Tag: homeschooling

Movie Review: Everything would be fine if you just got over that homeschooling thing….

Posted on by Suki

A number of friends have recommended the film “Captain Fantastic” to me. None of them were homeschoolers, and when they recommended it they didn’t even mention the homeschooling angle.

Perhaps, given where I live, they were more riveted by the Buddhism and the “stick it to the man” angles.

However, upon reading the reviews, I was looking forward to this film. It sounded like a magnified version of so many homeschoolers I know:

  • trying to raise their kids away from the corrupting influence of popular culture
  • trying to get back to what was good about traditional culture
  • trying desperately not to replicate the mistakes that they think their parents made

“Captain Fantastic” was all that. The film starts with a comic book version of what I know to be the days of many homeschoolers I am acquainted with: The dad is spending real, focused time with his kids. They are in nature. He has borrowed a tradition that he feels had value in the past and updated it [sorta] for his own modern uses.

The movie starts with homeschool bootcamp. (Admit it, homeschoolers, haven't you wished your kids would go along with something like this?)
The movie starts with homeschool bootcamp. (Admit it, homeschoolers, haven’t you wished your kids would go along with something like this?)

Keeping the expectations low

I’m not concerned about the comic book nature of the film. By virtue of the medium, films need to present concentrated versions of reality, the same way that haute cuisine reduces an honest broth to a concentrated perfection only served by professionals.

The homeschoolers in this movie are to homeschooling what superheroes are to police officers with their feet on the pavement.

That said, couldn’t this one movie, which is quirky and wonderful in so many ways, have risen above the obvious cliché that it ends with? Really, can all our problems be solved by sending our kids to school?

Apparently, they can.

What’s great about this movie

Here’s a recap of how this movie progresses:

  • Homeschooling family comes out of the woods to attend Mom’s funeral
  • Homeschooled kids find out how essentially weird they are
  • Homeschooled kids also find out how well-educated they are in comparison to their schooled peers
  • Well-intentioned grandparents attempt to take kids from loving, though misguided, father
  • Kids decide to stick with dad
All dressed up for Mom's funeral!
All dressed up for Mom’s funeral!

This is all pretty good, yes? It hits the major points:

  • Yep, homeschoolers are weird and guess what? We don’t care!
  • Granted, though some homeschoolers are ill-educated louts, homeschooling can be more effective than school for motivated learners.

It doesn’t sugarcoat things, but also doesn’t demonize parents who made admittedly weird decisions.

Then… the dénouement:

  • As a result of seeing The Real World, the oldest homeschooler, who has been accepted into “every top university” and clearly loves learning, decides to forego college entirely. Wha’?
  • As a result of seeing how great his children have turned out in comparison with kids in The Real World, the dad decides to… move back to The Real World and… send his kids to school? Double-wha’?

Really, I don’t think a movie has ever gone so wrong in the last few short minutes than this one did. The ending of this movie seems more intent on sticking it to anyone who has ever tried to live up to their ideals than on faithfully bringing the characters to a sense of closure.

Rewriting Hollywood, courtesy of Suki’s script-rewriting service

So, for my homeschooled readers, I am going to rewrite the ending for you. Please do watch this movie because you will laugh and cheer this quirky family of super-homeschoolers. But turn it off once the kids return to their dad, and imagine my ending instead:

  • As a result of seeing The Real World, the oldest homeschooler chooses the university that will allow him the greatest opportunity to learn and explore, while also growing as a human being amongst other humans. During the summers, he volunteers around the world, and is eventually able to marry his ideals with his life’s work, hopefully a bit more successfully than his dad did.
  • As a result of seeing how great his children have turned out in comparison with kids in The Real World, the dad realizes that yes, he is weird, but really, it’s OK. Maybe he’s lonely (he has lost his beloved wife, after all) and he decides to move closer to other humans. That’s great. But he also re-embraces the educational method he and his wife chose, seeing that his children are becoming the strong-willed, thoughtful, morally guided humans that they had hoped to raise.

But that wouldn’t be Hollywood, would it? We can’t celebrate real humans’ real achievements and real quirkiness. We have to force our world of soft greys into the black-and-whites of popular culture.

With this movie, at least, I had hoped for better.

