Category: Homeschooling

Why we’re homeschooling high school

Posted on by Suki

There are some homeschoolers who start in high school. Usually these are students who realize that they are wasting their time doing what someone else thinks is important because they have specific interests of their own that they want to pursue. Sometimes new high school homeschoolers are kids who are just having trouble figuring out which direction they’re going in.

But at the same time that new homeschoolers are starting, a sizable group of kids who have been homeschooled from a younger age go back to school during their high school years. The reasons that parents cite largely fall into a few categories: 1) lifestyle needs – usually a parent who needs to go back to work; 2) homeschooling anxiety – the parent fears that s/he isn’t advanced enough to teach a high schooler; or 3) college fears – parents start to worry that their student will not be “well-rounded,” will look too unusual to colleges, or won’t be able to fulfill requirements.

We’re now nearly a full school year into our first year of homeschooling high school, and I wanted to write about how we have managed all three of those objections. Homeschooling high school is working fabulously well for us and for our son.

Lifestyle needs

I completely understand a parent’s need to get on with a career, have more flexibility, or just more personal time. Since my son has been maturing, I have felt a strong urge to focus more on my work and spend less time carting kids around from one destination to another.

Our high school homeschooling style, however, works perfectly with my needs. One of the things that I’ve focused on since he was in sixth grade is transitioning the burden of his education from me to him. What I mean by that is that traditionally, parents, teachers, and schools take on the role of pushing education into students. In homeschool, however, the goal should be to have students take on more and more of the responsibility for their education. Now that my son is in 9th grade, he is able to do a lot of his educational activities with very little involvement from me. I am “teaching” him two subjects: geometry and literature. Next year, that will be cut down to literature. By 11th grade, I fully expect him to be learning largely independently from me, with support only in the areas of scheduling and transportation.

And even in those areas, he is gaining independence. This year he started to take the bus for some of his transportation, freeing him to be able to take classes at times that are inconvenient for me. And because we use a shared online calendar system, he has been able to take on a larger role in maintaining his schedule.

Homeschooling anxiety

I remember the day when I realized that my son’s knowledge of programming outstripped mine. I had put together a club of kids who wanted to learn programming, and we were learning Alice, which is a visual programming environment built on top of Java. My son was able to explain why something didn’t work in terms of the underlying Java, and I didn’t get what he was saying. That was the day I stopped trying to “teach” him.

Community college
Spot the homeschooler! Lots of homeschoolers take classes at community colleges, where their classmates are often surprised to find out that they’re younger.

Yet his computer science education has not stopped. It doesn’t matter that I can no longer teach him—I have been supporting his learning in other ways. I’ve helped him find appropriate classes, work with mentors, and hook up with other young programmers to do activities with.

A lot of homeschoolers look ahead to the high school years and get worried that they won’t be able to “teach” their children anymore. But I tend to use that word in quotation marks when writing about homeschooling because the ultimate goal of homeschooling should be that the parent doesn’t have to do any teaching. The parent is there as a guide and mentor. So yes, of course like everyone else I have anxiety about whether I am able to offer an appropriate education for him, but I try to channel that anxiety into finding new ways to access the education he needs. So far, we’ve been successful.

College fears

The major concern that homeschoolers cite for their high schoolers is that somehow homeschooling won’t prepare them for college, or that they won’t get into good colleges. I think this fear can be separated into two categories: truly putting together a good, rigorous high school education for your student, and then making your student look like s/he has had a good, rigorous high school education when it comes to filling out applications.

I have no concerns in the first category—I know that my son is getting an excellent education. Certainly, it’s not the same education he’d be getting in high school, but in most ways I think it’s superior. He has the time to delve deeply into the subjects he is most passionate about, and homeschooling allows him to just do the basics in areas he’s not so interested in. Schools require equal time for all subjects, resulting in kids who find much of their day boring and pointless. In homeschool, students have the time to shine in their areas of passion.

Concerning the college issue, I’m currently going on something like faith: First, every study of homeschoolers shows that they get into college and they do just fine. The studies are small and hardly rigorous, but homeschooling certainly doesn’t seem to have any measurable negative effects on college acceptance and performance. Second, I read about the experiences of homeschoolers who are further along in the process than we are, and I know that they in fact do get into college. Just like school kids, many of them get into their top choices, while others end up going to their backup schools. Just like school kids, many homeschoolers love their college experience, while others find that they’ve chosen the wrong school or the wrong major and need to readjust their plan part of the way through. Given all that I’ve read and seen with homeschoolers I know, I’m really not worried about my son getting into college. Now, whether he wants to go to college or straight to a high tech start-up is another question we may have to face…

Overall, I feel that our choice to continue homeschooling is the right one. As I see many of my son’s peers peeling off to attend schools, I feel no insecurity about our choice. As for our son, he has no hesitation. Each summer I ask him, “So, do you want to keep homeschooling or would you like to try out school this year?”

