Category: Homeschooling

How did I get here?

Posted on by Suki

When I was in college, the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime was popular with students. One of my friends, I vaguely remember, set an entire room full of test-taking students into guffaws by calling out, apropos of nothing, “This is not my beautiful pencil!”

But the part of the song that’s relevant today goes like this:

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself: Well… How did I get here?”

Well… How did I get here?

At the time I heard that song, I was young and rebellious. I listened to dark music (I actually didn’t own any Talking Heads because it wasn’t quite depressing enough) and wore rather outlandish clothing. I dyed my hair various shades that could be described as blood red to putrid purple. My friends called me Siouxsie after my online handle (this was the strange time before the Internet, where I would go to a terminal room and log on to Stanford.arpa). We called ourselves “death rockers,” the people now known to the world as “goths.” Our perhaps most unfortunately famous counterparts were the boys at Columbine.

These days, I know plenty of moms, especially homeschoolers, who will tell me, “This is what I always wanted to do with my life.” They always wanted to be moms, and everything else they did was leading up to that time.

One mom told me that from when she was a child, she planned to homeschool her kids!

I have to say that I’m fantastically envious of anyone who can be so certain about anything. I am still not certain about what color I want my hair to be, even, though putrid purple is out of the running these days.

I don’t know if moms like me are in the majority or the minority. It’s sort of the third rail of parenting: the topic we can’t really talk about. Once you have brought these beings into the world and you are responsible for them, it’s not terribly helpful to think of where else you might want to be, what else you might want to be doing. In fact, spending too much time thinking like that can cause serious ruptures in the parent-child continuum we call “family.”

It’s best not to think of it at all.

But since I’m on the subject…

Last I remember I was a still-rebellious, though more naturally-colored-haired adult, striving to be a writer, making money by teaching and doing graphic design. I don’t remember ever signing up for being a stay-at-home homeschooling super-mom. In fact, if someone had shown me a crystal ball into the future, I probably would have smashed the darn thing and gone back to my notebook.

These days, I don’t even bother to carry my writer’s notebook anymore. No time to write. Too many nosy kids wanting to know what I’m writing.

I know other moms like me. We sometimes get to shout a few helpful words to each other across a room full of ebullient kids. Or we end up at the same homeschooling support meeting, sighing as another mom says, her eyes sparkling, “I always wanted to be a homeschooling mom!”

But I wonder how many of us really know how we got here. Whether for us this was due to choice or just circumstance. And now that we’re here, how do we make the most of it? Can we even bear to think, “What if?” Can we dare to think, “Maybe once they’re on their own…” or even, “It’ll be easier when they’re teenagers.”

It’s just enough to get through the day feeling like, perhaps, we’ve done a good enough job for today. Tomorrow is simply too exhausting to think about.

OK, here goes: I did a good enough job, for today. Tomorrow, who knows?

Mother’s Day Musings

Posted on by Suki

Like most of you, I am spending my Mother’s Day being a mother. What that means to each of us varies slightly by our customs, values, and geographical location. But in basic terms, we create, we nurture, we teach, and then we let go.

ModelingOne mothering task I’ve spent some time on today is one happening in a good number of American households, I suspect: helping my son finish a project that was just a little more of a stretch of his abilities than he’d thought. I’ve heard and read a lot of parents say that this is one part of parenting they hadn’t planned on. They thought that they were going to send their kid to school, the teacher would teach, the kid would learn, and then it’s off to college and a job.

It occurs to me, though, that we modern Americans have got a few things backwards. In recent readings I’ve come across variations on a theme that goes somewhat like this: When our children are babies, we understand how to teach them. We talk to them using the words we want them to learn, we hold their hands as they take their first steps, we praise them for drawings that we could do much better ourselves.

Yet as our children grow, especially when they enter school age, our culture starts to encourage to force kids to learn the “right” way. While before we were showing them examples, incorporating learning into their everyday lives, and praising them for their efforts, as they start to “study” (as opposed to learn), we throw that all out the window. We expect learning to happen somewhere else, we expect them to learn a body of knowledge and skills divorced from their usefulness, and we show them our displeasure through grading, testing, and “high expectations.”

One thing I have especially been aware of has been how our culture looks at parents “helping” their older school children. Just a few days ago I sat at the awards ceremony for the state science fair. You can’t get more positive about learning than a science fair. But when one participant’s first prize was announced and his project mentor had the same last name as him, the man next to me groaned and rolled his eyes. The implication was clear: Oh, these pushy parents reliving their glory through their children.

