Category: Homeschooling

The ‘Mama Instinct’ answer: They’ll do fine.

Posted on by Suki

The things we do as parents.

We want our children to do well. We want them to succeed. We want them to say the right thing. To be respected by adults in their lives.

And sometimes that leads us to act in rather silly ways.

Last week that lesson hit home for me. I was teaching an online course at Athena’s Advanced Academy, a provider of online classes for gifted kids. We don’t test for the “gifted” part of it—our approach is that if kids can’t keep up, they figure out that they’re not in the right place.

For the most part, this approach works great. Research shows the the most reliable predictor of whether a child is gifted is the parent. Parents are keen observers of their children, and they notice when their kids are different.

“Trust your mama instinct” is something I heard often when my kids were young.

But sometimes we go a little past that. Sometimes, after trusting our instincts, we feel compelled to go beyond and, perhaps, do a little extra work to insure that our instincts were correct.

In a class last week, one of my new students turned on her microphone three times to answer questions. I always love hearing my students’ voices, and love waiting to find out the surprising and insightful things they will say.

But in this case, once, then twice, then three times, I heard the mother’s voice in the background prompting the child on what to say.

“Really?” I thought. “Who signed up for this class, the kid or the mom?”

I had a mix of feelings.

I was affronted as a teacher that a parent would invade our space this way.

As a parent, I was horrified that a fellow parent wouldn’t know how damaging this was.

As this child’s teacher, I felt that I was sharing in her mortification.

Just to be clear: All the other students could hear the mother. As far as I know, none of the other students was being fed answers by a parent. They were taking part in the class in good faith, being who they were: complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

But this is a story with a happy ending, or at least, a funny one.

The last time my student turned on her mic to answer a question, you could clearly hear the mother’s answer in the background first, and then the daughter’s.

But the answers didn’t match. The girl ignored her helicoptering parent and used her own mind.

I almost cheered.

Parents, please understand:

  You have your life; your children have theirs

      Your children will make mistakes, and this is how they learn

          Your children will sometimes be brilliant

and yes…

    Your children will say things that are not brilliant

         Your children will sometimes be wrong!

Here we are, complex bundles of gifts, deficits, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Get used to it. Let your kids go, and let them make mistakes. If you can’t trust your own “mama instinct,” trust mine:

They’ll do fine.

Goal-setting parent guide—free download

Posted on by Suki

Note: I have written a Parent Guide to accompany my new book, Homeschool with Confidence, which is a goal-setting guide for homeschooled teens. Although it is meant to introduce the concepts in my book, it might be of interest to parents in general (school and homeschool). Feel free to download it here if you are interested in reading more.

Dear Parents,

Congratulations on your recent acquisition of a teenager! I promise you will not be disappointed. Your teenager should be expected to display common teen features, including surliness, flashes of brilliance, sudden mood swings, unparalleled sweetness, antisocial tendencies, social neediness, advanced sense of humor, and unfailing attraction to all manner of digital devices.

This guide will help you guide your teenager through my goal-setting curriculum, following a few simple steps:

  1. Do not, under any circumstances, let on to your teenager that you are guiding them
  2. Do, always, give your teenager unconditional support and encouragement
  3. Do not let on to your teenager that you feel invested in the outcome
  4. Do let your teenager know that you see a bright future for them.

Confused? Welcome to being the parent of a teenager.

Sociologists have found that the concept of “teenager” is not common to all cultures and across the span of human history. It may be a unique phenomenon of modern industrialized societies.

However, that doesn’t make your job any easier. You are trying to guide someone who doesn’t want to be guided, mentor someone who may actually believe they are smarter than you, and stay sane in the process.

It’s a tall order.

Why goal-setting?

My new book was inspired by working with my kids and my students.

When my older child was 13, I started to see a difficult near future. Though he’s generally a pretty mild-mannered guy, we were getting a lot of pushback and defiance about things that I didn’t consider important at all. It was wearying. I’m sure at some point I must have said this: “If you must fight with me, can you at least choose something meaningful to fight about?”