Without fail, he gives me an incredulous look and answers, “Go back to school? You’ve got to be kidding!”

Homeschooling Mom’s Bill of Rights

Posted on by Suki

First, my disclaimer: There are some fathers who are the primary homeschooling parent, but this piece specifically addresses a “mom thing.” As women, many of us have been socialized to feel that it’s our job to take care of everyone else to the detriment of our own health and happiness. Homeschooling dads, please feel free to see yourself in here, too, but I won’t apologize for addressing the moms on this issue.

When I was a teenager, we had something we said in our house that needs a bit of translation. Our mom would make yet another self-sacrificing gesture and one of us would inevitably say, “But I like burnt toast!” That was our way of pointing out that our mom was very quick to deny her own needs in deference to all of ours, and there were lots to defer to. My mom deferred to the needs of a husband, five kids, and sometimes even our menagerie of pets. We teased her that when our old toaster didn’t spit out the toast at the right time and some kid whined, she’d always say, “Give it to me—I like burnt toast.”

Homeschooling moms all want to be Supermom, but we have to take care of ourselves first. Totally excellent illustration by Hannah Carpenter.

Homeschooling moms eat a lot of metaphorical burnt toast. We feel indebted to our spouses for earning the money that allows us to stay home with the kids, so we defer to them. We feel responsible for our kids’ happiness even more than other moms since we have taken on such a central role, so we defer to our kids when we should be taking care of ourselves. We find ourselves so used to taking on other people’s burdens, we often even do it for other homeschooling moms, agreeing to take care of another kid when really, it’s the last thing we need to have another bundle of wants in the house, or agreeing to go on yet another fieldtrip because we don’t want to be the spoilsport.

A lot of what we do is necessary for the job: Many a woman has given up a hard-earned career, or cut back drastically, because of taking on homeschooling. Many a mom has given up a beloved pastime that used to happen during school hours. Many a homeschooling family has had to cut back expenses, which often translates into the mom losing her yoga class, her writing retreat, or her much-appreciated pedicures.

Household economies and the limits of time may be unavoidable, but there is a dark side to all this giving: sometimes Mom gives so much, it actually negatively affects not only her family’s happiness, but their homeschooling success as well.

The way I see it, homeschooling is like the ultra-marathon of parenting. If you aren’t in top shape, eating right, taking care of yourself, you’re not going to make it to the finish line. And so often, a mom deny her own needs, thinking that it will help her family. But instead it injures her family, just like the marathoner who cut down on warm-up time or has been grabbing quick junkfood instead of eating right.

Of course, each mom’s needs are different, but here are what I see as the non-negotiable…

Homeschooling Mom’s Bill of Rights

I have the right to keep my body healthy

I will find some way to negotiate support from my spouse or friends so that I can go out of the house for fresh air and exercise, without kids tagging along. I will take the time to fix myself a decent lunch after making sure the maniacs have been taken care of. I will go to the doctor when I need to, and if I’m sick and need to stay in bed, I will.

I have the right to express myself creatively

I need time off to be the person I was before I was a homeschooler, that person I need to keep intact for when homeschooling is done. My children need to see me modeling a healthy approach to self-expression, whether I create art, dance, or enjoy cooking gourmet meals for adult friends.

I have the right to adult time

Time with the adults I enjoy connecting with is important, whether those adults are other homeschoolers separate from their kids, adults I am continuing friendships with apart from our children, or adults who share common interests. I don’t have to drag our children along when an outing is for me. It’s important that I model healthy self-respect to my children so that they can do the same when they have their own children.

I have the right to love my spouse separately from my children

I chose my spouse as an adult human, not as a baby-producing mechanism, and in order to maintain a healthy relationship, my spouse and I need time to relate as adult humans separate from our children. It will not hurt our children to spend time with friends or at Grandma’s house—it will teach them how to maintain a healthy, loving relationship with their own spouses when they are adults.

I have the right to ask for help from my spouse and children

I will not try to do everything that needs to be done, even though I know that I can do it best. I will negotiate with my family the best way for us to get household chores done so that we can all live in our home comfortably and safely. I will not do other family members’ jobs “just to get them done.” I will insist that we all share the burdens and joys of living in a happy home.

