Tag: book review

Review: Getting gifted homeschoolers (almost) right

Posted on by Suki

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl
by Stacy McAnulty
Random House, 2018

As a teacher of gifted learners, I am always interested in how they are portrayed in kids’ books. Generations of smart kids had to see themselves portrayed as clueless, clumsy, antisocial idiot savants. The Great Brain aside, it was definitely not cool to be smart.

And then there’s what mainstream writers do to homeschoolers. They’re weirdo Christian separatists who have never learned how to behave in polite society. At least sometimes they get to be vampires, too.

Stereotypes don’t come from nowhere—there’s almost always a kernel of truth. But it’s a writer’s job to go beyond the stereotype and find the real person.

Stacy McAnulty does just that in The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl.

This middle grade novel presents us with a familiar gifted homeschooler: Lucy is very weird. Struck by lightning when she was younger, she’s now a middle schooler who’s never been to school, whose OCD makes her stick out in any crowd, and who is immediately the target of Maddie, the alpha dog bully of her grade. Lucy is in school because her grandmother, who’s her guardian, believes she needs to be socialized. Yet another homeschooler/gifted kid stereotype.

But that’s where the stereotypes end, and the real child emerges.

First of all, Lucy does not buy her grandmother’s arguments for a minute. She knows that she’s not the problem—other kids and adults are the problem. Her grandmother (a wonderful character despite her stereotypical belief in the fallacy of socialization) has raised her well. She’s a self-possessed, thoughtful kid who makes the thoroughly believable choice not to let anyone know just how smart she is.

As she tells the girl who becomes her best friend, Windy, her OCD already makes it clear she’s weird. She doesn’t need any other baggage.

Charmingly, Lucy thinks her way through the problem and calculates how to get through this mandatory year of socialization. Just the fact that she’s able to do this disproves her grandmother’s opinion that she needs to be socialized—she gets what the other kids and the teachers need, and she sets about giving it to them.

She purposely becomes an A student, good enough to get into the college she wants to attend—but not a perfect A student. She calculates how to do just well enough not to gain too much attention.

She knows she’s not going to be acceptable to most of the other kids, so she doesn’t try. She presses on fulfilling her own needs for order (she has to sit and stand three times before sitting down in class) and cleanliness (the kids call her “the cleaning lady” because she wipes down every surface she comes into contact with using disposable wipes she carries in her backpack). But she’s thoughtful and kind to the other students, and soon at least two of them notice and accept her.

The miscalculation in the title does not refer to her attempt to deceive the others—she fits in well enough that the kids and teachers don’t guess just how smart she is until various circumstances lead to her unmasking. Her miscalculation is that she’ll be able to ride out this year without forming real friendships, experiencing real growth, and actually learning something (though not necessarily what her teachers think she’s learning).

I loved how realistic Lucy is, how all the characters (even the bully) are well-drawn and sympathetic, and how the book gets past almost all of the usual stereotypes and gifted homeschooler tropes.

I finished with only one question: Why does it take a strike of lightning to make Lucy smart? Why can’t she just be a generic smart kid, born that way? I know that the lightning offered a fun opportunity for characterization. But it’s a bit like writing a story about a white kid who wakes up Black and has to face racism. Why not just write about a Black kid?

Gifted kids are real. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them do have disabilities (called twice-exceptionalities in the gifted world). Some of them are socially awkward.

But they’re all people, and they deserve to be integrated into our schools—and our literature—as fully human and deserving of the same care and respect as everyone else. The fact that the author chose to make Lucy homeschooled gets at an ugly truth: Our society can be very, very nasty to kids who don’t fit in. Teachers largely don’t like being corrected. (Lucy actually keeps her mouth shut when her math teacher makes a mistake on a problem, for good reason.) Kids don’t like being bested, especially when it’s so easy for the gifted kid to do it. (Lucy is careful not to be the best at anything.)

But gifted kids are not an accident, not a strike of lightning. They’re just one side of the wonderful rainbow of human variability. Let’s just accept them and move on.

So yes, this is a great book for your gifted kid, but when they ask why they are the way they are, make sure they know that they are no accident. They are exactly the way they’re supposed to be.

Related:

The Search For The Girl Scientist In Literature

Books Featuring Homeschoolers

Educated: A belated book review

Posted on by Suki

I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.

But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…

And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.

On the fringe of the fringe

Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.

The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.

The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.

Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.

Is this homeschooling?

In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.

Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.

However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.

The village raised the child

Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.

Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.

An older brother acted like a parent.

A friend in town acted like a brother.

A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.

A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.

As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.

A final rift

There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.

Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.

In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.

The ultimate homeschooler?

Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.

This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.

Further reading:

Young writers’ reading list

Posted on by Suki

The most important thing that young writers can do to develop their skills is write, write, and write some more.

In conjunction with writing, young writers should read great writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, jokes, text messages…. The form doesn’t actually matter. The more great writing they read, the more the rhythm of language will take root in their heads.

But finally, young writers can be really inspired by books about writing and reading. Below are a few of my favorites for young writers of a variety of ages.

Spilling Ink: A Young Writer’s Handbook

The two adult writers of this book address kid writers as equals: fellow writers struggling to find out what they want to say and to say it well. My students love the advice in this book and they love the “I Dare You” prompts sprinkled throughout.


Rip the Page!

This is a book full of fun, inspiring prompts. My students love it. But I do ask them not to actually rip the pages…

Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
Ray Bradbury was probably the single most inspiring writer to me as a young writer. I didn’t discover this book until I was looking for a good book on writing for my more advanced writing students. This is not for novice writers or readers, and at times Bradbury can be a bit bawdy. (One of the pieces is entitled “Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle”!) But my advanced students love it as much as I do. It would be a great one to read along with reading the books that Bradbury references in his essays.


Shelf Life: Stories by the Book

It often takes a whole semester before students realize what all these stories have in common: they are all about books and reading in one way or another. There aren’t many contemporary short story collections for kids that don’t focus on “classic” stories. Although I love the great writers of the past (see Little Worlds below), some kids just aren’t ready to read past the antiquated language and into a world that doesn’t connect well with theirs. The situations and characters in Shelf Life are accessible and inspiring.

Little Worlds: A Collection of Short Stories for the Middle School

There aren’t a lot of great collections of classic stories for kids. I have to say, most of these stories require a high school reading level. I would also venture to say that most middle schoolers wouldn’t have the depth of understanding needed to really “get” these stories. For that reason, I always have to apologize about the book’s title to my teen readers, who may think that it’s a book for “little kids.” But of course, few of the stories in this collection were actually written for kids. They include many of the greatest short stories that have inspired writers for generations.

My “Teaching Writing” series:

Math Stories: Fun, Deep Learning for Elementary Students

Posted on by Suki

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

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

Sir Cumference was our introduction to math stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources

  • Living Math is a website full of great math resources

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

Book review: Raising Human Beings

Posted on by Suki

Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child
Dr. Ross Greene
Scribner, 2016

There are times when I fervently wish that all human beings were raised to understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration. This is one of those times.

I’ve been meaning to write a review of Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child by Dr. Ross Greene ever since it came out. Uncharacteristically, I bought this book in hardcover. Perhaps that’s because when my younger child was 10, I believe that I joined with a zeitgeist of parents around the country who willed Raising Human Beings into reality. Collectively, we had read Greene’s The Explosive Child because we had a child of that description, then realized that it was also the perfect manual for raising any human being, explosive or otherwise.

Dr. Greene apparently heard our collective cry for a book aimed at all parents outlining his approach, which so improved the lives of families trying to raise difficult children. He heard us, and Raising Human Beings was born.

Greene starts from a place of simple logic: All children want to do well if they can. As much as we want to impute devious motives to our misbehaving children, they are misbehaving not because they want to

Drive

   Us

     Out

        Of

            Our

                  Minds,
but because they simply need something. Sometimes they have no idea what they need. Sometimes they think they need something completely different than what they really need. But they have a need nonetheless.

Greene’s approach is to teach parents to work with their little human beings starting not from an assumption of misbehavior, but from a place of empathy and compassion. Our little human beings are works in progress. They need our guidance to learn how to work within this complicated, confusing world. As parents, it’s our job to raise our children, not to beat them down or lord over them.

All of us want to raise the best human beings we can, but many of us fall back on the flawed reasoning that informed previous generations of parents. Dr. Greene calls this Plan A, and he understands why you use it. It’s quick, dirty, and seems (sometimes) effective. It feels good to say “because I said so.” Getting angry can be cathartic.

But Plan A isn’t what our kids need in this world. We live in a Plan B world. In this world, you’ll do best if you know how to figure out what other people need, understand your own needs, and learn to collaborate so everyone gets their needs met as well as possible.

Plan B is complicated, slow, and frustrating. I would venture to predict that most parents actually give up on it somewhere before actual full realization of the approach (I certainly did). But I feel very confident that all families will benefit from however much of this approach you can implement in your particular family situation.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you have a particularly tough nut to crack, get The Explosive Child instead or in addition. It will improve your lives, and you will send out into the world healthy human beings who understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration.

And we could all use a few more of those around.

Now available