As my daughter and I were preparing to attend our local homeschooling conference last weekend, she asked a very good question: “Why don’t school families have a fun conference to go to?”
It was a little hard to answer. The immediate quip that came to mind—”because they’re boring?”—wasn’t fair to school parents, many of whom are fabulously creative and fun just like homeschooling parents. And “because they don’t want to do things with their kids” isn’t fair or accurate either.
The complicated answer, I think, is that it’s harder for school parents to find their tribe. They have friends, of course, and networks of people that they connect with through their work, their creative pursuits, and their families. But few school parents have what homeschoolers have: a tribe that welcomes their whole family.
A tribe is not a group of people who all know each other. A tribe does not have to include only people who like and approve of each other. People in a tribe are not uniformly similar.
Not actually a photo from the conference because I forgot to take photos! But weaving using t-shirt loops on hula hoops is exactly the sort of thing one does at a homeschooling conference…
But a tribe is an affiliation that somehow transcends daily concerns: people in your tribe are not necessarily people you’d want to have over to dinner, but still, they’re your tribe. People in your tribe may differ quite a bit from you in how they run their lives and make their decisions, but still, they’re your tribe.
Homeschoolers are a tribe by choice, but once we join, we become insanely protective of each other. Dare to write a blog against homeschooling? Expect us to pass it around Facebook and inundate you with tirades about why you’re wrong. Are you a homeschooler needing support? Just get it on your local e-mail group and other homeschoolers will show up at your home, or offer you a space in theirs.
Homeschoolers vary just as widely in their social and political views as other families, yet we are still part of the tribe. The conference we went to doesn’t check your homeschooling credentials at the door—they just open it wide and expect that we’ll all be one big happy family.
And we are. Those of us who homeschool with curriculum and expect our children to meet standards hang at the pool with our dedicated unschoolers who pursue child-led learning. Those of us who homeschool with religious conviction build boxes next to those of us who teach evolution and moral relativism. Those of us who voted for Obama learned about emotional intelligence next to those who voted for Romney or even further right. When you’re a member of a tribe, you don’t have to agree.
So what makes our tribe so tribal?
For one, homeschoolers, though we homeschool by choice, feel like an oppressed minority. Sometimes we need to be around each other so that we can feel something like normal. One of the participants in my From School to Homeschool talk said that she knew that once she started homeschooling, all her neighbors would think she was weird. “You’re a homeschooler now,” I replied. “Welcome to being weird.” In our tribe, we celebrate weird together.
For another, homeschoolers are doing something incredibly difficult. Like salmon swimming against the flow of a mighty river, we look over our shoulders at each other and pant out, “Good job! Keep it up! Don’t listen to that guy who just floated by downstream on his raft!” With a daily flood of pressure to go with the cultural and educational mainstream, we form a pretty fierce bond with each other, even if we don’t agree on the particulars of how we do things.
I’m sorry that school parents don’t really have anything similar to our conference to go to. Yes, they can attend events with their kids, but there is no tribal bond with the other families to draw on. Homeschoolers at our conferences are bound together in an inspiring, creative, energetic mass. It’s a great time when we get together and re-energize ourselves, drawing on the group’s strength to keep swimming against the tide.
This article originally appeared in Understanding Our Gifted as “Adapting Curriculum for Gifted Learners.” Although it was written with an eye toward children who are advanced in a subject, the advice can apply in many situations, as many homeschoolers need some variation from straight-from-the-box curriculum. The article is based on an excerpt from my book, From School to Homeschool.
When I started homeschooling, I would listen jealously as other parents discussed curriculum for reading and math, two subjects that my daughter never needed any instruction in as a young child. I was eager to try out curriculum, much of which seemed quite fun, but my visual spatial daughter wasn’t quite ready for learning on paper.
Once I thought she was ready, I found out that searching for the right curriculum was not exactly the fun job I thought it would be. Everything I tried seemed to have major flaws. I realized that because curriculum has to be written for some fictional “average” child, even curriculum written “for gifted children” is unlikely to fit my children like a glove.
Through some experimentation, I found that the really major problems are easy to fix:
The curriculum asks the same sorts of questions over and over:
Whereas the average-ability child needs repetition in order to learn, this is not necessarily true of your gifted learner. If the math curriculum you’ve chosen has 20 questions when your child only needs four, cross out the other 16! This is a good lesson for your child to learn as well: When you’re done learning, there is no reason to sit there and bore yourself until you don’t enjoy it anymore.