I have the right to be a full person outside of homeschooling

Though homeschooling often intertwines with identity for all of us, I understand that someday homeschooling will end, and I will be left with the me that is left over. If I don’t nurture that person during every day of my homeschooling, I risk being left with a vacuum to fill. I acknowledge that once my children move on, I will need my healthy body, my creative self, my friendships, and my relationship with my spouse to have survived intact.

As a homeschooler, it is my job to put on the oxygen mask first so that I can be the best, strongest, happiest, healthiest mom I am capable of being.

A question of scale

Posted on by Suki

This year my son and I decided to use a new and unusual history curriculum in our homeschool. The Big History Project is an attempt to reshape history to be meaningful to kids in the age of information. Rather than focusing just on the wars and conquests of the past, this curriculum attempts to help students understand a context for human history and make sense of their place in it.

One of the first concepts Big History covers is the question of scale. What does it mean to be human in an unfathomably huge and ancient universe? What is our role as a species? What is the importance of the individual and of our achievements?

Orion Nebula
The Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble Telescope

I was thinking about how to represent this in a way that makes sense to me. I think a lot about what it means for a human consciousness to be trapped inside a biological body. Our consciousness is so vast—unlike (as far as we know) other animals, we can conceive of the universe. We can imagine a million years into the future or the past. We can study fossils and recreate the life they lived in words, static art, and film.

This vastness of our consciousness leads us, however, to have difficulty in placing our lives in context. Especially when we are children, what’s happening in our heads naturally feels as if it’s the center of things. One of the most fascinating parts of being a parent for me was watching my children define who they are within their own bodies.

First, you have a baby who has only recently separated from being part of someone else’s body. The baby has a desperate need to be touched, as if that little consciousness can’t yet conceive of being its own person. I remember with both of my babies the day they pulled their heads back from nursing and looked up at me with a new curiosity—Hello! Who are you? Who am I?

Then the baby starts to look and move around. Everything in the baby’s life revolves around the baby. Having siblings perhaps makes it a little easier to sense that you’re not the center of the universe, but your needs are still very selfish—throughout the toddler years and for some kids, well into childhood, there is a selfishness in fulfilling desires and satisfying needs. Babies don’t ask, “Is it right that my mother has to drop everything to feed me?” Toddlers don’t ask, “Is this a convenient time for me to throw a tantrum?”

I see the primary years as the time when kids are negotiating these questions: Where do I leave off and other people begin? What rights do other people have over me? What right do I have to influence and involve other people? They start to learn by trial and error (and sometimes with adult help!) how far their consciousness extends and how much they are able to influence the world around them. During this time, kids start to comprehend the true scale of things and realize that their consciousness, though vast, is just one of billions.

And then the teen years. So many parents have trouble dealing with this time when their kids seem to take antagonistic positions just to prove that they are separate, autonomous beings. I agree that it’s hard, but it’s also a thrill to watch a child fully separate and develop into his own person, to start to understand his own consciousness and what he wants to do in this frustratingly brief turn we all get. A successful end to the teen years, it seems to me, is one in which the new adult is prepared to harness the vast consciousness to pursue goals within the limits of her human life. I know that I didn’t end my teens this way, but I hope I can guide my children as well as I can toward that understanding as their eventual goal.

If you’re interested in exploring the topic of scale, here are some cool resources we’ve used:

From homeschool to school

Posted on by Suki

A friend told me the other night that she was eagerly awaiting my next installment of our ongoing school saga. After homeschooling kindergarten through fifth grade, my daughter decided to try out public school this year.

Probably the most surprising news for most people is that there is so little news. Because it was her choice and she knew that it was her responsibility to follow through on it, we’ve had little trouble with the daily details that many homeschoolers find difficult. She sets her alarm and gets up each morning 10 minutes before we do. (This is to allow for the quiet reading time that she always had at the beginning of the day.) She is actually eating a [mostly] healthy breakfast each day. (As opposed to our less successful homeschool approach, which was to let her read until she was finally willing to eat, as breakfast is her least favorite meal.) And she doesn’t enjoy having to do homework after being at school all day, but it’s never a lot and she puts in a decent effort.

But the big question for her was never whether she would be able to deal with the daily grind. The big issue that comes up with any child like her, whether homeschooled or not, is fitting into an education approach that is at odds with her needs as a twice-exceptional learner.

