Category: Homeschooling

UC Scout curriculum: a new option for homeschoolers

Posted on by Suki

Note: This post is outdated. I am leaving this post up in order to provide information, but since this piece was written, many more A-G certified options have become available. Check out currently certified providers here. Please see comments below for more recent feedback!

I have known a lot of homeschoolers who have approached the high school years with trepidation. I am trying to remain calm, cool, and collected, but I have to admit that at times I join in the fear. What if I don’t inspire him to do his best and expand his horizons? What if he spends all his time playing video games? What if he doesn’t get into college?

Screen Shot 2013-06-02 at 6.20.09 PMIt’s that last fear that sends homeschoolers running to their local high schools for help. Homeschooling is frustratingly lacking in hard data, but it seems from observation that a lot of homeschoolers bail out at the end, when they see that the stakes are highest. Despite the fact that the available evidence points to homeschoolers getting into and doing just fine in college, we quake at the thought that our educational choice might limit our children’s opportunities.

Roadblocks

In California, one of the biggest limits we see looming on the horizon is the University of California’s “a through g requirements” system. Our best public universities now require* that applying students prove that their high schooling has met these requirements as a pre-condition to application.

*A caveat: individual homeschoolers report that their completely homeschooled and sometimes unschooled students did get into UC schools without jumping through these hoops. There are a number of ways to do this, and if you’re interested, you should join  a “homeschool to college” e-mail list to get more informed. In this piece, however, I am going to focus on those who are more comfortable finding a way to push their student through the hoop than finding a way around it.

The a-g requirements are not overly demanding. As any homeschooler knows, your student can learn everything a traditional high schooler learns—and more—in a lot less time and with a lot less stress. The stress, however, comes from the documentation end—how do you prove that your home biology course makes the grade? One way is to take standardized tests that document achievement (the required tests and scores are listed on this page).

Enter UC Scout

A new option is being offered through UC Scout, now updated and certified to fulfill a-g requirements. Scout is primarily designed to be used by teachers in the public school system, but that doesn’t mean that homeschoolers can’t use it to their advantage, as well.

“We’re finding that a lot of homeschooling families are very interested,” says Kevin Heller of Scout. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions in order to clarify how homeschoolers, both those who homeschool independently and those who use a public school program, can use Scout. Also, please note that if you do not reside in California, the Scout resources are open to your student as well.

A general introduction

Scout is a set of online classes in a variety of curriculum areas geared toward meeting UC’s a-g requirements. The lessons can be completed independently, under the guidance of a local high school teacher, or with a Scout-assigned instructor (for an added fee). California public high school students taking the course through a high school teacher pay no fees to take Scout courses. Private school and independent students pay a small fee for self-paced access to a course, and a higher fee if they would like to work with a teacher.

Answering a few questions

For homeschoolers, I felt like the website left a lot of questions unanswered. Here are my questions and Heller’s answers, which might tell you more about how your student might use Scout:

I see that you have a self-paced option and a teacher-led option. If the students buy the self-paced option, do they have a time limit to finish it or is it open-ended?

All options do have an associated start and stop date, however, those dates are variable. Open Access classes typically run for a year, but we also have a Summer semester version that is shorter. If a student or family wants a Personalized Section, we can customize the start and stop dates to their needs. If a student or family wants to hire one of our teachers, there are pre-set start and stop dates.

With the teacher-led option, what sort of access do they have to the teacher: e-mail, Skype sessions,…?

Students can email the teacher, chat live with the teacher, video chat, and teleconference with the teacher on an as-needed basis. We are working adding a video chat feature to our LMS, so that a student would not need to use Skype or Google Hangouts.

Will doing the teacher-led option look better on a homeschooler’s UC application, given that there will be an outside teacher responsible for it? Or is it enough for a homeschooler to do the self-paced option and submit scores from that?

UC Doorways does not differentiate between courses that are facilitated by a Scout teacher, a school teacher, or a student being supported at home using the self-paced version of a Scout course. However, Scout is also not a credit-granting institution. Students receive credit from their local schools, and school officials must choose Scout from the UC Doorways website to assign credit for Scout courses on students’ transcripts.

