I was honored to have been asked by my friend Theresa Bond to write a guest post on her blog Our Life In Words about my thoughts on what home school children need to learn before attending college.
To start off my academic blog, I wanted to ask Theresa why she started to homeschool and her thoughts about the overall educational system. In this post I think you will find lots of insight into one parents concerns and how she hopes her girls get the education they deserve.
I hope you enjoy Theresa’s post. I think scholars everywhere can learn more about the decisions of homeschooling and stand behind parents who are not only caring for their children, but also educating. I hope you will start to follow Theresa because she has a lot of insight on what goes on before they hit the college classroom.
Thank you, Janet, I am honored to be your first guest blogger and to discuss something that is near and dear to my heart: the American education system.This year, after five years in the public education system, my husband and I elected to withdraw our two daughters, ages 8 and 10 from public school and to educate them at home. When our girls were little, I had dreamed of volunteering in their classrooms and their school, working hand in hand with their teachers to hone their skills and helping them with science projects and book reports. When our oldest daughter began school, we learned that as a result of safety concerns schools are locked and parents are not permitted past the school office. I was classroom mom, but that meant, in some instances just dropping off a craft for Halloween or December Recess party. There were no opportunities to volunteer in the classrooms, because all of the children’s time is spent on rigorous academics to prepare for state standardized tests.
Beginning in second grade, from the first day of school kids are reminded daily that they will be taking a very important test in the spring. Every assignment is preparation for that test. Teachers complain that they don’t get to be creative in their classrooms because they need to cover everything on the test so that their students are familiar with various topics when they appear on the test. Children are given monthly benchmarks to predict how they will do on these tests and where they need extra help. In theory this sounds great. In practice, it puts a lot of stress on educators and that stress transfers to the children.
I am a reference librarian. I have always been a voracious reader, as is my husband. We seldom watch television, we are usually found with a book in our hand. When our girls were little, I spent hours reading to them, looking at the pictures, predicting what would happen next, discussing things like “what would you do if this character came over for a playdate?” My girls were both starting to read before they started school and they enjoyed it. They soon saw it as a chore. I was told that they were not good at inference, when they were told that a troll lived under a bridge and parents warned their children not to play with the troll, but one boy did and what did they think happened? My daughter answered that she thought the troll would be nice to the boy and be his friend. She was six. The teacher emailed me to tell me that this was an inappropriate response. She had been told that the parents warned their children about the troll. “But she is thinking of fairy tales and Disney movies and Shrek, “I explained. To which the teacher answered, “The test doesn’t want her to consider fairy tales, Disney movies and Shrek, they want her to only consider the information she is given.” I could understand that. I could go along with that.
But over time, I started to wonder, if all of these kids are expected to think the exact same way, who will be our future leaders? Who will be our medical pioneers? Our entrepreneurs? Our innovators?
As time marched on, I saw how the effects of the stress of these tests affected my daughters. My younger daughter vomited every Sunday evening. I kept her home on Monday, but she was fine. It was nerves. My older daughter worked with her guidance counselor for test anxiety, and still on the first day of the NJ ASK in fourth grade, she woke up screaming that she could not see. At first, I was panic stricken, then I realized that it was nerves over the test.
I began to notice other things as well. The teachers no longer taught for mastery, but just to introduce the concept so that it was not foreign when they children saw it on the standardized tests, they hoped that some would get it correct. My girls’ teachers spent one week in second grade on multiplication facts. That was it. One week. Then they had to move on to fractions, decimals, percents, metric conversions, volume, etc.
I am a reference librarian now, but my undergraduate degree is in psychology and sociology. I understand various educational concepts. I could see a benefit to spiral instruction, but I didn’t really see it working. I saw it making my children more anxious because they knew that they did not really understand it. I was given the option of paying for tutors for them, but decided that I would work with them myself over one summer. Both of my girls advanced 4 reading levels in 10 weeks, they had only progressed 4 reading levels the previous 10 months and only progressed 2 and 4 reading levels respectively in the next ten months.
I saw concepts being introduced in their classrooms: airplanes, World War II, and animal life and my girls would come home and research these topics on the computer by themselves and create their own booklets about them. They had a natural curiosity, a desire to learn and research.
After realizing that we accomplished more in one summer than they had in the previous or proceeding years, we didn’t want their natural curiosity quashed and we began researching homeschooling in earnest. We read blogs. We joined a local yahoo group. We sough out other homeschoolers. We researched curriculum. And we decided that we could do this.
It has been the best experience of our lives, next to having kids, of course.
We look forward to each day.
