by SOFIE COUCH
Language Arts and Math. That’s all I am required to teach my kids as a homeschool parent. Some think that’s terribly insufficient. Some think that’s far too much. If math is the language of science, then language arts is the language of every other discipline. I see the benefit of both skills and occasionally I lapse into that teaching camp of whacking my kids in the head with a formal lesson that they’re just not ready for. I forget what my mission, as a homeschooling parent, is all about, and I find myself trying to beat my little rectangular prisms into the cylindrical hole. Yeah, I might eventually pound them in, but at what cost to both the peg and the hole?
I was recently asked to share anecdotes about bringing in experts to fill in the gaps where I might be lacking in expertise. It’s like the Groucho Marx question, “do you still beat your wife?” To which I respond, “no, yes, I mean… what was the question?”
First, the question implies a set of standards in education. Usually a question posed by a public school teacher or parent, it suggests that, rather than just language arts and math, as mandated by law, I must also impart all of those disciplines mandated by the traditional public school or else they have “gaps”. Let’s see… using the elementary school down the road as my guide, that would require me to have an interest in teaching, (and that my kids have an interest in learning,): language arts, elementary mathematics, science, social studies, art, music, and physical education. Oh, and they just added another 15 minutes onto the school day to cover the recently mandated study of Spanish. That’s what’s required for a student in our district to be “well-rounded”.
The question also implies that I buy into that, which I don’t. That doesn’t make for a well-rounded person. That makes for, either, a Renaissance Man or a Jack-of-all-Trades, or a really bored kid who’s going to be a behavior issue during all those disciplines in which he/she doesn’t have a vested interest.
Here’s where I make the confession that’s gonna get me flayed by the proponents of “well-rounded.”
One of my kids has not memorized his times tables. What’s more, he doesn’t know his addition math facts yet. He can’t rattle off the sum of 8+7 with out using all his fingers and one foot worth of piggies! He is, however, quite masterful, (for a ten year old,) at cryptography. Our house is littered with little bits of paper covered in squiggles that bare an odd resemblance to some sort of Pokemon hieroglyphs. Today, I left a note stuck to the computer screen. It read: 21,0,17711,5 / 75023,610,10946 / 8,34,377,34,4181,21,5,3 / 75023,610,10946,2884 / 233,0,6765,21?
His response was, “your math is wrong.”
Sure enough, I messed up adding 8+7! (You’ll be in on the joke if you break the code. Hint: It’s a simple substitution code and because the number one would appear twice in the substitution, I just skipped it the second time.)
He’s familiar with this code and readily spits it out doing the math in his head (and using fingers and piggies and if one is readily available, a calculator.) Yet, despite my error in elementary addition math facts, I didn’t feel compelled to bring in experts to teach math facts where my own prowess was lacking or where others might suggest my child has “gaps”.
That’s not to say, however, that if one of my kids showed a readiness for a particular discipline of study, that I wouldn’t feed it in every way I could imagine. I probably would not hire a speaker who dresses in a toga and gives a song and dance about the Pythagorean Theorem. We might, however, use the fixed angle of elevation to measure the heights of some of the trees along the street. We might even leave our chalk calculations on the sidewalk for others to enjoy.
This brings us to the third assumption implied in the initial question: that I would bring in “experts”. I wouldn’t. My kids, however, might, (and have done so.) As a facilitator to learning, I am both pack mule and guide. It’s been a hard lesson for me, but invariably, if I arrange the “field trip” it’s a disaster and a lesson in frustration with a lot of effort on my part, minimal effort on their part, and ends with me being disappointed in their lack of interest. When they plan it, they’re invested and I can just enjoy the ride.
So today’s “lesson plan” will only include language arts and math with maybe a little cryptography thrown in for good measure. Darn it. It just occurred to me that my kid never did really answer my cryptic question. But maybe in light of my own mathematical gaps, I’ll let it slide.
We have brought in a number of ‘experts’ to help our children- from music teachers, to extra Spanish classes, to only courses in Philosophy and Logic, to extra programs for math, to sewing classes, to having a Jewish friend come in and talk about his experiences hiding from Nazi soldiers in occupied France during WW2, to inviting the piano tuner to talk to us about his experiences in the Underground in Holland during WW2, to attending concerts and lectures and public speeches by ‘important’ people.
But I think there is a more important question here, as there is an assumption here that it is homeschools which will have the most gaps and will need the most supplementation. Yet most of us who have been through public schools can testify that we have gaps in our education as well.
My neighbor up the street just shared with me last night that the public school is failing her daughter, so they are hiring a tutor to come in to help her this summer hoping she will catch up on what she missed in school.
