Category: Homeschooling

The way we do it

Posted on by Suki

Until recently, pretty much every mention I found of homeschooling in the mainstream press looked nothing like what we do at our house. Or nothing like people I know do at their houses. And definitely not like what the homeschoolers I know do when they’re out of the house, which is in general a significant piece of their time. According to the popular press, we were separatist religious fanatics or hippies raising our children like wolves.

Recently, however, I’ve seen a few pinpoints of light out there in the dismal mainstream world. Two of them come from Quinn Cummings, who is apparently famous as a child actor (since I ignore popular culture her name was meaningless to me!). Her message, however, was the one I’d been hoping to see in the popular press: Homeschoolers are choosing a valid form of education that is different from school, but most of us are neither separatist religious fanatics nor hippies raising our children like wolves.

Cummings has put out a book, which I haven’t read, and in the process of publicizing it she has made us rather invisible homeschoolers more visible. In the Wall Street Journal, she not only presents her own reason for homeschooling but also gives people a sense of what is a much more important thing in homeschooling: the hybrid ways of learning that most of our kids are involved in. On the Diane Rehm Show, she necessarily had to stay more personal, but she pushed back nice and hard against the really yawn-inducing questions (as far as homeschoolers are concerned) of socialization and how well former homeschoolers integrate with other kids.

Today EdWeek, an education industry publication, published “Hybrid Homeschools Gaining Traction,” a story about homeschooling that is much more familiar to me and the other homeschoolers I know. Though Cummings mentioned “outschooling” as an option in homeschooling, she still answered questions like “how can you teach your daughter math when you are math-phobic?” with traditional homeschooling solutions—in that case, her husband does the teaching.

Of course, sharing the responsibilities of homeschooling happens all the time in homeschools, and it’s a great part of why one of our local homeschooling programs is called Alternative Family Education. Homeschoolers are all about making learning a family affair.

But the reality for most of the families I know is that what we call “home”schooling would be better called—as people I know do—”custom schooling” or “a la carte schooling” or “cooperative learning.” The EdWeek article hits this nail right on the head, and also the article’s very existence is noteworthy: The only “related story” they could find on EdWeek was published in 2008! If that’s not proof that the education establishment has been ignoring a tidal wave, I don’t know what is.

This is not the sort of tidal wave that is going to gather everything into it and destroy everything else in its path. This is the sort of slow-moving wave that is already changing education, though most of the people in the educational establishment are “blissfully” ignorant.

I use the quotes because they only think they’re blissful. They have been ignoring us and it’s been serving them just fine, or so they think. We are educated parents, people who often went to public schools ourselves. We are people who support the concept of education for everyone. But we are people who know that it’s being done all wrong. And we have found that we can’t vote at the ballot box—Republicans and Democrats are largely unified in their ignorance over what public education should be.

So we’ve taken the vote to the streets. We are leaving schools—both public and private—and looking for something else. We’re looking for an educational world in which, when a teacher doesn’t mesh with a particular learner, you simply find a different teacher. We are looking for an educational world in which a kid who studies algebra at the age of 9 is just as comfortable as a kid who’s not ready for algebra till 16. We’re looking for an educational world in which knitting, map-making, and storytelling are as respectable to study as math and science.

And—EdWeek readers will be surprised to hear this—we have found that world. It’s homeschooling, and whatever we don’t find out there for our kids we are busy creating. It’s a tidal wave because there is no way that our experiences are not going to create fundamental change in education. The blissful establishment has been put on notice by one of their own publications that people are starting to notice what we’re doing.

Outschooling, custom schooling, a la carte schooling, unschooling, cooperative learning, family education, life learning… Whatever you call it, that’s what we’re doing.

Our kids are learning, they’re doing great on standardized tests (though we don’t really care about that), and best of all, they’re doing great at life, which is what we care about most of all.

Advocacy for Gifted Kids: Vote With Your Feet

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling discusses her take on homeschooling versus traditional schooling, for National Parenting Gifted Children Week.

This is Part 6 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation onFacebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My choice to homeschool my kids might look from the outside like a big vote of no confidence in our public education system. In fact, a fair number of homeschoolers do vilify schools, presenting homeschooling as the only valid choice.

