Category: Homeschooling

Homeschoolers. Will work for learning opportunity.

Posted on by Suki

OK, so I shouldn’t have left a post called “Existential Angst” up for so long. Perhaps my readers thought I’d decided to run off to the Himalayas to be a Buddhist nun. Or decided to take my kids on a sailboat trip around the world. Or decided to sell everything and stand by the road with a sign: Homeschoolers. Will work for learning opportunity.

No such luck. Here I am, rushing around as usual, passing by learning opportunities as they stand by the road, trying to thumb a ride.

This is our outschooling year. Next year will be our inschooling year. At least, I hope it will be.

Daruma
Daruma is a Japanese Buddhist icon which helps you achieve goals

Previously I wasn’t certifiably insane, but now upon this declaration I will be: Next year I am going to homeschool both of my children.

One of my calm, experienced, rational homeschooling mom friends was with me and my kids recently on a fieldtrip for Japanese Culture Club. My son has been jealously passing up most of Culture Club (cue music) because he really is supposed to go to the school we’re paying for. But going to San Jose’s Japantown just couldn’t be passed up. We were going to a tofu factory where they make tofu the ancient way. We were going to see a Japanese Buddhist temple, and eat shabu shabu.

Those of you who send your kids to public schools may or may not care how much your school loses in Average Daily Attendance funding each time you take your child on an unofficial fieldtrip. Those of us with kids in private school can easily calculate how much we lose each day we take our kid out…. but we prefer not to. I do on occasion let my son “be sick” when something important is happening, such as when Apple was announcing the iPad, probably the biggest event in his life this year.

But Japantown came in a close second. We didn’t even bother to use the word sick. We told his teacher he was going on a fieldtrip.

So my homeschooling friend is one of those unflappable moms who says, Oh yes, my kids drive me crazy, with a smile on her face. But about an hour into our fieldtrip, she turned to me and with only a hint of irony said, “You’re going to homeschool these two next year?”

San Jose Tofu
San Jose Tofu makes tofu as the Japanese have been making it for hundreds of years.

Yep.

The thing is, we searched high and low for the right school for our son, and when we found it, we realized what we were giving up. He’s gone all day, and when he comes home he’s beat. By all accounts, next year in middle school, he’ll not only be beat but he’ll have tons of homework, too! And on top of that, we’ll be paying tuition.

That leaves us badly situated for bringing about the major goal the kids and I have had together: study Japanese and go to Japan. As long as our son is going to his wonderful school, we’ll have neither time nor money to pursue that goal. So it’s off to our homeschooling adventure next year!

Why don’t you just send him to your local public school, you ask?

Ask me again in March… or January…. or perhaps September. My answer may change!

Really, my kids can get along when they have a common purpose. And I plan to sit them down the day after school ends in June, armed with a copy of Siblings: You’re stuck with each other so stick together!, school them in meditation and nonviolent communication, and rev them up for a common goal.

Oh, and I also plan to keep their fingernails cut short.

I’m determined to do it one way or another.

Candy store
We also visited a Japanese Candy store, and tasted a traditional candy for girls' day.

In Japantown, one of our stops was Nichi Bei Bussan, a Japanese general store. The owner told us about the Daruma, little squat eyeless figurines like a Weeble. The purpose of a Daruma is that when you buy it, you paint on one eye. You set a goal, something you really have to work for, and you don’t get to paint the other eye till you achieve it. My son and I each bought one. The day after school ends, we will paint our first eyes, and then start working on our goal.

Come spring next year, we’ll either be on our way to Japan, or on a corner near you.

Homeschoolers. Will work for a little peace and quiet.

Learning to read

Posted on by Suki

I have a vivid memory of how reading was taught in my son’s first grade classroom. His teacher had returned to the classroom after working as a homeschool teacher, and had brought some pretty unusual (from the perspective of public school, that is) ideas back with her. One of those ideas was the given the right rich environment, most kids will learn to read in one way or another, but you don’t have to instruct or push them in first grade.

What? No more phonics/whole language wrangling? No “reading readiness” homework? Just enjoying learning? [Read Alfie Kohn if you want to learn more about this approach.]

Needless to say, her ideas didn’t appeal to all parents or all students. It’s hard for parents to feel comfortable when they’ve been taught that children learn to read in first grade, and here comes a teacher who says, children learn to read when they’re ready. In this classroom, the teaching happened through reading aloud, telling stories, writing, and sharing. One student who’d just had it with waiting for reading instruction had a friend teach her! (Of course, her teacher thought this was fabulous.)

