Weirdly and Weirdness
Apr 20, 2009 Homeschooling
Weirdly, blogher is linking to one of my posts with my blog name and not the post’s name. That crazy blogher! You know, since they’ve changed out their review policy I’ve suddenly been inundated with exciting review opportunities that I’ve had to turn down. I’m not really interested in starting a review blog though so I don’t much care. Just noting it because I mentioned blogher.
I forgot to mention that I pulled Noah out of virtual school (with his blessing, obviously). It worked well for us last year but not this year because they were putting way too much emphasis on testing. I think they’re worried about charter schools losing their funding (we were using a state funded virtual school) and this particular charter school has pretty lousy test scores. I think part of this has to do with them having a high number of kids who were coming to virtual school because traditional brick and mortar school wasn’t able to meet their needs. At our orientation it sounded like a lot of the kids were coming in already behind or with learning challenges that would impact test scores. I’m just guessing though; it may be that the school sucks.
Anyway, I don’t care about test scores so I don’t care that the virtual school doesn’t have good ones but given that I don’t care about test scores, I also didn’t care for all the time Noah was spending on test prep. I think test prep is pretty valuable when the test scores matter and I also think learning to take tests is a skill that kids who want to go to college ought to learn but this was just mindless drilling. Noah found it fun up to a point — to him it was like playing a quiz game — but then he was burned out. Also he was getting too worried about his math scores being average instead of rocking out like his reading scores and I don’t want him thinking about scores; I want him learning.
So I pulled him. He’ll probably do a math curriculum though because math has not been something we’ve unschooled all that well.
I was thinking on how people sometimes hear Noah’s homeschooled and then they’ll make assumptions about what he’s like (if they’ve never met him, obviously) like thinking he might be, well, socially backwards or something. As it happens, Noah isn’t socially backwards and in fact if you saw him with all his Hebrew school classmates, you wouldn’t be able to pick him or the one other homeschooled kid out and if you were going by social awkwardness, you’d definitely lean to a couple of the other kids.
But I get why that stereotype is there because, sure, you’ll meet awkward homeschoolers and sometimes this has to do with they way the family is homeschooling (like the kids whose parents are keeping them home because the world is too scary and unsafe) but more often it’s for the same reason schooled kids are sometimes awkward — because they just are.
I don’t think homeschooling creates social awkwardness anymore than traditional school does. I will say that there are many homeschooling parents who are themselves proudly weird and so sure, there might be a higher ratio of weirdness in homeschoolers but this has more to do with who chooses to go against the educational status quo than it has to do with homeschooling itself. I mean to homeschool you have to be able to shrug off societal expectations and some people do this because they are anti-social (again with the fear-mongering anti-world homeschoolers) but others do it because they are marching to the proverbial different drummer. So the parents, sure, a higher ratio of weirdness, which has a trickle down factor.
And then, too, like the charter school there are families whose kids are homeschooling because brick and mortar school wasn’t meeting their needs and those kids are sometimes socially awkward. (There is a large-ish number of kids on the spectrum who are being homeschooled around these here parts.)
So maybe this is why the stereotype persists. But it’s not a chicken and egg type of thing because like I said, the weirdness comes before the homeschooling and sometimes informs the homeschool decision but I’m pretty sure that any of the odder kids would be odd in school, too. They’d just be a lot more miserable because people would tell them how odd they are. As it is, the kids who maybe would get their asses kicked in traditional school seem pretty happy and self-realized as far as I can tell much like my own kid who blends with his brick and mortar school peers.
In our world? Homeschooling = Happiness. And the floods? Those were gonna happen anyway.
Tags: unschooling, virtual school
Don’t argue with me
Sep 24, 2008 Homeschooling
The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them, and delight in playing these games with them and sharing in their delight with them — not because we want someday to get them into college. It is our delight in the baby and the games that makes the game fun, and worthwhile and useful for the baby. Take away the delight, and put in its place some cold-hearted calculation about future IQ and SAT scores and we kill the game, for ourselves and the baby. If we go on for long in this spirit the babies will soon refuse to play — or if they do, play only in the spirit of school, i.e., because they think we’ll be disappointed or angry if they don’t…
from Boing Boing’s review of How Children Learn (thanks Kris!)
See, this is why I don’t do stuff with an eye to teaching. I did at the beginning, with Noah. I’d play games and make note (this is math! this is grammar! this is science!) but I don’t anymore. Because they learn it. They do. At least my kid did and I think the little one will, too. And when it’s time for more formal learning — if it’s time and every kid is different — there is room for that, too. All of it happens in the rhythm that works for YOUR child and YOUR family. That’s unschooling.
Recently I heard Kristen say “I’m not homeschooling for excellenence,” which makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. (It could be our battle cry! “We homeschool for mediocrity!” Except we don’t — it just sounds funny.) So if I’m not homeschooling for excellence (these are the Well-Trained Mind people, the ones who are thinking about Ivy League spelling bee winners and I like these people but we are of a different unschooling ilk) then what am I homeschooling for?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I guess I’m homeschooling for confident, comfortable competence. Homeschooling for joy. For relationships. For family. For love. For creativity. For the experience and not the results. Ivy League? Sure, if you want. Trade school? That works, too.
During our crisis of the last month (financial, that — thanks to an ill-timed trip and very late checks and a client who just stopped paying, which arrived in a perfect storm over the summer that depleted our emergency funds) I felt fiercely defensive of our choice to homeschool because yes, if we’d send the kids away we wouldn’t be on such monetarily shaky grounds. (Although on average I make what I’d make with a “real” job but see, it’s on average, which is why Brett is now working to make up for those months when the Bell Curve isn’t working for us and to build that emergency fund back up.)
But I love our homeschool family and what’s more I believe in our homeschool family. I sit out on the front porch drinking coffee and doing Madison’s hair, chatting with Noah and hear the kids on the school playground across the way and I feel positively gleeful that we’ve kept it up this long. Noah is thinking about high school these days, thus his decision to keep on with a very truncated version of the virtual school. But Madison? Oh she is homeschooled! She will tell you, “I homeschool preschool.” And she spends her days spinning.
(Now I’m saying don’t argue with me but really I mean I won’t argue with you. Most of my homeschool posts end up being homeschooling debates and I’m too busy for it today. You can comment critically but likely I won’t comment back not because I’m insutled or angry with you but because I have so much on my plate today that I don’t have time. I think it’s swell if your kid is doing absolutely awesome in school and I sympathize if he or she is not. Only I don’t get why some people who love school — or at least love their kids’ school experiences — are so anxious to dismiss mine. I have yet to go to a schooled parent’s blog and tell them why homeschooling is better or argue with them about why school is worse yet most of my homeschool posts do indeed bring this out in folks. Which is why I rarely write about it anymore. But you are welcome to read my archives to read more about why I do it, how I’ve struggled and how I’ve responded to past criticism.)
(Also, this post? Which is apparently showing up in the Related Posts below? Noah didn’t flunk fifth grade because it turns out no one cares about the busy work as long as they can show “mastery.” He finished the year out ahead of his level on everything but math. He passed all the standardized tests with flying colors except, again, math, which he passed with muted colors. And he was reading at a tenth grade level midyear with a vocabulary to match so who knows where he is now but clearly he is FINE. So there naysayers!)
Tags: education, high school, holt, homeschool, Homeschooling, Madison, Noah, preschool, unschool, unschooling
Noah’s latest homeschool decision
Apr 22, 2008 Homeschooling
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.
Tags: education, homeschool, k12, Madison, Music, Noah, unschool, unschooling, virtual school
