As adults, it’s sometimes hard to remember that feeling of vulnerability that kids have when they’re learning new things. That’s one reason why I continue to value the experience of trying new things out in the world—I think it helps me be a better teacher.
One thing I’ve been doing recently is solo jazz singing. Although I’ve sung in classical vocal ensembles for years, I got shy about performing as a soloist. Last spring I decided to defeat that shyness, one way or another!
I took a jazz singing workshop at my local community college, which was a blast. [See “In praise of adult ed”] Another thing I’ve been doing is going to a jazz open mike to perform.
This is a picture of me singing with a jazz ensemble.
It’s great to get up there and be nervous about how well you’re going to perform, but then realize that the important thing is the joy of learning and expanding your boundaries. The people who come to this open mike range from rank amateurs who are just learning to pro’s who want a friendly audience to work through new material.
It’s hard to remember, when I’m there, that this is an unusual experience for most adults. For most of us—and I include myself in this category much of the time—life is about doing what we’re used to and what we feel comfortable with. Once we’re adults and we have a career (or not), we are less likely to take the sorts of risks that kids take for granted.
It’s possible, in normal adult life, to go months without going to a place we’ve never been before, have in-depth conversations with new people, and choose to do something in front of other people that we aren’t sure we can do.
Yet it’s this sort of striving that keeps us alive and learning. Certainly, we can go for months without having a conversation that pulls us out of our comfort zones, but those are the months that get lost in the mists of our memories. We’ll have these long stretches of time from which we can remember next to nothing, but then retain vivid memories of one conversation we had at a school gathering we didn’t really want to go to.
If we adults make an effort to keep striving for new and challenging experiences in our lives, it makes us better teachers and parents. My students, I try to keep in mind, do the equivalent of getting up in front of a jazz band nearly every day of their lives. They are always facing something new, and their bravery is inspiring!
A while back I was contacted by the Aha Moment crew about taking part once they got to Santa Cruz. I had never heard of them, so of course my first instinct was that this was some new kind of phishing invented to fool Internet-savvy homeschooling moms. It turned out it wasn’t—it’s a real thing and a real job. This really nice group of young people travel the country in a trailer tricked out as a TV studio, interviewing locals at each stop and putting their interviews up on the Web.
I had two reactions to the idea of taking part:
1) I don’t really have “aha moments,” so it wouldn’t be authentic
2) Why would I bother?
After watching videos from the first location that popped up, I decided to watch videos from San Francisco. That’s what sold me. I realize that this is just another way for Mutual of Omaha to try to make us like them, but it’s insidiously wonderful in a weird little way. As soon as I switched to San Francisco—though the trailer, the lighting, and the editing were the same—it was a whole new experience. Those were San Franciscans I saw on the screen. It was so cool to see my former city of residence, the place that I always wanted to live until I lived there, and then always wanted to go back to when I could, represented in this funny little modern sociological experiment.
It felt cool. I decided to do it.
Then I had to find my “aha.” As I said, I don’t really think that way. But once I did, what I wanted to talk about became obvious.
I’m not saying you should go watch me, but I will say that this is a fun and curiously interesting portrait of America that those fuddy duddy insurance guys are bankrolling. I got very little time to chat with the crew, but I could see why they enjoyed their jobs so much.
Choose a city and watch! It’s lovely in a weird, millennial sort of way.
I had the very fun opportunity to teach an online, 4-week seminar called Homeschool Start-Up at Athena’s Advanced Academy this spring. It was great fun for me and my students asked all sorts of great questions. One of the perennial questions that comes up is about homeschooling high school. For some reason, even seasoned homeschoolers sometimes quake at the approach of high school, and end up sending their students back to school. In some families, the students might lead the charge back to school for social reasons, but I think in a lot of cases it happens because neither students nor parents feel confident.
One of the great things about homeschooling high school is doing away with busywork so your student can focus on what s/he really wants to learn.
We, however, are having a fabulous time doing high school, so below are my recommendations for what all homeschooling parents should do before they give up on the idea. It’s really not that hard, and for a student who commits to this path, it is extremely rewarding and empowering.
#1: Connect with parents online
Get yourself onto a high school homeschooling email list. There are many—each with an emphasis on different types of kids and different homeschooling approaches. (The one I take part in, homeschool2college on Yahoo Groups, is very college-focused, lots of kids who are quite academic and advanced, for example—not a great place for a non-college-focused unschooling family.) There are so many different homeschooling high school options, and they change so quickly, that it’s really important to get up-to-date information. These lists are fabulous resources.
Here’s my warning, however: Don’t get on one of these lists until very soon before your child starts high school. If you get on when s/he’s 6, it’s going to Freak You Out, and we don’t want that!
