Category: Education

Local books for Santa Cruz kids

Posted on by Suki

Ever since my husband and I read The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet*, which is set in Pacific Grove, to our son, I’ve had a passion for snooping out books with local flavor. It’s such a passion that I was sure I’d written about it before. But having searched my files, I have to admit that I have not, in fact, written about all these wonderful books! So here it is, my rundown of kids’ books I have read (and a few I haven’t) that are set in or near the Monterey Bay area.

1. Kildee House by Rutherford G. Montgomery

This has to be the first book on my list, because it holds such an important place in my reader’s heart. I was introduced to this book by my son’s first-grade teacher. After she read it aloud in class, he came home and asked if we could read it again! It’s the story of an old man, retired from a career as a headstone-maker, who builds a little cabin against a massive redwood tree. When we did this with my daughter’s book club, we met at Henry Cowell inside of the hotel tree! It was magical, to sit inside a tree with dim lanterns, sipping hot chocolate and talking about literature.

2. The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (and sequels) by Eleanor CameronWonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

What can I say about this very weird, truly excellent book? It’s one of the ones I remember from my childhood, which is why, when we started to read chapter books to our son, I just had to read it again. And lo and behold, it takes place in Pacific Grove. I’m guessing there aren’t many works of fiction that take place there, but this one makes up for the lack of others. My husband has even searched to find out if the address in the book exists (it doesn’t). Great book to read to younger kids.

3. I Am Lavina Cumming by Susan Lowell

This rather obscure little book was recommended to me by Gay, the wonderful children’s book buyer at Bookshop Santa Cruz. It’s historical fiction about a real girl who lived in Santa Cruz during the earthquake of 1906. The writer posits (I’m not sure that this was the case) that Lavina counted amongst her friends the youthful Susan Pitts (later to be known as the famous actress Zazu Pitts). It’s a nice little book, and I suggest that upon reading it, find the detail that tells you without a doubt that the author has never lived in Santa Cruz (or anywhere on the California coast, for that matter).

Operation Redwood4. Operation Redwood by S. Terrell French

I haven’t read this one yet, though it’s been on my shelves for a while. My son read it and liked it — probably good for pre-teen kids.

5. Star Lost by Patsey Gray

One of my correspondents recommended this long out-of-print book, which our local library doesn’t even have a copy of. If you have a copy, donate it to the library and ask them to get it on the shelves so we can read it!

6. Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

This is a young adult book (definitely not for the kids, judging from the description) that is partly set in Santa Cruz. I haven’t read it yet!

7. The Changeling by Zylpha Keatly Snyder

Again, I haven’t read this, but a correspondent tells me that it’s set in an unnamed coastal California town. She also recommends The Egypt Game, which is set in Berkeley.

8. Eight Mules from Monterey by Patricia Beatty

From Nancy Winans: “I actually met her when I was a child when I was part of a junior library reading club and read several of her books, all historical fiction centered around her experiences living on the Pacific West Coast as a child.  Two were centered near where I lived in So Cal, one about the orange growing business and the other about boron miners.  Others focused on quilters in Oregon and a Quileute family in Washington state. I think they might still hold up to today’s readers, with parents explaining when they were written and about how people weren’t as aware of certain issues then.” [Visit Nancy’s Choices4Learning website]

9. The Terrible Churnadryne by Eleanor Cameron

Another from Nancy: “Another book I read as a child that was inspired by the Monterey Peninsula but which uses other place names.  I just re-read it last year for fun – only then realizing there were so many parallels to our area and finding out that the author lived here.”

10. Frosty: A Raccoon to Remember by Harriet E. Weaver

From another correspondent: “Apropos of Kildee House there’s also the 1973 “Frosty: A Raccoon to Remember” by park ranger Harriet E. Weaver, about half of which takes place in Big Basin and half in Southern California. Frosty even causes some commotion in the Mission St. Safeway parking lot.”

 

Back to homeschool

Posted on by Suki

Both homeschoolers and schoolers alike are often interested to find out how homeschoolers work within our cultural focus on a “school year” and “summer break.” For as many ways as homeschoolers do everything else, we all have different approaches, but here is ours.

Until last year, I always had one kid in school. So summer was by its very nature different because our school kid would be home. Another difference was that while taking part in two school programs, we were very, very busy with school-related events during the school year, so summer seems more relaxed in any case. This year both my kids were in the same homeschool program, but somehow we didn’t have a more relaxed spring! What with spring school events, doing year-end wrap-ups with our teacher-consultant in our public school program, and other things like recitals that always seem to take place all at once, we were ready for a real break.

