Category: Homeschooling

The great thing about a conference in your field is that it fills your head with ideas about The Thing You Do. In the past, the only conferences I went to were writing conferences, and I loved them. I’d get all stoked about writing,teaching writing, and ideas, and I’d discover new writers to read, and meet writers face-to-face. This is different, because homeschooling is not The Thing I Do, but only one thing that I do. And I fear that I will always view myself a perpetual novice at it.

This conference has a large contingent of unschoolers. A little over a year ago, I didn’t know that unschoolers existed. Till about six months ago, I never considered unschooling any sort of option for our homeschooling life. But the thing is, my daughter is a born unschooler, and so is my (schooled) son. I can’t imagine unschooling a kid who needs external motivation, but my kids don’t. What they need is for me to get out of the way!

Problem is, my “inner school” puts me in their path constantly. I know that I’m not going to get past my belief that there is a core set of knowledge they need to attain to be “an educated person,” and that there are a core set of skills they should attain to see if they are drawn to any of them and could use them in a productive way in their adult lives. An unschooler will tell you that a child will learn calculus if they need it. I will tell you that I think that any capable child should learn calculus to see if it leads them on to something else. Humanity has put together a huge vault of knowledge, and the way we add to that knowledge is by swimming through the huge vault of knowledge in some particular area so that we can figure out what to add to it.

And I can’t get past my hope that my kids don’t just swim in the vault. I want them to add to it, whether what they love is the Italian Renaissance or computational linguistics or mechanical engineering. …

Went to a lively talk by a woman who runs a homeschoolers book club in L.A. She did a great job on this sort of thing: she had all her notes typed up so people could refer to them (I was busy writing down the name of an author that she likes when she said, “your packet includes a list of all the books that we’ve done in the club”). It was clear why she’s successful! I’ve been thinking of starting a book club for my daughter, but with her, I never know whether she’ll be the kid who’s totally engaged or the one who starts throwing pencils! This mom did have good advice: don’t run a homeschooling activity that your child doesn’t like. So perhaps I will start small, just in case! …

What if you plan a workshop and no one comes? My last event of the conference is scheduled for Sunday afternoon, when lots of families are packing up to go home. I hope someone comes. I like being paid, but I’d feel bad if they were paying me to sit here and write in my blog! …

Alas, the teenagers were burned out on activities and spent the hour hanging together and drinking soda, so the workshop didn’t take off. Perhaps next year they can schedule me at a time when people are still stoked about the conference and not thinking about what time checkout was (1 hour before my workshop was scheduled to start…) ….

I’m at the Homeschool Association of California (HSC) Conference in Sacramento. Today I decided to go to Awakening Inquiry by Jon Young. I saw him yesterday and was intrigued by his ideas, but I didn’t feel like he made a connection between the ideas he was talking about and homeschooling. Today he started his talk by saying that he was developing an idea over three talks, and this was the third. So I missed the second, but I think I picked up the thread pretty well.

Today he talked about how a mentor can “light a spark” in a child and awaken them to learning, and how once you’ve done that, it can be pretty inconvenient in a controlled setting! He mentioned several times the idea that a mentor asks questions but doesn’t *tell* kids things. He and David Albert both mentioned finding non-parent mentors for kids. That’s sort of the idea behind sending them to school, but a teacher with 30 kids can’t be a mentor to any one of them, and then in most schools the kids move on every year and there’s very little integration between the grades.

A lot of what I’m hearing here reminds me of why my son’s school is so great. They really have worked out many of the systemic problems that bigger schools face: they have teachers who don’t have so many students that they can’t get to know them; they offer the kids the ability to follow their inspiration (within the boundaries of what a school can do, which is necessarily more narrow in some ways than homeschool); the kids mix across the grades and do lots of activities together, and the parents are well integrated into the school.

