Category: Homeschooling

Decelerated Reader

Posted on by Suki

This morning at breakfast my daughter sadly eyed the book I’d gotten her for Chanukah, Alice in Quantumland. This is the sort of nerdy, unusual book I love to buy—once we’re done with it we’ll donate it to our library and hopefully they’ll make it available to other nerdy unusual kids in our community.

But why was she sad?

A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?
A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?

When you have kids who are avid readers, they run into different obstacles than the general public understands. Our children’s publishing industry is focused on “hi-lo” books—high interest, low readability. In other words, books that are very similar to the type of kids’ movies that Hollywood puts out. The producers of these books assume that:

  1. Kids don’t like to read
  2. Kids have to be enticed into reading by high concept stories
  3. Kids are terrified to come across a word they don’t understand
  4. Kids will refuse to pick up any book that’s heftier than their iPad

Problem is, there are tons of kids who don’t fit this model, but because they are “doing fine,” no one is paying them much attention.

In the past, I’ve written about two periods of childhood in which avid readers run into roadblocks (pre-K/K and tween) and also how hard it is for science-minded girls to see themselves in kids’ literature (here).

Our daughter, now that she’s doing 7th grade in school, has run into another avid reader roadblock: Accelerated Reader.

In concept, AR sounds great. Kids read books on their own, log into AR at school, take a quiz about the book*, and get credit for reading time. At the beginning of each year, teachers set AR goals for all their students. Not having much of an idea who these kids are**, they set a low goal for the semester and kids like my daughter blow through that goal in a couple of months.

You can guess what happens next: The teacher doesn’t say, wow, this child has mastered everything she needs to in the area of reading, so I’m just going to encourage her to keep reading things she loves and stop worrying about proving that she’s reading certain, approved books. Instead, the teacher says, oh, no, this child reached the goal so early, I’m going to have to set a much higher goal.

So kids like my daughter learn a lesson that perhaps the teacher didn’t mean to teach: If you enjoy something that school cares about, make sure to hide it and pretend you’re just like everyone else. If you don’t, you’ll be punished with more busywork that will keep you from doing the things you want to do.

Here’s why my daughter was sad this morning. She clearly wants to read Alice in Quantumland. But she has to meet this new, high AR goal her teacher set soon after winter break has ended.

And Alice in Quantumland is not listed in AR. That means she can’t take a quiz to prove she read it. That means if she reads it, in her words, “I’ll be reading it for no reason since I won’t get credit.”

Oh, no! Reading for no reason! This terrible impulse must be quashed!

I can never get over the irony of being someone who understands how our education system works while listening to politicians and concerned community members talking about education. They want kids to read (mine does), be inspired (mine is), and learn (can’t stop mine from doing that). Yet they push our system for more and more “accountability,” which ends up quashing any interest in reading, any inspiration the teachers might be able to uncover in their students, and any real, deep learning that can’t be proven on a standardized test.

My daughter’s at school only because she wants to be. She knows that when she complains about AR, it’s not my problem. She could be homeschooling right now like her brother is, determining her own curriculum, reading books that inspire and excite her whether or not AR thinks they’re worth reading.

But for some reason, she’s continuing on this social science experiment that she started last year. I still stand firmly behind my reasons for letting her go to school: If I believe in child-led learning, then I have to let her see this through.

But when I saw her lovingly and sadly flipping through her new book, it gave me pause. It’s the last day of school before winter break. I could just say, “Come on, let’s be homeschoolers today.” But she had her celebratory cupcakes for her Humanities class party, and she was ready to go.

“Well,” I suggested. “Perhaps you will have time during vacation to finish your AR goals and then get to this book.”

And then we went to school.

* They take the quiz to prove they actually read the book—I won’t start on my rant about how unnecessary this is if educators were given the time to really work with and get to know their students…

** Another homeschooler rant here: If teachers had fewer students, if there were more continuity in our public schools from year to year so teachers didn’t have to depend on assembly-line teaching to try to serve their students’ needs, if we didn’t think we had to have “accountability” for each and every smidgeon of learning our kids do…

Sifting and sorting: summer beach magnetorheological fun

Posted on by Suki

Yes, it’s not summer anymore, yet I just was sifting through my blog and found this post I never activated. So keep this in mind for the coming summer. Or if you’re like us, you’ll enjoy a winter beach as well!

When I was homeschooling my daughter, I often wrote about things that we’d do to satisfy her need for tactile stimulation and goal-oriented projects. She just loves getting her hands into something, and when she was small, that meant our house could be, ahem, rather chaotic!