Now, I agree that there is too much of this. I’ve come across it myself. However, if we agree not to include parents who basically do the work for the child, telling them what to do step by step, not letting the child make mistakes, we’re only ruling out some of these cases of parents “helping.” Clearly this method of helping is not helping at all – it’s inflating the child’s sense of what she is capable of, and setting her up for an awful, self-esteem-smashing fall

But let’s ignore that sort of “help” and look instead at the sort of help that parents give children when they’re very young. All parents want their children to walk, but none of them walk “for” the child. We carry when necessary, we hold hands, but we know that if we never let the child practice the skill with help and encouragement, it won’t happen.

As our children grow, our role in their learning should not become less important. I think it becomes more important. We are still their models and their guides, though the learning they are doing is often what we would call “school work” and not “natural” learning like walking.

Since I started homeschooling, I have really learned the difference between destructive “helping,” where a parent makes sure that a child never fails by simply doing the child’s work and coaching him to make it seem like it’s his own, and constructive helping, where a parent models skills and guides a child.

It’s well-known in the music world that most of the great musicians had musical parents. In the past, this was incorrectly believed to be genetic. In fact, you still hear people saying, “I didn’t get musical genes.”

But really, the reason that children of musicians become musicians themselves is that their parents modeled the behavior and then encouraged it in their own children. (Yes, I will agree with you that some parents go way too far in the encouragement category, but you can’t practice for your child.)

I’ve known plenty of people who have discovered a love of something that was never modeled for them in their families, and those people figured out a way to do that thing that spoke to them. Most of them find a mentor outside of the family, I suspect. Few of us really achieve something all on our own, without some sort of modeling to build on.

So yes, my son decided to do a project that was a little past his abilities. And for the last few days we have been grappling with this. But I hope that my role has been mentoring, so that in the future, he’ll be able to do this on his own. And I know that in mentoring him, I’ve learned a bit more about myself as well.

My children are no longer sustained by the food from my body. They no longer need me to carry them. They speak enough language to get all the basics of life taken care of.

But that doesn’t mean that now I should just let their ships crash on the rocks that I could lead them past. I hope that as I lead them past those rocks, they are watching how I do it. And next time, they’ll be that much closer to independence.

A few words about scientists and inventors

Posted on by Suki

My son won first place in his division in the county science fair this year, and it caught us a bit by surprise that since he’s in middle school, that meant he was moving on to the state science fair. So here we are in LA, mom and son out on the town. Well, OK. Mom and son holed up in a hotel room working on a video project for school. But when we’re not holed up working, we’ve been partaking of a few of the wonderful offerings of LA: the Natural History Museum (excellent), the badly named ScienCenter (really cool except for the name), and great Mexican food.

ScienCenter
The Science Center in LA

Today was the opening ceremony for the science fair. The speaker, Dr. Gary Michelson, was someone I had no prior knowledge of, so I prepared for a snooze. But I found his talk engaging, funny, and wise. At one point he said that he’d gotten the advice that every speech you give should contain something you can’t find on Google, so his offering was a list of the most important aspects of being a scientist. If I publish this tonight, he’ll no longer be able to use this list! But it’s a good one, worth publishing:

1. Be ready to work with others, but willing to stand alone if you must.

2. Be disgruntled.

3. Be a dreamer.

4. Seek perfection.

5. Have great reverence for our home, this earth.

6. Live up to your gifts.

7. Aim high; aim to change the world.

8. Learn. Today’s knowledge is there for the taking, so take it.

9. Imagine.

10. Look for the extraordinary in the ordinary.

11. Everything is connected. Look for the connections.

12. Have a ready mind.

13. Be fearless. You cannot fear failure: As long as you have learned, you have not failed.

14. Dare to deconstruct in order to learn how to construct.

15. Question everything.

16. Think in diverse ways.

17. The walkabout: You don’t need a destination when you set out for a walk, and you don’t necessarily need one to do important work in science.

Dr. Michelson was yet another one of those successful people who says he wasn’t a very good student. People with a drive to create often seem not to be. Or rather: they are good students, but they’re good at it in their own way, which doesn’t always lead to good grades and awards.

