Schooling, Homeschooling and 'Un-Schooling'
I saw this article in the Baltimore Sun and the resulting discussion in the SlashDot nerd blog.
I felt inspired to write the following:
My own mind presented great resistance to homeschooling my children. I could feel the pressure of my own indoctrination telling me that I would permanently scar the kids, make them unfit, RUIN them. It felt like a huge, committing step. I finally fought clear of all that and realized that, because I could put them back in school at any time to test their progress, we could homeschool as an experiment.
I started out homeschooling my daughter (3rd grade) and son (1st grade) via the 'little red schoolhouse method': 9am until 12pm, sit them down and lecture history, English, math, and science in front of a whiteboard. I used workbooks and tested them on conventional school material that I printed up from ed services on the web. I demanded their attention! I got angry when I didn't get it!! I basically produced all the same problems they have at conventional schools: the kids learned at different rates, distracted each other and were bored. There was a lot of negativity. I swallowed my frustration and modified this to teach them separately and that worked better. What a concept; you can teach your kids one-on-one!! When their right-brain got tired, we would move to a left-brained subject.
I began to realize that our homeschool methods could be different and that I could fix some of the problems and concentrate on the things that had actually been important and effective in my own education. I realized that the kids would eventually attend conventional high school and college so I didn't try to have them master the material they would be taught there. Why cover it twice? (I think I was taught about the Conquistadors every single year in elementary school and again at the university. Sorry but what a waste of time! It would have been fine to have hit it ONCE.)
We diagrammed a few sentences and learned parts of speech but mainly read great children's lit: Alice in Wonderland, Oz books, Dr. Seuss. (If you're going to be a good cook, you have to have eaten some good meals.) I geared math toward the stumbling blocks that derail most children's progress such as fractions. We then covered all the things that other children would say were 'hard' in math and simply attained enough familiarity at each so that the fear factor was removed. The goal was not to make them mathematicians but to remove any basis for math phobia which seems so prevalent. I also realized that the science courses in many schools are better than what I could provide because they can afford the lab equipment, so I concentrated on scientific point-of-view. I used to talk to the children about very basic phenomena like "What makes the wind blow?" (Hardcores please don't get picky with this example.) We would start with considering the movements of air currents; that's the wind. Why does it move? It moves from high to low air density areas. So what is density?. Mass of the atoms per unit of volume. So what are atoms? What is mass? … We moved tangentially covering mass, density, weight, gravity, atomic structure and other fundamentals. After a half hour or so of discussion, kids at elementary school level get bored and tired so we would listen to music or go for a walk in the woods (which led to more opportunity to work in some biology).
We were also able to take the money we would have spent on private school for the kids, combined with the freedom of not being tied down to conventional school and arranged travel abroad for the whole family. The kids have tramped museums all over Europe.
My daughter, who was and is extremely social, preferred to be in school so she re-matriculated and had no problems. (I found I could help my daughter focus on her work by threatening to take her back into home school if her grades were bad. I would periodically re-matriculate my son to the local elementary school to make sure he was keeping pace. He would quickly become bored so I would tell him to that if his grades were good I'd take him back to homeschool. See the contradiction? J My daughter pointed this out. )
This left my son who needed several more years of homeschooling. Our one-on-one evolved into my directing my son's reading list, his study of the classical guitar with a very fine tutor, and a huge phys-ed component which involved the indoor climbing competition circuit and the beautiful outdoor cliff climbing areas of the Red River Gorge in Eastern Kentucky. The theory here being that children only grow up physically once! (When the schools gyp the kids out of phys-ed, there's damage that lasts a lifetime.)
My boy is now 15, has rock climbed at an elite level. He reads and plays classical guitar at a college level. He attends high school at a local public arts magnet school and mainly doesn't evidence educational boredom/burnout from eight hours a day of straight-backed wooden chairs and fluorescent lights throughout his childhood (what cruelty). My daughter has just graduated from the same school, works part time, attends college classes and plans her attack on life and higher ed.
If you are intelligent and fairly well educated, every minute you spend with your kids is an education for you both. When my kids told their friends that they were homeschooled, the friends would invariably reply, "You're so lucky!", to which my kids would say with a smile, "Yeah, but school is never really over." Any moment you choose can be one that results in a learning experience for your child. Cast off your indoctrination; you can make up a structure to suit yourselves. Just understand that most kids will only allow school to demand a certain amount of time from their lives. They're probably not going to let you instruct at home if they're already attending conventional school. That's why most parents think teaching their kids will be harder than it actually is. Once you start your homeschool (or unschool [IMNSHO: a very unfortunate descriptor] or whatever you and your students want to call it) your kids will allow and indeed, expect you to instruct.
As for myself, I wouldn't swap the time I spent teaching my children. No parent should deny him/herself the pleasure of seeing the lightbulb of understanding go on in his/her child's eyes.
Created on ... September 05, 2009