Will you be adding a feature so that potential students can see the curriculum before buying? Specifically, since homeschoolers don’t always have a degree in the subjects their high schoolers are studying, they are interested in the length of the lessons, how they flow, what sort of help is available from within the system (for example, pop-up definitions in the text), and how often the curriculum presents quizzes to help the student confirm his or her mastery level of the material. 

We will have demo lessons available soon, but they are not yet ready. The lessons were created for mastery learning, and they contain frequent checks for understanding and interactivity.

What happens if students don’t pass quizzes, or don’t do as well as they’d like to? Are they able to go back and repeat material in the curriculum, or does it only flow in one direction? 

All interactive lessons contain self-check quiz questions that allow students to practice what they have learned and test their understanding. They receive immediate feedback from the system and are able to retake the quiz or resubmit their answers as many times as they need to. There are also official quizzes and tests for each course that would be administered by a teacher (or homeschooling parent), who would decide what those options are.

What are the accommodations for students with disabilities and different learning styles? Is there audio text of all the written text? Can the size of the text be changed? How much multimedia/interactive content is there per chapter?

All of the courses are fully ADA-compliant, and a transcript of all spoken materials is available. The courses are compatible with standard screen readers. While each course has a great deal both multimedia and interactive content, each class is different. For example, the Physics classes were created at UCLA, while the Computer Science A course was created at UC Santa Cruz. So, they all have multimedia and interactive content, but each course has different amounts of each.

Are all the materials in the curriculum created by Scout or does it link to offsite web resources? And are there recommendations for further reading if a student is particularly interested in one topic?

99% of the content is Scout content; there are a handful of vestigial external links. They will be disappearing soon, but as we have current users, we do not want to remove the links until the replacement content is ready. Also, there are recommendations for further reading.

Parents of home-schooled students who are affiliated with a local school or school district should seek credit approval in advance of enrolling students in a Scout course. Local schools and school districts may also require proctored exams for full credit. It is always best to check with your local school affiliation before starting a Scout course.

My son will probably be taking a science course this fall that will use Scout as its backbone. His independent teacher will register as his teacher on Scout, and will offer in-person labs to compliment the online learning. Although he will not get public school “credit” for the course (and we’ll have to pay the small fee on top of his teacher’s fee for the labs), it seems like a great option for students who want to show that they completed a rigorous course of study in their homeschooling high school years.

Resources:

Visit UC Scout for more information

Addendum:

I signed my son up for two courses and now understand the system a bit better:

First, only CA public school students get a-g credit for these classes, and that’s only if you go to a public school that’s officially allowed to offer a-g. So for example, my son is registered in a public school independent study program which is not certified, so he will not get a-g credit for the courses. But our local homeschooling charter does have authorization to offer these courses for credit, so their students will get a-g credit. It’s really important that you understand that if you are homeschooling independently or outside of California, you can’t get a-g credit by taking a Scout course. The courses are approved for a-g credit, but Scout doesn’t actually grant a-g credit.

The other thing to note is that their documentation doesn’t clarify the difference between the levels. If your student signs up for the Core Basic level, they get access to the course materials only. And when I say only, I really mean only. My son and I were shocked to see that after he finished the first quiz in Algebra and clicked Submit Homework, it was just gone. No results posted to his account, no way to see that he’d ever taken the quiz. Core Basic really is just access to the course but absolutely nothing else. Given that it costs non-CA public school students to take the course, even $19 seems pretty steep if you can’t even get quiz results, so I would suggest that you only consider this if you choose a Core Premium account.

The Core Premium courses require you to sign up with a teacher and the teacher oversees your progress. In that case, your scores are posted in your account and you get those usual features, I assume. (We haven’t paid for Core Premium.) It costs more to hire one of their teachers. According to the Kevin Heller, it’s possible for a homeschooling parent to sign up as a teacher. It’s not clear, however, how much/whether you have to pay. (Again, no documentation that I could find.) And the form makes it seem like you have to be a CA public school teacher to register, so if you want to do it, you might want to query them first about how.

Authoritative homeschooling

Posted on by Suki

One of the questions that new homeschoolers often ask is “how am I ever going to get my child to do any work?” Having had a child in school, they lament, “it was hard enough to get him to do homework!”