One of the things Jon Young mentioned was that kids are often disciplined when they are “finding their light” — experiencing something that draws on their inner power and excites them. I think he’s right. I know that from my experience with my daughter that I often have to stop myself from stopping her. She gets so excited about doing things that are definitely inconvenient from a mother’s point of view! …

It is also a shopping day. One of the coolest features of this conference is the Recycled Resource Room. It opened at 7 a.m. this morning and there was a line already formed to get in when we got there. All the homeschoolers who come to this conference bring stuff that they’re not using anymore, price it at garage sale prices, and then put it in the RRR. Then we all rush in and buy each other’s stuff. I mostly got large, hardcover reference books that I’d never pay list price for. My friend Heddi from the Educational Resource Center (who is the one who knew that we had to get there before 7) treats it as a professional opportunity. She got 6 bags of stuff for the ERC — so far! The stuff there is now half-price.

As with all conferences, we also have an exhibitor hall to tempt us. Amongst the most interesting stuff I saw was: the Real Science series, which I had read about online. The real thing is as appealing as I’ve heard it is. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is present “hard” subjects – science, math, etc. – in less dumbed-down ways. My daughter has absolutely no interest in learning the building blocks that they usually think you need to teach kids. You can search for “visual spacial” to find my articles about why that probably is. And frankly, isn’t any kid more interested in making a homemade volcano explode than learning about what a chemical reaction is on paper?

I adored the zillio, which is a little hard to describe. Go to their website to see it. (Reminder: I’m back in the 20th century as this hotel only has a wired, very slow connection. So I feel rather lost without my ability to link, borrow, link as I go!) It’s a math pyramid, and I sure hope they have a video demonstration on their site, because words will not really do it. Definitely an interesting possibility for your visual learners out there.

I have become, in two days, a sort of David Albert groupie. Today’s first talk was on intelligence, what we have thought intelligence was through the ages, what people think intelligence is now, and what David Albert thinks intelligence is. He’s a very engaging speaker, and though he dismisses his long tenure in our greater houses of higher learning as unimportant, one of his biggest attributes is his ability to synthesize a lot of information that he has stuffed into his head into new ideas. So they may have tried to stifle his creativity at those institutions, but they sure did give him some pretty building blocks!

I found the combination of his talks and Jon Young’s to be a good one. Young talks about the soul; Albert talks about the brain. The soul talk makes me feel good but sets off blinking read lights in the logical inconsistencies part of my brain. (This is both a strength and a failing of mine, I’m sure.) The brain talk, for me, makes sense of the soul talk and integrates it into my need for logical organization.

Albert’s next talk is about “sixes and sevens”, and since I have a six going on seven, I’m hoping that he illuminates things for me. Or at least gives me some new ways of looking at it. I have to say, if nothing else, coming to this conference is really stoking my fire for the upcoming school year. That poor girl isn’t going to know what hit her. She’s going to think her mommy went to Sacramento and some tree-hugging, inner-light-finding hippie mom came back.

Except her hippie mom still wears black…

Last talk of the day was great. Albert’s copious experience with his own kids and nearly everybody else’s (see his bio) leads him to have a great perspective on things. He talked about a time in a child’s life (usually between 6 and 7) when the child starts to understand time and her place in it, and then really starts to understand death and loss, and so starts to experiment with control and trust. It pretty much defined what a friend’s 6-year-old is going through. In a nice twist on things, though, my six-year-old has apparently passed through relatively unscathed. I guess I was having so much other trouble with her that the control and trust issues seemed part of the noise! But her current need to test her independence marks her in the next period: striking out in the world on her own and finding out who she is separate from the family.

It’ll be another fun stage in the parenting adventure!

Today is the first day of the Homeschool Association of California (HSC) Conference in Sacramento. I’ll be writing something like a trip report for the next few days, with my thoughts about the conference, homeschooling, and perhaps getting away from the kids.

Lots of people bring their kids to this conference. It’s such a nice change to be in a featureless conference center and see kids running around everywhere. Certainly, the folks attracted to this conference are not the usual types you see at convention hotels. Women working while a baby sleeps in the sling, women nursing, children playing while their parents chat nearby, relaxed-looking men who give the image, at least, of being strangers to the business world, lots of fanciful, handmade clothing and jewelry, a happy teenage couple walking arm-in-arm, smiles from pretty much everyone whose eyes meet yours. Our badges are pretty much the only thing that connect us to the larger world of conference-goers.

