Category: Homeschooling

Musical Inspiration

Posted on by Suki

It’s at this time of year every year that I look at my August calendar and say, Why, oh why am I so busy? I should just set aside the first couple of weeks of August for my personal passions, but every year I am so busy. Last year I had big family events. This year I have family visiting and I just had to go to the Homeschool Conference in Sacramento, which a friend encouraged me to go to and also to apply to be a contributor to. (I get to lead a workshop on writing fiction, returning to my past as a teacher of fiction writing, which seems so distant now…)

But why is it that I want to keep the beginning of August free? Quite simply, it’s one of the most exciting times of the year to be a classical music audience member, when scores of world-class classical musicians descend upon Santa Cruz to be led on a musical journey by the amazing Marin Alsop — in other words, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

I don’t expect many readers to be wowed by this. I realize that my taste in music is a bit esoteric, though the CFM usually does include a nod toward more popular tastes, like this year’s concert of Grateful Dead music.

But all of you who care about your children’s education should know about an adjunct part of the CFM that is not only fabulous, and not only not about esoteric music, but is also FREE! The Free Family Concert attached to the CFM is just fabulous. First of all, you get the instrument “petting zoo.” The crowd (and it is a crowd) is broken into groups, each with a charming musical name, and led around the Civic and the City Hall to meet with musicians from the orchestra. The musicians talk about their instruments, and then play a demonstration. They answer questions. They show your children how they enjoy what they’re doing. They open up a new world of ideas and possibilities.

Then the orchestra comes back together to perform some music. Usually they have a contemporary composer compose something for this performance, or they perform something recently composed for children. That’s pretty cool. They also usually choose a piece that’s in the repertoire for the adult concerts that will appeal to children. Short, often containing funny sounds, lively and interesting.

Our kids are growing up in a world where the people who get the most fame and the most money seem to be people who have done little to deserve it or who got it through being blessed with something (physical abilities, family money) that the rest of us can’t have. Our kids so seldom get to see and interact with people who are doing something really cool and rather different purely for the love of it. The musicians they will meet are not highly paid. They don’t get much glory. They play music that most people don’t know even exists. But they love what they do, and their enthusiasm is something you can actually feel.

It’s so heartening in this world where there’s a line around the block for the latest blockbuster movie that the Free Family Concert still even exists, and that so many families in Santa Cruz love it and wouldn’t miss it for anything. Starting today, you can walk up to the Civic Box Office and get tickets… for free. Just ask, really! But not for long. The Free Family Concert always “sells out.”

I just ordered our tickets. As usual, my August is way too busy, with the Homeschool Conference added on top of the visit from family members and all the other “oh no summer’s ending and we still haven’t done that” stuff that’s going to come up. So unfortunately, I won’t be attending the Family Concert this year; it’s my first year of not attending since my son was small. But my family will be going. In the face of everything they’ll face as they go out into the world, I want my kids to remember what really matters: passion, love, intensity, community, achievement.

Our popular culture is hell-bent on teaching them that the most important thing they could do would be to win on a reality TV show. My kids don’t even know what reality TV is yet, but they do know what a viola is, and why a certain viola player loves playing the viola, and why it’s worth working on something — whatever it is — that they love. Whether or not anyone else thinks it’s cool or important or worth giving government funding for. It’s worth doing something you love simply because you love it — that’s the message I hope they get.

Oh, and I guess they’ll have fun as well.