My public schooled son-in-law (who made the honor roll through high school) has a shocking number of gaps, and he just revealed that he did not know who King Arthur was and had never heard of the Knights of the Round table. This may seem unimportant to some, but to us it means a world of missed cultural references and allusions.
I taught a fellow home-school mom how to use the dewey decimal system at the library. She graduated in the top ten percent of her public school high school.
My husband graduated from public school, and he had never heard of William the Conqueror, didn’t know the significance of 1066, and he could not tell you when the Civil War was fought (not to the century, even). He’d never heard of Jane Austen, never read Shakespeare, and his spelling was atrocious. In fact, he had read exactly one book when I married him- Helter Skelter.
I was a public schooled graduate, too, and I did well in school. I, had high scores on the ACT (a scholarship based on my scores, which were well into the 90th percentile in science and language arts), and I went on to college where I made A’s in courses like Japanese, Marine Zoology, oceanography, and all my English classes. I took one math course, a general 100 level course, and got a B.
Yet I never learned how to do fractions until I homeschooled my own children (my ACT scores in math were low- around the 40th percentile). I discovered, as we homeschooled our way through their math books from kindergarten on, that my math education level was basically fourth grade. And for this I was given a diploma and academic scholarships?!
Homeschooling our kids has filled in those gaps for dh- except for the spelling issue.=) And I have filled in my own gaps as well, though it has been quite hard at times.
The issue really isn’t ‘are there no gaps?’ There will be gaps in every education- public, private, or home education. Some gaps matter more than others, of course. But what I think is more important is how much do the children care about knowledge? About the world? How equipped are they to continue to educate themselves for the rest of their lives? Do they know how to continue to fill in the gaps in their educational lives? Do they care about doing that?
Has their educational life honed the sharp edge of their appetite for knowledge that they were born with, their willingness to see the world as an interesting place, or has it blunted, dulled, and stunted their curiosity about the world? That’s the gap that matters most.
Charlotte Mason, an educator writing after ‘The Great War’ when crippled and seriously injured soldiers were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives pointed out that “many of our young men and women go about more seriously maimed than these. They are devoid of intellectual interests, history and poetry are without charm for them, the scientific work of the day is only slightly interesting, their ‘job’ and the social amenities they can secure are all that their life has for them.”
I consider it a success when children finish their schooling and still have intellectual interests and the ability to pursue them, are still delighted by history and poetry, interested in and able to follow to some degree the science of the day, and when American Idol and pop culture are NOT what they spend most of their leisure time on.
Do most public schooled graduates finish school with the same enthusiasm for knowledge that they started with? Why not?
This is one of the areas where I think HS really has it on PS education. PS teachers are so overwhelmed by standards, teaching to the test, and paperwork, that the thought of organizing a guest speaker or field trip is often not even on the radar. With HSing (I’m imagine), field trips and finding an ‘expert’ on the lesson are as easy as getting in the car. It’s probably been every day of my teaching career that my students would have learned more if I could have loaded them onto the bus and brought them to the local newspaper, or to the mayor’s office, or even to the garbage dump for creative writing exercises.
It sounds like HS vs. PS is like comparing a race car to a giant bus: one is smaller, easier to maneuver, but in some ways more vulnerable, while the other is bigger, slow to turn, but in some ways the safer choice.
The occupants of a school bus are carrying 30 pound book bags and have no safety restraints.
more . . .
Dang, Jesse – maybe you DO have it in you to approach homeschooling with some thought.
You said I was too cynical, but cynicism allows me these sort of pleasant surprises in life.
Safer how?
Predictability is not safety.
Nor is conformity.
There’s nothing safe about society placing most of its eggs in one homogenized ideological basket.
I don’t even think it is as close as comparing a race car to a bus, and, given the number of stories of school shooting, abusive teachers, and bullying, I find it hard to believe that it is the safer choice except in those (rare) specific situations where a truly abusive parent decides to homeschool- and even then children fall through the cracks of public school all the time. Where public schooling is a ‘safer’ choice than homeschooling, I would venture to say that probably those parents shouldn’t have been parents at all.
As for analogies- I have often explained on my blog that it’s like comparing an industrial, cafeteria kitchen which must serve hundreds or thousands to a home kitchen which serves the immediate family and sometimes our friends- the goals are different, the tools are different, the constraints are different- radically different
What teachers in public and private schools (most private schools) have to do is get a large group of students who all are the same age and live in the same district together through the same curriculum (a curriculum the teacher seldom chooses and the children never) at the same pace, in lockstep, and within the narrow confines of an ordinary school day, five days a week, within 9 months. They have to do this while answering to taxpayers and the government for what they are doing with taxpayer funds. They have to do this with a brand new batch of students each September. They will seldom have the same student twice, although sometimes this happens. They have to do this with students who go home at night to two parents who love them and to broken homes where the father is absent, and to foster homes, and to group homes. They have to do this with students whose parents are careful to feed them nourishing, healthy food and whose parents don’t bother to feed them at all. You have to keep your class in lock step, moving forward, whether a student has a drug-dealing mom or an alcoholic father, and they have to do this just the same regardless of whether the child’s dog died that morning, another child’s grandmother is in the hospital, another child’s father went to jail- and you may not know when these situations have come up.