Example: My nine-year-old has been enjoying the Key Curriculum Press mathematics workbook series. She loves that everything she needs is in the book, and she doesn’t depend on me too much. However, these books contain entire pages of repetitious practice problems. I noticed that when my daughter turned to one of these pages, she would scribble in the book in frustration. Now I go through and mark a small selection of problems on each page and tell her she doesn’t have to do any of the others unless she wants to.
The curriculum proceeds at a snail’s pace through material that my child gets immediately:
In this case, you probably need to find new curriculum. Again, the fact that some children need more practice in certain areas doesn’t mean that your child should have to suffer through unnecessary repetition.
Example: My son loves computer programming, but everything that we found for children went so slowly and was so superficial he couldn’t get interested. So we jumped into a combination of adult–level online classes and self–initiated projects.
The curriculum sparked my child’s interest but didn’t go deep enough:
This is where the Internet and your public library come in. A great curriculum will include resources to expand into, but even if it doesn’t, you can take the initiative to find more.
Example: Pretty much every curriculum I have used, with a few exceptions, suffers from this problem. Especially print curriculum can’t offer links to the rich, infinite library we now all have available to us on the Internet. Also, my very hands–on daughter always requires a more project–based approach, so I just use the curriculum as a guide and we devise our own projects to go with it. At this point, I consider curriculum to be the starting off point, not the end product.
Sometimes the problems with curriculum are more complex and necessitate changes in how we homeschool. These problems might include:
My child seems to hate every curriculum in this subject, even though he’s good at it:
Children often resist curriculum in their strongest subjects simply because they are beyond it. This is a time to trust your child’s instinct and look for something different. If you have a strong, independent learner (an unschooler, in other words), just be there as backup to provide what he needs. If not, you might have to devise a curriculum on the fly or find a suitable tutor who can go at your child’s pace.
Example: My son really hates having to write the standard middle school essays that most middle school curriculum would recommend. The thing is, he’s a fine writer and skipping a year or two of these essays isn’t going to mean that he won’t get into college. For now, I just let him do the writing that he enjoys, such as software reviews on his blog.
My child is ready to learn at a college level (input) but can’t do the writing or problem solving (output) on her own:
Again, this is pretty common. Gifted students are often advanced in their analytical skills but behind in skills they need for output, such as writing, organizing ideas, computation, and working through multi-level problems without support. Homeschooling parents have to accept this disparity in their children’s skills and provide support as needed. A child who can’t write college-level papers has no business going to a college-level literature course at the community college, but there’s no reason why you can’t use college-level curriculum at home and do the output part of it verbally.
Example: My daughter is highly verbal, but starting from the age when schools would have expected her to hand write her work, she started to say that she didn’t like to write. Her difficulties with fine motor control and her frustration with the slow speed of her hands not keeping up with fast speed of her thoughts had resulted in frustration. Instead of forcing her, I let her dictate everything while I typed. She worked independently on her handwriting, but I didn’t try to force her to work on her handwriting while also trying to get her ideas out. The result was a child who loved writing to the point where she started to publish a newspaper that she designed and wrote. I did the typing, and that freed her to do her best on the rest of it.
My child consistently wants to do easier work than I know he’s capable of:
Our children may be gifted, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t children and that they don’t have their own preferences. Some children are simply not going to be those high–achieving prodigies you read about. A sensitive parent sometimes has to follow her child’s lead, even when she knows that the potential is there. Skilled homeschoolers develop a sense of when to push and when to be more flexible.
Example: My daughter spent her first few reading years, after she’d tested at a sixth-grade reading level, reading Captain Underpants and Magic Treehouse. I resisted the temptation to make an issue of it, and now at nine years old she’s reading well past her grade level.
It’s not unusual to be frustrated that your child can’t “perform” as you expect him to. School-based assumptions have trained us that “smart” children do well in school. But you’ve given up on school (for now), and you need to adopt a new mindset. You are trying to create an environment in which your student excels. Curriculum, therefore, must bend with your student’s needs.