My experience and the experiences of lots of homeschoolers say the same thing: most kids are going to learn to read when they’re ready, and though many of them are ready in that 6-7 age year, outliers disprove the idea that learning to read in that timeframe is necessary or even appropriate or healthy for many children.

Psychology Today just came out with an article on this very topic, which sums up what a lot of educators are noticing. First, kids learn to read at radically different ages if you leave the process to a more natural development. Second, the age a child learns to read actually doesn’t correlate with how well s/he will do in school, how much s/he will enjoy reading later, or pretty much anything else.

There are the outliers, of course: kids who learn to read fantastically early and then go on to show other remarkable early intellectual growth may thrive in a different type of educational environment. Kids who have problems such as dyslexia or other learning disabilities will clearly need a lot of instruction and help.

But all those other kids, it turns out, do just fine being read to, listening to recorded stories, and learning in the myriad other ways that humans learn without reading. Once they’re ready to read, they’ll show interest in learning and will ask for help when they need it.

The other thing that the Psychology Today article mentions is the harm that comes to kids when they are pushed to read before they are ready and willing. The process our public schools use for teaching reading can be brutal to a kid who really isn’t ever going to learn to read well until unusually late. I remember those kids in my school — the “stupid” kids. Yes, we all knew who they were, and the other kids could be quite cruel to them.

(I hope I was nicer than the kids I remember, but perhaps not. I remember a lesson in humility early on when I had to help one of those kids with a spelling quiz and I mispronounced a word – “wholly” – because I’d been reading in class rather than paying attention! He was actually very kind to me when he corrected me, and I think we both thought it was pretty funny.)

As all reasonable people know now, those kids aren’t “stupid” at all, and I bet most of them can read just fine now. Their success in life had absolutely nothing to do with the age at which they learned to read.

What else can happen to a kid who’s not an early reader? Being held back, for example. I was shocked when my sister told me that her son had to learn 30 sight words by the end of his kindergarten year or he’d be held back! My son, a prodigious reader, didn’t know 30 sight words by the end of kindergarten. Imagine if he’d been held back — what good would that have done him? (Or the school, given that when he took the STAR test in second grade, he was at the top of the curve.)

About why most children learn to read, the author has two memorable pieces of information: “Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end” and “Reading, like many other skills, is learned socially through shared participation.” It’s clear that most kids in that great variety of humanity will learn to read if they are in the right environment and they see good, compelling reasons to read.

If our schools relaxed their approach of pushing kids to read, they could pay special attention to kids who are showing real difficulties — special positive attention. There’s a difference between a kid who’s not ready to read at 7 and a kid who is showing signs of dyslexia, and a good teacher can see that. Then everyone can relax and not be pushed into being failures at the age of 6.

Standards for everyone!

Posted on by Suki

I didn’t need any more convincing that Alfie Kohn is one of the clearest thinkers about education out there. When my son was in first grade, his teacher handed out a copy of his article on why homework is unnecessary. I’ve been a fan ever since.

A friend pointed me to this article that he wrote for Education Week about national education standards. As usual, he’s right on the money. This is his summary of No Child Left Behind:

Today, we survey the wreckage. Talented teachers have abandoned the profession after having been turned into glorified test-prep technicians. Low-income teenagers have been forced out of school by do-or-die graduation exams. Countless inventive learning activities have been eliminated in favor of prefabricated lessons pegged to state standards.

And here’s what he says about imposing more of what preceded that wreckage:

Advocates of national standards say they want all (American) students to attain excellence, no matter where they happen to live. The problem is that excellence is being confused with entirely different attributes, such as uniformity, rigor, specificity, and victory.

I’m not a great believer in the conspiracy theory of education that some homeschooling advocates cite: They’re actually trying to make school dumber and dumber to get kids to become more compliant adults who will churn out widgets in Mr. Big Man’s factory. Mr. Big Man, of course, went to fancy prep school and Ivy League college, so he has no stake in public education except in that it churns out his perfect workers.

Perhaps I would have believed that theory in 1958, but now? As we all know, America needs more creative, scientific thinkers and more entrepreneurs. We’re importing those people in scores while we bore our children into submission in our test-driven schools.

