Category: Homeschooling

My son and I went down to LA so he could attend the state science fair for the second time. It’s quite an exciting thing, to see so many kids who are into science and are willing to put their work out there to be judged. Unfortunately, the state science fair’s listings don’t include the kids’ schools, so I couldn’t count how many homeschoolers were there. I recognized at least four homeschoolers from Santa Cruz—the same three as last year plus a sibling who’s now old enough.

One of the fun things about the science fair is that science-minded families, whose kids are usually spread thinly throughout different schools, get to come together. Our kids don’t have to dumb themselves down for acceptance, and parents don’t feel the need to apologize for our kids’ abysmal social skills. (Though many of these kids have pretty impressive social skills, so there goes another stereotype.)

I also get to see a few other school parents I know, which is really fun because our paths don’t cross very often anymore. One conversation I had reminded me how our lives have diverged from school families’ lives. The mom I was talking to is someone I’ve known for a long time, and she was talking about how her daughter didn’t like to miss school. I joked that in our case, we miss school all the time!

Her answer was very interesting to me: She responded that it must be exciting for my son to get out, given that he’s homeschooled. Now, it’s possible she didn’t mean to be negative or critical – it’s the sort of thing people say in conversation. But when you say, “It must be fun for your son to get out” to a homeschooler, we hear, “We know you are an overprotective parent who isolates her kids by keeping them home from school.”

As I posted a month ago, the things that people say to homeschoolers don’t always get received as they might imagine. It’s possible this person didn’t mean to imply that my kids are somehow deprived, but since this is the sort of thing we hear a lot, we can’t help but hear implicit (and many times explicit) criticism in statements like these. The other thing we can’t help but do is laugh to ourselves about their naiveté—about how little school families seem to understand our lives.

The state science fair is very exciting for my son, that’s true. But it’s not exciting because it’s such a contrast to his usual life. For us, getting out and about is the ordinary state of things. Staying home a lot is something he and I only dream of.

I look at my son’s last few weeks and wonder if the general public could really continue to think of homeschoolers as deprived of appropriate interaction with the world if they had to tag along with us for a few days. Here’s a short list of some of the things he did (and this is on top of doing all the “school” work that we do at home, plus all of his classes which take place outside the home, plus his online math tutor, plus…. well, you get the idea):

• Fun in the snow with another homeschooling family
• A stop at the most awesome museum: The Fossil Discovery Museum.  [We saw a sign for it in Chowchilla, which is off Hwy 99, which goes to Fresno. It’s built around a huge cache of fossils they found in the garbage dump across the road (really!). The man who took us around the museum, it turns out, is an adult homeschooler. He got into helping out with the dig, self-educated himself, and is now ABD (all but degree) a paleontologist, and is about to go back to school to get the degree he already has all the knowledge for.]
• When we got back my son had his art class with the most excellent Yvette Contois of the Art Factory. (OK, that’s an ongoing activity, but I thought I’d give her a shameless plug.)
• A trip with me to the Makers Factory to do an interview. While I interviewed, they got a personal tour of the cool tools they have there.
• Meeting friends at Pogonip (on a school day) and going for an excellent hike on which my daughter adopted her new pet, a darkling beetle named Abyss.
• Creative writing club, which we organized for a really great group of highly creative, thoughtful homeschooled writers.
• Planning with one of the teachers in our homeschool program about the upcoming student film festival, which was planned and run entirely by middle school kids.
• I admit we were so dragged out with all the running around that week that we skipped a fabulous field trip on Friday so we could hang out together at home and garden, play, and work. We also skipped about four other really cool homeschooling activities (out of the house, with other kids) that we could have done that day.
• Science camp up in Yosemite with his homeschool crew.
• The new Math Circle happening up at UCSC for middle/high school students.
• A homeschool Presentation Day where he presented his work in Minecraft to a bunch of other homeschooled kids and their parents.
• More intense work on the film festival, meeting with students and teachers.
• Having his Minecraft crew over to our house for Minecraft club (which means that the kids actually interact with each other and play outside in addition to playing online… and the moms get to drink tea and gab!).
• A fabulous fieldtrip to Point Lobos, swim team, sister’s softball game….

All this headed into the weekend of the state science fair, which started with my son accompanying me to San Francisco for a concert I was singing in, eating really fabulous Thai food in SF, going to a party at the composer’s house, staying in a hotel, and getting up very early to get to LA and set up for the science fair.

So… back to what homeschoolers are thinking when you say things like you imagine our kids don’t get out much. From our perspective, it’s school kids who don’t get out! Your kids go to the same place every day with the same kids and the same teacher. Yes, they do fieldtrips. Yes, they can also take part in competitions and go on cool vacations. But on a day-to-day basis they stay in one place, interact with the same people, and have very few unplanned interactions with adults out in the real world.

Now, I’d like to point out that I’m not criticizing the choice to send kids to school. I did it for years and may do it again! But it is so interesting to contemplate how differently we can mean something from how it’s received. I think this is the case whenever there is a large difference of experience between the two speakers—the same thing happens between people of different races or nationalities, people of different professions, people of different educational backgrounds. Because homeschooling is still a rather unusual thing to do (even though they say it’s getting so much more popular), other parents make assumptions that they don’t question about what our lives are like.