One more thing that is really important to note is that school—and a lot of curriculum—focuses on documentation. Over the course of the school year, your child will produce piles of papers: worksheets, diagrams, graphs, drawings. Most parents don’t realize that this output does not document learning—it documents work. School teachers require output in order to prove that their students are working. In a homeschool, you know your child is learning. You don’t need to produce a piece of paper every time your child watches a history video, for example, or does a science experiment. If you try to force a gifted child into too much busywork for the purposes of documentation, you’re going to have an unhappy homeschooler.
You should always be willing to bend curriculum to work for you and your child’s needs. A completed curriculum booklet doesn’t prove that your child has learned anything. However, a happy, engaged child does prove that your homeschool is on the right track.
I’m writing this on July 23, but I’m guessing that on July 24, I will fail again. How? Well, July 24 is
Yep, that’s right. School children get a break all summer. They don’t have to go to school. But homeschoolers? What a drag. We learn every day. Never a break. Well, leave it to Sandra to give us a vacation of our own.
Problem is, I’m already anticipating our failure. I’m wondering how I’m going to keep from learning anything, and keep my kids from learning, too.
What a huge job homeschooling is. I think I’ll just send them back to school so they can have 10 weeks off from learning. It’s so much easier…
I’ve been holding something back. It’s just, well, difficult to acknowledge this and feel certain that people won’t think I’m bragging. I mean, it’s one thing to homeschool your children. You already look like Superwoman to all those women out there who have real jobs and get paid and can afford to go out to lunch. They hear that you’re still wearing your pajamas at 10 a.m. and they are so envious that it’s hard for them to be nice to you anymore. And when they find out that you actually get your laundry done occasionally? Then the real jealousy sets in.
But on top of that, when you admit that you have a supergenius prodigy in your household? That you’re the mother of a homeschooling phenom? Well, that can be hard to admit. It’s a show-stopper, like telling a working mom that instead of taking the time to make your own lunch, you just eat the crumbs and slimy bits off your kids’ plates. I mean, you have to be careful not to make your friends too jealous, you know?
But I just can’t hold it in anymore. I am so proud of my little boy, the one I call my little bandit. He’s amazing! He talks, he does math, he steals things, and he proves over and over that he is much smarter than his older brother, who is six.
And here’s the kicker: he’s only two.
Oh, and he’s also my most handsome child. Here is a recent photo:
I’m sure you can just see the intelligence pouring forth: the distinguished brow, the alert ears, the apathetic expression.
He’s seen it all. You can’t fool this boy.
So perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. He can’t be all that smart. Well, let me tell you a few things:
Most two-year-olds have a limited vocabulary. They get what they want by throwing fits and grabbing.
This child has never, ever grabbed something or thrown a fit. He is a perfect gentleman. He speaks in complete sentences. Now, it’s true that most of his sentences contain only one word, but that’s because he’s a master of brevity. He always gets straight to the point.
Most two-year-olds don’t even know what heat registers are. They walk right by them without a notice.
Look at my brilliant young man. He’s not just sitting on the heat register: he’s guarding it. He knows a secret that even most adults haven’t yet figured out: If you sit by a heat register long enough, occasionally a tasty fish pops out!
Not only that, but he knows how to open up registers. People deny that a two-year-old could do such a thing, so he finds it necessary to prove his abilities over and over. He opens every register in the house and leaves them for us to find, just to remind us of his brilliance.
Another piece of evidence that he is the most intellectually advanced two-year-old on the planet:
He steals reading glasses.
You probably find that ridiculous. Of course he doesn’t steal reading glasses – he can’t know how to read yet! But he does. I bought a four-pack of reading glasses from Costco, and I’m down to one pair. My prodigy has been taking them and hiding them in his secret fort, where he also takes the books that he reads them with. We haven’t figured out which books those are, but we’ll keep looking and I’ll start his reading list on Goodreads soon.
OK, one final proof of his brilliance: do you know any other two-year-olds who can do such insightful self-portraits as this?
Imagine the mind that can produce such an image, and in the medium of cake and frosting, no less! He’s a born master of modern art. I’m sure he’s ready to start selling in galleries, if we could only figure out how to preserve his creations so that they wouldn’t get eaten.
So there you have it. My secret is out. I know you’re probably raging with jealousy at this point. You’re going to call me all sorts of nasty names online, and write scathing notes on your friends’ Facebook pages. But I just felt that it was unfair to my precious darling to hide him from the world any longer.
He is a homeschool prodigy, and I am his mother.
