Last summer, I had a really cool experience. Ready for it?
I talked to the people I work with every day.
Sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it? Actually, to most people I suppose it would sound unusual that I don’t talk to my coworkers, but that would be because you work IRL. Since my work is all online, it’s a rare treat for me to be able to spend time with my co-workers, people I text and email with almost every day.
It started with serendipity.
Dr. Kirsten Stein, the owner of Athena’s Advanced Academy, where I teach, has been friends with one of the other teachers for longer than Athena’s has existed. And she’s known another one of the teachers since birth (since that teacher is her daughter). When Prof. Becky announced a trip to California, we decided that we’d have our first in-person meeting with as many students and educators as we could muster.
A visit to the beach!
We met first to go tide-pooling, which was extra exciting since one of the teachers is a marine biology specialist. Since I live on the coast, I have been tide-pooling many times. But never with someone who could tell me about the reproductive habits of kelp.
Emma the Animal Lover explains the reproductive habits of kelp.
As soon as Emma the Animal-Lover started talking, I realized something cool was happening. I pulled out my cellphone and asked Emma and Becky to keep talking. We got lots of great video. (Forthcoming!)
Athena’s founder, educators, and students all in one place! What a treat!
A visit to the redwoods!
Then we decamped to my house for dinner. But first, we partook of the wonders of Nisene Marks State Park, which happens to be in my backyard. Professor Becky Riethmeier was out in front here, asking questions about the local flora and fauna. I pulled out as many of the names of plants as I could from the deep recesses of my mind. My kids and I made a homeschooling project of writing a book about the redwoods, but that was a good while ago.
The redwood canopy
It was very cool to walk in a forest I know so well with people who could ask such deep questions. From the crashing waves and wide-open space of the Monterey Bay to the filtered sunshine and dusty stillness of summertime redwoods is pretty much a day complete.
More friends and conversation!
But why stop there? Another Athena’s educator, Dr. Meg Wilson, lives nearby, and she arrived with her daughter and food for the potluck. We were complete!
Here’s where I get to the real theme here: I love our online school, and our online community. But there is nothing that cements it more than a real-life interaction with nature, food, and friendly conversation.
If your kids are learning online, make sure to try to connect that learning to their everyday lives. It’s not like we can always meet with friends who live thousands of miles away, but we can find ways to connect our online life to our real lives, and deepen the meaning of both.
Our kids are immersed in violent and despairing media every day, and it’s affecting what they write and share with each other. From the earliest days of telling tales around the campfire, violence in the stories we tell has played an important role. But not all violence is the same.
The morality of violence is important for students and caring adults in their lives to consider when they want to address violence in writing that they share with others. As I tell my students: Write whatever you need to write. But share only what is appropriate for the context.
Below are some questions that I ask my students to consider before they share work with violent content.
What is the intent of the violence?
Appropriate reasons to use violence
Artwork courtesy of Destiny Blue
Some children writing violent stories have an honest need to explore the reasons behind human violence in an attempt to understand it. In that case, the violence in their writing will raise questions about where violence comes from and what we can do to address it.
Some children use violence to heighten the danger that their characters are in, to bring about a more satisfying conclusion when the protagonist is able to defeat the antagonist. As long as the violence is appropriate within the context, like in the Harry Potter series, this is also acceptable.
Some children use fiction to create parallels to real violence that they have read about and experienced. In this case, again, it is acceptable when they use their writing to try to understand the moral basis of human conflict.
Inappropriate reasons to use violence
Some children have not yet learned that violence in writing is not just a flavoring, like grinding pepper on their pasta. Their intent seems to be to shock and titillate their audience. The violence in their pieces is often couched in revenge fantasies. Usually the antagonist wins in these stories.
Even worse, in some of this writing the protagonist is the evil person doing the violence, and they suffer no repercussions for their acts. Sometimes there is a thin veneer of “the other guy had it coming” that is supposed to explain their characters’ evil deeds, but often the violence is simply there because the writer perceives it as fun or cool. In the words of a teen writer I work with:
“I think they are trying use their edginess to differentiate themselves from their more ‘square’ peers.”
In other words, they are trying to be “cool” kids. This is not an acceptable reason to share violent stories with other kids.
What is the context for the violence?
Appropriate contexts
Artwork courtesy of Destiny Blue
Human stories of struggle often feature some amount of violence. In these stories, an individual or group is subjected to an unfair or discriminatory situation in which they are victimized by a more powerful group.