Some very real (non-super-)homeschoolers learning in nature and celebrating their own, quirky selves.
Some very real (non-super-)homeschoolers learning in nature and celebrating their own, quirky selves.

Homeschooling and educational standards

Posted on by Suki

A mom on a homeschooling email list I take part in responded to a post of mine with a question. I thought it was a great question, and I wanted to share my answer. Her question:

I’m writing bc of your response to X the other day regarding wanting her kids to cover standards…

You said “the belief that kids have to “hit standards.” … is really completely untrue. If all you wanted was to make sure that your kids mastered K-6 standards, you could just wait until they were 12 and teach it all to them in a matter of months.”

I really would like to believe this, but I’m wondering where this idea comes from.

As with most homeschooling “wisdom,” I don’t have a source to cite about this. However, from what I’ve seen with my kids, kids I know, and kids I’ve heard of at conferences and through other parents, it does seem to be true. Aside

Two happy unschoolers we used to hang with.
Two happy unschoolers we used to hang with.

from unaddressed learning disabilities, an intelligent, healthy, pre-teen child seems fully capable of learning most of the skills taught in elementary school quite quickly. 

If you think about it, it makes sense:

Most of math taught in elementary school is stuff that kids who are living a rich lifestyle can derive for themselves when they’re ready. (In fact, this is how ancient mathematicians did it, right?)

My second child entered public school in 6th grade after very little math “instruction” (he did like to occasionally do math booklets but almost exclusively was interested in geometry). His teacher complimented me on “how well I taught him math”! Why? Well, their first homework was to learn how if you subtract a larger number from a smaller number, you get a negative number. This is something any kid who has been playing with math for fun can simply derive for herself (as my child did). Most of elementary math is only “hard” for kids because it’s being pushed on them when they’re not developmentally ready and without any fun attached. 

Then there’s literacy skills:

Assuming your child learned to read (almost all kids will learn if they live in a household where books are loved and shared, whether or not they are taught), almost everything that is “taught” to kids in elementary school is something they would do anyway once they’re ready.

Children who grow up in reading households usually become readers themselves.
Children who grow up in reading households usually become readers themselves.

For example, my child’s English teacher made her students go through every single book they read and find “inferences” in each chapter. This was a pointless exercise for kids like mine. Any child who has read lots of stories and been read to and had lots of discussions about stories can do this. But most elementary school kids, unfortunately, are only hearing stories in school. And they seldom have an in-depth discussion with their families about much of anything. So the people who devise curriculum think that kids need to be “taught” this. Yet most homeschooled kids would just figure it out.

So what use are standards to homeschoolers?

There are two advantages that standards offer to homeschoolers who are living rich learning lifestyles, I believe. One is that you can sometimes use them if you suspect that your child might have a learning disability. But the problem is, since they don’t take into account natural variations in development, people often use them to over-diagnose learning disabilities.

The other advantage of standards is the actual content—I’ve used them to remind myself about topics that we might want to interest our kids in. So I think it’s valuable to look at standards and remember that kids should learn about ancient civilizations, for example, or electricity basics. But I found, to tell you the truth, that we went so far beyond what most standards call for in our areas of interest, and in our areas of non-interest, the kids don’t really retain much that they’re taught in elementary school anyway.

But truth be told, I’m not a pure unschooler:

I’m not a proponent of unschooling in any dogmatic way, but I think that parents’ understandings of their kids’ learning and intelligence has been poisoned, frankly, by the emphasis on hitting standards earlier and earlier.

Every bit of research of eminent adults has shown that many of them were considered “stupid” as kids. If you create one timeline of learning and expect everyone to achieve every point on it at the same age, you’re going to set a lot of kids up for failure.

It’s the educator’s job to set students up for success:

Pure unschooling - never offering guidance to children - doesn't appeal to me, but child-led learning is what works for us.
Pure unschooling – never offering guidance to children – doesn’t appeal to me, but child-led learning is what works for us.

I’d rather set kids up for success, and raise them to believe that they can fill in any gaps that are there when they are ready to. I’m watching my 17-year-old doing this with great success right now. I’m not saying that I wasn’t really scared that we’d put out uneducated kids at the end of this (I’m at that scary point with my 13-year-old right now), but watching the 17-year-old blossom and go for his passions has been wonderful.