Another really important reason that we change our routine during the summer is the wonderful opportunity of summer camps. I’ve written before how if school were more like summer camp, we’d be doing school year-round as well! So when the camps are announced, we start scanning the possibilities and thinking about how to sandwich them in between travel, beach, swim lessons, and relaxation.

So as a result, in our family we do “take the summer off” from homeschooling in a formal way. This does not mean, however, that we take the summer off from learning:

  • Travel is a great way for kids to learn. You don’t have to do worksheets and tests to learn history, social studies, geography, and even math and literary analysis during your travels. This year we went to my kids’ father’s homeland — New York/New Jersey — for two weeks. We went to some great museums where they were presented with learning opportunities in a formal environment, and we did things like catching fireflies on warm Jersey evenings that promoted learning of a more experiential sort.
  • We didn’t go out for camps in a big way this summer, but my daughter did repeat her yearly visit to soccer camp. Of course she learned soccer skills, but she also learned important social and emotional lessons in an environment that is much more accepting of her big personality than a closed-up classroom.
  • We took time to work on long-delayed projects. My son and I started learning more about Arduino, a really cool piece of hardware that your kids can graduate to once they’ve learned the basics of computer programming and electronics. While we were doing that, my daughter got out our Snap Circuits, one of the best “toys” you can possibly invest in, and retooled her knowledge of how circuits work.
  • We spent a lot of time gardening and hanging out at my parents’ farm or down in the redwoods. Today’s kids are getting less and less time just to hang out in nature, despite the overwhelming research showing that they’ll do better in life if you just leave them alone sometimes.

The most successful thing we did to make sure that we didn’t just veg out during the summer was what has become an annual tradition: the Our Fun Summer poster. The kids and I sit down at the beginning of the summer with a pad of enormous paper and start to write down everything we hope to accomplish over the summer. We only took the poster down last week, and I’m satisfied to say that we did pretty much everything we wanted to do.

So now it’s back to homeschool. What that means for us is, first of all, reconnecting with the folks at our public homeschool program. This year reconnection took place at Blue Ball Park with a fair-like atmosphere — the older kids leading activities and crafts for the younger ones. The parents brought homeschooling supplies they were done with and exchanged them with other people’s cast-offs. (I scored a copy of Brian Jacques’ Redwall and a cursive practice book.) The teachers met with each group of kids and did a “get to know you” since there are always new kids coming in. Everyone perused sign-up sheets for school-led activities that they wanted to take part in. I signed up to help lead the film festival and the technology group.

So yes, Back to Homeschool does have meaning for us. But it’s not back to the grind, as it was in the old days. It’s more like a renewal of our commitment to living and learning together.

Teaching writing in the elementary years

Posted on by Suki

This is a transcript of a talk that I gave at the recent HSC Conference in Sacramento. Thanks to my great audience, I have edited the content so hopefully now it’s even more helpful. This talk was written with homeschoolers in mind. If your children are in school or will be in school, you’ll find that schools have a very different approach to writing. Somewhere along the way, they forgot to observe children who eventually became good writers and analyze what helped them get there. You’re not going to be able to change the way your child’s teachers do things, but perhaps if you have a child who has been deemed unsatisfactory in the writing department, you can follow some of my suggestions at home. You might also even consider making suggestions to the teacher, if you think s/he is receptive.

*

I graduated from University of Michigan with a Master’s in Creative Writing. Somehow, this made me eligible to teach expository writing at the college level. I remember when I got my first job, my elation and then my dismay: How do you teach expository writing? Nobody had ever taught me much of anything. I read the textbook before walking in the first day. And I got one valuable piece of advice: Another teacher told me that the best way to get to know my students was to have them write their first essay on the topic, “How my family eats dinner.”

I followed his advice. The results were fascinating. The worst-written essays came from 18-year-olds who wrote things like, “I grab a TV dinner and eat in front of the TV.” One of the best essays, however, was from a young man who happened to be a preacher’s son. His essay revealed how every evening of his childhood, his father had sat the family at the table and grilled them on topics of his choice. At any given moment, they were supposed to be able to expound on questions concerning morality or rights.

This young man also revealed to me that he’d gone to an abysmal California high school that seemed bent on preparing its low-income students for prison. He’d never written an essay before, but because of his father’s training, he intrinsically knew what it was.

He got an A.

In order to get you into the mind and body of an elementary-age kid who has assigned writing, I’d like you to do the following exercise: Choose a profession you are not interested in pursuing. Write three paragraphs about the best things about practicing this profession. Do it with your non-dominant hand. Consider how that feels, and how your eight-year-old might feel when given an assigned writing topic.