The Hunger Games is a good example. Katniss is not a violent person and tries very hard to maintain her moral judgment. But the government’s actions force her into a situation in which she has to make the decision whether to kill other people. Although quite violent, this series is deeply moral.
Inappropriate contexts
An immorally violent story sets the violence up as the main attraction. There is no particular justification for it within the context of the story. We are to accept that this is just an evil world, filled with evil people, and so it’s going to be fun to read about them.
Although I can’t come up with a mainstream published example because I choose not to read that sort of literature, Internet memes are rife with this sort of inappropriate violence. One student in my classes shared a piece based on a meme in which the narrator speaks about how fun it is to kill people. There is no context that explains his behavior, and no consequences for it.
Violence without context is always received by readers as a celebration of violence.
What is the nature of the violence?
Children’s stories have been full of violence since the beginning of time. The witch attempts to bake Hansel and Gretel alive! But in no mainstream telling of this book do we get graphic descriptions of the raised bubbles that form on their hands as they resist being put into the hot oven, and the smell of…
OK, I think you get the point.
Violence for children should be largely implied
Artwork courtesy of daveneff-d35ix6m
A child who has been exposed to many violent images will visualize plenty of details that were left out of Hansel and Gretel. But a child who doesn’t have violent imagery in their head will take the violence at face value. The witch tried to bake them, but she failed. That’s all that the child needs to consider.
We do not need to put new violent images into children’s heads. The world is full of violent images that they already live with.
Violence for children should be countered with kindness
A story in which there is only violence is simply immoral and inappropriate to share with children. The story of humanity is the struggle against our worst impulses and toward our better ones. Every religion addresses this struggle and attempts to help believers with stories that show goodness as well as evil. Children’s literature, similarly, has always tried to impart a secular version of this moral view.
The same goes for what our children write to share with others. They need to balance violence in their writing so that they can train their own perspective away from anger and despair.
A Tale of Two Stories
Last year, students shared two stories in one week that couldn’t be more different. I will keep details of the stories private, but here is what they looked like:
Story #1: The “look at me I’m cool” revenge fantasy
In this story, a narrator whose situation is never defined hears voices telling them to kill others who wronged them. There is graphic description of a dead body. There is no reason to believe that the narrator is a decent person who is in a difficult situation. In fact, there’s no context at all. We just hear this narrator telling us about their anger and despair and expecting us to share in it.
End of story.
Story #2: The Jewish diaspora, with creatures
I have no idea whether my young writer knew that they were writing the story of Jews throughout history, but the parallels were striking. In the story, a person who belongs to a maligned race of creatures moves from village to village, attempting to find others like them and acceptance from general society.
There was some violence in the story, including one member of the group being put to death. But there was only one detail, no titillation, and clear understanding in the context of the story that this person’s killing was immoral and caused anguish to the others.
It was also clear to any reader that this story was an exploration of what happens when a minority group is misunderstood and maligned. This was written by a child, certainly, but a child who was grappling with what it means to be a decent person.
Violence can be moral
Children’s fiction without conflict is the Bob books. Dick and Jane. In other words, books that attempt to do nothing but teach reading skills. Real literature explores conflict, and conflict is uncomfortable.
Not all conflicts in children’s reading need to be violent. But there is a place for appropriate violence. I believe that reading Anne Frank’s diary and learning about World War II permanently shaped my view of moral behavior in societies.
I can hardly imagine this, but what if the book I had read was an unapologetic diary of a Nazi soldier who enjoyed killing people…written for children? Even if that soldier had been put to death in the end, the point of a book like that would have been to teach me to despair that humans can act in moral ways.
What can we do?
I’ll end where I started: I encourage my students to write everything in their heads. I encourage them to keep journals and explore their worst thoughts if it helps them.
But when we share our writing with others, we are making implicit moral choices and making explicit declarations of who we are as people. I encourage all parents to ask their kids these questions, and then listen to the answers.
2e: Twice Exceptional is a low-budget documentary with heart. There’s nothing fancy about this peek into the lives of twice-exceptional teens, their parents, and their teachers.
But just the existence of this documentary is revolutionary enough.
2e?
The average reader’s first question is obvious: 2e? What’s that? I wrote a long discourse on the topic which you can access here. However, the short answer is that a twice-exceptional child is both gifted and has a disability. That disability could be physical, emotional, neurological. But no matter what the disability, the end result is that the disability often masks the giftedness.