I feel so fulfilled, I think I will go eat some chocolate. And then I’ve got to take some time for phone calls. CNN and the Huffington Post will want to know about this, for sure.
Note: I have been teaching a teen literature circle and have been thinking a lot about why it’s so hard for some teens to write when they have such wonderful and wise things to say in our workshops. Here is the first piece of advice that I want my students to think about.
When teachers talk to each other about teaching writing, they often talk about “process over product.” Most teachers try to instill this idea through how they teach. I think that teens, who often focus on the product, can improve their writing experience by rethinking their mindset and intentionally focusing on process over product while they write.
What are process and product?
When we are little kids, process is everything. What is process? It’s getting our hands all sticky and gooey in fingerpaint and the smooth feeling of spreading the paint on paper. Process is telling our parent a long, imaginative story that we made up, which is fun to tell but actually has no point at all. Process is getting on a bike, going a few meters, tipping over, crashing, getting up, and then doing it all over again. Process is grabbing Dad’s camera and taking one hundred and fifty-six photos of the mound of dirt we just made.
When we become adults, product seems to become everything. Product is getting an A in a tough physics class in college. Product is getting the diploma and the job or the promotion. Product is handing in that research we had to do by Thursday. Product is winning an award, meeting a goal, or earning a title.
Our culture teaches us that product is supremely important—more important than anything else. We read about a musician’s award, an actor’s pay, a businessperson’s stock holdings, and a politician’s victory as if the end-product is the most important thing. But is it?
Which is more important, process or product?
My process includes a cup of tea, Trident gum, Altoids, and a bowl of nuts (now empty).
Consider a woman who was raised to believe that her self-worth is equivalent to how much money she earns. Because she believes this, she chooses to study a major in college that will lead to a high-paying job. This isn’t the major she’s interested in, but she reasons that this isn’t important because the major she’s interested in doesn’t lead to a high-paying job. After college, she’d like to move to a quiet, rural setting, but she knows that her industry is based in a big city, and that’s where she will find success. So she moves to the big city. She gets a great job, works hard, gets promotions, and soon is earning large amounts of money.
If you ask this woman if she has achieved success—the product she sought—she’d probably say yes. But did she enjoy the process? Is she now a happy, fulfilled person? Of course not. Though she has achieved a product that looks great, in the process she lost everything she loved and was interested in.
Imagine next an actor who is at the top of his game. His recent movies have been blockbusters. The movie he’s just about to work on is with a great director. Imagine he turns up for the first day of shooting with one thing on his mind: Will this be a successful movie, too? Will it make a lot of money? The actor ignores everything that has made his acting great—the process—and is focusing only on the end product.
Will the actor be successful this time around? Will he look like he is in character, or will he look like he’s thinking about whether this movie will be another blockbuster? Obviously, in focusing on product, the actor will lose what he had in his previous movies. (This in fact seems to happen quite often in Hollywood!) He will seem like he’s not really engaged with the part. He will appear as if the process doesn’t matter to him. And his product will therefore suffer.
One final thought experiment: Imagine you are a concert pianist and are about to perform a wonderful but difficult piece that you have spent months preparing. You also know that a very influential critic will be in the audience, and this may make or break your career. You know that your best performances have always been ones in which you relaxed into the music—the process of playing—but on this night, all you can think of is whether your right hand is playing too loudly, whether the critic would notice that you missed a note, and what you will do if you get a bad review in tomorrow’s paper.
Your process, clearly, is misery. And your product? You may be lucky and find that no one noticed how your performance—your product—suffered. But most likely the audience will go away wondering why everyone recommended that they go hear that stiff, self-conscious pianist.
What do teens learning to write have to do with the businesswoman, the actor, and the pianist?
When we hear about successful adults, there is mostly a focus on product. We hear about the businessperson’s millions of dollars, the athlete’s awards, and our neighbor’s new job. When we see a picture on the cover of a magazine, we see the product, not the process of making the subject of the photo look perfect. When we read about someone’s achievements, they look inevitable, as if the award at the other end had always been there waiting.
But if we focus on process rather than product when we study successful adults, we would see that their product was not, in fact, inevitable. Life led them through twists and turns they could not have predicted. And this is exactly like the process of writing.
Rule #1: Don’t start with your product in mind
When you ask a teen who is sitting down to write an essay for her English class what she’s doing, she might answer
“Trying to get to the end of this dumb essay”
or
“Working really hard because I want an A in this class”
or
“Worrying about whether I can actually write down all the ideas I have.”
