Category: Homeschooling

One reason, perhaps selfish, to homeschool your kids is so they don’t have to do the time-wasting, mind-numbing exercises that you hated in school. I’m not of the parenting mind that thinks, “I had to suffer through it, so she should too!”

The thing is, my kids don’t necessarily hate the same things I do. My son was complaining because his fourth-grade teacher had assigned two pages of plotting points on a graph. I reasoned that it was clear that he could do it, so why should he have to do it again if no new skills are being added? My husband disagreed. It’s an important skill to practice, he said, and besides, I liked doing graphing!

The thing is, I liked graphing, too. I also liked diagramming sentences. Yep, you heard it here, someone in the world was not bored in seventh grade while diagramming endless, pointless sentences. “Susie’s shoes, which stunk like dog poop, had to be left by the door with the yellow sign that said, “Don’t use this door, dorkhead.”

Or something like that.

I find a certain comfort in mind-numbing exercises that approach meditation in their monotony. For example, I love sharpening pencils with the industrial-strength electric pencil sharpeners they have at schools. I like to fold laundry, as long as no one is jumping on the bed, upsetting my piles. I like to do repetitive editing on a computer even if I have the skills to write a program to do it.

My homeschooled daughter is similar: if she’s having a bad day, the best sort of exercise I can give her is something like sorting beads by color. We got a book of Victorian stained glass patterns recently, and this girl who has never enjoyed coloring books asks to do them. Sometimes mindless repetition can be just what you need.

On the other hand, someone on a homeschooling list I read sent out a recommendation for a website of “Reading Units.” Hm, I thought, that sounds interesting.

Just in case you haven’t noticed, we love to read in our family. My husband and I are never caught somewhere without a book. We have to give our son consequences for reading instead of doing what he was sent to do. I have found him in his room, naked, one foot in a pair of underwear, paying rapt attention to the book open on the floor in front of him. Our daughter can hardly see without her glasses, but I find her struggling to read without them because she got so caught up in a book first thing in the morning that she didn’t have time to go put her glasses on.

So I went to the website, and found out what Reading Units are. You remember when you had to go home and read one chapter of a book (and only one chapter, with a verbal flogging if you actually liked the book and wanted to read on, ahead of everyone else), and then when you got back to school, or in your backpack you found a sheet of questions. Not the sort of questions you might want to answer if you’re an avid reader — If you were Templeton the Rat, what would be YOUR favorite thing to find in the dump? — but those questions that make you prove that a) you read something, b) you understood what you read, and c) you’ve filled your head with all sorts of details that really don’t matter if the book was a good one.

Yes, I have managed to get a degree in Linguistics and a Master’s in Creative Writing without once taking the sort of class where I had to do the college-level version of Reading Units. I hate Reading Units!! If I had the choice of reading one of my favorite authors and doing Reading Units for each chapter, or being forced to read one of my most disliked authors (Pynchon [my husband’s favorite, btw], Miller, Lessing [former boyfriend’s favorite])… I’d suffer through Pynchon rather than answer questions about the nicknames of all the characters in War & Peace or the trivia of who did what in which chapter of Austen.

When I was in high school, I was forced to do this, chapter by chapter, to The Great Gatsby. Boy, I thought as I searched each chapter for the appropriate symbolic reference to answer the questions, why does anybody like this novel? In college, a friend told me it was her favorite novel. I saw a paperback copy in the bookstore one day and bought it. I still have that paperback.

Not only did I find out that day why Gatsby was great, but I realized that Reading Units were not for me. Give me sentences to diagram or a closet to clean out, but leave me in peace to love what I read and decide for myself what to remember.

So my daughter’s not going to be doing Reading Units anytime soon. I imagine that some day in the future she’ll call me from college. “Mom,” she’ll accuse, “Why didn’t you ever do Reading Units with me? It’s my Favorite thing EVER!”

But that’s the chance I’ll have to take.

I grew up in a town in the Midwest that happened to be the world headquarters for Dow Chemical Company. We may have had a senile high school French teacher who gave the same test over and over, but our chemistry teacher had a PhD.

It would be interesting to find out how much effect our solid science programs had on kids whose parents weren’t scientists. There were plenty of them — a town full of scientists also needs hairdressers and lawyers and musicians. And because our town had more money than the average Midwestern town of its size, we had solid funding for the other things that would bring families in: parks, libraries, a good hospital.

As the child of scientists, I can’t say for sure, but I think that our schools probably had an effect on the way kids who went through them looked at the world. Frankly, if you want a natural way of looking at the world, turn to religion. It’s easy for the human brain to wrap itself around mystery, wonder, and unexplained miracles.

Less easy is to train the human brain to do the thing that it alone among animal brains can do: reason. The scientific method is based on reason. It requires you to take that mass of neural pathways created by senses, emotion, and the story of your life and force them into the straight and narrow.

An example: One of my pre-mommy jobs was teaching argumentation at Cal State Hayward (now CSU East Bay). The young people I was teaching were largely products of poorly performing California public schools. Though the class was a basic Language Arts requirement, it was fundamentally a science class: How can we take apart something we believe is true and prove that it is true?

This is a hard thing for most people to do. One student I remember in particular. He had written an essay about driving (what a California topic!). Per my instructions, he tried to state his position, then develop the reasons behind it. In his first draft, he had a section about how Asian people were bad drivers. I pointed out to him that this was a stereotype. He agreed.