There have been some movies made about 2e people without identifying them as such. The most prominent that comes to mind is My Left Foot, about a child so physically compromised, he couldn’t communicate what was happening in his very active brain. It is a dramatic and beautiful movie.
In contrast, this documentary focuses in on real, everyday teens fighting the battle between their intellect and the issues that compromise their ability to access education, communicate, and achieve. There’s not a lot of drama here, just a clear look at the hard work of supporting these students into adulthood.
What you’ll see
This one-hour documentary is long on direct interviews. Parents explain their journey from thinking they were raising typical kids to being plunged into the chaos of raising a child with special needs. Teachers talk about their experiences working with this difficult, but rewarding, population.
The focus, however, is on the kids themselves. And in this movie, they make a compelling argument for why we need more educational flexibility. Many of these students argue that without their 2e-dedicated school (Bridges Academy in Los Angeles), they would have been lost in a system not equipped to handle them.
The drama centers on Pi Day, when the students compete to memorize Pi to the furthest amount of digits. Punctuated with students struggling to perform the digits they have memorized, we hear from the students themselves about their challenges and their dreams.
Limits exposed
The limits of this documentary mirror our society as a whole. With its dense population and surfeit of wealthy donors, L.A. is the sort of place where such a school can exist. In most places, such as my county where our only school serving 2e students just closed, there is neither the large number of 2e students nor the concentration of wealth to support such a school.
The limits of this documentary point out the limits in our society as a whole. In most places in this country, a 2e student is lucky to get a couple of teachers throughout their school years who understand and connect with them. It’s hard enough for gifted students to find teachers trained in the special needs of giftedness. (Most teacher trainings do not require study of gifted learners.)
But most teachers have absolutely no training in how to serve the needs of gifted students with disabilities.
Awareness is key
Documentaries like this one can help by spreading awareness of these students’ existence, their great potential, and their educational needs. By the end of the movie, it’s clear how much these kids have to offer society. Many similar kids, spread around the world, are not receiving the support they need. They are languishing in special education programs that do not support their academic needs. They are bullied and emotionally harmed by fellow students and teachers in regular education. Their parents are told they need medication and therapy.
The teachers in the documentary make a strong case for an educational approach that is sadly rare in our society: instead of focusing on these students’ deficits, they focus on their strengths and interests. This is messy, complicated education. It’s expensive and the payoff is sometimes not obvious. It’s very hard to quantify.
But when you see these students move past their disabilities as they shine in their abilities, you can see that it’s all worth the trouble.
It’s the sort of question homeschoolers report receiving in stores, at the Thanksgiving dinner table, while pumping gas… In this case, it was in the hot tub at my health club.
He prefaced the question by explaining that public education “was sort of a family business,” with relatives working as teachers and administrators. When he found out that I teach homeschoolers, and homeschooled my own children, that question was his response.
What do I have against the public school system?
I can’t answer for all homeschoolers, but I can certainly answer for myself:
I have nothing against the public school system
My husband and I were both educated in fine public schools. We had planned to send our children to our neighborhood public schools, and tried very hard to do so. But a variety of issues got in our way.
Like America’s founders, I believe that a healthy, robust public school system is essential to our democracy. That said, public schools can’t do it all.
All public schools are not equal
Our first foray away from public school, I have to admit, had something to do with convenience and a lot to do with environment. Our local school’s kindergarten program, at the time we looked at it, was overcrowded and uninspired.
It also started at 7:42 in the morning, and I had a baby. Frankly, I didn’t want to have to get a sleepy child to school at 7:30.
I won’t apologize for what we did: We bought our older child a really cool year of climbing trees and playing in the mud at an experiential learning school on an old farm. It didn’t end up being the school for us long term, but at the time, its relaxed schedule and lack of kindergarten academics suited us just fine.
Later in our children’s school years we avoided our local public schools for other reasons. Our high school didn’t offer the college-level math, science, and computer science that one of my kids wanted. It didn’t offer a band program for my other student. Because we have the resources (and I understand that not everyone does) we chose homeschool for one of the kids and a different public high school for the other.
Not every public school is equipped to handle every child
When my younger child was in preschool, it became clear that we were facing some difficult developmental issues. No diagnosis seemed to fit. School environments exacerbated the problems. Everyone we consulted with had the same advice: avoid public school special education for this child.