The first talk I went to was Storytelling by Jon Young. I actually didn’t realize he was from Santa Cruz till he started talking. I’d link to his organization’s website, but since the major failing of this hotel, besides no fridges in the rooms, is that they don’t have free WiFi! What kind of hotel do they think they are? Anyway, I can’t do my usual thing of linking while I think, which means I may forget to go link things later. They’re putting a cramp in my blogging style! (Haha! I foiled their attempts to bring me back to the 20th century and remembered to link! Ed.)

He talked about traditional storytelling and its role in traditional cultures. He also talked about mentoring in the style that he was mentored, which is sort of the opposite of story-telling. In traditional story-telling, he said, villages create a story as a group exercise. It contains the perceptions and observations from all the senses and all the participants. I liked how he pointed out that when he goes to a school, there are always lots of kids with hands up, eager to talk. But if he calls on one, it opens the floodgates, and every kid wants to tell his snake story, or his cat story, or something even less related to what is being discussed. This reminded me of my son’s first grade classroom, which was run by a teacher who had been a homeschool teacher and was back in the classroom. Their circles would last, sometimes, nearly an hour. When all the other classrooms had settled down with each kid at a desk, focusing on their individual work, our class was still singing and laughing and telling their accumulated stories.

It was lovely, but it did have the drawback that we were not homeschooling. Our kids were only at the school from 8:30 to 2:45, with lots of time eaten up with taking role, lunch orders, lining up to go places, giving instructions that at least a few of the kids didn’t listen to so you had to repeat them, etc. As the year progressed, some of the parents started to get agitated at the length of the circle time, and why their kids weren’t coming home with math homework or showing progress in the traditional manner.

So I did enjoy hearing Jon Young talk about traditional storytelling, but I didn’t quite see him draw the connection that I think needs to be drawn to the modern world: how can we possibly take what was good about traditional culture and work it into today’s culture? Today’s world necessarily depends on a lot of people doing too much drudge work, with no time for a relaxing morning circle or forming stories with their kids. I know how privileged my life is, that I am able stay home with my kids and guide them in the way I see fit. But my life is unusual. We have built a world that is attempting to sustain life in (what is it these days?) 7 billion people! If we all chose the slow life of the storytelling traditional culture, a lot of us would start starving to death. And there would be no one to answer the phone when my computer goes on the blink.

I know: Get in touch with your inner utopian, Suki. Stop being so practical! But how can I? I did like his talk, but I felt like the connection with real life wasn’t quite there. I love the idea of leading my kids through the woods and listening for the coyotes (which we actually do more often than most families, I would guess), but the fact is that my son wants to be a computer programmer and my daughter wants to be a doctor, and they’re going to have to spend a huge amount of time hitting the books and rushing from one activity to another…

I have discovered a new homeschooling guru (it occurred to me to tell a fellow Santa Cruzan at lunch that Heddi Craft of the Educational Resource Center is my “homeschooling enabler”). David Albert, (hopefully, see above, I’ll remember to link to his website), a noted homeschool author who says he doesn’t even like the word “homeschool” because it’s got school in it. His first talk was about dismantling our “inner school,” which is made of bricks of beliefs that we were fed by our culture about what learning is, what school is, what an educated person is.

I felt a bit uncomfortable because I’m rather fond of some of my “bricks” — I believe that there is in fact a lot of stuff in “traditional” education that’s worth learning, and that there is some body of knowledge that the modern person needs to draw on in order to be “educated.” A bit too much use of quotes there, but that’s because I believe that the old rigid boundaries were too restrictive, but don’t need to be completely thrown out. The ancient Greeks were and still are worth studying, even though we’re now adding the Koran and African pre-colonial history to the list of things worth knowing. My other problem with the old way of looking at things was what Albert called the “Swiss cheese” view of his brain: all he saw were holes that he needed to fill. I don’t see holes — I see constant opportunities for inspiring myself and making connections between what I already know and what I am now learning.