I want to go back to my own writing training. My school system was pretty old-fashioned. None of this new-fangled “writing across the curriculum.” We studied grammar, we studied spelling, we had to write reports in middle school, and papers in high school. Also in high school we were given the opportunity, occasionally, to write creatively. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach: It’s uninspired and ignores creativity and the joy of writing.

But the good thing about this approach was that I was never, as a young child, expected to want to write or to have opinions on things adults thought were important. By contrast, when my son was in public school, his math book had problems where he was supposed to write narrative answers. I’m sure the committee that thought this up had good intentions, but really, who wants to write about math? Even the people I know who are good at it have little interest in writing about it. And if a kid isn’t good at it, forcing him/her to write about it instills more resentment…against both math and writing!

So I actually don’t know that our school-y approach to writing has improved all that much. It’s replaced a system that expected little from kids and did little to inspire them with a system that expects way too much from kids and turns inspiration into force-feeding.

Let’s talk about what writing is:

  • Expression
  • Ideas
  • Argument
  • Self-awareness
  • Flow
  • Creativity
  • Communication
  • Being part of a community of readers/writers
  • Permanence

Writing is more than just learning a skill. It’s about expressing yourself and your ideas, being able to bring your ideas out of your head and give them a form where you can consider them, edit them, change them, and refine them. It is the process of revealing what’s in your brain in a sort of real-world, permanent way. It’s a really BIG thing, especially to a kid. Writing is power.

So what stifles writing?

  • The wrong tool (scratchy pen, dull pencil, broken keyboard)
  • The wrong environment (too noisy, too quiet, wrong kind of music, bad smell)
  • Too high expectations from someone else or yourself
  • Having to write about something you don’t care about
  • A physical problem (carpal tunnel syndrome, young hands with very little fine motor control)
  • The editor on your shoulder (that voice in your head that keeps criticizing what you’re writing, often even before it makes it to the page)

Taking all of this into account, I believe that enforcing a general rule that all kids must “work on” writing before they are, at minimum, in late elementary school is unwise. Now, notice that I said “a general rule.” As a child, I was a clear exception to this. In the third grade, I wrote an entire post-apocalyptic novel on purple notebook paper. It was, if I remember correctly, about a girl who has lived through a nuclear disaster and is left to fend for herself in a poisoned world. (Unfortunately, it was lost in a flood at my parents’ house. I’d love to read it now for a good chuckle!) So there I was, an 8-year-old, definitely not a kid who was afraid of writing or unable to express myself. But there were two other extenuating circumstances: First, no one had ever told me I had to write or had edited my writing. They had edited my spelling, punctuation, and grammar on exercises, but no one had ever asked me to produce writing I cared about and then proceeded to tell me what was wrong with it. Second, I was unusually drawn to writing at a young age, and no one was expecting me to write novels, or even essays.

Parents homeschooling their kids need to have a stern talk with themselves about interfering in their young children’s writing. Here are some rules I suggest you follow:

  1. Never, ever correct your child’s spelling on a piece of spontaneous writing unless you are asked to
  2. Never, ever correct your child’s grammar on a piece of spontaneous writing unless you are asked to
  3. Do notice the errors your child is making and gently point them out in circumstances completely separated from creative writing, if you feel you need to
  4. Do nothing but praise what your child produces, and make your praise “functional,” e.g. “Wow,  you worked hard on that!” or “It is fun that your story has a surprise ending!” (Not, “That’s brilliant and should be published!” because that’s a lie.)

So now you’re thinking, Wait, are you telling me that I shouldn’t have my younger elementary child work on writing at all? Yes, indeed, that is what I’m saying. However, I’m not saying you shouldn’t interfere, but rather, I’m suggesting that you should do it in a stealthy way that looks nothing like a “writing exercise.”

Here is what you should do to stimulate your child’s writing:

  • Read. Then read. Oh, and also read. Read some more. Read all the time. Enjoy reading. If your child enjoys reading aloud, ask him/her to read to you.
    Reading constantly and enjoyably is the number one way for your child to learn how to write. When I teach writing, the worst writers are the ones who never read for enjoyment. How can they write well? They haven’t seen any examples! We don’t expect kids to do much of anything else well without millions of examples, so why do we expect that of writing?
  • Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk!
    Talking about things cogently is how your child is preparing to be a writer. Our first babysitter was from Colombia, and she viewed part of her job as learning American culture. She was amazed that I talked to my kids “like they are people.” She said that no one she knew in Colombia ever talked to kids in anything but babytalk. I had to break it to her that this is probably true of most Americans, too. But at our house, we knew we wanted our kids to be able to talk well, so we talked to them like they were smart, interesting people with fascinating opinions. This is how you make a writer.
  • Let them see you write – the actual physical process of it.
    This is where some parents are going to groan. Oh, I hate writing. I have hated writing ever since third grade when Mrs. Evans… Exactly. And you don’t want that to happen to  your child. So get out your notebook and write. Write bad nature poetry, and read it to them. Write a letter or e-mail and read it to them. Read them something in the newspaper that really makes you angry, write a letter to the editor, and read it to them. You can even let them see you edit. My kids were fascinated when I read them the first draft of a book I’m working on with pen in hand, and kept making marks. “What’s wrong with that paragraph?” they asked excitedly.
  • Make writing physically easy for your kids.
    Let them dictate while you type/write
    Make a recording device available to them to dictate into
    Incorporate writing into things they love
    Don’t ever criticize anything about their writing
    Keep homemade blank books around
    If your child’s brain has developed ahead of his/her hands, get them voice recognition software or teach them to touch type
    If your child has a disability, work around it
  • Any writing is good writing: signs, comics, tracing. My daughter loves to make signs and for years that was her biggest writing output.
  • Don’t push good penmanship until they are clearly ready to improve, and don’t comment on penmanship when they write for pleasure. Ditto spelling.
  • Never, ever edit things they write for pleasure. (Unless they ask you to, and then make them beg till you do it.)
  • Never, ever assign them topics. (Unless they ask you to do it.)
  • Incorporate writing into project-based learning.
    This is a big one. A kid who is reluctant to sit down and write a book report may be very willing, even eager, to write up the results of a cool science experiment. (Who the heck ever thought up book reports anyway—that’s enough to ruin any good book!)
  • Create actual products that contain writing. Lots of kids are very inspired by this. Actual products can be:
    Letters to Grandma
    Newsletters for their friends or neighbors
    Reports that they present at their homeschool program
    Copied poems with drawings to hang on the wall

Relax! Remember that as long as they are reading and having interesting conversations, your kids are preparing to become good writers.

Here’s a self-assessment you can take if you want to think about what you’re doing to inspire your child’s inner writer:

  • How often do you read to your child aloud, even after s/he can read alone?
  • How often to you ask your child’s opinion about something you’re reading together?
  • How often do you read to your child from something you’re reading for yourself or something you are writing?
  • Do you ask your child questions about the things she is interested in?
  • Have you offered to type/write as your child dictates?

For most kids, creative writing is going to come first. They may incorporate words into their art from a young age. They will usually start producing creative pieces if they see it modeled for them. They can be very inspired to write if you write down the stories they tell and then read them back.

When kids are producing creative work spontaneously, that’s when you know that they are developing a healthy attitude toward writing. You might actually see them gravitating toward things that you could have “assigned” to them. When my daughter was in first grade, she decided to write a “report” about squid, since we were studying the ocean. She did it, then presented it to her teacher at her homeschool program to be put into her portfolio. She did this all on her own. And she, by the way, is a kid who swears she “hates” writing! (What else would you expect the rebellious daughter of a professional writer to say?)

Finally, we do have to address the obvious question: When is a child ready to do assigned writing? If your child is homeschooled and is not required by a charter to take writing tests (something I abhor about one of our local charters), remember that writing on a prompt is only a skill they will need on tests for admission to programs, high school or community college classes they take, and on their college applications. If you’ve already nurtured a happy writer, learning to do this will not be hard. This skill is best developed by: a) reading a lot, and b) not being forced to learn it till they actually need it.

Most homeschooled kids–assuming you’ve been following the advice above–probably don’t need to practice writing from prompts before middle school. Of course, you are going to have kids who want to attain this skill earlier on their own, or perhaps who are so academically advanced that they will have to learn this skill in order to take the classes they want to take. But they are the exceptions. This isn’t a skill that needs to be forced on younger kids, who will only learn to dislike writing if it is “taught” too early.

If you have kids in school, you’re going to see that the educational establishment doesn’t agree with me at all. And, well, good luck with that. I hope that your child has understanding teachers who figure out how to meet the standards while still keeping creativity and ideas distinct from editing and correcting. Otherwise, they’re just going to be feeding that editor sitting on your child’s shoulder and it’s going to be that much harder for your child to find pleasure and learning in writing.

And that, really, is all it takes to become a good writer.

Taking your gifted learner out of school

Posted on by Suki

I gave a workshop at the recent Homeschool Association of California Conference in Sacramento, and a few people suggested that I post it here for those who couldn’t attend. If you are the parent of a gifted learner and you’re thinking about taking him/her out of school, perhaps this will help you make an informed choice.