First we tried a little private kindergarten in a cabin in the redwoods. That failed. Then we tried homeschool. That succeeded. Our public schools just weren’t set up for our child’s needs at that time.
Not every child is right for public school
When my older child joined us in homeschooling, it was because he was very advanced and self-motivated in some areas and completely uninterested in others. In school, he would have been a mediocre student. In homeschool, he was a star. Eventually, he caught up in his lagging areas and he’s now a successful college student.
In school, he’d been frustrated that he didn’t have time to follow his passions. Once he had that time, he was more willing to address other areas of learning in a more gentle fashion.
Not every family needs to follow the same path
Traditional public education emphasizes following standards. In all seriousness, an adult once asked me how my children were going to be able to be educated if they didn’t follow California public schools’ standard of studying the mission system in fourth grade.
Maybe you think the answer is obvious, but for that parent it wasn’t. The possibility that a family could study missions at a different age, or not study missions at all, didn’t occur to her. Lest that seem a bit ridiculous, it’s important to remember that standards weren’t based on how children actually learn. They were based on how children were traditionally taught. My children are now extremely well-educated, though neither of them studied missions in fourth grade or memorized their times tables in third.
(I will add that neither my husband nor I, both raised in other states, knew much about California missions until we moved here!)
And by the way, homeschoolers can attend public school
We did, in fact, use the public school system throughout our homeschooling years. In our county, we are fortunate to have a healthy slate of alternative public school options!
Freedom of choice is as American as the Constitution
Freedom of choice is firmly embedded in the founding of this country. Our founding documents inspired governments and revolutions around the world for a simple reason: Freedom of choice—control over your religion, your body, who you associate with, what you do for a living—is fundamentally important.
Of course we all support reasonable limits on choices. We don’t allow parents to abuse children, but we do allow reasonable discipline. We don’t allow murder, but we do allow doctors not to continue life-prolonging treatments. We shouldn’t allow educational neglect, but we do allow a certain amount of freedom of choice in how our children are educated.
Education is a balancing act
We start with a baby, and if we’re lucky, we send a fully functioning adult out into the world. But there are many ways to get from the beginning to the desired end result.
Homeschooling is just one way to balance our children’s needs with the opportunities available to us. Homeschooling is not for everyone, and it won’t solve all the world’s problems.
But the freedom to choose homeschooling improves children’s lives, and I believe it can strengthen our public schools as well.
My husband and I are both graduates of Stanford University, though the university we went to bears little resemblance to today’s Stanford. I was in one of the last classes admitted under “Dean Fred”—the amazing Fred Hargadon who knew that although test scores are nice, a truly great student body is made up of diverse, passionate people who are….a little bit weird.
You know how you read stories and they’re just stories, and then you read a story and something really hits home?
This did it for me:
Zhao is in the Stanford class that my son would have been in.
My son got higher test scores than she did. (They published hers; his are a state secret!)
My son did nothing in high school that was aimed at impressing Stanford. He did cool, amazing things that were an expression of who he is. She engineered her way in with precision.
My son did not bribe anyone; my son was not admitted. She paid, and was admitted. Her parents protest that they thought they were donating, but even in that case, WWDFS? (What Would Dean Fred Say?)
Wherefore art thou, Dean Fred?
I realize that there are other reasons that my son isn’t at Stanford. There were legions of kids with great scores who applied and didn’t get in. But it really makes me wonder: Which kid’s place did this young woman take? How many brilliant kids is Stanford rejecting to make room for kids whose parents will build them a new building?
And it makes me wonder even more:
If Stanford is full of kids like this, why would anyone want to go there?
If Stanford is full of kids like this, why would anyone want to teach there?
If Stanford is full of kids like this, why should any decent kid apply?
If it wasn’t glaringly apparent already, it is now: Elite universities are no longer places where intelligent and creative people should want to be, whether as students, parents, or faculty. They are all about making money for themselves.
Certainly, there were dull rich kids at Stanford when I was there. There were kids who were there just to please their pushy parents. There were the kids of celebrities, who may well have paid to get in.
But for the most part, the student population was made of kids who had something just a little bit unusual on top of their test scores. A common conversation that Dean Fred students would have was, “So, why do you think you got in?”
I heard lots of reasons, from “I started a successful company when I was 14” to “I was homeless and a teacher took me in after seeing some drawings I made.”*
These days, it seems, the answer to that question would be obvious:
“Why am I at Stanford? Oh, well, my parents paid to get me in.”