I started to read about teen development and realized that goal-setting might be a way to get around some of the communication difficulties we had. I couldn’t find a curriculum that wasn’t full of school and organized sports, so I did the homeschooler thing: We muddled through with what we had and adapted what we could find.

I was amazed at the changes in our relationship, and immediately started to integrate what I’d learned into my parenting and teaching. (I teach in-person classes and also online classes at Athena’s Advanced Academy.)

It’s really quite simple. Goal-setting allows you and your teen to:

  • Get to know each other on a new level, as humans with ideas and desires rather than just parent and child
  • Develop a common understanding of your family’s values and concerns
  • Develop a common understanding of your teen’s values and concerns (which may be different)
  • Create a system of planning that is both focused and flexible
  • Learn a new vocabulary to communicate without value judgments and emotionally loaded expectations

Read on by downloading the full guide from my website.

Related:

Support your teen with goal-setting

Posted on by Suki

[Disclaimer: I didn’t write this because I have somehow perfected the art of raising a teen. I’m writing this because the teen-me watched in horror as the adult-me parented my teens exactly how the teen-me knew I shouldn’t. The teen-me was positively screaming in my ear, but did I listen? Well, I did my best!]

My new book is about goal-setting for teens, and I wrote it directly for teens, not parents. The reason for that is that from what I’ve seen, teens pretty much won’t do anything well unless they feel invested in it.

But teens also need the adults in their lives. Though there are those rare teens who seem to be able to handle everything on their own, most teens need—and actually want—guidance. It’s just that the sort of guidance parents tend to offer is, shall we say, not exactly what they’re looking for.

So how do we support our teens?

Give them agency

In traditional cultures, teens were young adults. They got to take up a spear or build a fire. But our culture is significantly more complex. As much as we might wish that our teens will do well in life with a fine spear and good aim, they need education, a driver’s license, and lots of experience sorting real from fake Nigerian princes.

So they do still need our guidance, and few are ready to be modern “adults” at 14. But they also need to feel growing independence as they go into their teen years. They need to feel trusted with real jobs (even though they might complain about them). Lots of destructive teen behavior comes from their need to make a mark in some way.

Follow their lead

We all knew when our babies were learning to walk that we needed to let them fall. It’s so much harder to let our teens fail when their failure might make a permanent change in their life path.

College professors are reporting that more and more, young students are coming to them and asking how they can make sure they get an A, as if success is more important than learning. This attitude leads to kids who have an instinct always to play it safe and to guard what they have. Perhaps this might make for success in getting into college, but it’s not a good recipe for success in life.

Help them find a direction (for now)

If we’re going to let our kids lead, we have to feel like they are going somewhere. And lots of teens really don’t know where they are going. Goal-setting is a way to help them have a direction, even if it’s just for the next week. And having a direction is important, even if, halfway up the path, we decide to go a different way.

Enter goal-setting

That’s why I fixed on goal-setting as a way to communicate with my kids. I figured if I could get them to articulate goals, even the most minor ones, we’d share a common language for moving forward. I didn’t find a book I liked, so in the spirit of being a lifelong learner, I wrote one myself!

I also use the book (in its previous nascent form and now as a published book) in goal-setting classes I teach online at Athena’s Advanced Academy. It’s fun to work with teens who aren’t my own and find out that just like mine, they thrive when they feel that they have agency, choices, and a direction.

Math Stories: Fun, Deep Learning for Elementary Students

Posted on by Suki

Readers: This is an update and consolidation of previous posts on this topic. Hopefully I’ve gotten all the resources in here!

It started one night when my seven-year-old daughter explained to her father how you can determine the number of faces in a geometric solid from the number of points. I’d ordered a Sir Cumference book from the library on the many recommendations I’d seen, and for the fact that my daughter was obsessed with knights.

Sir Cumference was our introduction to math stories.

It didn’t occur to me that this would be an efficient way to teach math. Since then, I’ve been on a quest for math stories.