I talked to Albert about that later, before his second talk, and he congratulated me on not viewing my brain as swiss cheese (I didn’t tell him about how much self-abuse I have engaged in recently owing to my increasingly scattered memory — I had to leave the house no less than THREE times when I was leaving for the conference because I kept remembering what I had forgotten!). He agreed that we don’t have to throw out all the old learning, but instead expand our idea of what learning is for and what people need to learn in order to have a fulfilling life.

In his second workshop, he talked about his cousin who seemed to be unteachable, till he finally figured out how to tie learning to his fascination with tunnels. He became a successful designer of subway systems. This was in the context of talking about perfectionism. The thing about his talks, I have learned from going to two of them, is that he works things in that I can’t explain later. How was this related? I don’t know, but it made sense at the time.

Some notable things that he said: I appreciated that he started his talk with two bald facts that so many homeschoolers choose to ignore: he said, “I am aware that not all parents are equipped to homeschool” and “Society has a legitimate goal to educate children.” As someone with one foot on each side of the fence, I agree that homeschooling is great. But I don’t agree that it’s going to negate the need for public education, reliable, appropriate childcare, and equal treatment in the workplace.

More amusingly, he quipped, “School is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation.” I liked that, because I have prevented that from happening by choose my children’s school programs carefully. Again, I know that I’m privileged to be able to choose homeschool and private school, but it wasn’t without lots of poking around, including public schools, that we got to a place where we were happy with our kids’ education.

Last quotable quote of the day from Albert: “Education is too important to be left to the professionals.”

The last talk of the day that I went to is one I walked out of, so I won’t say more than that. I spoke my mind anonymously on a review form which I stuck in the appropriate box! I will just say that just because someone can DO something does not mean that they can teach it. Or even talk about it intelligently!

…

I know that my experience at the conference is just one experience of many, but so far it’s be intellectually stimulating, fun to see old friends and meet a few new people, and get away from town…

Even when you live in a town everyone else wants to go to, it’s nice to get away.

In the line of succession for New Yorkers, I’m second. It’s not bad being second — my husband reads fast. My mom is third, and she has to depend on me to read the darn things and then get them to her in order. My brother apparently gets the dregs from her. I’m guessing for him the New Yorker is like the Ghost of Christmases Past…

So I didn’t find out about this article by reading it — I found out the way I find out most things these days, from my wonderful fellow homeschoolers. They’re always sending out interesting stuff. Amazingly, unlike most groups I’ve belonged to, it’s usually worth reading. OK, the piece about how the UN Charter for the Rights of the Child is causing British authorities to raid homeschoolers’ homes was not exactly informed journalism, but generally pretty much every day something worthwhile comes down the pipe.

Today it was this piece in the New Yorker about high-achieving homeschoolers in New York City. It’s really cool being a homeschooler in semi-rural California reading about what homeschoolers are doing in the great metropolis. My kids are putting their science fair exhibits in the county fair; their kids are onstage in New York. We’re worlds apart in how we live our lives, yet this article seemed so familiar to me.

The writer really hit on the most important themes of homeschooling: kids learn when they want to learn, they learn what they want to learn, and they learn how to learn if there’s something they end up needing to learn. The other themes are also important: homeschooled kids find school kids “mean,” they don’t think of adults as enforcers but as enablers, and they’re a tiny bit concerned about how they’re going to get into college without any transcripts.

But they’re laid back about it. My homeschooled child is only 6, going into 2nd grade, so I love reading interviews with homeschooled teenagers who just seem so relaxed and happy about the way their lives are going. That is definitely not the description I’d give for teenagers I grew up with. There was so much nastiness and stress in my high school life, I finally dropped out. I was lucky to have my mother as a guide. She didn’t homeschool me, but she got me into a program at the university that was set up for bored, frustrated kids like me.

My 6-year-old would probably not be interested in the article, but she gets something similar in her homeschool program when she’s paired with Big Buddies from the middle school. Like the kids in the article, they’re laid back, sweet to the little kids, and they follow their passions.

Homeschooling isn’t the only way (in fact, it’s not the only way even within my family), but it’s definitely a legitimate approach to schooling a child. And now that it’s hit the New Yorker, I feel truly legitimate. I can say to my husband’s New York relatives, look at this! We’ve arrived…. next stop, Broadway!