My experiences and point of view, however, are somewhat different. I admit that public school and I got off to a bad start. I did due diligence on our local elementary school and opted for a small private school for our first child’s kindergarten year. I had many reasons, but the big two were these:

  1. Our local public schools had no interest in serving the needs of families. To make busing cheaper, our local elementary’s kindergarten started at 7:40 in the morning, and to save money on staff, it was only two and a half hours long. I did the math, and decided that private tuition was worth the extra hour sleep my kids and I would get.
  2. The principal scared me off. When I described my son’s learning and what we were looking for in a school, he said, “It sounds like you are a family I’d love to have at our school. Unfortunately, we can provide nothing that you’re asking for.” No GATE program, no foreign language (in fact, he said “teaching Spanish is illegal!”), no art, music, or PE besides what teachers and parents provided.

We eventually happened upon a charter school that was a better fit for my son and our family, but it ended up being a terrible fit for our daughter. Our quiet, compliant son was suffering through the long stretches of boredom he met in an undifferentiated classroom. But I realized that our twice–exceptional daughter would never function in a school geared toward serving the needs of the kids in the middle of the spectrum.

So we ended up trying private school for our daughter as well, and finally gave in to homeschooling.

As soon as we started homeschooling, I knew that we needed some sort of “school” to go to. Despite her difficulties in the classroom, my daughter is very social and was bored with me alone at home. So we found a public homeschool program that was wonderfully accepting of her and her unusual behavior, and then again accepting of my son when he started homeschooling.

So how do I see our schooling history as advocacy for gifted kids?

I think that too many parents keep quiet about their gifted kids’ needs. Their kids suffer in school, but not quite enough for their parents to feel like it’s worth making a fuss. And thus teachers, administrators, and decision-makers on up the educational food-chain don’t get the message that gifted kids’ needs aren’t being served by our schools.

Yes, I could have stayed with our neighborhood schools and advocated for more: teacher training, differentiated classrooms, broader educational goals, and reintegration of essential curriculum that has been lost. But I knew enough about the state of our local schools to know that I wasn’t going to be effective in that fight.

However, there is one thing that bean–counters do understand: money, and who gets it. My kids move from school to school carrying their ADA funding with them. I transfer them out of our district into a smaller, friendlier district, one that supports alternative education, if not specifically gifted education. By registering my children with a public homeschool program, I keep them in the system and the system knows where they are.

I wish I could do more on this front, but I decided long ago that I have to put my kids’ needs ahead of any activism that may tempt me. I make sure in a variety of ways that we vote with our dollars. Our local district has never bothered to find out why we—and many other families—transfer to another district. If they did gather that information, I believe they’d be surprised at how many gifted kids are “voting with their feet.”

To a certain extent, I do believe that our public school system needs to learn its lessons the hard way. The more they emphasize test scores, the more families with high–scoring kids leave the system. The more they cut the curriculum to the bone, the less money they will have for the active, experiential learning that would tempt these families back.

I have no wish for us as a society to lose public schooling. Our public schools bring us together and offer us a common vision of ourselves as a country. But as long as it is possible to choose an alternative to inappropriate schooling for my children, I will. I am glad that for now, we have a public school that we love.

Continue to Part 7.

The Difficult Question of Gender Identity

Posted on by Suki

In celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week, Great Potential Press is pleased to present a series of guest blog posts covering some of the biggest topics in childhood development and gifted education today. GPP author and blogger Suki Wessling takes a closer look at how parents can support their gifted children – in this post, when it comes to gender identity.

This is Part 4 of her guest series. Return to Part 1 for links to all the posts.

Have your own experience or perspective to share? Join the conversation on Facebook or tweet us @GiftedBooks or #NPGCW12, and you may see your comments featured in a future post!

When my daughter was still a preschooler, pretty in pink with long, curly blond hair and a charming smile, I started to watch the way older girls acted and dressed as they approached puberty. I wondered how I was going to help my daughter through the difficulty of being a girl in our society. And that was even before I knew what kind of girl she’d be.

At about the age of six, my daughter decided to do away with girlishness. She insisted I cut off her gorgeous locks. She moved to the boys’ section of the clothing store. She developed an abiding interest in weapons and potty language. Her favorite book was Captain Underpants. Except for her undying love of baby dolls, she declared all things girlish “stupid.