Recently she and her father were talking about iron filings (why were they talking about iron filings? these are the sorts of questions it’s best not to ask!) and he suggested that she get some from the beach. It being summer, we were able to indulge this whim without worrying about getting homework done. (Ah, homeschooling a younger child, how I miss you!)

We made our way to the beach with two strong magnets and three ziploc bags. The bags are important: Of course, you need one to store the filings into. The other two are to cover the strong magnets, because the thing her father warned her about came true almost immediately: if you drop a strong magnet into sand, you end up with a strong magnet covered with iron filings! OK, that in itself is pretty interesting, because we spent a good while pondering the physics of how to remove iron filings from a strong magnet! But I recommend trying to keep the magnets in their bags, because even though we came up with lots of nifty ideas, our magnets are still, to this day, covered with iron filings.

Step 1: Sweep your magnet through the sand and pick up iron-rich sand.

IronSandsm1
Step 1 if you accidentally drop your strong magnet directly into the sand. (Oops!)

Step 2: Put your magnet and bag into another bag. Pull the magnet out and the sand will drop into the bottom of the second bag.

Step 1, using the bag around the magnet
Step 2, using the bag around the magnet

Step 3: Repeat until you have a bag of sandy iron filings.

IronSandsm3
Step 2, assuming you have forgotten about keeping your magnet in the bag and instead dropped it directly into the sand.

Step 4: Repeat the attract and drop sequence with another bag or container so that you can further refine your iron filings and filter out sand.

My husband then recommended that we follow these instructions to create a “magnetorheological fluid.” That was pretty interesting, as well, though not quite as satisfying as the sifting process.

On digital education

Posted on by Suki

No matter which publications you read, you’ve probably come across a fair number of articles expounding the virtues of online and computer-based education, and probably just as many bemoaning the ineffectiveness of digital education. Since I started homeschooling, I’ve had the opportunity to work with kids both in real world classes and online, and it occurs to me that neither side is right.

The Arguments

Proponents of digital education make some very good points about what the medium offers:

  • The ability for anyone, anywhere to access high-quality education
  • The ability for students to be able to move at their own pace rather than being hampered by slower learners
  • The availability of esoteric learning to anyone who wants to access it

From the perspective of enrolling my own homeschooled children in online courses, I would add:

  • Freedom for unusual learners to take part in classrooms that require fewer real-world social skills
  • Ability for children to connect with non-local children who have similar interests

Digital education doubters also make good points:

  • The best, deepest educational experiences stem from social connections as well as access to information
  • There is no quality control online so much of what passes as education doesn’t meet the barest minimum standards
  • Automated digital learning often passes children to the next level when they haven’t achieved mastery of the previous level
  • Education can’t be quantified
Athena's logo
I have been enjoying teaching literature and etymology at Athena’s, an online school for gifted homeschoolers. I’d never be able to put together enough students in my town to carry a multi-age class in etymology, but online, I meet weekly with a pack of enthusiastic, word-crazy kids.

Digital education won’t save us, but…

I actually agree completely with the digital education doubters: Digital education is not the answer to all of our educational woes. We need well-educated, well-respected teachers who are paid well and given ample opportunity to continue their education throughout their careers. We need a variety of types of schools for different types of learners, and these schools need to be clean, well-stocked, happy places where everyone actually wants to be. Human beings are social animals, and we need education to reflect that part of our nature.

On the other hand, digital education is, in fact, filling needs that real-world education has not fulfilled, especially for children. First of all, our education system—not just public schools but also private—tends to focus on the broad middle of the spectrum. Educational institutions can’t serve every child’s needs; they are designed to fit some chunk of the spectrum. Private schools, at least, can admit this fact and cater to certain types of learners, or certain types of families. But we have charged our public schools with the seemingly unattainable goal of serving every child’s needs.

Digital education helps to make that goal a bit more attainable. Children who are advanced in a subject can take online classes to learn more advanced material than their physical world teachers are able to teach. They can also find communities of learners who are like them—each child is unusual in his or her own environment, but on the Internet, just one of a crowd.

Children who are struggling also benefit from digital education. Children who require more repetition in math, for example, can get that repetition in a math program geared toward their needs. Children who need more instruction in reading can practice with modern tools that help them progress more quickly.

Digital education also democratizes education. It used to be that your zip code pretty much determined your prospects. It is still the case that your zip code pretty much determines the test scores at your physical world school, but it doesn’t have to hold back a student who wants to access higher learning anymore. Digital education has made learning available to all, even the many who don’t yet know it exists.

