Category: Education

The value of the personal touch….online!

Posted on by Suki
This photo is of a group of students who met for the first time. They are members of a long-running writing group and it was as if they were old friends…because they are even though they’ve never met IRL.

In my summer off from teaching online at Athena’s, I didn’t stop working. I read books, updated my classrooms, emailed with students and parents, consulted with our wise Athena (a.k.a. Dr. Kirsten), and sat in a circle on a lawn with some of my longtime students.

Wait, don’t I teach online? Isn’t online teaching all about being separated from your students?

Yes! And No!

Teaching is about connecting

One of my most important jobs as an online teacher is finding ways to connect with my students personally even though we are not in the same room, the same state, and even sometimes the same country. It’s a tricky part of online teaching.

This summer I got to see the fruits of my labor when I was hired to speak at a conference that, it turned out, a good number of Athena’s students would attend. I declared a time and place for the meeting and then, well, decided I’d have to wing it.

30-some homeschoolers meet on a lawn…

If I’d been a classroom teacher, I would have had physical memories to draw on: I could have brought familiar items from the classroom or done activities we’d already done together. But what would we do in an outdoor space?

The first challenge was to get everyone to make a circle. School is very good at teaching kids how to form geometric shapes. Homeschool, not so much!

Once we’d done it, though, I felt like we were back in our Blackboard classroom (which had developed ninety-degree weather, well-watered grass, and slices of watermelon being passed out by a parent). All the eager hands; those familiar voices chiming in with their creative, intelligent, and wacky ideas; and the smiles, though this time they were real rather than emojis. 😊

And then we connected

Here I am presenting at the conference.

When I asked the students what they liked about Athena’s, they pointed out everything that we teachers hope to convey: a safe space for all kinds of kids; a place where they could express their ideas; a place where they could explore a wide variety of topics with teachers who love what they teach and other passionate students.

I noticed that Dr. Kirsten had to wipe away tears!

Online education fills a need

The fact is, yes, we teach online. But no, we aren’t disconnected from our students. Online learning will never replace physical get-togethers, but it it fills a need that many students have. Our students feel that they are part of a community of kids and adults who share values and passions.

For me, the experience was one of the most memorable of my teaching career. Nevertheless, I’m happy to be back in our webinar room….though it is BYO sunshine, grass, and yummy watermelon.

A place to focus on success: Explore MCP

Posted on by Suki

I don’t usually write in my blog what might seem like a promotional piece for a particular business, but in this case, I am moved to let the community know more about an endangered resource: Explore MCP. When I tell people about the school, they often respond, “Explore what?” And then I have to figure out how to answer succinctly when the answer I want to give would take hours.

Here is my succinct answer: “It’s a tiny private school in Scotts Valley that serves the needs of unusual learners.”

But that leaves out so much! The school describes itself as serving ‘students who learn differently,’ then continues by explaining that all children learn differently. So much for succinct. It’s hard for a school with such an unusual mission to explain anything in 20 words or fewer.

The last resort

MCP gets kids out and about in the community.

The long answer starts with a long list of children, one of mine included, who entered MCP as a last resort. These kids largely came from public schools, but some also from homeschooling and private schools. These kids had usually been subjected to years of testing, educational specialists, interventions, special classrooms, new schools, medical specialists, and therapists (not to mention the occasional legal team). And almost all of them find MCP when all other educational options seem to be exhausted.

“The goal at MCP is to develop each student’s potential by embracing different ways of learning and exploring different ways of being intelligent.”

Then, it seems, almost always the students and parents have the same response: Why didn’t we try MCP first?

Focus on success

MCP does something that I have long advocated to homeschoolers: they focus on success. Instead of asking, “what is wrong with this child?” they ascertain what is right, what works. Then they proceed to do more of it. It sounds logical, but this isn’t the way that other schools have worked for MCP students.

These students are unusual: MCP doesn’t serve the needs of typically developing students (though I have to say, I think all children would get a better education through MCP’s approach) or severely impaired students who are better-served by the public schools. MCP students are different from the norm but also different from each other. MCP serves kids with learning differences, physical disabilities, high-functioning autism, gender dysphoria, depression, and more—but who are learning at or above grade level. It’s quite a challenge, and yet the tiny, close-knit staff works like a team of Cirque du Soleil acrobats, keeping the delicate balance of running a school while also serving the individual needs of such a diverse group of kids.

And on top of that, MCP prepares these kids to be college-ready, arming them with skills ranging from how to register online to how to negotiate disagreements with professors.

