flunk fifth grade anyway because we aren’t making him do any of the busy work. We just mark him done on it and don’t mark the answers to the questions, which I think will make them not count. If they don’t count, they can’t mark him as passing, I guess. But WE DON’T CARE. We’re going to back to regular old unschool anyway next year and our teacher supervisor person (for homeschooling) will say Noah’s in whatever grade we say he’s in. Because our teacher supervisor person is an educational anarchist.

Brett wants Noah to take the proficiency exam at the end of the year so he’s got Noah working on the Study Island practice tests every day. I’m against this but not so against it that I feel I need to do anything more than occasionally saying to Brett, “Yeah, I’m against that.”

Here’s what I noticed with Noah and this typical school curriciculum:

• Interest in grades and scores that are outweigh his interest in the material.
• Fascination with his performance compared to other kids (in their virtual lectures where the kids work together).
• A tendency to label segregated learning as more real than learning in his every day life.
• An announcement that “I hate history!” which is a lie. He just hates the stupid history curriculum, which is when Brett and I tossed it. Instead they read a book on the history of comics and lo and behold, Noah ended up being very interested in the Great Depression. So there, k12 curriculum masters!
• To be fair, he did find out he had some interests he didn’t know about. (Taxonomy — but hell, I told him he’d love that two years ago only couldn’t find a curriculum for his age that didn’t emphasize creationism.)

(By the way, Kristen is a K12 drop-out. I’m jealous.)

(108 responses to the survey so far! Has anyone shared it at the Bethany Boards or whatever Soul of Adoption is called now or Adoption Teatime? Pretty please?)