Change can be uncomfortable

kid with computer
Kids anywhere can come together to learn subjects they choose from enthusiastic teachers.

Digital education does the same thing for learning as digital media has done for information. Digital media took the power from the large media power brokers and gave it to everyone. Your blog could end up being as influential as a city newspaper. Digital education has similarly spread education to the many. Where before you had to have the connections and the money to access education in esoteric subjects, now you can interact with others across the world and learn about subjects that used to be obscure.

None of this means that the digital education doubters are wrong. Digital education is not going to solve the fact that a high school in Oakland has no toilet paper, or that an elementary school in Mobile is staffed by teachers who don’t know its from it’s. I like to think of digital education as filling in gaps rather than replacing the structure. If our brick and mortar education system is the structure of the log cabin, digital education is the mud we use to make sure that a cold wind doesn’t come in through the cracks.

We’re in an exciting period of infancy in education, and no one promised that rebirth would be comfortable.

Teach your children well

Posted on by Suki

I joined an auditorium full of parents and teachers last week to hear psychologist Madeline Levine talk about where we’re going wrong in our education and our parenting.

For me personally, the auditorium full of people was like a village meeting. I saw and spoke to parents from almost every school my children have been to, from preschool on up to high school. And though we think of Santa Cruz County as a relatively populous place, when it comes to parents we’re truly a small town. My son’s current homeschool program teacher knew the preschool parents who in turn knew the mom from the private school who in turn knew other homeschooling friends.

Homeschoolers ahead of the curve?

Teach your children wellBut on to Levine’s talk: As I sat listening in my little pod of homeschoolers, I thought, we are definitely not her target audience. Everything she said was part of why we are homeschoolers. For example, she pointed out that our education system forces students to think that in order to be successful adults, they have to be good at everything. On the contrary, she pointed out, “You don’t have to be good at everything, you go to your strong side,” illustrating it with the fact that she always has to ask for help from the audience when figuring out percentages. This is a fact of human development that drives many a student to homeschooling: our educational system makes them feel like failures for their weaknesses, and doesn’t offer them the opportunity to build on their strengths.

Another thing Levine pointed out is that plenty of parents are dissatisfied with their local schools, but they always say there is no community support. But, she says, when she’s signing books, “Everybody in line says I’m the only one in my community.” Again, we homeschoolers have found each other largely because homeschooling is nearly impossible to do well without community. School parents are given a pre-formed community, but they are seldom forced to take advantage of it the way we are.

Another point Levine made was allowing children to have “successful failures”—failures that teach them to reach higher to attain their goals. She points out that today’s “helicopter parents” try to pad their children’s lives so that all they do is succeed. The problem is, those children eventually leave home, and are often devastated by their first small failure because they have no experience in it. This is a situation that is much easier to bring about in homeschooling. In school, if a child fails the consequences can be relatively severe (from their point of view), such as a bad grade or in some schools, losing privileges like recess. In homeschool, we can allow failure in a more natural way. My son, for example, had a bad experience with an online class where he didn’t pay enough attention to the way the grades were being calculated. He ended up doing pretty poorly, even though he’d turned in good work. He learned, with no longterm consequences, to pay more attention to things like due dates and late penalties.

She also spoke about how public education has not kept up with our changing workforce. Our public education system was designed to produce dependable factory workers, people who can follow directions and produce consistent results. Our current work world is quite different; factory workers have lost their jobs to automation. Levine points out, “Every school should have project based learning because it’s collaborative – in the real world we’re collaborating all the time.” Again, this is something that homeschoolers are able to do so much more readily. Since there are no grades and it’s all about enjoyment while learning, collaborative projects are natural to incorporate.

What we really want for our kids

Levine reminded the audience that when she asks parents what they want for their kids, they almost never mention income or status. “We want to raise people who are happy and find meaning in life,” Levine reminds us. And our educational system simply is not geared to do that. As a psychologist, she is seeing more kids who are stressed out about school. In the past, she said, kids would suffer from other life stresses—a divorce or bullying, for example. But now she gets kids who get a B and worry that they won’t get into Harvard and their lives will be ruined.

Many homeschoolers are what we call “public school refugees,” people who didn’t come to homeschooling on principle but instead because they were saving their children. I have known former school children who came to homeschooling after attempted suicide, devastating bullying from peers, debilitating pressure from schools to raise their test scores, and absolute loss of motivation and love of learning.