Had I focused too much on standards and not on letting him follow his passions and develop his strengths, I believe that he may have become a “safer” student, but certainly not a more passionate, wide-ranging, and well-educated one. He’s apply to college this fall. I hope that the admissions committees see his achievements as I do: the success of rejecting the safety of standards for the joy of learning and following one’s passions.

Postscript 4 years later:

Kid #1 is a successful college senior. He continued his passion for learning and filing in the “holes” in his education is just a natural part of life for him. Kid #2 went back to public high school, was very successful there, and is now doing well as a freshman in college. In no way did it hurt them that they hardly ever met the “standards” head-on. When they find “gaps,” they fill them. But usually what they find is that our scattered approach prepared them for college better than focusing on standards ever could.

Approaching formal writing

Posted on by Suki

This post continues the discussion of teaching writing that I started with Healthy Writing Habits for Children. In that post, I discussed how to encourage younger children to write freely and comfortably by not stressing what is wrong with their writing. In this post, I’ll address the topic that parents are so often concerned with: preparing children for formal writing.

The most natural formal writing to approach with kids is letter-writing, both digital and physical.

First off, let’s admit it: Formal writing doesn’t yell out “this is fun” to most kids. In fact, teaching kids formal writing too early is often what makes them hate writing in general. Traditional schools excel at making kids hate writing, and the more they force writing lessons on students, the more students end up hating writing. Then they justify moving formal writing lessons even earlier, because so many students end up poor writers in high school.

One of the things that many people notice about homeschooled kids, though, is that excepting students with a specific disability, homeschoolers often end up being proficient writers with little instruction.

The less instruction the better

Is this really true? Should we stop teaching kids how to write? Certainly, this isn’t what I advocate. But I do believe that formal writing lessons need to be left until formal writing is a reality in students’ lives, not just something that school makes them do. This doesn’t mean that kids shouldn’t be learning to write, but they should be doing it in the developmentally appropriate ways:

  1. Read a lot of great writing
  2. Write a lot about things they are interested in
  3. Value the creation of narrative in any medium—audio, video, illustration, etc.

Don’t jump into formal writing too soon

How do you know a student is ready to approach formal writing? The answer is pretty simple: When the student’s life demands it.

The first formal writing kids do are things like letters to Grandma, Santa, or the Tooth Fairy. This formal writing is perfectly in line with a young child’s life. The next formal writing a child might want to do is start a blog or newsletter about something the child is passionate about. Again, this is formal writing but it draws from a need within the child.

As students progress, they might have to do small amounts of formal writing such as:

  • send an email asking for information about a program
  • send an email to a teacher about a class assignment
  • write a letter to the editor of the local newspaper on an issue they’re passionate about

Parents can encourage students no matter how young to write these communications themselves, with some parental guidance.

Bridging the chasm

But aren’t these simple types of formal writing terribly far from a formal essay? Well, not really. As students mature, they start to see the need to communicate as part of their education and/or work. You don’t have to teach students the execrable 5-paragraph essay format in order for them to understand how to write.

Students go through the analytical process anytime they ask for a raise in their allowance or permission to get a new pet:

  1. break the issue into its basic parts
  2. analyze it
  3. offer supporting information
  4. argue against common objections
  5. present the conclusion
Although the gap between the daily writing that your student does and formal writing may seem wide, kids are learning a lot that you will be able to draw on once they approach formal writing.

A child who is not afraid of writing will start developing formal writing skills as a matter of necessity, as long as the parents and teachers are encouraging and supportive. The first few times my son had to send an email for a formal purpose, I would ask him to send me a draft first. We’d go over it, then he’d rewrite and send. After that, he stopped asking for help with emails.

The first time he had to write something longer than an email for a serious purpose, it was simply second nature to him that he’d write out his ideas, we’d look at it together and discuss it, he’d edit and send it.

Writing assignments encourage the worst writing

The times I’ve had real trouble getting my son to write were the times that I simply assigned something to be written for me, to prove that he could do something. And each time I’ve done that, I’ve regretted it. His formal writing that had real purpose was so much more inspired than anything I ever assigned him.

There comes that day…

Eventually, as students recognize the need for formal writing in their lives, they will be willing to tackle the challenge.