Like everything in homeschooling, the answer depends on the family, their values, the choices they make, and how they view their roles. But in general, the approaches can be broken up into three groups: authoritarian, pure unschooling, and authoritative.

Authoritarian homeschoolers are perhaps the ones that the general public is most familiar with. Most conservative homeschooling families work on some version of the authoritarian model, because that’s also the model they parent by. Authoritarian families, when they transition from school to homeschool, are less likely to have a huge change in their relationship with their children. They started out already viewing their role as parents in a way that works well with a school-based model of homeschooling: “Because I told you to” is an explanation that their children are familiar with, so transitioning to a school-based model of homeschooling can work quite smoothly.

Homeschoolers who embrace pure unschooling—child-led learning where the parents do not impose any restrictions or requirements on what and how the child learns—generally spring from families that already follow a similar model of parenting. I’ve seen plenty of parents who express an interest in pure unschooling quake at really following through when their children decide to play computer games for 36 hours straight! This model of homeschooling is as hard for parents to follow as authoritarian homeschooling, if this isn’t the way their families work already. The families that this approach works for are families that already follow something like this model in their parenting style.

What what are we left with? Most of the families I know who are moving from school to homeschool do not already run authoritarian households, and would not be comfortable with a pure unschooling approach. Immediately, they ask the question, “How am I ever going to get my child to do any work?” and it’s a complicated question for them. I think the best answer for those of us in the middle lies in translating the “authoritative” style of parenting to a similar model for homeschooling. Parenting Science offers a nicely laid out definition of what authoritative parenting is (whether or not you consider yourself “science-minded”). Starting from that definition, here’s how I would translate this approach to homeschooling:

  • Like pure unschoolers, authoritative homeschoolers respond to their children’s interests, passions, and desires.
  • Unlike pure unschoolers, however, authoritative homeschoolers offer firm guidance and structure to help their children learn knowledge and skills that the parents believe are important.
  • Like authoritarian homeschoolers, authoritative homeschoolers embrace the idea that there is a body of knowledge and certain skills that should be taught in their homeschool.
  • Unlike authoritarian homeschoolers, however, authoritative homeschoolers encourage their children to question the validity of what they are studying, argue for changes in curriculum or approach, and lead their own studies when appropriate.
  • Authoritative homeschoolers value a balance between freedom and responsibility: for us, homeschooling is about freeing our children from the unreasonable and sometimes harmful expectations of school, while not freeing them from the responsibility to become educated, productive adults.
  • Authoritative homeschoolers want to produce independent thinkers, but we also want to produce adults who have self-discipline, understand how to set and meet goals, and respect the differing opinions and goals of other people.

Here are two examples of how this works in a real-world homeschool:

I hate math!

Your 9-year-old daughter says she really hates math and wants to stop studying math altogether. You believe that not only are math skills important for life in general, but you know that your daughter’s current ambition is to be a veterinarian, and without strong math skills, she will not be able to make that goal.

As an authoritative parent, you know that your child will not necessarily have the same goal when she’s 18 that she has now, but you honor your child’s goal and support her in trying to achieve it. You are tempted to lay down the law and say that your daughter WILL learn long division NOW and she won’t get up from the table until she does it. However, you know that the result will be screaming, tears, and bad feelings that will result in no learning at all.

So instead, you back off and set a meeting time to talk about what is going to happen with math. You ask your daughter why she doesn’t like math, and you listen without criticizing her. You find out, about ten minutes into the conversation, that she actually doesn’t want to stop math—she wants to stop (for now) working on long division, which is very frustrating to her. She tells you that what she’d really like to do is some cool geometry projects. You remember a curriculum you looked at and show it to her on the company’s website. She agrees that it looks fun and that for the next few months you will study geometry and lay off long division.

You may or may not (depending on how your family works) set an official meeting time in a few months to revisit the issue.

 I’m sick of this class.

You have a 15-year-old son who agreed that it was time to try out taking classes that had assignments and deadlines. He has done some goal-setting with you and has stated an interest into getting into a certain university that is quite competitive. Together you’ve researched what that college and others like it will want to see on a transcript.

