practical bits

What’s funny about homeschooling around here is that people can’t figure out why I’d  bother. The simple reason is that I want my kids’ education to be what mine wasn’t. To wit:

I want my kids to have a history education imbued with a sense of order and causality.

I don’t want a disjointed multi-year social studies program. I want a HISTORY program.

I don’t want a science curriculum that is cobbled together off of random web sites and then treated like the inconvenient “extra” (ranking even lower than art, music and – heaven forbid – P.E.) I want them to read a little science and then get their hands dirty with experiments. All the time.

I want a language arts curriculum that includes writing and grammar, not just spelling and vocabulary. I don’t want a language arts curriculum that assumes writing is covered “somewhere” just because other subjects assign writing projects.

I want a curriculum that includes logic and critical thinking, not an education where facts are spoon-fed to the student and their pass rate depends entirely on their ability to regurgitate on command.

And the last reason why: I’ve got three students on different levels, moving at different speeds with different learning styles. But there’s only me and them – not me and 18 or 23 or 26 of them. I have great respect for teachers: given their restraints, it’s amazing they turn out what they do with the 18 or 23 or 26 at a time. But it’s still not enough. When we made the decision to cut loose from schools, we’re not just freeing them from the bonds of an institution – we’re letting them go as far and as fast as they want.

I just hope we’re not too late.

In the second grade, my child came home with a book report assignment. “Oh, a book report,” I thought, “that’ll be easy. My kid is reading on a fifth grade level, piece of cake.”

No.

It was torture. She could read the book, she could comprehend the book, but she couldn’t write about it. Getting her to write five sentences about what she read was like pulling teeth. Only, pulling the teeth would have been easier. (Weirdly, this is actually the case. My kid loves going to the dentist. She’s had four teeth extracted and each time was happy as a clam. It probably helps that we have a very Zen pediatric dentist. ) But I was baffled. Was there something wrong with my kid?

Again, no. Digging my brain out from the depths of Mommy Madness, I dusted it off to examine what was actually being taught in school. It finally dawned on me that what I needed to consider is what’s *not* being taught at school. Namely, writing skills. The kids do vocabulary and spelling. They get free time every day to read books. As part of their reading groups, they are given worksheets about the assigned reading with questions to answer. But nowhere do they teach the tools to organize thought and construct a logical paragraph.

“Here, kid. Read this book, then boil it down into six salient points. Organize them, defend them, and hand it in next week.”

Easy for you to say. You’re not a seven-year-old kid who, two years ago, was still learning how to write words, much less organize them.

At university I took an advanced Shakespeare class. We were split into groups of four and were supposed to critique each other’s papers. The other three people in the group handed me papers with spelling errors, grammatical inaccuracies, and sentence fragments. This wouldn’t be so bad if only their papers had any kind of coherently organized thought to them. Did I mention that you had to be a junior to get into this class?

I strongly suggest you read The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and compare it to what your kids are – and are not – learning in school.

…by researching curriculum. All sorts – language arts, math, science, history. A person could go nuts with all the choices available to homeschoolers, and it appears that I am on my way to proving that theory true.

Well, I read The Well Trained Mind and have drunk the Classical Education Kool-aid: I am a trivium convert. It’s partly because I can see in the classical education model what has been missing from my kids’ educations, and partly because I believe in their definition of the learning/growing process. Start with building blocks, then introduce simple tools in middle school. When they’ve had a few years of practice with those, move on to power tools at the high school level. Sounds simple, right?

No.

Science. What science do you use? Especially when you’re coming from a background of virtually no science, and the little that was offered was useless? Seriously: I went to Parent’s Visiting Day at our school and sat in on the 5th grade science class. They were going over Newton’s laws. As taught by the instructor, the first two laws were incomprehensible. At least, at a 5th grade level.

“Jenny, what’s Newton’s second law? Read it from the text.”

Student, reading from teacher handout: “Acceleration and force are vectors, and the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.”

My version for the 10 year old brain: When you push on something, it goes on the direction it was pushed. This is brilliantly demonstrated in the science experiment, “Crummy Marble“.

Sit down, all you science types, and save your breath for the coffee. My objective is both to offer a general exposure to science, and keep their interest. Y’all are already interested in science. And you should know perfectly well that if a kid asks you, “What makes stuff move?”, the way to keep their interest is NOT to hand them a copy of Newton’s Principa Mathematica and say “Here ya go, have fun!”

But as I was saying. Do you cobble together your own science out of library books? Do you pick up a complete – but expensive – science class in a box? Do you hire it out to someone else? (Oh, wait, the county is trying to impose extra restrictions against doing just that.) I’ve been reading the forums over at WellTrainedMind.com because I figured, hey, these people are all within my Venn Diagram sphere of educational philosophy, I’ll see what they’re using!

My word, just plaster my picture in the dictionary under “naive”. Over there, they run the gamut from Charlotte Mason to Latin-based to The Well Trained Mind Is My Bible And If You Deviate, The Gods of Education Will STRIKE YOU DOWN. That said, it did have the benefit of introducing me to a number of publishers I never would have found on my own. Or, maybe I would have found them, but it would have taken twice as long. And as this search has already eaten my every evening for the last two weeks, I see this as a positive thing.

I figure I’ll wean myself off of this insanity and try to spend at least two days not obsessing over it, then make my choices and get on with life. Two spreadsheets, 27 pounds of borrowed books (bless you, Neile) and seventy-two thousand websites later, I think I’m almost done.

Then I can get down to the nitty gritty of obsessing over schedules.

Hello, everybody out there in TV Land!

Long time no blog, I know. We went full-gear into homeschooling and while there were definite rough patches, I think it’s going well. Things I’ve learned in the last couple of months:

1. When you start, everyone asks “what’s are you going to do?” Well, it’s pretty much like it sounds. I’m going to teach. him. at. home. The next comment is usually, “Gosh, I could never do that.” On good days, I just smile and let it go. On bad days, I want to say: Really? Seriously? You couldn’t handle kindergarten?
2. I don’t trust the County for review. Nothing against the actual reviewers, you understand – I hear there’s plenty of very nice, non-invasive and encouraging staffers out there – but there’s also enough of the Overstepping Legal Bounds variety to set off this sort of brouhaha – and by “enough” I  mean “any number greater than zero”. This is why I signed up with an umbrella group. Speaking of umbrella groups, mine is lovely. Knowledgeable, supportive, friendly, inclusive, non-judgemental – all that good stuff.
3. When removing a child from a schooling environment where they have not had a successful experience, both of you need to step back and take a breath. We definitely had days when my “OMG am I teaching him enough??” neuroses got the better of me, and The Boy (not surprisingly) stonewalled. Just like in school. Which is why we took him out in the first place. The difference: I caught on. They never did.
4. By set out bite-sized bits of learning everywhere, I’m comfortable knowing some of it’s gonna get eaten. He’s naturally curious kid – which is part of what drove his teacher crazy – but he tries everything. I think it’s more important he retains his natural curiosity intact than learn how to line up properly with everyone else.

At my annual review, the reviewer told me, “Everything counts for everything.” Which is not to say it’s unschooling: it’s everything schooling.