***

Parents generally assume that the year their children turn six years old, they will send them off to kindergarten. The children will use scissors and paste, learn the alphabet, and maybe even learn to read. They‘ll sit quietly while the teacher reads stories to them, and use manipulatives to familiarize themselves with basic mathematical concepts such as number recognition and counting. It will be fun, and parents will proudly display their children‘s artwork on the refrigerator at home. When the parents go in for their first parent-teacher conference, they will meet the wonderful lady (it‘s usually a lady, isn‘t it?), maybe for the first time, whom they have entrusted with their children‘s introduction to the world outside of their home, and they will be told how sweet their children are and how well they have learned to play with others. They will have no worries.

It’s a nice fantasy, isn’t it?

Making the Choice, When Typical School
Doesn’t Fit Your Atypical Child (Goodwin/Gustavson)

When I read this quote, I imagined a classic frame from the Peanuts cartoon, with all the kids’ heads up and all you see is their big mouths laughing: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! This description fits me, and I’ll add one more piece: I considered the day that my second and last child started kindergarten as the day my life would get going again. Not that I didn’t love having babies and preschoolers, but I was itching to find my adult self again. Well, it didn’t happen. At least, not the way I thought it would.

My first child was your classic “smart kid.” Always at the top of his class. Well-behaved. Sometimes a bit of a smart-ass, which we respected him for. Our second child was… something else. She was clearly highly intelligent, but her need to “get into” things surpassed any parenting method you have heard of. Frankly, if we were the type to beat our children, we would have worn ourselves out trying to beat her into submission. She would never, ever stop following her own muse.

Her muse, it seemed, did not work in a classroom setting. I enrolled her in a small private school, joking that either the Buddhists would reform her, or she’d turn them all Catholic. I should go check out the church at the bottom of the hill, because none of their patience and compassion got her to settle down. Her three months in the classroom was awful. By the end of it, she was a psychological basket case and so was I. When I told her she wasn’t going back after winter break, she was sad.

I wasn’t.

We tried homeschooling for a few months on our own, but we just sat around and hated each other. We didn’t know other homeschoolers and I didn’t really have good friends with kids. It wasn’t until we joined a public homeschooling program that spring that I met parents who didn’t act as if my daughter’s bad behavior would somehow infect their kids. They just accepted us in our weirdness, which was such a relief.

Fast forward a few years. My daughter and I are seasoned homeschoolers, and my son was doing Just Fine in school. This is the sort of thing parents tell themselves when they actually know they have no choice. Things with my daughter were very difficult, and my son’s needs were taking a back seat. We were paying for a fine private school (I still think it’s a fine school!), and his teacher was impressed with his abilities.

But I started to notice something: My son started to focus on the minimum effort he had to put into anything. Where my homeschooled daughter did things because she enjoyed them, my schooled son did things because he was told he had to. On top of that, there was a rough personality clash in the classroom, and my son was making himself sick with worry. He’d get off the bus every afternoon with a new physical ailment. He missed ten school days in the first semester of classes due to “stomach aches” that disappeared as soon as the bus pulled away from the curb and he knew I wasn’t up to driving him 40 minutes to school.

He and I started a casual discussion of “if you homeschooled for a year” and he jumped on it with much greater ferocity than I expected. He had made a best friend at school, the first really solid friendship of his life, and I thought this might dissuade him, but it didn’t. So in June 2010, we officially became a 100% homeschooling family.

Now that you know my story, let’s turn to what I know about the experience of gifted kids and schools in general.

How do schools not serve some gifted kids’ needs?

I want to be very clear about that word “some”: I am not including all gifted learners and all families here. So if you love school and your children are excelling in school, that is really wonderful and don’t feel the need to flame me. However, this is not the experience of all gifted learners and their families.

By their very nature, almost all schools offer few independent learning options. It’s just too hard to integrate a kid into a classroom if he’s doing different work than other kids. Few schools accept the research that shows that acceleration of gifted kids (either putting them in a more advanced group for single subjects or grade-skipping them) actually shows positive results. [Download and read A Nation Deceived for data on that.] No matter how they try, schools by their very nature offer an inflexible curriculum that is supposed to suit all the kids. A kid who is on a different plane of learning altogether can be disruptive. One mom of a gifted boy told me that his teacher had forbid him to ask any questions at all in the classroom. So the message was, “Not only are your questions irrelevant in our classroom, but you also aren’t allowed to have a legitimate question when you don’t understand something.”

On top of that, most gifted kids just aren’t the poster kid you’re thinking of: You know her — she’s well-groomed, well-spoken, the valedictorian, and top scorer on the volleyball team. Nope, gifted kids are as mixed a bunch as any group of kids. You have many who simply have bad social skills. On top of that, you have a good proportion who are “twice-exceptional”–both gifted learners and disabled in some way. A surprisingly high number of kids who test very well on IQ tests have disabilities such as dyslexia. Another chunk of gifted learners have Asperger’s disorder. That well-groomed valedictorian you know is not undeserving of her prizes — she worked for them. But there are lots of gifted learners who find that the one-size-fits-all approach to learning just can’t accommodate them. Try telling your public school that your kid who is in the 99th percentile on the STAR test needs special accommodations. It’s a hard world out there for 2e kids.