So he signed up for two classes: an online math class and an in-person English class. For the first couple of months, he was doing pretty well. There was a hump where he wanted to drop out of the class early on, but after you talked it through with him, it turned out that he was feeling demoralized because he didn’t know about something that all the other kids seemed to get really easily. So you asked his uncle, who is an engineer, to help him out, and once he understood the problem he got back on track.

But now it’s spring and he has been playing baseball and spending more time with friends. The English class, he says, is too demanding. He just can’t do the work. He wants to drop out. You don’t tell him that dropping out is not an option because you know that this will turn it into a power struggle, which will mean no one will really win. Instead, you sit down with him and look at what he’s done so far, and how much is left. He has done 90% of the reading and has one paper left. He sees already, once you present what he’s done, that he’s on the home stretch.

You ask him what he will put on his transcript for spring semester when he’s applying to colleges, and he admits that it would be good to be able to say that he completed a course. You ask him if he wants to repeat it in the summer, when he was hoping to take time off from academic work, or in the fall, when he was planning an already full schedule. He agrees that he should just put in the effort to try to finish. He asks whether you think the teacher would give him a short extension on the paper. You say that it wouldn’t hurt to ask, but that he should have his reasons ready. Well, he admits, wanting to play more baseball is probably not the most compelling argument. He asks you to help him put goals on his schedule so he can make sure he gets it done on time.

These two examples are idealized, though they are altered forms of things that have happened in our household. But I think the authoritative model offers parents a way to work through homeschooling snags without damaging their relationships with their children. I admit that I don’t always remember to follow my own advice, and there are days in our house when I attempt to force my will, or just give up altogether and let them do something I don’t agree with. But our most successful homeschooling moments follow the authoritative model, where I involve my child – and sometimes the whole family – in decision-making and goal setting.

Helping teens navigate MOOCs

Posted on by Suki

One of the well-known phenomenons of homeschooling is that kids tend to become accelerated in their areas of passion. No longer being held back by the offerings of school—and the low expectations of many educators—even if they aren’t academically advanced in general they often soar ahead in their favorite subjects.

At the end of the day, a MOOC is still just a talking head on a screen. It takes human interaction to facilitate the deepest and most important learning.

For my son, that subject is computer science. His big motivation for homeschooling is having more free time, and what he does with that free time is program, read about programming, and see what other programmers are doing. When he was younger, he read through any computer manual that someone would hand down to him. He blew through every programming class aimed at kids even before we found them, so that every time we found a new option, it no longer suited him. Finally, we enrolled him in some online courses through our local community college, which were bland but got him used to the way classes worked.

This year, we decided to try out MOOCs. In case you don’t know (in which case, I’m concerned about that cave you’re living in!), MOOCs are the latest thing that will change the future of education. Yes, iPads are SO 2012. Now, everyone who can get a pulpit to preach from says that MOOCs are changing the educational landscape, and will eventually make going to a physical university obsolete. (I plan to address the question of whether that particular sky is falling in a future post.)

However, it occurred to me that we have learned a lot about MOOCs this year, and I might be able to give a few pointers to others who are thinking of using them with their homeschoolers.

1) MOOCs are not educational manna from heaven

Not all MOOCs are created the same. We’ve seen a pretty high quality on Coursera, where they are quite rigid about quality control. But they’re not all going to be life-changing for your child, or even at all of interest to them. The first one we signed our son up for stated very clear requirements that our son met, and within the first video blew past those requirements and started to ask for Calculus-level math mastery. Oops. Other pitfalls may be that the professor may present in a dry manner that doesn’t draw teens in, or that the level of work just simply may be too demanding.

2) MOOCs are not a big investment, for better and for worse

So obviously, my son dropped the first class he signed up for. This easy-come, easy-go nature of MOOCs is a blessing, but also a pitfall. Immediately, I realized that if a teenager knows that you can just drop out of anything anytime, with no consequences, that might lead to less than optimal commitment on his part. So we dropped the class, but made sure to talk about why it was the right decision (“clearly, they misstated the math requirements”) and where to go next. Later in the year when our son hit a particularly tough patch in a class he was doing, he pointed out that he could simply drop out of it with no consequences. We had to have another talk about making commitments and sticking with things.