#2: Find local resources
Lots of what you do is probably going to depend on your local area. My most valuable resource locally is our homeschool program teacher, who has guided hundreds of students through high school. She knows all the ins and outs of the local community college. This is really important because on your national email list someone will say very authoritatively “of course concurrent students can take art classes,” but at your local CC suddenly you’ll find out that’s not true. A local network can save you a lot of work.
#3: Authoritative resources
If your student is looking toward college, a good, straightforward book like College Prep Homeschooling (Byers) will give you a good picture of the sort of bookkeeping and other concerns you want to be prepared for. Again, this is a good book for my family, but yours might be more unschooly (e.g. Forging Paths (Beach) or College without High School (Boles)) or Christian/structured (Homeschooled and Headed for College (Boiko)).
#4: Online resources
There are tons of Facebook groups for different flavors of high school homeschoolers. They’re free – check them all out! Search for “homeschool high school” and choose a few that seem like ones you’d be interested in. Look at the quality of their posts and leave if they’re not helping you. I haven’t used many of the websites much, but Let’s Homeschool High School comes with a high recommendation. In general, I don’t recommend joining groups till you actually need them because you’ll just start running in circles like a rat on a wheel, and then who will homeschool your kids??
And that last comment is key: Don’t go crazy looking for resources when what you need to do is focus on your student’s needs and goals. Don’t think you can plan four years of high school when your student is in eighth grade. And don’t think you won’t have unexpected twists and turns in your path.
Do know that you can do this successfully, and whatever your student’s ultimate goals, you can do it well.
It was the weighty Bible of gifted homeschoolers. You saw it on every shelf. My copy was so coveted, one of my homeschooling friends apparently walked off with it and it hasn’t been seen on my shelves since.
What was it? An extensively researched book called Creative Homeschooling by Lisa Rivero, published by Great Potential Press (who published my book, From School to Homeschool, ten years later).
The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer and more focused on modern homeschooling.
Creative Homeschooling was exhaustive and a bit exhausting. At least one homeschooling mom I mentioned it to said that just looking at it gave her a headache! But it was a necessary resource when the Web was in its infancy. With the great changes in homeschooling since the first edition in 2002, homeschooling books have become something other than a resource list. At the time the first edition of Creative Homeschooling was released, however, parents were hungry for information.
“I wrote this book because I needed more information,” Rivero writes in her introduction to the new edition. “At the time, little had been published about homeschooling gifted children, and the Internet was not nearly the quick go-to resource it is today. Fewer people knew anyone who homeschooled or thought of it as a ‘normal’ choice.”
When I started homeschooling in 2007, Rivero’s book was already a classic. Although I couldn’t utter the G-word (“gifted“) in my usual homeschooling circles, as soon as I met another gifted homeschooler, we’d talk about Creative Homeschooling.
But now it’s 2015. People get their homeschooling information from the Web. Why a new version of this venerable homeschooling book?
Rivero says that the first thing she did in the revision process was to realize that her book was no longer valuable as an up-to-date resource list. In fact, even if she updated the list, it would go out of date quickly. The Web is the right place for resource lists. So what is left?
The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer, more focused on the “why” and “how” of homeschooling. Paper listings go out of date immediately, but great advice is timeless.
“Present generation [homeschool] families have quickly learned that homeschooling a gifted child is not about finding the perfect approach or even the perfect resource; they know that the only way to make homeschooling work is to inform themselves as much as possible, and then to always make decisions based on their individual families,” Rivero says. “There is no book that can make those day-to-day decisions for them.”
Rivero’s book focuses on the keyword in its title: creativity. Homeschooling is not about following a formula, and learning is not about attaining a set body of knowledge. Modern education is all about creativity and flexibility; homeschoolers are well-situated in a world where being a lifelong learner is key to success (monetary or otherwise).
“Many of my college students can do a Google search in a heartbeat but are lost or anxious when it comes to organizing their own thoughts during an hour of solitude,” Rivero says. “Time is homeschooling’s greatest gift.”
Rivero gives away her point of view in many ways, not the least of which is starting her “Nuts & Bolts” section with thoughts on creativity. She focuses on creativity throughout, even when discussing such mundane topics as the loss of income in a household.
“Some homeschool parents give up a job to stay home with their children,” Rivero writes. “Often more stressful than the loss of income is the loss of intellectual and creative outlets.”