I lost out an entire week of public school and never fully caught up in math because my dog died in my lap after being hit by a car- I was grieving and simply tuned out the world around me, but when my teachers asked if anything was wrong I said no (I do not know why, except I was an intensely private and secretive child, as abused children often are).
In my own home when a pet has died (we lost an aged dog, a beloved turtle, and a well loved geriatric horse this past year), we stop school unless the child needs it for continuity. I *know* what they have been through- if Dad had to work out of town this week, if Grandpa’s dementia is overwhelming them, if their friend died of cancer in another state, and I can adjust accordingly. We can take two hours off to bake bread together for the lady up the street who has breast cancer because we can work on the history lesson after supper, or review multiplication in the van on the way to piano- luxuries of flexibility and time that a public school teacher simply does not have.
These luxuries of flexibility, time, small student/adult ratio, and intimate knowledge of my children, btw, is why a dedicated parent *can* homeschool with better results than a public school teacher- not because I am a better teacher or superior human being (I would HATE teaching a large group of other people’s children and would be horrid at it), but because I have an easier job to do.
I have homeschooled four daughters through high school (well, the fourth will be done soon)- when they got to high school, I picked out four or five history books, asked them to read one chapter a day in each for two weeks and then pick out the one they wanted to use the rest of the school year. Because I chose the books from which they made their selections, I was confidant they were good books (I have often heard public school teachers complain about the drudgery of having to plough through a textbook they had not chosen and couldn’t stand), and because they made the final choice, they were more invested and interested in their choice- often I had two high school students reading separate history books, but this was doable for me in my home- it would be impossible for a teacher with 20 students or more.
I have the luxury of being able to discuss their reading with my children on a personal level at odd hours of the night, on car trips, while washing dishes. I skip true/false, multiple choice tests, except for one or two here and there just so the kids know how to take them. A teacher in a public school could not do justice to essay questions answered by all her students every single day of the week.
My goal is not to teach my children the state objectives for math/English/Science/ the arts, from September to May or June each year. My goal is to teach them for life- to help them to be lifelong learners, engaged, curious people with the basic skills they will need to support themselves and to continue a lifetime of living the interested, examined life worth living.
Deputy Headmistress, that is a beautiful response! What you’ve outlined is what I think most homeschool parents are aiming for — to instill a love of learning in their children, to teach them HOW to learn, so that they will see a lesson, something fascinating, around every corner! So that life and the world and people will intrigue and touch them for the rest of their lives.
You’ve put your finger on my biggest dissatisfaction with public schools — I have far too often seen my high school friends (and many others) turned into apathetic, education-loathing drones by overworked teachers, classrooms packed full of needy students, and mindless lessons.
DH,
Great answer, but I don’t think he meant physically safer.
teacherrevised, I suppose you meant something like ‘less probability of utter disaster if the vehicle crashes’. I know PSers often see PSing as a safety net to ensure at least a minimal education for everyone and worry about the (whatever the number is of) HS parents who don’t do an even minimally adequate job.
Of course, individual HSers often feel as if it is our personal integrity that is being questioned, so that line of criticism is often met with more of heat than light. Liken it to your own feelings if the government mandated that since many children are fed inadequate diets as home, they will be required to eat three meals a day which the school will provide, plus snacks that are sent home at the end of the day. So not only are you personally worried about the nutritional quality of the gov’t food, but your kids are too stuffed afterwards to eat anything healthy that you cook.
But honestly, assuming that HSers are more prone to ‘academic malnutrition’, than PSers simply because they lack government oversight…is a bit of a large assumption. Finding out the actual statistical odds of each kind of failure is probably prohibitively difficult, so let’s agree to not jump to any conclusions either way.
My husband and I are celebrating our 26th wedding anniversary this weekend. My parents, who are celebrating their 49th wedding anniversary this weekend, have graciously taken the spawn, (oops, I meant our beloved progeny), off our hands for the weekend. Impetuous, romantic fools that we are, we decided to drive to the 24 hour Wal-Mart just before dawn and purchase a 14 ft diameter trampoline for our children. We assembled in the drizzling rain, guided by the clearly written instructions and fortified with frequent gulps of 7-11 coffee.