It comes down to numbers

In the beginning of this piece, I referred to MCP as “endangered.” That’s because it’s in a niche that, so far, no school I’ve heard of has ever survived in longterm. Most kids with special needs go to public school, and many are served well by public schools. But MCP takes on the hard job of educating students whose needs are so specialized that the public schools aren’t able to help. By design, therefore, MCP doesn’t attract the wealthy families who form the core of other private school populations. Parents find MCP through desperation, and do not come from a single demographic. (Some of the students’ tuition is actually paid through public school districts.)

MCP’s staff would like to do just a few things very well:

  • They want to educate the students who fit their mission rather than admitting students who don’t belong at the school just to receive the tuition.
  • They want to be able to serve any student who needs them, regardless of family income.
  • They want to be able to pay their hardworking staff a living wage.
  • They want to stay in our very expensive community.

Those modest goals are nearly impossible for a tiny nonprofit with no deep-pocket donors. The students come from as far as away as Monterey County and Santa Clara County, but they only come when they find out about the school, and outreach to such a tiny percentage of the population is difficult.

What can you do?

“Students benefit from working with neurologically diverse peers because they are able to adopt, and adapt to a wider range of learning styles and problem solving tactics.”

The main thing I hope that my readers will do is spread the word about MCP. Continued healthy enrollment is the top priority. People who should know that MCP exists include:

  • Public school teachers, administrators, and support staff
  • Private school teachers, administrators, and support staff
  • Therapists
  • Tutors
  • Doctors
  • Lawyers (unfortunately)
  • Parents

I would hope that a few families will stumble across this article and think, “This might be the place for our child.”

The other thing, of course, is to support MCP in any way you can, even small donations. I’d love it if this piece ended up on the screen of a wealthy donor who wants to make a difference. I’m not holding my breath on that one, but stranger things have happened. MCP needs operating expenses, which are very hard for small nonprofits to get through grant-writing; a scholarship fund so they can serve any student who walks in the door; and an endowment to carry them through years when unexpected expenses arise.

I describe our experience with Explore MCP as “transformational.” Another mom said to me, “It still surprises me that when there’s a problem, they try to solve it rather than just saying my kid needs to change to fit their agenda.” MCP is not the school for everyone, which is why it’s such a good school for the small number of students it serves. I can only hope that in ten years’ time when a desperate parent finds this blog post, they will be able to click on this link and see Explore MCP still up and running, doing its very important service for its uncommon, wonderful population of students.

Making it up as we go along

Posted on by Suki

When I think back to cultural trends that happened during my kids’ early years, there are a few that stand out as important. Both kids were born after the Web but before the iPhone, and my fellow parents and I have watched as our children’s lives took on explorations and dangers literally not dreamt of in our childhoods.

We’re Makers

But there were other trends running counter to this relentless pull into the digital future. In our lives, the Maker movement was perhaps the most prominent. In a time when you can buy anything you want with the click of a mouse, people started to value making again. And when people started to value making again, they didn’t just value professionally made, “artisanal” goods, though those of course have gained prominence at the same time. People started to value the role of the amateur in our cultural and commercial lives.

Amateur means you do it out of love

As a musician, I see this through the lens of what has happened in music. Before the second half of the 20th century, music was in the hands, and voice, of anyone who wanted it. Americans banged on cans, strung strings over cigar boxes, or just yelled out a tune as best they could. Varying by income, culture of origin, and social status, everyone had a piano, a fiddle, an accordion, a steel drum, or a recorder in their house. We had a shared national treasury of folk music, and regional and ethnic music as well. We had our most important American art form, jazz. We had well-funded symphonies in small towns and music in every school.

My father has been an amateur winemaker my whole live, so Making was a part of my childhood.

Then something happened: People started thinking that music was something that professionals did. Music was something you paid a ticket for, bought a disk of, or listened to on the radio. We became consumers. Fewer children had music lessons; fewer families had instruments in their houses.

Enter technology

I have to admit that I never expected to see this trend turn around. But technology, that thing that is turning our kids into zombies by some accounts, has revived music in an unexpected way. While music instruction is still down, folk music—and by that, I mean music that any folk can pick up with the tools available around them—seems to be busting out of its old confines.

Have you ever watched a kid play with Garage Band? How about a simple music app on their phone? Do your kids seek out amateur Youtube videos the way you used to go to the record store to flip through albums?

It’s not just music

To me, this is all part of the growing Maker ethic in our culture, a return to the belief that the act of making something has intrinsic worth, even if the product isn’t worth anything (monetarily speaking). Take a look at Etsy, at local craft fairs, and at open mics if you want to find passionate amateurs doing something out of love. Read any teaching blog and you’ll find discussion of project-based learning (otherwise known as Making).