Socialization and the Homeschooled Child

Posted on by Suki
Homeschooling parents will tell you that the comment they get most often from well-meaning adults is that their homeschooled kids might not get proper socialization while being homeschooled. Usually the well-meaning adult has an example or two to give as proof of the deleterious effect of homeschooling on the social skills of children.
Homeschooling parents get angry about it, joke about it, brush it off, but still it keeps coming back and back.
I’ll tell you my own experience: being in school five days a week had an awful effect on my daughter’s social skills. She started kindergarten generally happy. She left kindergarten in a different state entirely.
She went to a school where the word “bad” was never spoken by adults and never tolerated from children. Not a single adult or child referred to her as “bad” in her entire three months there. Yet by the end of her short kindergarten career, my daughter was drawing self-portraits with the word BAD scrawled at the bottom. She would say things like, “Mommy and Daddy are good, Brother is pretty good, and I am bad.” She had nightmares and said that everyone hated her.
How did that happen?
A structured kindergarten environment was the very worst social experience for her. Her small, quiet, orderly program was the worst sort of place I could have chosen, but I didn’t know that then. My daughter stuck out as different. She had a lot of trouble following some of the rules, and because the rules were so strictly enforced, she was often called on for not following rules. The other children noticed. She started to be made a scapegoat in the classroom.
When I was a freshman in college I wrote a paper about George Orwell’s “Newspeak” in the novel 1984. Orwell posited a world in which the government controlled people’s minds by using a language that made bad things sound good. To a certain extent, this is just what advertising does. But really, there’s no way people can change fundamental ideas. You might use the word “ungood” for “bad,” but it doesn’t cancel out the concept of bad. You replace a set of sounds with a new set of sounds, but you can’t change the concept.
Every child, whether or not they’ve been called “bad,” (my daughter hasn’t been, to my knowledge) can tell you who the “bad” kid is in their school classroom. Even if they don’t use the word “bad,” they know who it is. In my daughter’s case, when she was very young she wanted a word that expressed a revulsion at something, not just “bad” but really, really gross and awful. The word she invented was “gox.” Food she didn’t like was gox. Clothing she wouldn’t wear was gox. She has stopped using the word, but the concept remains.
So for my daughter, the most socially healthy thing I ever did for her as far as schooling goes was to take her out of school. Now she sees her school friends a lot less often. And yes, they still, in their limited times together, notice that she is different. They notice that when they sit in circle, sometimes she sits in circle, but other times she lies down in the middle of the circle, pulls up a chair outside of the circle, or turns her back on the circle and ignores it completely. They notice that if they do something she doesn’t like, she’s likely to react in a stronger way than other kids. But she doesn’t have to be with them all the time. She doesn’t need their constant approval. Twice a week she gets to play and have fun, to share her interests and passions, and the rest of the time she can relax. She no longer finds herself playing the “bad” kid so often, and so she is happier. Her self-portraits now have gone back to having the word “love” or “I love you” on them. She’s back to being herself.
I realize that there are some people who homeschool because they want to keep their children away from society, but in reality homeschooling families are anything but homogeneous. If you spend time with a bunch of homeschooled kids, you’ll find that they are as ungeneralizable as any group of people. Yes, as younger children they are probably harder to corral into a unified activity — this isn’t something they practice on a daily basis. But the most compelling argument against homeschooled kids not being socialized well is right there in front of you in every mainstream school in this country: when, in the rest of your life, are you going to have to march around in a group of people all your same age, have a set place in line, do what you’re told, and learn a set group of facts that will be tested by filling in bubbles? These are not social skills any of us need in our daily lives. And certainly we don’t need to be forced into situations where we constantly feel bad about ourselves. For now, as long as she needs it, I’ll take my happy little girl feeling good, and drawing her lovely, loving pictures.

A Study in Contrasts

Posted on by Suki
A few weeks ago my son’s private school had their big spring performance. The other night my daughter’s public homeschool program put on their yearly play.
It was a study in contrasts.
I know a lot of people who have moved from public school to private. In fact, I know of families at my son’s private school who have come both from a public program he was in and the public program my daughter is in. I’ve known a few families who have moved from private to public, usually under duress. But there are few of us who straddle this divide concurrently.
As someone who is interested in compare and contrast, I enjoy seeing two side-by-side examples like this. On the one hand, it’s all about similarities: the teachers worked REALLY hard. The students pushed themselves to the limit. The parents pitched in a lot. The families came out in droves to support their kids. Everyone was appreciative.
Then the contrasts, which were few but potent. It goes without saying that families at private schools generally have more money, but the picture is a lot more complicated than that simplification. First of all, private schools like my son’s try very hard to give as many scholarships as they can, so the student body is more economically diverse than you might expect. Second, those of us who choose a private school not because it’s “what one does” but because we feel that it’s truly the best place for our children often feel every dollar that goes into that school. Not long ago I had a conversation with a private school mom who had just lost her job. She and her family were trying to figure out any way to make ends meet, but taking their kids out of their school was not one of the options.
That’s the long digression to once again remind you, in case you’d forgotten, that private school families are not all wealthy and don’t all choose the school without deep thought about what they’re doing.
But let’s not pussyfoot around here: the private school has more money. My son’s performance was — it’s hard to describe it another way — lavish. Yes, the costumes were largely donated and made by families, but the families clearly have more means, and possibly more time, than public school families. (As I wrote before, having less means and definitely less time, I was thrilled to find out that my son’s costume would consist of a black shirt and black pants. Phew.) My son’s performance had high quality sound, the kids had the attention of dedicated music and dance teachers, and the teachers had the full support of the school and the parents for whatever they thought would be really excellent to do this year. It was thrilling and wonderful to attend this performance.
My daughter’s public homeschool program attempted something they’d never done before: the middle school kids wrote the play with one of the teachers, and then the teachers, kids, and parents put the whole thing together in very little time and with very little money. The sets were painted by kids on scrap cardboard. The costumes were pulled together by each family, with whatever they had or could find or make. The most professional part of it was a take on “Paint it Black” recorded by one of the dads who’s studying in the music program at UCSC. But even then, I luckily logged in three hours before the performance and found a frantic note from one of the teachers saying that the MP3 hadn’t been burned to CD, and did anyone know how to do that? Luckily, I did.
Contrast: lavish, quality, thrilling. Cardboard, seat-of-the-pants, last-minute.
Compare: wonderful!
In both cases, the kids had a full, thrilling, and educational experience. It was just very different. During one of the rehearsals for my daughter’s play, I was taking pictures of the kids rehearsing and I thought, wow, they pulled the set together from cast-off junk. During the performance? No one cared or even noticed! Although it wasn’t Shakespeare, and shouldn’t have been, the performance was real. It was written, created, and performed by kids who are really learning to do it all in their homeschools. Each of them in a different environment, learning different things, coming together to create a unified vision. Really Cool.
I didn’t get much involved with my son’s performance — I’ve been getting involved in different things at his school. But again, it was a thrilling, meaningful experience for them as well. Yes, everything in his performance was sleeker, more expensive, with more time to make sure everything went off smoothly. But for kids, experience is experience. I’m not sure that poverty or riches are the key here. I think the key is passion, and both schools have enough of that. Not to say that I wouldn’t like my daughter’s public program to have enough money to fix the plumbing, but to say that as they say, “It’s all good,” if you make it so.