What day is that? When your teen is mature enough to realize the point of formal writing without being told. The other day my son casually said to me, “You never read the essay I wrote for history class, did you?” Then he handed it to me. It was a beautifully written, college-level piece of writing about the history of immigration to the US. Yes, it was assigned writing, but he found a topic of interest to him, broke it apart and found supporting documentation, and presented it to his teacher because it was expected of him in the class he was taking.

The process he went through uses what I see as the three developmental stages in developing formal writing skills:

Developmental stage 1: Write about topics of interest and learn to love communication

Developmental stage 2: Learn to analyze, support, and argue an issue so that you can interact with the world

Developmental stage 3: Learn that formal writing has a real, immediate purpose in your life

Not every student is going to be an inspired, enthusiastic writer. But every student who can learn to communicate effectively can learn to do it in textual form. Our biggest job as homeschooling parents is not to make them hate it before they even start to learn.

My “Teaching Writing” series:

Healthy writing habits for children

Posted on by Suki

This is the first of a sequence of pieces about teaching writing to children in the homeschool environment.

My “Teaching Writing” series in order:

Click here to access all my articles about teaching writing.

One of the hardest things for homeschoolers to work on is writing. We all carry baggage from our own education that colors how we see the writing process. There’s always that nagging voice that says that if we don’t subject our kids to something similar, we will fail to teach our kids to write well.

I have homeschooled two kids, one of them a natural writer, the other reluctant. I also teach kids writing at Athena’s Advanced Academy, and my students come in all flavors. Starting with my own kids, and now even more with my online students, I have rejected the traditional approach to teaching writing. In this post, I will discuss writing strategies for younger (pre-teen) children.

handwritingpenThe tradition: Focus on shortcomings, follow rules

Traditional writing instruction teaches that writing follows rules, and that the teacher’s job is to show students where their writing fails. Students are forced to write:

  1. for no purpose
  2. non-creatively
  3. about subjects they have no interest in
  4. without an audience

Then teachers look at the product, point out what’s wrong, and tell the students to do it again. The result is bad writing, and kids who hate writing so much they will only produce it under duress.

The new approach: Follow passions, focus on the positive

notebookWhen I started homeschooling, I took cues from homeschoolers and from special education teachers. Homeschoolers said that integrating learning into life made for deeper, more meaningful work. Special education teachers, faced with kids who have such severe shortcomings, have to focus on their students’ abilities, whatever they are.

I came across the writing of Patricia Zaballos, who blogs extensively about teaching writing and also wrote a handbook on teaching writing. The crux of her approach is, like special education teachers, to focus on the positive.

My approach to teaching writing is an about-face from the traditional. My students write:

  1. with a clear purpose
  2. creatively
  3. only about their interests
  4. for an audience of fellow students or a general audience on the web

I am there to guide and nurture them, but instead of focusing on their shortcomings, I encourage what’s good about their writing.

Why focus on the positive?

Everyone who has ever had their writing critiqued in a traditional way carries psychological scar tissue that colors their writing. Writing, though necessary in business and academics, is an art. It comes from someplace more personal than the answer to a long division problem or remembering the cause of World War I. To be told that one’s writing is “wrong” is painful and results in negative feelings about writing.

When critiques focus on the positive, students are encouraged to do more of whatever is good in their writing. They are energized by success to find more success.

What if there is no positive?

Sometimes it’s very, very hard to find something good to say about student writing. But it’s worth delving as deep as possible to find encouragement. One student of mine was a very reluctant, poor writer. I had to struggle to find something good to say, but I pointed out that some sentences made me want to know more about what was happening. He responded by developing those sentences into full paragraphs. His writing blossomed. Within a month he was producing writing levels above his original pieces, and I could help him continue to improve by finding new positive points to encourage.

How will students fix the problems if we don’t point them out?

notebookThis is where it’s hard for me to shed the baggage of my own education. I had learned that no one will learn how to write a good paragraph unless we point out that they write bad ones. However, the reverse is actually true. In order to encourage positive development, I point out the very best a writer has produced (even when it’s quite poor). The writer works from her own level to build on her own successes.

I don’t completely ignore lessons in grammar, spelling, and writing structure. But in my classes, I separate these issues from the writing itself. It’s much more fun for students to savage a pretend piece of bad writing generated by me than their own work, which comes from their own souls.