So a week later he turned in his finished paper. It had much in it that was well-reasoned, but he ended with something like this: “It’s not racist of me to say that Asians are bad drivers, because my sister is adopted from Korea, and she’s a bad driver.”

Oy. That sentence is a fallacy goldmine. Why was he able to write with reason for the rest of the essay, but when it came to his sister, he was stuck in emotion and prejudice?

Science makes us take fundamental parts of our belief systems and question them. Most of us are not comfortable doing this. I know that when I question something I believe and find it biased or lacking in evidence, I get this protective feeling. I MUST justify this, my instincts tell me, because it’s something I BELIEVE.

Another example: From a teaching point of view, there was one pair of essays in the book that we were using that showed rational argumentation at its best. The essays were about evolution. One of the young women in the class found them fascinating. She was a Christian, and she told me that she wanted to write her paper about evolution and religion. I don’t remember if I told her my concern: it is very hard for deeply religious people to look at their faith rationally in the way that she had to in order to write a successful argumentative essay.

I was amazed at the result. Instead of falling back on the easy arguments on both sides, this young woman of faith wrote a well-reasoned piece that both held up as argumentation, and confirmed her belief in religion. She came to me in what was like a religious fever, so excited about her paper. She had been “born again” into the realization that it is possible to be human, to have emotions and faith, but also to use the rational abilities that she as a human had been given. I considered it a great success of mine as a teacher, but she is the one who did all the work.

Science is not easy. In college, I took a physics class with a German professor who was always getting his demonstrations wrong. “Oh, vell,” he would say. “You know vat vas supposed to happen.”

That was the human coming to terms with science. Science wants to be exact, but the world is imprecise. Our atoms work mathematically, but our societies are chaotic and freeform. Those darn wire strippers made what seemed like a simple experiment very hard.

For the county science fair, my daughter and I are just about to redo her experiment so that she can show the physical results to the judges. And if it comes out different this time?

“Oh, vell,” she can say. “You know vat vas SUPPOSED to happen!”

Our daughter’s homeschool program had its science fair today. There were about twelve exhibits. Two of them were group projects done during the kids’ regular class days. Given that her program has close to a hundred kids, this is probably average participation in voluntary science-related projects in schools. Which is to say, Americans don’t like science very much.

This experience is borne out at a national level. American kids just don’t seem all that interested in science. I wonder why?

Disinterest in science certainly isn’t part of our inherited culture. The United States has been the birthplace or at least the chosen home of many of history’s great scientists. The United States has been the site of many of the world’s most important inventions. Our lifestyle has been built on science: agricultural science that created our incredibly high-yield crops, chemical science that created the high tech cleaners we love so much, medical science that has given us our long life expectancies. Not to mention social science, which among all the good it has given us also gave us modern advertising and marketing techniques!

Modern kid culture is heavily invested in science. I wrote an article in January about children and media, and found out that use of video games is now nearly ubiquitous in American youth culture. Video games, of course, are based on science: electrical engineering, computer science, etc. Yet as we have to import more and more of our programmers from India and other countries that offer a well-rounded science education, our kids just shrug at opportunities to become educated and get coveted jobs in industries that affect their lives on a daily basis.

Our economists try to sell us on the idea of a “service economy.” But no economy is all service: things need to be created, and many of the creators are scientists.

I know that one problem with teaching science at a homeschool program is that homeschooled children both benefit and suffer from the abilities of their parents. Parents who shrink from the idea of following the scientific method are going to be ill-equipped to help their children navigate it.

But my daughter’s homeschool has a teacher who loves to teach science, and introduced the science fair projects by talking about how she loves to help kids learn to find the answers to their questions.

I wonder, though, if the problem isn’t even more basic. I wonder if kids are ever taught to ask the questions in the first place. Yes, we all like to celebrate our preschoolers who ask those wonderful questions: Why is the sky blue? Who made the first chicken? How is the baby going to get out of your tummy if there’s no hole in your tummy? (That was from my son, age 3!)

But later, as our kids become more and more products of our culture rather than just of their raw genes and abilities, the questions cease. I will never forget the first class I taught at Foothill College. I was trying to draw out a young woman who didn’t seem to have anything to write about. I asked her, well, what do you and your friends talk about?

“We just b.s.,” she said.

But what do you say?

“B.s.,” she said.

She was a perfect product of the culture we have created, where kids get fed entertainment rather than having to make it themselves. She and her friends probably talked about… t.v. shows they watch, fashions they were wearing, what their favorite pop stars had been caught doing. Though they may have had many wonderful ideas and curious questions as preschoolers, our culture had taught them to stifle those questions.

We all know that being smart isn’t cool. It is definitely not cool to be the kid who knows all the answers. It’s even less cool to be the kid who asks uncomfortable questions.

Scientists have to do that. A good scientist tries to disprove her own theories. A good scientist is happy when someone else shows the faults in his process. Good scientists never reach perfect. They don’t ever get the completely right answer.

And that’s a problem for our culture of pre-digested entertainment. When the teacher at my daughter’s school asked one of the kids what she’d learned from her electronics experiment, the girl joked, “uh…that wire strippers are evil?” She and her classmates had had trouble with the materials. But instead of questioning why, and trying to figure out a way around it, she just gave in.

I don’t blame her. I was raised by scientists, and instead of placing blame, I have to question why. I’m not completely sure, but I hope the answer occurs to someone who can do something about it.

Till then… my kids and I will see you at the County Science Fair! Come check it out. It’s fabulous to see how many kids are still interested in asking why.