In all three cases, by focusing on product she’s inhibiting herself right from the start. This is a big part of what people call “writer’s block.”
Rule #2: Do start with a brain dump
There are many ways to do brain dumps, so I’m using a neutral term to include them all. Writing teachers usually swear that the one they like is the best, but I’d say the best is whatever works for you. I once had a student who would write sentences on the subject she was writing about on individual index cards. Then she’d lay them out in front of herself and shuffle them around. Personally, this approach seemed alien to me, but I was glad she’d found it.
Maybe your brain dump will be one of these:
Word associations scribbled on a large piece of paper
Various thoughts dictated into a recording device
Doodles and cartoons on the subject
An outline
A brainstorming session with a fellow student
Imagining that you are being interviewed about the topic and typing out your responses
There are countless ways you can dump what you know into some sort of “hard” form. The important part of it is that you get it out of your head and into some external form that you can look at or listen to.
Rule #3: Figure out what you know and don’t know
If you’re writing about something you really care about, you might just need to look up a few facts and figures. So you can make some notes:
How many pounds of plastic do Americans throw away each year?
Was it Henry VII or Henry VIII who had six wives?
What year was it that our family went on that trip to Costa Rica?
If you’re writing about something you don’t care as much about (and yes, that happens sometimes), you’ll find that you have more blanks to fill in. But again, don’t focus on the blanks so much as the process of filling them in. Just be confident that you’ll figure it out in the end and stop worrying about it!
Rule #4: Write a roadmap
Some of you are outline people. You really like using the Roman numerals and nesting all your individual ideas. Go ahead and do that.
Some of you are graphic types and you might just want to start putting color-coded circles around each idea you wrote down and grouping them together. Go ahead and do that.
You may even have a teacher who requires you to use a specific method. Go ahead and do that to please your teacher (if you want to), then go back and do it your own way because that’s the process that appeals to you. (In my experience, most teachers will accept deviation from their instructions if the student shows that it was a successful alternative process for them.)
In any case, this is where you figure out what all your ideas amount to. It’s actually a fun process if you let it be, and part of letting it be fun is continuing to ignore the product. Consider again working with a partner or an imagined partner here. Talking about what you might want to write can be very helpful. Have your partner take notes, or do it in a text chat so that you have all your ideas typed out already, or record it.
Rule #5: You don’t know to know where you’re going when you write
Lots of people think that professional writers spit out polished prose like water out of a faucet. They don’t. They struggle and strain just like anyone else. The difference is that most of them actually enjoy it. They come to like the process of figuring out what they want to say, and how they want to say it. Even if you don’t become a professional writer, your writing will improve if you view the task as enjoying the process, not as creating a product.
At this point, lots of different things could happen:
some of you are going to feel comfortable following your roadmap
some of you are going to veer off of your map and find out you are writing about something else altogether
some of you are going to skip around and write disjointed pieces
All of these things are fine. All of these approaches are part of your process.
Rule #6: Nothing you write is set in stone
Finally, remember that even more now than when I was a kid, your writing is temporary. You can erase anything you write. You can hit the return key a bunch of times and start over or write something completely different. You can get halfway through, type, “Wow, this is stupid,” and go get a cup of tea. (That’s something I do pretty often.)
No one has to see what your process was. It’s yours, so own it!
When do I start thinking about the product?
Well, at this point, I advise you not to think about it at all. Like that pianist worrying about the critic and the actor wondering about how many tickets he’ll sell, this is simply not the time to care.
This is the time to remember that businesswoman who threw away the subject she loved and the place she wanted to live in order to gain a product she actually didn’t care about.
Your job now is to figure out what you think about a topic. You might surprise yourself. You might think of some really good jokes (and when you do, you’re not going to worry about the probability that you’ll cut the jokes out of the final draft). You might make a parallel between a book by Jane Austen and your favorite video game. You might take the time to text your friend a drawing of yourself holding Jane Austen upside-down by the ankles. You might decide to spell everything really badly. You might write the end of the essay because that’s what came to you first. You might type it all in Comic Sans even though your assignment clearly states that it has to be in Times Roman. Who cares?
You’re in process mode, not in product!
The more fun you make your writing process, the less you actually think about your end-goal, the better your product will be.