I always hold out hope that the homeschooling movement will get serious attention from people who make educational decisions in our country, but I know that often we are dismissed as ignorant or worse. It’s heartening to know that people like Levine are coming at it from the opposite direction, giving legitimacy to basic principals that homeschoolers have been acting on for years.

Further reading:

The Feminist Homeschooler

Posted on by Suki

If you are like I was before I started homeschooling, your view of homeschooling moms goes something like this:

  • They are separatist Christians
  • They homeschool because their husbands or churches tell them to
  • They are probably not terribly well-educated themselves
  • They use Bible-based curriculum that doesn’t teach children the whole truth about the world
  • They are raising their children to be subservient girls and dominant boys

feminismThere are certainly some homeschooling moms who fit this description, though I’ve never met one who fits it to a T. However, those of you who know my homeschooling community know what kind of a shock I was in for when I became the world’s most reluctant homeschooler after my daughter didn’t take to kindergarten.

The homeschooling moms I’ve met (yes, they are mostly moms, but more on that in a moment) are as varied in background, theology, and political views as the general population. (Though of course, I will admit that where I live, conservative homeschoolers are just about as populous as conservative voters, which is to say I’ve met very few…)

How would I describe homeschooling moms?

  • From deeply religious to lackadaisically atheist
  • Committed to educating their children as best they can but from within their own definition of what education is (which varies greatly from family to family)
  • Committed to raising children who are comfortable with themselves and have learned how to figure out what they want and how to get it (whether or not society defines what they want as “success”)

So I can say that the public perception of homeschoolers, at least where I live, is pretty far off. When a group of homeschoolers gets together to talk about how they educate their kids, you find out that in the generalities they may seem similar, but when you get down to specifics, each homeschool is as different as each child.

But there are some overwhelming similarities when you look through a gender-based lens:

  • Almost all of the full-time homeschooling parents are women
  • Most homeschoolers are growing up in two-parent, heterosexual households
  • Most of the homeschooling moms left careers to homeschool
  • Many of the moms still work part-time, but even those moms often seem to have changed careers so that their work is more compatible with homeschooling

So of course, seeing this as I started homeschooling, I wondered how to view this from a feminist perspective. Is this a throwback world where women are disregarding everything our mothers and grandmothers fought for? Or is this something new that only looks from the outside like a throwback?

I gave a talk on this topic at the HSC Conference a couple of years ago and recently at the DLC in Santa Cruz. The moms that came were the sorts of women that I have gotten to know during my homeschooling years: smart, committed to raising well-educated children, able to “think outside the box” as far as what education and success are. They are all the sort of homeschoolers that I respect and admire.

Yet many of us feel ambivalent about our choice to step back from a career to raise our children. Those of us who are still working while homeschooling know that clinging to our work (whether from financial or emotional necessity) can sometimes conflict with our success in homeschooling. We can feel uncomfortable being financially dependent on our husbands. We sometimes wonder whether our own education was wasted on us since we haven’t gone out and had fabulous careers to “justify” spending the money and time to educate us.

But all those fears and conflicts are more than canceled out by our real homeschooling experiences. Many women at my talks mentioned their own personal growth that has come from homeschooling, from needing to relearn things that were difficult the first time around to finding out new things about ourselves in the process of homeschooling.

Women also mention how important they feel that their influence is on their children. Their kids might not see a mom modeling the “independent woman” paradigm, but they do see their moms as strong leaders, caring community members, equal (though not “the same”) partners with their spouses, and lifelong learners willing to tackle pretty much anything. (How many of us thought that dissecting roadkill would be part of our adult lives?)

Homeschooling itself is conducive to raising feminist kids. Separated from oppressive school cultures that enforce clear gender roles, our kids develop in whatever direction feels right to them. So when you get together with a group of homeschoolers, you will often wonder at the genders of several of the children in the group – boys with long hair wearing capes, girls with short hair and not a shred of pink to be seen. And because they are homeschooling, their education will reflect their interests rather than some authority’s idea of what they should be interested in. This leads to young adults with a firm sense of identity.

Whether they call themselves feminists or not, many homeschoolers typify what a feminist is: someone who believes that all people should have the opportunity to express who they are without succumbing to society’s ideal for their gender.

And that gets back to the moms. Many of us made a choice to homeschool; some of us were forced due to circumstance. But once we start homeschooling, we realize that we have not taken a step back. We are just entering a period of reinvention in our lives. As one mom said, “When I left my job and started homeschooling, I had to reinvent myself. Once my children are grown, I will just reinvent myself again.”

That’s the spirit—the feminist homeschooler spirit!

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