We have been very lucky that her teacher is a caring and flexible educator, so we haven’t had to overcome the barriers that so many teachers set up in front of their unusual learners. But at its core, the American public education system is very unfriendly to kids like her in a variety of ways. Here are some of the major differences we’re noticing between school and homeschool education:

1. The focus on weakness
When my daughter was young, I found that contrary to what I’d learned during my education, she learned much more when we focused on her strengths rather than her weaknesses. For example, she has strengths in science, reading, and conceptual math, so we focused on those almost exclusively in the early years even though she was clearly behind in writing and math calculation skills. Rather than subject her to “drill and kill” methods of inserting math facts into her brain, and rather than making her write more and more because it was difficult for her, we either went easy in those areas or at times ignored them altogether. Using this approach, she eventually brought her weaker skills along because they were required to fulfill her goals in her areas of passion. Though she seldom wrote an essay the way she would have in school, she willingly wrote long reports for her science fair projects. And realizing herself that math facts would help her do other math more easily gave her the internal motivation to work on skills that were hard for her.

The public school approach is quite different. She is in a class of 32 students who have all been taught to expect a teacher-led classroom in which they largely do the same assignments in the same way. Inevitably, this means that my daughter is required to do assignments that focus on her areas of weakness, rather than doing them in the context of a strength. She’s been pretty game to try (again, the influence of a caring teacher), but I know (and I suspect that she does also) that this isn’t the best way for her to learn.

We’re early in the process, but we’re also looking at whether we want to pursue the public school fix for this focus on her weak areas: getting an official stamp of approval on letting her have accommodations to help her learn. In homeschool, this is just how you do things. In school, you need official permission to let a child learn in the way that works for her. Quite a change for us!

2. The focus on “school skills” vs. “real-world skills”
American schools have a long tradition of having kids learn things that seem to have little or no application in the real world. One of the reasons for this is just historical: It takes us a long time to take something out of the curriculum once it no longer has a practical application in modern lives.

Another reason is that we can’t predict which kids will need which skills, so we make them all attempt to attain all skills. That’s why we make our budding actresses and chefs pass math and science classes that are not geared toward their future careers, while we force our budding engineers to enrich themselves with “fuzzy” classes that are aimed at teaching them college-level skills in a discipline they’re not going to major in. (As an aside, I will say that I heartily approve of encouraging people to become well-rounded learners – my beef is not with the concept but rather the execution of this goal.)

So to look at this through the lens of my daughter’s homeschool science projects, in the past she learned all sorts of things – history, writing, letter-writing etiquette, scheduling, geography… – in the context of a project that had a real-world goal. In school, all of these subjects are split up and taught, often isolated from each other, in the same way to each student. So the student who is passionate about geography because she has the goal of traveling to different countries gets the same assignment as the student who goes home and takes apart her household appliances.

In school, therefore, my daughter gets an assignment to write a Venn diagram about two of the characters in the novel she is reading. In homeschool, either she would have just read the novel, enjoyed it, and moved on, or she would have been so inspired by the story that she would have decided to write a screenplay or another story based on it, in which case she would have needed to master the goal of the Venn diagram exercise as an integral part of reaching her goal. No child will need making Venn diagrams as a skill in the real world, but many will need to understand how to compare and contrast in order to fulfill other real world goals. In school, this translates to Venn diagrams. In homeschool, we would have learned the same skills through self-led projects in her areas of strength.

3. Following rules because they are rules, not because they are right
When our children were smaller, we had to deal with the inevitable result of the parenting choices we were making: If you raise your children to question authority, they will question your authority as well. In homeschooling, you deal with this by developing a “authoritative” rather than “authoritarian” relationship with your children. You welcome your children’s questioning of rules as part of their education.

In school, my daughter comes home daily with tales of school rules, how she likes them or doesn’t, how they make sense or don’t, how the children and adults follow them or not. One day I was waiting for her at the fence and she pointed out that I wasn’t standing in front of the area bearing the first letter of her last name. I protested that this was a rule for the children, not the adults, and then she cheerfully agreed that although it was a rule, she’d seen few children and fewer adults following it. She tells me about kids who don’t follow rules and don’t get called on it, and rules that she follows but she clearly thinks are unfair. The homeschooler/anti-authoritarian in me says that she should try to challenge illogical rules, but the practical me (the one who went to and dropped out of public school) tells me to advise her just to let most of it slide.