Empire State Egg Drop

Posted on by Suki
More on the visual-spacial learning style. I’m reading Visual-Spacial Learners by Alexandra Shires Golon. She gives a lot of pointers about how to identify the visual-spacial learner — one of the uses of the book is for classroom teachers to identify and help their visual spacial learners.
VSLs, as a general category, are people who think in pictures rather than in words. The “opposing” general category is auditory-sequential learners. Because a book has to be written about VSLs, you might guess that VSLs are not the peopel we usually teach to. You’d be right. You might also guess from these labels that people are one or the other. There you’d be wrong. It’s all about a continuum. We are a rainbow, you know.
My daughter was pegged as a VSL, and I have slowly been trying things out on her. First of all, it is clear that she is quick to conceptualize but slow to organize. A typical VSL, she can get the answer to a question quickly, but she can’t really tell you how she got there. That was enough evidence to tell me that everyone in our family has some amount of VSL-ness. But she’s clearly different. When I asked her (as instructed in the book), “Do you think in pictures or words?” she positively snorted at the silliness of the question. “Of course I think in pictures,” she told me. “Everyone does.” She added that she “can” think in words if she wants to!
Another test in the book is to ask someone to spell a word backwards by seeing it out in front of them, and watch what they do. A VSL is likely to look out to the left. A predominantly auditory-sequential learner is more likely to look to the right. In a quick quiz, I found my son and husband to be instant ASL; my daughter, when asked to spell her name backwards, smiled at the silliness of the question, fixed her gaze on her name floating in space ahead of her, and quickly recited the letters backwards. Another test passed.
If that hadn’t been enough, we got to the Great Egg Drop. My son’s school sent home a paper announcing that his grade and another grade would be competing in an “egg drop” contest. They are to devise a container that will protect an egg dropped from 12 feet. Upon hearing this, my daughter was thrilled, excited, and inspired. Jumping to her feet and dancing, she talked wildly about the prospect of dropping an egg from the top of the Empire State Building. Then she ran to her room.
A few minutes later she reappeared. “This is how the contest works,” she explained. She showed us two diagrams. One showed the Empire State Building + a picture of an egg wrapped in bubble wrap = a picture of an intact egg. The other diagram showed the Empire State Building + a picture of an egg = a picture of an omelette!
A digression: When we tried our daughter in a private kindergarten program, a quiet, contemplative, beautiful place where she would get lots of individual attention, academic stimulation, and emotional education, she had a very rough time. A kind grown-up at the school took a particular interest in her and every day for a few weeks took her for walks and talked to her. After a couple of weeks, this person reported to me her findings. My daughter, it was clear, was very intelligent and creative. But didn’t I think that perhaps “Captain Underpants” was the wrong sort of literature for her to be reading?
At the time, our daughter wasn’t admitting to being able to read, though clearly she’d been able to recognize lots of words for quite a long time. We had a couple of hand-me-down Captain Underpants books that my son had been given; he’d never been particularly interested in them. But our daughter all of a sudden discovered and devoured them. I think she was drawn in by the idea that not only can a story be told in words, but that lots of the information can be conveyed in pictures. A graphic novel is not just an illustrated book. In the graphic novel, the pictures actually tell the story, with words sometimes involved. In an illustrated book, the pictures illustrate what the words are saying but don’t add any information of their own.
My little VSL just loved Captain Underpants, not only because its irreverent attitude matched hers (which I am sure that the books didn’t create or encourage — she was already like that before she discovered them). They also showed the world the way she saw it. She has since grown into reading much more sophisticated comics, and spends significant time pondering the illustrations in books and sometimes remarking on how well or badly they match the story.
It’s a fascinating trail of discovery for us. Stay tuned for more!