As we worked, we noted that our research had paid off. The trampoline was as advertised, and a good buy. The two simple tools that came with the kit were more than adequate to the task. We also noticed that the trampoline’s design had been improved by decades of product development influenced by stupid consumers and civil litigation. It was a very safe toy. The experts had done a good job of designing it, packaging it and directing us in the process of assembling it.
When we decide to make a significant purchase, we find that research pays off, and that there are always products on the market that more than fit our needs. Home school curriculum works in much the same way. Experts put together great curriculum packages, and all that is necessary for customer satisfaction is good research, a frugal purchase and reasonable faithfulness to the instructions enclosed.
This approach has served us well for Math, Science, Language Arts and Social Studies (We call these the big 4). We’re also happy with various products that have assisted us in teaching Typing, Handwriting, Latin and various subcategories that fall under the big 4.
Sometimes we run into challenges that require us to ask experts pointed questions.
We asked a historian how to make our children’s History Education better. He suggested that the children read a great many biographies, write summaries and plot events on a time line.
We asked a retired teacher who had specialized in teaching children with learning disabilities how to help our daughter overcome her Spelling problems. We also asked for methods to help our son retain his Arithmetic facts. She gave us new strategies, and her advice proved helpful.
Among our friends and family are biologists, chemists, physicists, and other people with extensive education in various branches of Science. They frequently enrich the children’s education with field trips, special projects and supplemental materials.
Never discount the value of books written by well-qualified experts. I read volumes on all the subject I teach my children, and study teaching methodology extensively.
We know there’s more to life than academics. For this reason we’ve also introduced the kids to Archery, Sailing, Swimming, Camping, Fishing, Canoing, Rowing, and Karate. The kids have coaches for Gymnastics, Soccer and Skating.
My husband and I are not artistic, nor are we musically inclined. The kids have enrichment classes at our home school co-op in Drama, Music, Dance and Art. This costs almost nothing, because by teaching there myself, I generally break even.
Later on this month, both kids will be participating in a Civil War Re-enactment at Fort Wool. They’ll be there for about 72 hours, living there as Civil War era Union Marines would. They’ll be fielding questions from tourists, and they’re well-qualified to give answers. The kids have been re-enacting with historians, Marine Corps veterans and docents for years. They’ve been groomed by experts to become experts.
In short, we value experts, and we know how to benefit from their insights. We recognize their contributions to curriculum, we read their books, and we consult with them personally. The kids benefit from interacting with experts in the same way, in part because the behavior has been modeled. All of the home school families I know personally operate in this way. We’re not unique.
There’s so much misinformation about home schooling, we rarely bother to explain these things any more. Home school families don’t live in social and cultural vacuums. We get out, we get around, and yes, we consult experts.
An embarrassing number of typos, but the most important, I think is this one:
to only courses in Philosophy and Logic,
That should have read online courses- our older girls had the opportunity to take a couple of online courses from college professors.
And the extra math was through DVDs and computer programs with a small amount of tutoring from a friend who does well with math.
Deputy Headmistress,
” I skip true/false, multiple choice tests, except for one or two here and there just so the kids know how to take them. A teacher in a public school could not do justice to essay questions answered by all her students every single day of the week.
My goal is not to teach my children the state objectives for math/English/Science/ the arts, from September to May or June each year. My goal is to teach them for life- to help them to be lifelong learners, engaged, curious people with the basic skills they will need to support themselves and to continue a lifetime of living the interested, examined life worth living.”
Essays, reports and summaries are an integral part of our home school. We save a lot of time, because we’re able to do Language Arts through the children’s written work in History, Social Studies and even Mathematics. Like you, I hope the children will grow up to become like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, one of our favorite characters from Children’s Literature.
“It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out”; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. ”
We want our children to enjoy the spirit of free inquiry. Education should form adults who are lifelong learners. Such people face what the world throws at them with a zest for living and boundless curiosity, not trepidation and prejudice.
Sofie,
You’ve hit on one of the problems that newbie homeschoolers, as I’m just in my 2nd year, hit on when bringing the public school mentality into homeschooling.
In NY, I have to produce quarterly reports and an end of year assessment. In doing so, I’m castigating myself for not covering all the science that I had planned in the IHIP. I’m doing so even while planning a Read Across America Road Trip where paleontology and digging for fossils is one of our prime directives.
I know that my son is learning more about science, and other subjects, than his sister did when she attended the same grade in our old public school. However, I’m comparing our results to an unrealistic mental scoreboard.
Thanks for the reminder to look at the child, and not arbitrary standards!
Thanks to all for your thoughts, comments, reminders! I am always inspired by the collective creativity of homeschool educators. (And I loved the trampoline analogy.:)
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