I really appreciated what he said about what success is. I think this applies not just to science, but to many endeavors. He said that no successful inventor thinks of his failures as failures, because he learns from each one. And that learning leads to the ultimate success.

He also pointed out that success in science is, as Newton said, “Standing on the shoulders of giants.” Edison, he explained, was twentieth in a line of scientists who worked on lightbulbs. All of his work rested on the work that had been done before. We say that Edison invented the lightbulb, but human endeavors are a river, each one depending on those that came before.

That leads me to thinking about the history of the computer that my son and I read about and learned more about at the Computer History Museum. There were two men involved in the making of the computer who might be said to have failed: Charles Babbage created his Difference Engine on paper, but never saw it realized. John Atanasoff invented the binary computer that ENIAC was modeled on, yet seldom got credit for it in his lifetime. Both of them were important parts of the river of knowledge that has led to today, and that is a success that couldn’t have been measured in their lifetimes.

Kids doing a science fair may or may not see themselves as part of this river. But they are doing the preliminary wetting of toes that leads them to know whether they’d like to jump in. Whether my kids end up being scientists or artists, managers or makers, I think it’s a healthy thing to think of themselves as part of something bigger than their contribution.

Which gets me back to number 1: Be willing to stand alone. In these times, science is hardly a cool pursuit for a teen. But the audience was filled with teens willing to be part of a river that perhaps their friends have never even visited.

It was a privilege to watch them get their toes wet.

Welcome to the hairy potty homeschool. Please be seated and stop arguing with your sister.

Posted on by Suki

I admit I’ve come rather late into the game. I have only just now been introduced to Harry Potter.

Yes, it’s true: Harry Potter has been part of our household for six years, and I have managed to avoid him. My husband read the first two books out loud to our son, then declared it of no further interest. Our son became obsessed, reading Harry Potter — or as he was often called in our house, Harvey Pooter — over and over. The library’s copies took turns living at our house, squirreled away in his bookshelves or under his bed till I sought them out, attempting to avoid yet more late fees.

Finally we bought our son a set, and promptly had to “disappear” them when he became way too obsessed. Since then, we’ve had to disappear them twice.

A boy needs some time to be Potterless, we believe.

But recently, we finished an audiobook in our car and had nothing new to start. Audiobooks are what keep my children from tearing each other apart in the car. It was a deeply scary moment, in which I pondered our being scarred for life after the duel that would ensue.

Then my son suggested, “I’ve got the first Harry Potter on my iPod.”

The sun came out and he plugged in. My daughter and I got introduced to Harry.

So far, we have finished books 1 and 2 and are on the third. So far, I haven’t really prodded my kids for much.

I will, though. This is a homeschooling moment too fertile to give up. Just why is every boy — and many girls — under 15 obsessed with these books? I am already planning how I might start working it into curriculum.

…Which leads me to imagine my children — perhaps all homeschooled children — as adults…

My adult child slinks furtively into an alley, his hands in his pockets. He sees a shadowy figure in a doorway.

“Do you got the stuff?” he asks the figure. He may be a homeschooled dork who hasn’t been allowed to watch TV, but he knows the lingo.

“I got it,” a gruff voice answers from the shadows.

“Is it…” — my son pauses with pregnant longing — “Do you guarantee that it’s not educational?”

“This is good stuff,” the gruff voice answers haughtily. “Not educational. What do you think I’m selling — Sesame Street?”

A hand exits the darkness holding the goods.

A book.

A book with absolutely no educational content. My son drools. His other friends who were homeschooled will be so jealous at this…

OK, back to our regularly scheduled blog.

Here’s my question: Why doesn’t Harry ever confide in adults?

Harry’s got Dumbledore, the most upstanding wizard of his generation. This is a man who sees all, and who understands all, and who forgives all. Note to self: Teach kids about Jesus figures in literature.

Why doesn’t Harry tell him that it’s Snape out to get him? Then everything would be SO easy. Dumbledore would explain why Snape isn’t out to get him, and how he’s planned the whole darn thing, down to Harry getting slime all over his socks.

Or something like that.

It fascinates me that this series has so captivated young modern Californians. Harry is so old-world. So pre-New Age. He never confides in adults. He doesn’t tell people what he’s feeling. If he did, there would be no story. Everything would be worked out so easily. All the happy people would hold hands, hug, and “make it right.”