First, a definition: What I’m calling math “stories” are books in which the story is more, or at least as important as the math it contains. I’m not confusing them with “story problems,” the bane of many a standardized test-taker. A math story is a really great story that happens to contain math.

It’s also a very effective way to spark interest in and understanding of math in elementary-aged kids.

The first books we tried, the wonderful Sir Cumference series, are picture books about medieval times peopled with wonderfully named characters: Lady Di of Ameter, Geo of Metry, and of course Sir Cumference himself.

The books have the lush pictures and captivating storylines you’d expect from picture books, but they also teach math concepts in a deep way.

In learning about pi, that confusing number associated with circles, Radius (Sir C.’s son, of course) actually experiments with a pie. The shape of King Arthur’s table leads to a discussion of circles and their particular attributes.

The success of Sir Cumference led us to seek out more math stories. A friend recommended The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat. Author Theoni Pappas has written a number of math books for a range of ages and abilities. They all seem to center around the idea that if people just understood all of math’s lovable attributes, they’d love the discipline as well.

We instantly fell in love with Penrose. If you have a cat, you will recognize Penrose in an instant. He learns mathematics because his mistress (Pappas) is always looking at her math papers. So like any good cat, what does he do? He inserts himself between his mistress and the papers. Fun and learning follow.

The charm of Penrose is, first, that he is a real cat. Though the illustrations are in pen and ink, there’s a photo in the beginning of the book of the real Penrose, poised in mid-play amongst his mistress’s papers.

The fictional Penrose not only enjoys getting attention, but also gaining knowledge. He starts to wonder about what’s on the papers, and soon the numbers and shapes come alive and talk to him.

This is a consistent metaphor in the books, and is a good metaphor for what happens to a child charmed by Penrose. At the end of each story there is a small box with an intriguing question. My daughter, who screams in frustration at a page of math problems, took the initiative in finding paper and pencil to answer the first chapter’s conundrum.

We’re on to our third Pappas book now, hungrily lapping up Penrose’s forays into tessellation, prime numbers, and equiangular spirals.

We were on a roll. Someone else suggested The Number Devil. There are a couple of caveats about this book: First, this is a playful take on religion, with a Number Heaven/Hell and the Number Devils that live there, so beware if this doesn’t fit with your world view. Also, this book starts with the main character, Robert, having nightmares, and given that our household was being turned upside-down at that point with nighttime wakings, I was leery of adding more ideas for bad things that happen at night.

I decided, however, to give it a try, and it was a hit. Not only did Robert’s nightmares not scare my daughter, but the Number Devil soon invades the dreams and drives away all the bad thoughts. They are replaced by dreams of number theory, explained through colorful language and ever-changing scenery.

We loved the Number Devil not just for the math but for the fiction.

The book has a therapeutic as well as didactic approach: Robert’s fears of the big, scary world and also of his detested math teacher, Mr. Bockel, are replaced by musings about the beauty of numbers. By the end of the book, Robert becomes a number devil himself, having earned a place in Number Heaven (or Hell, depending on how you look at it) and a license to think about the cool stuff that number philosophers have thought about since ancient times.

This may all beg the question: What did my daughter get from this? Is she learning useful skills?

First, I have to say that all this reading will probably not translate directly to any increase in her testable numbers. Standardized tests look for mastery of skills; these books encourage excitement about ideas. Standardized tests focus on grade-level standards; these books throw that all out the window and figure kids should learn about the cool stuff… leave the boring, repetitive stuff for another day.

What math stories do is introduce kids to the big, enticing ideas that make all the work on boring stuff like multiplication facts worth the effort. A child who is excited by triangles is going to learn soon enough that having to pull out a calculator or multiplication chart over and over to remember 3×3 just delays the pay-off.

Math stories also teach math concepts in a deeper way, embedding them in a narrative that fits into the way children learn in the real world, through experience and need.

If you’re looking for math stories for older children, check out the British Murderous Maths series (which I’m happy to see is now available in the US) and Theoni Pappas’s The Joy of Mathematics, both of which teach the history and ideas behind the math that kids will need to tackle in late elementary and middle school.