3) There’s a MOOC for every interest, for better and for worse

I was drooling over all the history, philosophy, and art, but I had to remind myself that those are not his areas of passion. Because of reasons #1 and #2, it’s really important to guide kids to choosing classes that they really can stick with and get something from. The educational smorgasbord has its drawbacks just as the cloistered academy has its drawbacks. So we took quite a lot of time thinking carefully, not only about whether he was able to handle the level of a course, but also about whether he was personally committed to the subject matter and would stick with it.

4) Forums are not replacements for in-person interaction

This is a significant difference between a MOOC and an in-person class, or even an online class with a live instructor. When you have tens of thousands of people taking a class, the advantage is that if you have a question, it’s pretty much guaranteed that someone already had that question and someone else already answered it. But while forums are a great way to disseminate information, they aren’t a great way for teens to develop their critical thinking skills. Really, there is no replacement for being in a room (or an online room) with other people who share a passion (or are at least committed to getting through a class) and can talk and argue. Also, access to a good professor, someone who really does know more than you and really can get you to stretch your intellectual boundaries, is a very valuable thing that the MOOC cannot provide. The talking heads are very interesting and erudite, but they can’t chat after class and they can’t recommend a book to read or an idea to pursue. And your fellow students on the forum are spread around the world and have no connection with you. Unlike students in a real-world class, you aren’t going to be able to get the back-and-forth that is so important to academic growth.

5) Be prepared to be a Teaching Assistant

It’s the unusual teen that can bounce into a college-level class and be able to take care of the small but important details: Your teen will likely need you to be there to help pace the work, schedule the assignments, find ways to answer questions not answered in the videos, and navigate the online systems. One of the hardest parts of the courses for my son turned out to be the mechanical aspects: Remembering to get assignments on the calendar so he didn’t find himself in a crunch the day before; remembering to read the fine details of how to submit the assignments in order to get full credit; understanding grading (since he’s homeschooled) and figuring out how the grading reflected how much work he needed to do on the next assignment. His father and I were there to guide him: his father focused on details having to do with the subject matter, and I focused on making sure he got his assignments in on time and paced the lectures so he’d be able to make the next deadline. No matter how good the MOOC, your teen will need you to be there to act as TA.

6) Consider trying to connect with others

I think that the MOOC experience would be greatly enhanced for teens if they had someone else to learn with, not necessarily to watch videos with but to talk to and get feedback from. This summer my son and a friend are going to take a MOOC together, which I’m very excited about. Although my son really learned from the classes he took, I saw that he wasn’t nearly as engaged as he would have been had he someone to talk about it with. I think it will be great for him and his friend to be able to get that social back-and-forth that you get in a real life class. I think the truly optimal experience would be for a local adult to lead teens in “sectionals” along with the classes. I can imagine a future in which MOOCs are used not as the end product, but as the starting point for local teachers. Imagine how great it would be not only to get MIT-level computer science and Harvard-level political science, but also a real-live person to guide you and give you feedback.

Though I’ve heard plenty of talk about how MOOCs are going to kill college as we know it, the way I see them, they’re just a new, useful tool. I think homeschoolers should evaluate how they can use this tool in their homeschools, but don’t expect that you’ll be able to hand off your kid to a computer system to get the job done. Teens still need guidance, especially in the new wild world of the MOOC.

At the end of the day, a MOOC is still just a talking head on a screen. It takes human interaction to facilitate the deepest and most important learning.

Recycling reality

Posted on by Suki

Last week I went on a fieldtrip with our homeschool group that was a real eye opener. I’d always been told that taking your kids on a fieldtrip to the dump is a great experience, and now I know why.

To set the stage, I should describe our family’s relationship to garbage: We are, I would guess, on the more vigilant side when it comes to recycling. We recycle everything that we can, and try to keep up with what our garbage collection facility will take. We are careful to dispose of potentially hazardous waste, like batteries and used electronics, in the best manner. When we go shopping for food, I point out to the kids when something they want to buy is overpackaged in a wasteful way.