I think what’s happening is that people who are well-educated are just completely out of touch with what got them there in the first place. They all think, ‘I did well on standardized tests so that’s what it means to be educated.’ I have to admit that I was one of them before my kids forced me to open my eyes. I always knew that I had largely hated school, that high school was a big waste of my time and I ended up dropping out. So why was I so focused on my kids going to “good” schools and getting “good” grades?

Before I had kids, I figured our local neighborhood school would be fine for them. When I saw how incredibly boring it was going to be, I started to look at alternatives. My son’s first grade teacher introduced me to the idea that even public school didn’t have to be boring. Learning about homeschooling made me focus more on what education really is.

Let’s face it: every child is different. A child can’t be tested for efficiency like a condom or a stapler! Each child has his or her own strengths and weaknesses, things that excite him or her and things that are just plain boring. Our job as teachers is to encourage the strengths and excitements, and to gently address the weaknesses and lack of interest.

My son now goes to one of the best private schools around. “Best” in my definition, of course. We just had a meeting with his fifth grade teacher. His teacher told us that he figures his first semester job is getting to know the kids, helping them form a community in the classroom, and gaining their trust. Yes, that’s what he does for the entire first semester.

The second semester is all about gentle encouragement (i.e. pushing) to remedy their weaknesses and to encourage them to expand from their focused passions. My son’s school does standardized testing in a few grades, but they aren’t testing whether the teacher is doing a good job. The test of the teacher is that grown-ups who had him when they were in fifth grade are still starry-eyed about what he did for them. The test of the teacher is that my son, who was at the top of the standardized test scores and has achieved the learning goals for fifth grade, still wants to go to school.

Here’s the problem with a standardized nation: how would my son’s teacher look as represented by numbers to someone in an office in Washington D.C.? Frankly, he had nothing to do with his students’ test scores. My son went into fifth grade at the top of the curve. My son’s test scores are largely reflective of his parentage, our parenting, and the whole of his school career. Standardized tests can’t measure whether his teacher has him fired up to learn and be a good, concerned citizen.

That’s what school needs to do: excite kids, teach them how to build on their passions, remedy their weaknesses to the point that they can become functional adults who contribute to our society. Not all kids are going to be proficient in all subjects. If they were, what a boring nation we would have! All those scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who are snapping up our green cards don’t want to be here because we are “proficient” and “standardized.” They want to be here for the passion, the opportunities, and the grand vision of this country. That’s the only standard that I want.

Avant parenting, Japanese style

Posted on by Suki

Sometimes I wonder homeschooling is a sign of madness.

Then it occurs to me that parenting is probably a sign of madness. It certainly is for the men: they could go off and do the mighty hunter routine and go find another cave to live in, but instead they stick around with us. For the women, it’s less easy. It’s hard to reject flesh of your flesh, if you know what I mean.

Hard at work at Japanese Culture Club

This comes up because I’m exhausted. Today I ran “Japanese Culture Club” for four homeschooled girls. It used to be three, but four is a definite improvement. We added an older, calmer girl to the mix and gave it a good stir. Not quite the craziness of the three ingredient mix, if you know what I mean.

In the fall we did Nature and Baking Club with the three girls. That was exhausting but also easy. When my son was four, he and I went for lots of walks in the redwood forest that I’d been living next to for seven years and learned the names of the plants. We took photos and did research and then wrote a book about it. So teaching about the redwoods was something that I’d done before, and we did art and poetry and lots of playing in the creek.

Baking also comes naturally to me. I grew up in a house where lots of cooking happened, but baking was a powerful thing. My little sister still hasn’t forgiven me for making her grease the brownie pan over and over in exchange for getting to lick the bowl.

My brother and I were once inspired to make cheesecake and we stayed up til midnight waiting for it to get cold enough to eat.

But Japanese Culture Club is something different. Instead of something from my past, it’s something I’m planning for the future. The kids and I have been interested in learning Japanese for a while, but we’ve never done anything about it. Then I got a bee in my bonnet a couple months ago and decided that we were going to study Japanese, just do it. But in order to make myself do it, I had to raise the stakes. Thus three, and now four girls coming to my house weekly, expecting me to know a few words of Japanese, a song, and a meal.