Since we got home, we’ve been going nonstop again and even though I wrote this in a cafe in LA, I’m only now publishing it. So the next time you pity us poor homeschoolers for being deprived of social interaction, remember:

It’s all in a week’s play for a homeschooling family!

It’s that happy season again, STAR testing time, when kids across California sit in a room and fill in bubbles with #2 pencils. The kid think they just have pencils in their hands. But in this era of NCLB, students actually hold the fate of their teachers, schools, and districts in their sweaty little palms. Parents fret that kids think these tests are too important. Teachers fret that their students might not take them seriously enough. District officials fret if the mix of skin colors that show up for the test tilts too far to one side, and hope that the parents from the wealthy side of their school’s neighborhood haven’t decided to keep their kids home “sick.”

I have strong memories from my years of standardized tests. In the third grade, I took a statewide standardized test that informed me that I should become a mathematician. I was crushed. I knew I wanted to be a writer—did this mean I couldn’t do that? I didn’t tell anyone of my fear, but you can bet I made sure not to like math nearly as much as I did before.

As an undergraduate, I wrote a paper about cultural bias in testing. The theme was suggested to me when, as a volunteer at a local school with a high immigrant population, I administered an “English” test to a girl from Venezuela. One question showed a picture of a girl in ice skates standing next to a sign that said, “Danger: Thin ice.” My sweet little student looked puzzled, and asked me, pointing at her eyes, “ice?” Well, yeah. She’d never seen a frozen lake before. Or ice skates.

Did I mention that this test had been developed for Puerto Rican children in New York? That was in the eighties, when cultural bias was just starting to be understood.

I remember when a few years later, my 100% English fluent boyfriend had to take the TOEFL as part of applying to grad school, since he was a non-resident from a non-English speaking country. He said that the recording they listened to was so bad, he couldn’t understand half of it. And his English was so fluent, few people knew he wasn’t born and raised here.

In case you missed this part, the TOEFL is supposed to test how well people understand English, not how extra-sharp their hearing is.

Despite all this, I don’t hate standardized tests and think they should be abolished. They have a job that they do well, when they are designed well to do that job. The job they do well is offer up a number correlating to how many correct answers a person got on a specific day on a subject that can be tested with multiple choice answers. Subjects that can be tested well are basic math skills (though ambiguously worded word problems are always a problem) and subject mastery (details of disciplines like biology). As long as the test-writers don’t try to make the test interesting by including cultural information (my daughter refuses ever to answer a math problem involving football, a game she has never seen played), some basic picture of the student’s knowledge and skills can be created.

The problem is, Americans have jumped on standardized tests like we built the railroad to the West: full steam ahead, don’t worry about how many Chinese laborers you hurt in the process. We have this idea that the tests can tell us something about how well the students think (impossible), how well their teachers teach (ridiculous), and whether their district should be allowed to continue administering their own schools. On the basis of standardized tests, we are told that our government can fire everyone working at a school (Ed. Secretary Arne Duncan’s pet project), as if having kids turn up to learn from strangers will somehow scare their brains into compliance. On the basis of standardized tests, we think that we can decide which teachers need more pay, and which should be fired.

Furthermore, the different parts of our government are making decisions independent of each other, so they end up using testing like a carpenter who uses a screwdriver to hammer in a nail. California’s STAR test is designed to measure students against each other. It’s designed to put 50% of the kids taking it under the line, and 50% over. When they try out new questions on the STAR test, they don’t want to see if it’s a good question based on whether kids get it right. They want to see if it’s a tricky enough question that the right number of kids get it wrong. So when your child is in the 50th percentile of the STAR math portion, for example, that says that half the kids did better, half the kids did worse.

No Child Left Behind, however, stipulates that all schools must get 100% of their students above proficiency. How do you test proficiency? You give kids questions based on what you think they should know, and if 80% of them get it right, you say, Wow, our schools are doing OK. You don’t say, Wait, we need to make that question less clear so that not so many kids get it right. But that’s what the STAR does. If you don’t believe me, download their sample questions and take the test. You’ll find ambiguities and obscure elements all over it. Any thinking kid takes this test and finds that even in sections that should be clear, such as math, there are ambiguities. The test is not trying to figure out what they know: it’s trying to trick them into failing.

We’ll be doing STAR tests this year. Our district is pressuring our little program (which officially doesn’t have to test because we are happily “statistically insignificant”) to get our testing numbers up. They don’t seem to care about our scores. They care about those cute little tushies warming chairs, grasping #2 pencils, and filling in enough bubbles to make it valid. It’s a silly game. We homeschoolers, if we’re doing our jobs well, know what our students’ strengths and weaknesses are. Last year, I laughed when I saw my daughter’s STAR math results – they were exactly what I would have predicted. Luckily, my daughter actually thinks the tests are fun (and looks forward to the popsicles handed out afterwards), and my son has grudgingly agreed to waste time that would be much better spent on his computer, just to humor me.

But we all know what game we’re playing: We’re not testing them to find out what they know. We’re testing them to make a bureaucrat happy. And if my kids’ good scores help their school and district a little bit, well, I’m OK with that. But these tests, I make sure they know, are meaningless in the scope of things.

Even if they get in the 99th percentile in math, as I did in third grade, I’m not going to announce to them that I know what their career path should be. No test can tell me something about my kids that I don’t already know just by talking to them, working with them, and loving them.