So it might surprise you to find out that the reasons that parents actually do decide to take their gifted learners out of school are largely not academic. Lack of intellectual stimulation and challenge are high on the list, but the parents I know talk more often about the lack of peers, the social isolation their kids faced, and the resulting health problems that were often the call that finally woke the parents up to reality: My smart kid isn’t doing well in school (even though he’s getting straight A’s).

Parents of gifted learners don’t take their kids out of school to insult the school or the other families. They take them out of school so they can follow their passions, work at their own pace, have healthy social lives, and do the unusual things that they are often drawn to.

Making a positive transition to homeschool

So say you’ve made the decision, and you’re going to take your kid out of school. You have a few hurdles to get over, and they aren’t academic ones. Most states have clear rules about what you have to do if you homeschool. California has an undeserved reputation as a state that is “hard on homeschooling,” but it’s easy. Go to the HSC website if you want details.

The big question is, how do you get your kid on board? Even kids who are miserable in school often prefer the hell they know to the one they don’t. Perhaps they’ve even heard bad stuff about homeschooling (perhaps even from you!). And isn’t quitting school “giving up”?

I recommend a positive path toward choosing homeschooling. Rather than framing the choice as “quitting” and “leaving”–all these negative terms–, consider how you can talk positively about the choice. I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve heard speak negatively about school in front of their kids, only to have to resort to that choice again later. Better not to do the damage now than to have to backpedal later. Also, chances are that your child has a healthy affection for, say, his teacher who was so kind even though she couldn’t integrate him into the classroom. Vilifying her forces your child into a psychologically difficult position.

An important thing to do is to introduce your child to homeschooling and homeschoolers. Perhaps you can have “days off” where you do what you envision doing as a homeschooler, so your child has an idea what to expect. Also, it’s great to meet other homeschoolers (and great for the parent, too). You find out that they aren’t all weird (though many of us don’t mind being called that!), and they may have a lot in common with you and your child.

Easing your child into homeschooling: Do gifted kids need to “deschool”?

My correspondents had two answers to this question, and those answers were: Yes and No. (You didn’t think this was going to be easy, did you?)

*If you need to learn what “deschooling” is, visit this page. Generally speaking, deschooling is the time you take to decompress before you start to homeschool.

Yes:

Your child has learned to do only what is required.  Your child is not self-motivated.  Your child is way ahead academically and needs some downtime.

It sounds like taking time to deschool and get a sense of why you’re homeschooling is in order. Time off will not hurt your child — it can only help. In this case, don’t push too hard.

You need to watch your child and learn more about his learning style.  Your child lagged academically and you are eager to teach.

In this case, you may be tempted to jump right in. I don’t know how my child learns, so we’d better start now! Bad idea. I am so sure I will do a better job than his teachers of whipping him into shape and getting him to show his true brilliance. Definitely time for you to chill for a while and get to know each other.

Your child is resentful/angry about leaving school. You don’t know any other homeschoolers and the process is new to you.

You are leaving behind a lot of cultural assumptions that you’re going to have to learn to shed…slowly. Take some time before you think you know what homeschooling will look like in your home.

No way!

Your child has projects lined up because schoolwork took so much time. Your child is begging to get going on learning new things.

You know your child better than anyone else does. If deschooling just seems completely wrong to you because your child is so ready, go for it. I know one kid who left school and within a couple of years he was the top student (as a young teen) in all his community college math classes.

You and your child are “in sync” and you will notice if she goes into overload.

Here’s where you have to be completely honest with yourself: Are you really as clear on your child’s needs as you think? If so, then go for it. But watch carefully and be willing to step back if your child starts to resist.

What does gifted homeschooling look like?

Let’s face it: The homeschooling parents of gifted learners are taking on a bigger job in some ways. Our kids are more likely to be drawn to careers that require college, and thus we have a lot more riding on our decision to homeschool than a family whose child has no college aspirations. If your kid is fascinated with astrophysics, your choice to homeschool could literally dash his hopes into a million pieces. Then again, so could school, but no one person would have to take the blame. One of the hard parts of homeschooling is the level of pressure that society places on individual parents, whose kids may just as well have bombed out in school, too.

The great thing about gifted homeschooling is that it is just as varied as the homeschooling of any kid. It depends on the child, the family, and all sorts of other variables.