Hard at work in Japanese club
Hard at work in Japanese club

Today was good morning, good afternoon, please, and thank you. It was tempura vegetables and teriyaki. Singing “Bun bun bun” about a bumblebee. At the time it didn’t seem like much. But it was.

It has left me drained and thinking about that flesh of my flesh thing. Now, why am I here when I could be living in that quiet, orderly cave I used to know? Why am I learning Japanese rather than sitting my kids down with a video from the library?

Working on the future is so much harder than enjoying the past.

How to fix our schools? First, ask the right question.

Posted on by Suki

A friend forwarded two articles about the state of education in California and all the political wrangling: How do we best improve our schools? How do we get more federal money? What is the effect of teacher’s unions on reforms? What is the effect of charter schools on kids and on neighborhood schools?

I realized that some of my strongly held opinions make me just step away from arguments like this and say, “They’re arguing about the wrong thing.” In both arguments, test scores formed the basis for “proving” that one approach was better than another. But depending on how you read the data, you can use test scores to prove pretty much anything!

Here’s the problem with test scores: It has been proven that one way to predict a school’s test scores with alarming accuracy is to look at the zip codes of the parents. It’s also been proven that a way to predict a particular student’s test scores is to look at what scores the parents would get. Schools have so little effect on test scores that when all these politicians argue about them, their arguments are invalid right from the beginning!

You can look at my own family as an example: two PhD parents. Our high school grades were all over the map – from an excellent student to a poor student. Test scores for all of us? Right at the top. Doesn’t matter how well we did in school, because that’s not what standardized tests are testing.

So then come all the arguments about charters. Their scores are lower, thus they aren’t succeeding. Their scores are higher, thus they are leeching the best students from the public schools. See? The scores can be used to mean anything that people want them to mean, and thus they are meaningless!

Here’s how I think we should “fix” our schools:

First, I believe that for one chunk of students, CA public schools are too academic. These students should be given an education appropriate to what they’re planning to do in life. They don’t need to be forced to take all sorts of academic classes that eventually convince them to drop out of school. They need well-equipped shop classes, classes in money management and health, classes in bookkeeping and law clerking, and other sorts of practical classes that will engage them in becoming productive. No wonder they drop out: school has nothing to do with their lives.

On the other hand, the old method of “tracking” students based on their class and race was stupid: students should choose tracks based on their interests and their plans. They should be able to jump tracks anytime they want, just in case they wake up one day and realize that what they really want to do is be an English professor or a rocket scientist. And community colleges should be there, well-funded, to help everyone if the path they chose in high school doesn’t end up working for them or if the jobs in their field dry up.

For students who want to go on to higher education, programs should exist to support their needs also. In that case, high schools should focus the more academic classes on kids who are trying to get into a university and who will need higher level math, higher level research skills, and advanced sciences.

The second major change that I think needs to happen is in the structure of schools. The idea that a school draws kids based on their location rather than based on their interests and needs is outdated. Schools should be based on an area of expertise, and students should be allowed to attend full-time or just by the class. A kid who homeschools should be able to take a math class at the high school, regardless of his age or “grade.” The school should get funding for the classes it offers, and if a class isn’t well attended, it gets cut just like at a college.

As a result of this, everything would need to become more community-based. I’ve heard a persuasive argument that kids’ sports should be taken out of schools and turned over to communities — I think this would become necessary. Kids would join leagues just as they do in sports that are not traditionally supported by high schools. Schools would start to need to serve kids’ needs rather than administrators’ needs.

I’m not totally anti-testing: I think all kids should be tested a couple of times during their education to make sure that problems are caught early and that we are providing all our kids with the tools they really need in modern life. But once schools become more fluid environments, having something like the California high school exit exam would be meaningless. More kids would be able to graduate from high school with meaningful degrees, and they wouldn’t have that dreaded feeling that their lives are set in stone by the age of 18. That reality is one that died in the last century.

All the arguments about improving our schools are meaningless to me until the idea of school gets into the 21st century. Few people think that the old model ever worked, if they really look at it. It’s just what they’re used to, and change scares people. Just look at the health care debate: Before it became a possible reality that change was going to happen, everyone agreed that our health care system was broken. As soon as a bill was being put together, all of a sudden people hugged onto their awful, overpriced, overbureaucratic health plan like it was their beloved baby!

Incremental change is happening in education in places like Santa Cruz County, but we need to identify the right questions before we can create a system that works with our modern culture.

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