I would say, however, that I’m a bigger fan of reusing and using renewable resources than recycling. Although some recycling makes a lot of sense, we could make even bigger changes that would have a much more beneficial effect on the world. In our family, we buy a lot of what we eat in bulk using reusable containers. We started using reusable grocery bags years ago, before our local bag laws were even being debated. It took a little bit of forced reprogramming, because I kept forgetting the bags that I was keeping in the car, but at this point, grabbing bags on the way into a store is so second-nature I don’t even think about it. I even buy clothing and hardware with reusable bags.

But despite the preceding two paragraphs, I’ve always known that my family could do better. I have never entertained the idea of living completely waste-free as some friends of mine are attempting, but I have watched our habits and considered what we how we could improve what we’re doing.

Our kids lined up in front of a few day's worth of aluminum cans used by residents of the City of Santa Cruz (and this is outside of tourist season).
Our kids lined up in front of a few day’s worth of aluminum cans used by residents of the City of Santa Cruz (and this is outside of tourist season).

Here’s where a trip to the dump—or rather, as they call it, “the recovery facility”—came in.

Workers at the dump no longer see their job as hiding away society’s garbage. Our guide was first in line to show us that. We met in a nice, clean building surrounded by pleasant gardens which included a demonstration composter. She showed the kids various types of “garbage” and explained whether they could be reused, recycled, or just thrown away. Her big displays were a huge pile of the ubiquitous single-use plastic shopping bag, a bin of different recyclable and non-recyclable containers, and an aluminum water canteen.

Our kids are generally a tough crowd when it comes to teaching this stuff—they already knew what everything was and some even debated why one type of item was recyclable in their district when it wasn’t in another. So the real learning came in when we donned our hard hats and orange vests and trouped into the recycling facility.

Many things could have hit me as impressive, but here are the big things I learned:

First of all, when you throw stuff in your recycling bin, it doesn’t just go off into machines and magically turn into a new bottle, some toilet paper, or playground matting. Actual individual people get their [gloved] hands on a lot all of it. Our recycling starts by getting dumped by the truck into a huge pile, then it gets pushed by a person driving a frontloader, machine-sorted with magnets, jigglers, and blowers, and then finds its way back to humans again for the final sort. I was very conscious as I watched these hard-working people sorting our crap of whether my actions were making this job any harder. And I had to admit that they were.

We commit various recycling faux pas:

I will admit that I don’t always check whether our garbage collection service actually takes some of the things I throw in the recycling. I know that everyone in my family has been guilty of the “it’s better to put it in if you think they might be able to use it” mentality. Well, no, it’s not better to put it in. The people working at the facility have two major jobs: One is making sure that the machines did their job, grabbing various items out of the stream that should have been sorted before. The other is to separate out the things that machines have no concept of: garbage that has made its way into the recycling stream. So first of all, I have made a pledge to myself to check when we have a question about whether our facility can handle something. (And often, if your facility can’t use it you can drop it by a facility like Grey Bears sometime when you’re passing by and they can take it.)

I asked our guide about cleaning out containers. I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether containers in the recycling bin should be clean or not. She said that they prefer that people rinse them, because they have problems with vermin that just love the last of our spaghetti sauce or yogurt. However, since most of us are using pure drinking water for everything from cooking to washing our cars, this is actually not a great use of water in areas prone to drought. People who have done the analysis say that it’s really best in places where water is scarce not to rinse them, since the final destination facility will be using grey water for that purpose. However, I do know that I can do a better job of striking a balance. My biggest fault is in not doing the dirty

UCSC students created beautiful and thought-provoking sculptures from things they found at the dump.
UCSC students created beautiful and thought-provoking sculptures from things they found at the dump.

work when I find a container in the back of the fridge half filled with moldy something-or-another. More often than I should admit to, I put the whole container, moldy stuff and all, into the recycling. But I am now going to remind myself that I’m making my problem someone else’s problem, and I’ll be scraping out those yucky containers.

Two small bad habits: I tend to screw metal jar tops back on because of the smell factor. But when the recycling facility gets a glass jar with a metal or plastic top, someone has to deal with that. And although I know that containers made of different materials should be broken apart, I don’t always do that. But if the recovery facility gets a paperboard container with an aluminum bottom glued on, it will probably have to go in the landfill.