In my experience, there are gifted homeschoolers trying out all the variations on homeschooling:

  • School at home: This is where homeschool basically mimics school, but with only one desk. Many new homeschoolers try this route, especially if they sign up for a charter that requires lots of documentation.
  • Classical homeschooling: This approach centers on going back to a more old-fashioned definition of the educated mind. Here’s a magazine that could teach you about it.
  • Unschooling: Also called child-led learning, this is pretty much the polar opposite of school at home. Instead of being the teacher, you the parent are the facilitator. Whatever your kid expresses interest in, you try to help make it happen. Very pure unschooling is hard to do, because that would mean that the parent never makes a suggestion or prods in any particular direction. But lots of people who call themselves unschoolers do a bit of prodding and stealth education, just making sure their kids don’t notice.
  • Eclectic homeschooling: This approach works for families who don’t follow one particular philosophy. A little of this and a little of that. For example, my family is pretty unschooly in many ways, but I insist that my son (who is not terribly fond of math) keep up to grade level in math. So I’m unschool-y in language arts, and a little more structured in math.

My personal experience is that no matter what philosophy you are drawn to, most homeschooling families of gifted learners end up somewhere on the eclectic scale. Yes, there are those gifted kids who just learn all they need to with nary a prod from a parent, but they’re pretty unusual. Most gifted homeschoolers do take some classes or online courses, and do have some idea of academic goals, such as when they plan to take the SAT, or which gifted education program they might want to test into. By definition, these homeschoolers really can’t be called unschoolers in any pure sense.

The things you should take into consideration as you start building your homeschool life are:

  • relationship between homeschooling parent and child
  • the child’s maturity
  • the parent’s ability to teach subjects
  • availability of local resources
  • sporadic learning rather than constant change
  • depth over breadth
  • resistance to certain subjects
  • child favors certain learning modes
  • child may resist parent as “teacher”

Remember that no choice is forever. If you sign up for an online charter and your child is bored silly, just drop it. Don’t feel like you need to stick with a full school-year of anything. Remember, you’re homeschooling for more flexibility in your child’s education.

The most important thing you can do is to make sure to set up a support system:

  • Local homeschool programs: Hanging with other homeschoolers is so helpful. Be aware, though, that this is a general community group, and using the g-word in their presence will probably invoke those “all children are gifted” discussions that won’t do you or your child any good. Best to get your gifted support elsewhere.
  • Co-op classes: Join with other parents to offer variety of classes. This will work best in a population center where you’ll be able to find a good group of learners who resemble your children in some way.
  • Online classes: There are tons of classes both for pay and free. I always suggest trying the free ones first! Check out Hoagies’ Gifted and Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum for lots of links to resources.
  • Online support: Join the Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum Yahoo Group or other online forums to ask questions and seek advice.
  • Mentoring: As your child’s interests develop, find other adults willing to help. This is particularly useful if your child’s interests are far from yours. If you care nothing for astronomy, your astronomy lover might seek out mentors in the local astronomy club.

Do homeschoolers get into college?

Yes! In fact, a number of the best colleges now have special applications for homeschoolers, whose applications are apt to be very different from schooled kids’. Here are some ways your child can approach college:

  • Concurrent enrollment:
    Kids take some college classes at college or online while homeschooling. In this case, the child does not get a high school diploma, and thus registers at the cc as a special class of student. With the budget cuts at the community colleges, this option is becoming more difficult.
  • Community college leading to transfer to a university:
    For this option, the homeschooler matriculates (through getting a private school diploma or taking a high school equivalency exam such as the CHSPE in California), and enters CC as a student. The drawback to this is the it’s likely that your homeschooler will get so many credits, s/he won’t be able to apply to university as a freshman. It’s a great option if this doesn’t bother them.
  • Early 4-year:
    Some gifted kids are ready emotionally and academically to go early. In this case, your child needs to find out what the requirements are and how s/he can fulfill them as a homeschooler.
  • Traditional route:
    There is no reason why your child can’t wait until 18 if having a traditional college experience is important!

The only right answer is what’s right for your child’s temperament, areas of interest, and future plans. To get more information on these options, join the Yahoo Group Homeschool2College. Here are a few more considerations:

  • Prepare early: Start researching options a few years ahead of when the decisions will have to be made.
  • Get involved with others on the same path: Use local resources plus online support groups.
  • Get ready to let your teen lead the way. College readiness starts with ability to make their own decisions.

Evaluating success

I think this is one of the hardest part of homeschooling. Since homeschooled kids tend to move into a more natural way of learning — intense periods of growth followed by long periods of what seems like stagnation — it’s sometimes confusing and frustrating to decide whether they are on the right path. Some advice:

  • First of all, don’t compare: Kill those school demons! Your child will probably not develop and learn like school kids.
  • Second, remember that how long it takes to settle into homeschooling will vary from child to child.
  • Finally, remember that homeschooling is about whole child learning: Do you see your child’s growth in all areas?