Oh, yeah, I could be pessimistic

Not everyone is Making. Some kids have turned into zombies controlled by their little devices. Heck, I’ve had students complain that their parents have turned into zombies while the kids are just fine. Most schools no longer have healthy programs in music, art, home ec, shop—all those places where Making used to happen.

But instead…

When in doubt of what to make, slime is always a good option.

I haven’t yet visited a local Mini Maker Faire, but this weekend I plan to. My 15-year-old saw a sign and his eyes lit up. “Can we go?” Nothing  like a Maker Faire sign to make a teenager forget to be snarky (at least for a short time)! I’m looking forward to seeing all the stuff that people are getting into these days, along with some presentations by local corporations. From people with graduate degrees down to a kid who made something cool in his garage, we’ll celebrate people getting into it and enjoying Making for the process.

amateur (n.)
1784, “one who has a taste for some art, study, or pursuit, but does not practice it [professionally],” from French amateur “one who loves, lover” (16c., restored from Old French ameour), from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) “lover, friend.”

Related:

5 reasons why homeschooling is a vital educational option

Posted on by Suki

Homeschooling is in the news again because of a sensational story: one homeschooling family severely neglected their children.The knee-jerk response to a problem like this is to restrict, regulate, or abolish.

But have no doubt about it, homeschooling is an educational choice that is a vital one for families. Here are five reasons why homeschooling needs to remain an option for all families:

1. Different people, different educational needs

Our schools, whether mainstream public schools or elite private schools, are largely set up to offer one-size-fits-all education. The few schools that actually serve the needs of kids on the fringes are generally too expensive for most families. That leaves an enormous gap that is filled by homeschooling.

Although I know many people who homeschool largely because of their family values, a good percentage of families come to homeschooling originally because of educational needs that aren’t being served. Gifted children, twice-exceptional children, children with learning disabilities, children with specialized academic interests—it’s hard to find a single school that serves their needs. When it works for the family, homeschooling is uniquely suited to these students. Most homeschoolers in this category do “go to school”—just not one school. Their education is patched together using trained educators, therapists, and schools to meet their unusual mix of needs.

2. Promotion of family values

Back in the 80’s when “family values” became a code phrase for right-wing Christian, I would have recoiled at using the phrase for myself. However, I believe that “values” has now been reclaimed and redefined. Although many homeschoolers choose it for religious reasons, many others choose it because of family values that come from another religion or are not religious in nature.

Every time yet another article about toxic school environments hits the Internet, homeschoolers trade them around with comments such as “this is why we homeschool.” Some families value non-violence and homeschool to maintain a peaceful, vegetarian lifestyle. Other families value cross-cultural communication, and they homeschool so that they can travel, learn other languages, and provide service work in needy areas. Some families homeschool because their unusual child was bullied. Some families homeschool simply because they value education, and their children’s schools seem not to.

3. Pushing innovation and choice

Over the time since I started homeschooling, it’s happened over and over: I learn about a new educational idea from homeschoolers, and then I watch as it trickles into mainstream education. Does your school have a STEM program? No schools I knew of had one when I started homeschooling, but homeschoolers were all over it. Now it’s become a staple of more progressive schools. Does your child have a teacher who is integrating project-based and child-led learning into the classroom? Homeschoolers have been doing that forever.

When a culture allows educational choice, it encourages innovation.

4. Resisting groupthink

Yep, this sounds pretty lefty-liberal, but it’s part of homeschooling on all parts of the political spectrum. Homeschoolers of various types have their own problems with groupthink, of course—it’s only human to want to be part of the flock. But the choice to homeschool is a choice to forge your own path, no matter what your political direction is. The parents who choose homeschooling “because all my friends are doing it” are generally the least successful. It’s the parents who resist groupthink who find their home in homeschooling.

5. It’s a free world

This is something people used to say a lot when I was a kid in the Midwest, and I have mixed feelings about it because it was often used to justify bigotry. But the fact is, living in a society that controls every aspect of the citizen’s lives isn’t good for anyone. In order to take the good we get with freedom, we also have to accept the risks. Granting freedom to our citizens comes with the responsibility to maintain a delicate balance between free rights and social responsibility. Every time we face a new issue in our society, from vaccination to teaching evolution, we have the obligation to weigh the freedom to live as we wish with our responsibility to maintain a healthy, safe society for everyone.

Homeschooling, to me, is one of the risks we have to allow. We don’t require education, training, or any sort of license for parents. It’s the most dangerous occupation we allow people to practice without regulation. Yes, there are bad parents. And some bad parents inevitably choose homeschooling. But the good that we get as a society from allowing this choice is worth the risk.

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.

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