As we walked up the road, past sculptures made by UCSC students (see photo) and to the top of the landfill, our guide told us a recycling success story. Twenty years ago, this landfill was given 50 years before it would be exhausted. Today, they still are predicting 50 years, all due to diverting recyclables from the landfill. Off in the distance, she pointed to the most successful part of the recycling effort: a mountain of yard waste slowly composting itself into the beautiful, rich soil that built our county’s huge agricultural business.

Two thumbs up for taking this fieldtrip with your kids. It’s important that we not push important issues like where our garbage goes aside. All of us share the responsibility of making our community healthy for now and for the future.

 

Science and inquiry

Posted on by Suki

Each year, as soon as our county adds its science fair dates, I get them on the calendar and block out the weekend so I’m sure we don’t schedule anything over it. Since my son became eligible, I started blocking out those dates as well. For the last two years, he and I went to L.A. and had a blast.

This year, however, things are turning out a bit different. Neither of my kids is doing the science fair.

Fish tank
Sometimes science is all about looking into a fishtank and dreaming.

My son is a budding computer scientist, and each year he has to do contortions to make his projects fit the hypothesis-driven focus the science fair requires. Each year, he thinks of a really cool idea and gets very excited. Then I have to ask him the question that causes the air to hiss slowly out of his creative tires:

“What will your hypothesis be?”

I ask the question because I know that our science fair is set up, for better and for worse, to favor hypothesis-driven projects. They do allow for inquiry-driven projects, but word of mouth from other parents is that those projects never win. And although we know winning isn’t everything, it sure is a fun part of the science fair when you’ve done an enormous amount of work to get there. Entering with a project that can’t win seems a bit pointless.

Last year I ended up having the hypothesis problem with my daughter, too. Even though her project was in chemistry, which lends itself more easily to hypothesis-driven experiments, she really couldn’t figure out what her question was. “I just want to do this because it’s cool to find out what will happen,” she said in frustration.

Well knowing what would happen, she submitted her project with a clearly made-up-after-the-fact hypothesis. Not surprisingly, she didn’t even place. This year, in contrast, she came up with a gorgeous, inspired hypothesis. Her project idea was huge, and would have involved much more work than she was willing to put in, so she scrapped it.

I have been talking to Sue Carter, Professor of Physics at UCSC and founder of the new IRIS Science Academy, about her new academy and her approach to teaching science. She had this to say about the way science is taught in schools… and encouraged in our science fair:

The hypothesis approach to science inquiry is pushed in most K-12 school curriculums. While it is certainly a useful thought process to form a hypothesis, it isn’t the only way to approach science and it does have a few flaws. By forming a hypothesis you presume to know an answer and seek to develop a process to prove yourself right or wrong, but in so doing you have just limited the extent of your experiment to the question/hypothesis you formed before you even started the experiment, as well as possibly biasing the answer itself. You may be asking the entirely wrong question. Alot of great science is done without ever forming an initial hypothesis — but keeping an open mind on what the question you want to answer is and taking instead a voyage of discovery which may ultimately lead to a hypothesis. This is known as discovery science and is what many scientific research labs do. So while we may start a lab with a hypothesis-driven approach, we hope the students will evolve throughout he course of the experiment to a discovery-based approach to scientific inquiry led by their own curiosity.

In a sense what she is saying is that my highly creative, science-loving kids are actually behaving less like science students and more like scientists. Instead of formulating a question that would limit what they find, they are interested simply in following a passion and seeing where it leads them. Given that they’re homeschooled, it’s not surprising that they’ve come to science this way. Lucky for them, their dumb mommy forgot to teach science “the right way”!

But much of our current educational system stifles innovation and creativity while encouraging rule-following and safe choices. No wonder so many of the science fair experiments seem lifted directly off Science Buddies—this is what you get rewarded for.

I’m not saying I dislike the science fair—I’m actually very disappointed my kids won’t be taking part. But I think it’s worth questioning what we’re teaching our kids: not just what we actually say, but what message our actions give them. I just had to let my son off from doing the science fair this year, because I think he has a good point. The only hypothesis in most real computer science is “can I do this?”

As for my daughter, she entered an invention contest. And she didn’t get penalized when her major reason for inventing was simply, “I thought it would be cool.”

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