It can be very helpful to observe before & after:

  • Confidence
  • Social skills
  • Focus on interests
  • Willingness to try new things
  • Follow-through

For older kids:

  • Goal-setting
  • Self-motivation
  • Willingness to face a challenge

Lots of parents, used to their schools testing all the time, wonder about assessment. I think it’s helpful to assess occasionally, but not to rely on it more heavily than on your own observations of how they’re doing. Consider:

  • Younger children: Occasional grade-level assessments if you’re concerned or want a benchmark.
  • Older children: College readiness and covering a set curriculum becomes more important.

Lots of parents wonder about whether their homeschooled child has to go through all the testing that they do at public schools for gifted programs. For homeschooled kids, I.Q. testing is not necessary unless you think it will offer you valuable information. Some parents find out valuable information about how their kids learn and what they need help with. But the raw score isn’t going to tell you anything particularly useful to homeschooling.

***

I’m now in the fifth year of homeschooling my daughter and the second for my son. It’s always a roller coaster and I’m the last person to say that it’s been easy. It’s not. But here is the question I ask whenever I feel a need to: Would my child be better off in school? If the answer isn’t a definitive “Oh, Yes!” then I figure I’m still on the right path. School can be great for many gifted learners. But if it’s not right for your child, don’t think of it as failure. Just choose a different path and discover where it leads you.

Comin’ back atcha

Posted on by Suki

The first time I was ever quoted in a newspaper, I was misquoted. It was a little thing — the writer simply misquoted a number. But it was humiliating to me — getting that number wrong made me look like I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Fast forward to my life as a journalist. I try to take great care when quoting other people to get it right. If I have any doubt, I shoot them off an e-mail to ask. If what they said wasn’t clear, I ask them if they’d like to clarify so I can use a quote that won’t misrepresent their meaning. But of course, I’m sure I make mistakes. If I annoyed you by how I wrote about you, I’m issuing a blanket apology! I didn’t mean to!

But it’s a good thing to get a little of my own medicine back at me. I was quoted this week in the Santa Cruz Good Times in the article “School’s Out… Forever” by John Malkin. I actually think John did a good job of explaining homeschooling and capturing the Santa Cruz homeschooling community’s vibe. And, as far as I can see, he got my quotes perfect. Right down to the one where my pronoun and antecedent didn’t match. (“You can always go back to school!” my husband just joked to me by IM.)

But it is really interesting to have my words put into someone else’s context, and I think it’s a great reminder for me that when I write about other people, I am taking little bits of them and putting them into something of mine.

The nice thing is, I have a blog, and John nicely linked to it, so I can respond at lightning speed!

I wanted to point out one thing that he didn’t make clear in the article: Lots of homeschoolers are not anti-school. Yes, it’s true that school was painful and boring to me, and I eventually dropped out rather than stick it out as I was expected to.

But I actually think that many schools do a great job for many kids. I’ve been involved with a few too many schools in my time, trying to find a place where my kids would thrive. At each school my kids have attended, and at each school where I know parents or teachers, and at each school I’ve written about, there are parents, teachers, staff, and even students who love their school! Schools, I believe, are not intrinsically the problem. And homeschooling is not necessarily the enemy of schools.

John sprinkled his article with quotes from John Taylor Gatto, a well-known anti-school writer. I have tried to read Gatto’s work. I did make it through one entire book. But I found the arguments so polemical, the bending of history to his point of view so obvious, and the unnecessary skewering of teachers so spiteful that I haven’t read much more.

Unlike the people who made up the term, I actually do believe in the “Big Tent” theory of our country. I believe that we have a framework that allows us to accommodate many different lifestyles and cultural norms, all under the stars and stripes. We have some common goals that we all have to embrace, but past that, we have room for military academies and AFE, prep schools and unschooling, charter schools and neighborhood schools.

So while I really appreciate the Goodtimes’ support of the Santa Cruz homeschooling community, I also feel a bit uncomfortable seeing my words right under this from Gatto: “Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.”

Well, no. Some schools may do that, but that doesn’t have to be the essence of a public school. And it’s certainly not true of any school I’ve been involved with.

So… I am smilingly swallowing my own medicine and thanking John for his thoughtful article. I’m glad that the GoodTimes is getting the word out about many of the wonderful homeschooling programs we have. But I just want to remind people, again, that loving one thing does not necessarily imply hating something else. It’s just the best choice for us, right now. Tomorrow? Ask me again when soccer camp’s over and I don’t have a quiet morning to myself to write in my blog!

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