Resources

  • Living Math is a website full of great math resources

Here are various math stories that we read and enjoyed or that other readers have recommended:

Our approach to Internet safety

Posted on by Suki

My older child takes part in open source projects, posts on forums about topics he’s interested in, and uses the Internet daily in his education, his leadership/service projects, and his social life. He’s now almost 18, but he’s been online for many years, starting in the Scratch community at the age of 9.

talkingonyoutubeMy younger child is an active Youtuber. He loves Instagram. He chats with friends he’s never met in person. He loves to share his creative work, and he takes part in conversations about topics that interest him.

I think that overall taking part in creative communities and finding people to share interests online is an extremely positive experience for most kids. They get direct feedback on their work, and get to feel like they are taking part in a larger creative conversation. I definitely feel that parents who keep their kids off the Internet are being too cautious, sort of like not letting them travel to a nearby city by automobile because it’s more dangerous than walking. The benefits are so great it’s worth taking some risks.

However – the big however – I also think it’s really important for parents to be aware and to educate their children. Kids are growing up as digital natives, and this is all within “normal” for them. So we adults run the risk of sounding like reactionary old fogies when we talk to our kids.

Lots of parents are confused about whether they should allow their kids to share online, and how they should do it. Ours is an imperfect system, of course (all family systems are). But I’m offering it up as an example for others to consider.

Reasonable restrictions

Here are the restrictions we put on our kids’ Internet usage:

1) Before the age of 13, they chose a pseudonym to use online and were not allowed to divulge their real name to anyone we already didn’t know IRL. My younger one is still using the pseudonym as a Youtuber, though now 14. My older one, who is building the foundations of a career, uses his real name.

2) Everyone in the family is required to have a master password that they write on a piece of paper (how 20th century!) and keep in a sealed envelope in a special place. This is just in case of emergency, and we’ve never opened these envelopes and hope we’ll never need to.

3) I subscribe to my kids’ channels and connect with them on all of their social media. For one of them, this is easy. The other one loves to generate new accounts, so it’s a challenge! But I feel that they shouldn’t be saying anything online that they wouldn’t feel comfortable saying IRL, and I hope that my presence as their online “friend” normalizes this connection between the online and physical world. I don’t snoop, but I do want to know where they are if I need to help them.

Bad things happen

independence-dayOf course we all read the horror stories about kids on the Internet. But here are some of the bad things that are actually likely to happen:

Unless your child creates a password-protected blog and only unlisted Youtube videos, others will be able to find them. Those others may have different values. The most common thing that raises my hackles is the type of language used in comments on Youtube. This is something you won’t be able to get away from. In our family, we just talk about how this isn’t the way we talk to each other, and we try to brush it off.

You will also get people who are dismissive or critical – maybe once or maybe they will move into bullying behavior. In any case, your kid is likely at some point to get “you suck” type of comments. My Youtuber just totally shrugs them off. But more sensitive kids might need support when this happens, and of course, extended bullying has to be dealt with.

Kids also get really drawn into conversations and can experience obsessive/emotional/depressive behaviors as a result. Again, how kids react to this depends on what they’re like to begin with, and parents can watch for signs and keep an open dialogue if they are concerned.

But what about the really horrific stories?

And then there are those other horror stories: My personal approach is to know that we take appropriate precautions in our family and that these things are unlikely to happen. And also, they’re just unlikely in any case. Just like stranger abduction, they’re scary but much less frequent than the media leads us to believe.

Balance

robosukipatrckWhat our family aims for is creating the same balance in online life that we try to have in “real” life: We want our children to be independent, creative, and to feel comfortable exploring. We also want them know that we love them, support them, and have their backs when people mistreat them.

Each family, of course, makes their own decisions based on their own values and experiences. The important thing to consider is whether you are communicating those values and experiences to your children by making reasonable, supportive rules for their online lives.

Resources:

Other posts on this topic:

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