My girls are voracious readers, devouring books. Sometimes they choose the book, sometimes I do. Sometimes I pick a genre and they pick a book within that genre. We discuss the plot and sub plot and characters. We use story maps and character webs. Sometimes, the girls write book reviews for their blogs. Other times, they write what they think the main character’s favorite movie or song or television show would be and they defend their answer with information from the story.
Both of my girls love to write. They write stories all the time. In school, my third grader would be expected to write a five paragraph essay, but I am not sure if three years of schooling is enough preparation for effectively writing at that level, so we have broken it down. We work on organizing our writing, we work on different kinds of paragraphs. We work on word choice. With only two students, I can give them each the individual help that they need.
Our math program, Teaching Textbooks, has won awards. It is all on the computer. There is a lecture and then some practice questions, based on how a student does there are exercise questions and extra help available on-line.
We all love our history program, Story of the World. It presents history chronologically as a narrative. My girls were fascinated with out study of Egypt. We made a model of the Nile and flooded it, we made scrolls and wrote our names in cuneiform, we had an Egyptian feast, we watched BBC documentaries. We were fortunate enough to see the King Tut exhibit in Manhattan. On their own, my girls built a pyramid with legos and “buried” treasures inside, they made a sarcophagus out of clay and begged to watch the documentaries again.
I have not found a science curriculum that I love yet. I want something with a lot of experiments. I admit that I did not enjoy science in school, but have come to realize that was because it was all rote memorization and I didn’t really understand it. We are part of a homeschool co-op with a wonderful science teacher who does experiments that really make science make sense, even to me! On our own, we have worked through several science kits, which have taught chemistry concepts.
We took part of the month of December off and I had an opportunity to reflect and evaluate what is working and what is not. We are starting this term a little more laid back, allowing things to happen, connections to be made, spending time on the areas we are interested in or where we are struggling. Today, my younger daughter and I spent more time on her writing assignment from yesterday because she was not understanding it. A couple of days ago, my girls had some extra time, so they created a village for their American girl dolls, which they blogged about here and here, after editing the photos with photo editing software. My husband asked them who the mayor of the village was, which lead to a discussion of the role of the mayor and why organization and representation are important. I think this kind of learning, that is tailor made to the child’s needs will benefit them greatly. I think my girls will be confident, know how and where to get information and how to defend a statement.
It is our purpose to allow the girls to explore their interests as well as the core curriculum of language arts, math, science and history. I have heard of home school children with on-line businesses. Our girls are interested in fashion and jewelry making; our oldest daughter loves to make things with fimo clay. Our girls have the time to pursue these interests. We are considering starting an etsy account, where they can learn presentation, as well as money management and a whole host of things involved with running a cottage business.
I see the issues with homeschooling and we try to address them, by being part of a homeschool co-op, where they have friends and experience different teaching styles. My girls take sewing and music lessons, we are part of a homeschool park group and I have the ability to run a homeschool program at the library where I work. Also, once a week, I start school at 3pm and the girls come with me and hang out with some of their friends from school who come to the library after school.
I think homeschooling is the best of all worlds. We can see where our kids need extra help and find ways of offering it. I have heard it said before that no one cares about their child’s education more than the parents. In that vein, as our girls grow, we can look for new ways for them to explore the world and hone their critical and higher order thinking skills, so that by the time they enter the college classroom they are eager to learn in their chosen field of study.
We are taking homeschooling one year at a time. Right now, both girls are saying that they want to homeschool forever, but that may change and that would be fine. Much of the research I have done on homeschool through high school suggests that some, if not most, of homeschool high school is self-led, a combination of on-line, distance learning and a student deciding what they want to learn, researching the curriculum and learning on their own. I hope that if my girls decide to homeschool though high school that they will have the self-discipline necessary for this kind of learning, although I am sure that many parents monitor this type of learning to keep the student on track. I am sure we will figure that out when -and if- the time comes. Should they opt to homeschool through high school, starting at age 16, our state allows any student to take 6 credits at the community college level. I would like to see the girls take laboratory sciences at the community college, as well as other classes in which they are interested. In our state, those credits combined with a passing score on the HSPA (High School Proficiency Assessment) allows a homeschool student to get a general state high school diploma (not a GED). I also know students who have presented portfolios of their work to colleges and were granted admission at both Rutgers University.
We talk to the girls about career choices and college often. We would like to see them both go to college, however where they go and what they choose to do will be up to them. We are working on developing skills, such as critical thinking and research skills that can be built upon over the next several years in an effort to prepare the girls for university. I would hope that with experiences of teaching them how to research what they want to learn about, having the time and the freedom in a relaxed environment to make connections, the higher order and critical thinking skills that we work on in a variety of ways and taking on challenges in a non-competitve environment will give our girls the confidence and desire to learn and take on more challenges in the college classroom.