But our kids are fascinated by these books. Our kids who have been raised to be so emotionally intelligent, to divulge their feelings and listen to the feelings of others. They not only read about Harry’s stiff upper lip and believe it….they eat it up. They love it.

I have no answer to offer here. I personally find Harry frustrating. Sheesh — why didn’t he confide in a trusted adult about the dogs? Oh, if only he’d told the truth when Professor Dumbledore gave him an opening.

But no, Harry never does confide, never does tell the truth when he could just forge on ahead and let his destiny play out. And we love him all the more for it.

There’s a moral here somewhere, but that will have to wait for another homeschool moment. Until then, join me in joking about our hairy potty. At least the kids aren’t fighting in the back seat.

The Computer History Museum

Posted on by Suki

I have been teaching a group of homeschoolers how to use the Alice programming environment. This is an environment created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon with young programming students in mind. Most of the kids using it are high school students, but the kids I’m teaching range from eight to twelve. If you want to know more about teaching programming to kids, visit my blog on that subject.

Our Alice Club went on a fieldtrip to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which has recently been renovated and expanded. My kids had been there before; I had not. I have written recently on what I think makes a good science museum. This was an interesting counterpart because this museum makes no pretense at being a “hands-on science learning” experience. It’s about history, and history is already made.

Babbage's Difference Engine

However, this actually is a great science museum. We had a group of students and siblings ranging from one to twelve. Though the babies didn’t get much from the exhibits, they appreciated the open floorplan, the variety of textures, and the cool light exhibits like the moving pattern of 1’s and 0’s. Their mothers appreciated the fact that most of the exhibits were behind plexiglass and they weren’t mortally afraid that they’d have to dig out their own old Commodore to give to the museum. There were also ample places to rest and regroup.

There was some amount of hands-on stuff for the younger set. The first area of the museum teaches the pre-modern history of computing, with replicas of many of the computing machines designed and built through history. Some of these are very hands-on, allowing kids to manipulate old computing devices. They even had a slide rule, which was the first piece of equipment that made me feel like I might belong in a museum — we actually used those (and I enjoyed it!) in high school chemistry.

In the computer gaming room, of course they had some old games that kids could play, including Pacman. Now, that probably takes a few people back to youthful times!

But mostly, this museum is about looking and marveling. One of the most fantastic machines is one of the earliest designs and the most poignant: Charles Babbage designed his Difference Engine in the mid-nineteenth century. Existing technology didn’t allow the Victorians to build the precise mechanisms the machine required. Babbage died never knowing for certain that his engine would work. Now, over a hundred years later, they have one at the Computer History Museum…and it works! It wasn’t being operated when we were there, but it was positively elegant in the video. Sadly, by the time we had the technology to build his machine, our computers had made his obsolete.

Each area of the museum is about different historical periods or sets of inventions that were important in the development of computers. For elementary-age kids, or kids who have no prior fascination with computers, the museum provides a sort of treasure hunt that takes kids through the different areas in search of important developments. Kids who love computers probably already know enough just to be entertained on their own. Our two oldest kids, both boys who love computers, were completely self-entertained. Thinking that perhaps they’d just been hanging out and not really interacting with the exhibits, I asked my son about a few things I’d seen that meshed with his interests: he’d seen them all and had plenty of interesting observations that told me that I didn’t need to be there, quizzing him to make sure he’d been getting our money’s worth.

(Another benefit: The museum is $15 for adults, but free for kids 12 and under — it was a cheap visit for us all!)

As an adult, I particularly enjoyed seeing how computer history intersected with my life. I have direct or tangential experiences with a number of people who are featured in videos, which was pretty cool. (Not a one of them has aged since my Stanford days, I swear!) And it was frankly cool to see artifacts from my childhood and beyond: A robot I remembered some child having when I was a kid. My first laptop in pristine condition. (This was particularly interesting because we gave that laptop to our kids to play with, and they eventually dismantled it!) The very terminals I worked on as a student.

For the student of computer science, there was more: Recordings of various luminaries in the field talking simply about their approach to programming; in-depth analysis of what made various innovations important; a computer language time-line that I could have spent much longer untangling; and an emphasis on the fact that this is an ongoing process of invention and discovery.

I highly recommend this museum as an unusual stop for kids who might not think they’re terribly interested in computers, as well as the kids you know will love it. I didn’t see one bored kid in the place.

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