Workbook Envy

Posted on by Suki

A couple of days ago I attended the homeschooling support group at the Educational Resource Center. A couple of the moms there were talking about how they put together lesson plans for their kids in advance. One mom said she was concerned that perhaps she’d missed things in her son’s math education.

I was agog. Their version of homeschooling is as close to ours as military school! (OK, a slight exaggeration, but…)

Homeschooling, of course, needs to be tailored to every kid. And needs to fit the style of the parent doing the schooling. Therein lies our problem.

One of the ways I got myself to do project-based learning was to invite other girls over to our house for specific projects. Being in a group inspired us all!
One of the ways I got myself to do project-based learning was to invite other girls over to our house for specific projects. Being in a group inspired us all!

Long ago, when we thought that our problems with our preschool son were actually problems (now I know that they were just new parents learning to get through the stages), we consulted with a psychologist whose specialty was helping families figure out how their personalities fit together — he called this “goodness of fit.” He pointed out that a lot of families can have trouble because they end up with kids who don’t “fit” with other family members.

Applied to homeschooling, this describes our situation exactly. I would probably be happy as a clam coming up with lesson plans and choosing curriculum. We’d have a schedule (including the time when I get to drink my chai), and our workbooks would be done from front to back. I would be able to join in on the conversation about lesson plans and what time of day it’s best to teach academic subjects versus the creative arts.

Then there’s my daughter. I actually hired a professional to come work with her and give me some pointers. Some of our days were being spent in opposition from beginning to end, with lots of tears, some physical violence (child on mother, not the other way around!), and lots of pent-up anger (all mine…my daughter doesn’t pen any of her feelings up!).

The consultant pegged my daughter as a gifted visual-spacial learner. In other words, her learning style is going to resist all my attempts to organize, schedule, and control.

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I had already noted her intense zeal for project-based learning. We started out the year studying the ocean (which may sound inspired to those of you not on the coast, but studying the ocean in Santa Cruz is probably the easiest project to come up with!). My daughter, then five, went into it with gusto. I had a great time, too, but it was all seat-of-the-pants teaching. Nothing in particular in mind for today? Go to the beach!

The other reason I shouldn’t be surprised is that we’re all like this to some extent. Though our daughter is the purest expression of creative zeal in our household (she hums wildly and dances when she’s engaged with something), the rest of us fit it pretty well, too. Her brother, like me, is comfortable with structure and order, but he has also shown a tendency for the sort of “backwards learning” that presents itself so clearly in our daughter. Out of a chaos of activity springs, fully formed, a new skill. And though my husband went for computer science while I gravitated toward music and writing, we are both creative people who are happiest when we’re engaged in a longterm project that engages our creative minds as well as broadening our knowledge and skills.

So perhaps our goodness does fit a bit better than I’d thought.

In any case, I was struck with a pang of jealousy. I bet those moms even get to use those teacher notebooks with columns to check things off. Geez, some people just get all the cool toys!

So at the meeting, I couldn’t contain my jealousy and made some comment about how I’d love to find a workbook my daughter would do. The mom across from me chimed in: in order to get her son to use a workbook, she says, she actually has to rip the pages out and present them individually. Workbook? Never! Individual pages from that same workbook? Cool!

Homeschooling is to teaching a class as getting along with your family is to getting along with your co-workers. I wish I could plan, but my daughter always has a better idea. I have been told I need to “unschool” her, and though I have done my requisite Visual-Spatial reading (check out this website and that one), I’m still dragging my feet on learning how to be an effective unschooler.

But there’s hope: This morning I pulled out a discarded workbook about telling time, and asked her to do a page. She did four. One of these days, I’m going to get me one of those teacher notebooks. THEN she’ll see who gets to set the schedule!

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