What about preparing for college?

Once students are preparing to write for college or work, they need a different approach: Click here to read “Approaching Formal Writing”

My “Teaching Writing” series:

Decelerated Reader

Posted on by Suki

This morning at breakfast my daughter sadly eyed the book I’d gotten her for Chanukah, Alice in Quantumland. This is the sort of nerdy, unusual book I love to buy—once we’re done with it we’ll donate it to our library and hopefully they’ll make it available to other nerdy unusual kids in our community.

But why was she sad?

A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?
A book about quantum physics for kids! Featuring a girl! How could AR pass this up?

When you have kids who are avid readers, they run into different obstacles than the general public understands. Our children’s publishing industry is focused on “hi-lo” books—high interest, low readability. In other words, books that are very similar to the type of kids’ movies that Hollywood puts out. The producers of these books assume that:

  1. Kids don’t like to read
  2. Kids have to be enticed into reading by high concept stories
  3. Kids are terrified to come across a word they don’t understand
  4. Kids will refuse to pick up any book that’s heftier than their iPad

Problem is, there are tons of kids who don’t fit this model, but because they are “doing fine,” no one is paying them much attention.

In the past, I’ve written about two periods of childhood in which avid readers run into roadblocks (pre-K/K and tween) and also how hard it is for science-minded girls to see themselves in kids’ literature (here).

Our daughter, now that she’s doing 7th grade in school, has run into another avid reader roadblock: Accelerated Reader.

In concept, AR sounds great. Kids read books on their own, log into AR at school, take a quiz about the book*, and get credit for reading time. At the beginning of each year, teachers set AR goals for all their students. Not having much of an idea who these kids are**, they set a low goal for the semester and kids like my daughter blow through that goal in a couple of months.

You can guess what happens next: The teacher doesn’t say, wow, this child has mastered everything she needs to in the area of reading, so I’m just going to encourage her to keep reading things she loves and stop worrying about proving that she’s reading certain, approved books. Instead, the teacher says, oh, no, this child reached the goal so early, I’m going to have to set a much higher goal.

So kids like my daughter learn a lesson that perhaps the teacher didn’t mean to teach: If you enjoy something that school cares about, make sure to hide it and pretend you’re just like everyone else. If you don’t, you’ll be punished with more busywork that will keep you from doing the things you want to do.

Here’s why my daughter was sad this morning. She clearly wants to read Alice in Quantumland. But she has to meet this new, high AR goal her teacher set soon after winter break has ended.

And Alice in Quantumland is not listed in AR. That means she can’t take a quiz to prove she read it. That means if she reads it, in her words, “I’ll be reading it for no reason since I won’t get credit.”

Oh, no! Reading for no reason! This terrible impulse must be quashed!

I can never get over the irony of being someone who understands how our education system works while listening to politicians and concerned community members talking about education. They want kids to read (mine does), be inspired (mine is), and learn (can’t stop mine from doing that). Yet they push our system for more and more “accountability,” which ends up quashing any interest in reading, any inspiration the teachers might be able to uncover in their students, and any real, deep learning that can’t be proven on a standardized test.

My daughter’s at school only because she wants to be. She knows that when she complains about AR, it’s not my problem. She could be homeschooling right now like her brother is, determining her own curriculum, reading books that inspire and excite her whether or not AR thinks they’re worth reading.

But for some reason, she’s continuing on this social science experiment that she started last year. I still stand firmly behind my reasons for letting her go to school: If I believe in child-led learning, then I have to let her see this through.

But when I saw her lovingly and sadly flipping through her new book, it gave me pause. It’s the last day of school before winter break. I could just say, “Come on, let’s be homeschoolers today.” But she had her celebratory cupcakes for her Humanities class party, and she was ready to go.

“Well,” I suggested. “Perhaps you will have time during vacation to finish your AR goals and then get to this book.”

And then we went to school.

* They take the quiz to prove they actually read the book—I won’t start on my rant about how unnecessary this is if educators were given the time to really work with and get to know their students…

** Another homeschooler rant here: If teachers had fewer students, if there were more continuity in our public schools from year to year so teachers didn’t have to depend on assembly-line teaching to try to serve their students’ needs, if we didn’t think we had to have “accountability” for each and every smidgeon of learning our kids do…

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