*

So it does seem as if our year-long social science experiment is going swimmingly. Her learning has largely been centered around social and cultural learning, and the homeschooler in me says that’s just fine. As long as she isn’t concerned about how her grades reflect her weaknesses much more than her strengths, and as long as she doesn’t come home demanding to go to a Miley Cyrus concert, I’m pleased with how much her time in institutional learning is teaching her lessons that aren’t necessarily in the curriculum. When she returns to homeschooling, I hope she’ll have a new respect for how homeschooling allows her to follow her passions, shine in her strengths, and use her strengths to address her challenges.

Note: Today’s reading included this article on asynchronous development, which touches on some of the problems that kids who aren’t developing at a normal rate can have at school.

Unschooling School

Posted on by Suki

This morning, like every other public school mom or dad in the neighborhood, I dropped my daughter off for the first day of sixth grade.

You may think that I’m joking, or that I’m referring to our homeschool program. But no, it’s simpler than that: My daughter has decided to go back to school.

Longtime readers will remember that I had to take my daughter out of kindergarten because she simply couldn’t hack it. School was such a bad environment for her that her teacher had no idea she could read. She was so distressed that she regressed in all areas of her development. By the time she came home, she was suffering from the stress.

Back to schoolAnd so was I. I had no idea what homeschooling even was. I’d thought of the first day of kindergarten as the first day back to my “real life.” I’d drop her off in the morning with a kiss, pick her up with a “how was school today, honey?” and expect to hear about the wonderful things she’d learned.

Instead, we had to figure it all out together. At first we were angry with each other. I was confused why such a smart girl would not be able to do well at school. She was confused why no one could understand what she was so clearly saying with her body, if not her words.

But homeschooling saved both of us. She learned how to learn in her own way—in fact, she’d known all along but hadn’t been allowed to do it. I learned how to let her go and support her but not make demands of her that she couldn’t fulfill.

To a certain extent, my daughter is the “perfect homeschooler.” It’s pretty much impossible to stop her from learning. When I would fall down on the job, she found ways to teach herself what she needed to know. (See “Spinning and Mixing” and “Swinging and Multiplying“.) I have never followed any rigid homeschooling philosophy, but it was clear that she was a born unschooler, setting goals for herself and figuring out what she needed to learn in order to achieve them.

A few years ago, she started a new tradition: each spring, she would read a lot of Harry Potter and then declare that she wanted to go back to school. And each summer, she’d dismiss the idea after I pointed out that she’d have to get up every morning, eat breakfast without grumbling about it for an hour first, and get to school before eight.

Then last spring, things were different. She temporarily gave in to the idea of continuing homeschool after her homeschool program teacher and I talked to her about ways we could change how things were working. But over the summer she admitted to me that she really did want to try school, and there was nothing I could promise that would change her mind.

The question everyone is asking me is what her reasons are. People who know her know that she’s in her element in homeschool. She gets to express herself in her own, unusual way. She gets to study ancient Greece and create inventions instead of filling out worksheets. She doesn’t have to eat a quick breakfast (something that has always been difficult for her). She can choose her teachers for whatever classes she wants to take.

It’s a little hard to be completely sure, but I think these are her general reasons:

  • She has always been interested in systems. She likes to know how things work. And for an American kid, the most important system out there is school. It’s what all her favorite books are about. It’s what kids who aren’t homeschooling talk about. She wants to figure it out for herself.
  • She is a seeker of novelty. Most kids would probably think that school is a bit on the boring side, but for her, it’s such a strange idea to go to the same place at the same time with the same people for nine months. And all strange ideas must be explored.
  • She and I have been butting heads quite a bit, and she wants to have the time we spend together be more positive. She has been talking to me about how she’s looking forward to having “Mommy time” after school, not having me as both teacher (not that I ever taught her anything!) and nurturer. I think she’s telling me that we both need a break.

For my part, I am viewing this decision of hers as just another step in our child-led learning path. She really wants to do this. As long as she doesn’t come out the other side damaged in any way, I support her in exploring everything that interests her. If nothing else, she may come back to homeschooling with a renewed view of the freedom and challenge it offers her. On the other hand, perhaps she’ll decide that school is the right place for her, and then we’ll have a whole new pack of decisions to make.

It’s a weird feeling to drop a homeschooler off in a room with an adult she doesn’t know and 30 other children who may or may not accept her for the unusual being that she is. But there you have it: our family is having the same experience that millions of other American families are having this week. For once, we’re going to try to melt into the crowd and go with the flow. It will be an interesting experiment, if nothing else!

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