Despite my being a woman who appreciates the finer parts of girlishness, I supported her decision not to follow gender norms she didn’t like. I agreed to cut her hair, though I warned her that she would be taken for a boy. She decided this was a consequence she could accept. I tried to squelch the potty talk in public, but there was no stopping it at home. My husband and I successfully moved her from Captain Underpants to King Arthur, which at least had literary value.

But the fact is, my daughter suffers the consequences of being an unusual girl on a daily basis. Despite telling some people repeatedly that she’s a girl, she is often referred to with masculine pronouns as if the speaker is unwilling to accept a girl in boys’ clothing. Teachers expect her to “act like a girl” and often come down on her harder than they might a rambunctious boy. Other kids make open, hurtful comments about her.

All this, and she doesn’t even go to school.

School is a minefield for all kids with gender differences. Gifted kids, according to research, are less likely to adhere to gender roles than other kids (see Webb et al., Misdiagnosis). When you add giftedness and gender differences together, you get a lot of fodder for bullies.

My daughter is homeschooled, and most of the above experiences happened in the context of homeschooling. You’d think I might think twice about homeschooling, but the fact is, these experiences have been few and far between. Homeschooled kids, in general, are so much more accepting of differences because they haven’t been socialized to enforce conformity. I know that things would have been much worse in school.

Not long ago a homeschool group we belong to took part in a science workshop. Included in the group were my daughter, a boy with long hair who wears girls’ clothing, and a boy with long hair who wears boys’ clothing. After the workshop, our group received a letter from one of the teachers. She said that as a transgendered person, it was heartening to work with kids who accepted each other’s differences with respect, unlike most of the kids she works with.

It was lovely to hear that, but it also made me think of all the gifted kids in school who suffer because of their gender identity. Although many schools are making the right moves toward creating a more supportive atmosphere, the enforcing of conformity is still alive and well, and often has tragic results.

I have no idea what kind of woman my daughter will be. A friend tells me that her daughter dressed like a boy until puberty, when she suddenly changed without comment. Sometimes my daughter muses about growing her hair out, and since her softball team was forced to wear pink uniforms, she has decided that wearing pink isn’t the worst wardrobe nightmare by far.

But no matter what kind of woman she grows up to be, I want her to feel comfortable in her own skin. I want her to know that whoever she wants to be is fine with me, with her father—with everyone who loves her. And those people who feel threatened by someone who doesn’t follow their expectations of gender roles? I’ll just remind her of her attitude when she was six:

Those people are just “stupid”!

Continue to Part 5.

On Moral Fiction

Posted on by Suki

I have a book, pages yellowed and stiff as if I’d been born much earlier than I was actually born, that my brother gave me when I graduated from college. He inscribed the front page, which is why I know when he gave it to me. Otherwise, I’d have to depend on my memory, which is a bit stiff and yellow about the edges, too.

The book is John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. I don’t know if anyone reads Gardner much anymore. I know that men of a certain age, who were already stiff and yellow about the edges when they were my writing professors, loved John Gardner. I never had much use for his fiction, which seemed to be speaking to an audience much older and male than I was, but I did like this book. And I was touched that my brother would give it to me as I finished school and was about to embark on my life of art.

Fast-forward a few years, and my brother is in advertising, and I’m a homeschooling mom, but the book hasn’t lost its relevance. I skimmed it and found that my young self had helpfully underlined all sorts of important bits. Amazingly, they sound just as important to me now as they did then.

Gardner wrote, “Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth.”

He goes on to say a lot of things, but the main point I took from his argument, and have held onto ever since, is that whether you try to or not, any time you create a work of art you are making a moral statement. So since it’s unavoidable, you might as well think about what moral statement you’re making, just in case it turns out you’re making a statement that you don’t really want to stand behind.

This comes up now because my kids and I have spent the last two years – the time in which both kids have been homeschooling – listening to lots of audiobooks together in the car. When my son was in school, it was too hard to share books because his sister and I would want to listen while he was in school. But then our lives coincided a bit more and it became a project of sorts. We have listened to three series that I think Gardner would have had strong opinions about, had he lived to read them.

First, we listened to all of Harry Potter in the space of a few months. It was an interesting exercise – HP started to invade my thoughts about everything. It is clearly a series that has a lot of compelling content. But in the end, after all that build-up, I felt like we experienced an enormous group shrug. OK, well, good thing it’s over now so we can listen to something else.