Author Lisa Rivero
The book’s emphasis is on “gifted” children, but the definition of that word has widened and Rivero’s advice is applicable to any child who is an asynchronous learner. Refreshingly, although Rivero’s book is aimed at families who value academics, she doesn’t push achievement-oriented learning. Rivero doesn’t jump on any bandwagons. Her material is based on research, such as questioning the validity of learning preferences, a bit of a sacred cow amongst homeschoolers at the moment.
The updated edition incorporates much of the cutting edge psychological and neurological research that has happened in the years since its first writing. Rivero includes information gleaned from research, such as Carol Dweck’s Mindset, takes on the right brain/left brain fallacy, argues for considering the problem of applying labels to children, and takes on the damage that overly high expectations can have on developing minds.
The new Creative Homeschooling isn’t the resource Bible it once was. It’s now a lean and focused look at the value and challenge of homeschooling bright children. The fact that it’s only being offered as an e-book is perhaps its most telling feature. This book is not a romantic look at homeschooling past, but rather a guide into homeschooling’s future.
I was out on a mushroom hunt this morning with my mother, going to a place where we knew there would be chanterelles, but we took a wrong turn in the forest and weren’t sure we were on the right path.
So we tried three solutions: first, push on to see if we were mistaken that we were on the wrong trail (we weren’t); second, go up to the top of a hill to see if we could get a sense of which direction we were off by (we couldn’t); finally, start back at a new starting point where we knew we could find the right trail—success!
Three enormous bags of very dirty chanterelles. Don’t ask me where we found them!
Result: Bucket full o’ lovely chanterelles!
I got to thinking that the mushrooming experience is a perfect metaphor for how I want my kids to approach their education. People in homeschooling groups have been discussing this article that ran in the New York Times a few days ago. In one group I’m in, someone pointed out something a professor posted in the comments:
“… By and large home-schooled kids tend to be bright, energetic, and with appalling focus issues – they are great at doing what immediately interests them, dreadful at doing “the boring stuff”. They also have remarkable amounts of detail about some topics and huge lacunae in other areas. …”
I actually agree with the professor that this is a danger that homeschoolers face: In allowing our kids to pursue their own educations, we sometimes don’t encourage them to develop the focus and grit that will help them be successful as college students and beyond.
In our house, we take a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, we let our younger kids follow their muse when it came to education. Certainly, we tried to expose them to a variety of things, but we didn’t force them to continue studying something they hated. We modeled perseverance, but we didn’t enforce it.
But now that we’re homeschooling a teen, we’ve altered that approach. While following your muse is great, sometimes when you pursue a goal you come upon obstacles. We feel it’s very important to help him learn to navigate the real world, in which not every class is interesting, not every teacher is a soulmate, and not every subject you study rocks your world. But, for example, if you want to be a computer scientist you are simply going to have to study algebra (sorry, kid).
So how do we foster perseverance and grit while also allowing for personal choice, inspiration, and dabbling—all important in their own right?
Cleaned, chopped, and ready to cook. Without perseverance, no yummy mushrooms!
For us, it’s like my mushrooming trip:
First, simply deal with the fact that not every class you take is going to be fun, not every skill you learn will be easy to master, not every person you have to interact with will be a bosom buddy.
Second, be willing to push on and persevere if there still seems to be benefit in the path you’re taking.
And finally, know when to give up and try a better path.
Balance is the key here: But balance absolutely doesn’t mean that kids should be taught always to suck it up and continue with something that’s not working. That’s the school approach, one we have rejected.
In our house, we believe in following through with commitments. If our kids make a commitment and then one day say, ‘Oh, this is getting hard, I’m going to drop it,’ we don’t simply let them do it. We ask them to take stock of the situation, be clear about why they want to quit, and consider whether they’re quitting because of something important (the teacher is truly awful and they’re getting nothing from the experience) or something easily surmountable (this teacher’s style is not one they terribly like, but when they look at what they’ve done so far in the class, they’ve learned a lot in unexpected ways).
If they end up deciding to quit something, they are expected to take ownership of that decision. They can’t blame the teacher for not being a good teacher, for example. Instead, they can make a positive decision to use their time in a different way to achieve the goals of the class they were taking.
I hope this is teaching them that when working toward goals, they will almost always run across obstacles along the way.*
I hope that when they come up against “the boring stuff” that they have to do in order to succeed in their field, they see it as an obstacle that they can tackle in one way or another.
If not, perhaps they’ve started down the path that leads to amanitas instead of chanterelles.
* I hope that when they get to college, if they run into that professor, they’ll perhaps alter his opinion about homeschoolers a bit. However, anecdotal evidence shows that many people out in the wider world only notice homeschoolers when the homeschoolers do something to justify their low opinion of homeschoolers. So perhaps the professor won’t notice our kids at all, which would be a victory as well.