It’s not that we didn’t enjoy it – we all did. But in the end, it seemed like there was so little to sink our teeth into. Harry, as a friend of mine pointed out, really didn’t “grow” that much as a character. He started out pretty good, he stayed pretty good, then in the end his goodness triumphed over evil, just as predicted.

It wasn’t an immoral tale, certainly. But I was left wondering, Does HP give us anything to aspire to? Have we learned anything? Do we feel better equipped to face the challenges of our lives? The answer was that resounding group shrug. It was a good tale, worth listening to, and I don’t think it damaged us to listen to it. But if Gardner is right, HP’s ambivalence is a statement in itself, a message where one was not really defined.

The second series we got into started simply because we found out that the author had published the first novel as a homeschooled teen. That sounded interesting, so we decided to check it out. The series, Inheritance, is all the rage with young teens I know. It certainly was a gripping tale, full of swashbuckling fighters, glorious dragons, lithe elves, and Icelandic-style scenery as a backdrop. Our hero, Eragon, is a farmboy who becomes a sort of accidental hero after he finds a dragon egg. Eragon has to grow immensely into this role. Nothing is ever easy for him. (Believe me – by the 50th time you read that Eragon felt some part of his body give way as he did some amazing deed… you get the point that he’s suffering!)

We were stymied in finishing the series, however, because I refused to buy the audiobook and the last book had a long waiting list at the library. So while we waited, we started on our third series, which we’re just finishing. This series, Tiffany Aching by Terry Pratchett, has a lot of surface similarities to Inheritance: made-up land, lots of magic, fairy folk. There the similarities end, however. Pratchett is a master writer with a slew of adult novels under his belt. His books not only feature a sly, intelligent humor that makes you sure this man knows what he’s doing—they are also firmly grounded in a moral universe of Pratchett’s making.

We finished Inheritance because we’d come so far and we needed to know how it ended. By the end, we were referring to it as “Blood and Guts” due to the enormous amount of violent imagery. The author would often pause to have his hero bemoan the amount of violence he was required to engage in—a nod toward morality—but then again he would rise up to drive his sword through an endless parade of bodies, telling us in gory detail about the sinews snapping, the fluids draining, the surprised looks on the doomed faces.

The other thing that hit me wrong about the series was indicated by the name: This series of books is all about how you can’t change your destiny. You are who you are, you are fated to be swordsman or victim, and you play your part no matter what. In the end, Eragon has learned many things, but the biggest lesson he’s learned is that none of his struggles changed anything. He’s on the white ship sailing off to his destiny.

I have to say that I found this a repugnant message to give young readers. As Gardner said, whether you mean to teach a lesson or not, what you choose to put into your fiction teaches a lesson. And the lesson learned from Eragon’s travails is that some of us are just born with great drama, and it doesn’t matter what we do to the little people on our rampage across history.

It’s so interesting that the end of Inheritance was sandwiched in between visits with Tiffany Aching. Tiffany is also a farm girl who gets caught up in something much bigger. But on every step of her journey, Tiffany pauses to think. She notices how her actions affect people. She makes decisions, and she takes responsibility for her decisions when they hurt other people.

The first three books are largely free of any gross violence. The fourth, I Shall Wear Midnight, starts with a shocking scene. A 13-year-old girl is beaten so viciously by her father that she loses the baby she’s carrying. Plenty for me to cringe at as the book opened and we listened in the car. However, by then I trusted Terry Pratchett, and he has not violated that trust. He is a writer who wields his pen with great assurance. There is no ambivalence about right and wrong, no sense that there’s no reason to fight, never a suggestion that someone can’t grow into being something more than they are today.

My kids had probably never heard anything so personally, horribly violent as they did at the beginning of Pratchett’s final book in the series. Nothing in HP or Inheritance was so personal and true to life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into discussions about just how and why a 13-year-old gets pregnant! But I don’t regret letting them listen to it. By the end of the book, Tiffany has unraveled the mess, not to make it perfect, but to make it as good as she can.

And that’s why she’s good, and why she’s moral, and why, if I wanted my kids to emulate any of the many people we’ve gotten to know in the last year—Harry, Ron, Hermione, Eragon, Arya, Roran, Rob Anything, or even Slightly Bigger Than Wee Jock Jock (gotta read Pratchett to understand!)—my vote is for Tiffany. She’s a hardworking, imperfect, thoughtful person. She’s not always nice, because she knows that nice is not always the most important thing.

But she is moral, as are her books.

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