It’s official: after ~3 years of research (a.k.a. obsessive blog reading and lurking on mailing lists) and 2 years of alternative schooling (for one of my children), we’re saying “goodbye” to school and “hello” to home learning. My kids will be finished with school by June 15.

Yeehaw!

In September we hope to attend our first not-back-to-school-picnic, as we also start to figure out exactly what home learning will look like for us. I have some ideas, but since the kids haven’t really had a chance to just do it, we’re going to have to wait to see how it turns out.

But I’m also truly thrilled to finally have taken the plunge, so I must take a moment to give a hearty and heartfelt thanks to all the homeschoolers who write or frequent homeschool-related blogs and to the homeschoolers with whom I have spoken or corresponded via email. All of you speak so eloquently of the joys, challenges, and benefits of home learning with your children — you have helped my family understand that homeschooling is more about the way you live your life than it is about how you educate your children. Thank you for sharing your insights and your passion for your — to coin an oft mis-used phrase — lifestyle choice.

Heh.

My daughter marked her last day of school on her calendar as “School Vacation.” The other night we talked about the fact that it’s going to be a really long one. My kids are both excited and nervous about not going back to school in the fall. Their primary concern seems to be who their friends will be — they won’t have classmates for a built-in supply of candidates. So we have feelers out into nearby communities so that we can connect with other homeschoolers in the area. It’s important to me that my kids feel like they belong to a community of people who also opt to learn at home.

Our decision to homeschool has been a long time coming, and it’s a relief to have finally made it. I have the usual concerns about my soon-to-be missing income and whether or not I’ll be any good at my “new job,” but I know we’ve made the right choice for our kids. I don’t know how long the journey will last — we’ve told the kids we’ll take it year by year — but honestly, I hope it lasts a long, long time.

Wish us luck!

Over at Blogcritics, where I sometimes cross-post my blog entries, Diana Hartman has written an article about fairness and what it does and doesn’t mean. Or maybe it’s about what it should and shouldn’t mean.

Hartman rails against scholastic relay races that either let all the kids compete regardless of skill level or that don’t have winners and losers, against the way school awards are given out to students, and against making tests easier in response to complaints that the tests aren’t fair.

She makes a good point with her last example, one from “real life”: the driving test U.S. military and their dependents have to pass in order to obtain a driver’s license when they’re stationed in Germany. Upwards of 45% have been failing the test — leaving military family cars in the holding lot for months at a time — so the military has decided to make the test easier. (Or at least that’s how Hartman sees it. I don’t know anything about the test.)

The problem — and I agree with Hartman on this — is one of safety. If she’s right and the test is being made easier, we now will have a bunch of U.S. drivers over there who don’t have as much knowledge and skill as the German citizenry. How dangerous will those drivers be on the German roads? How smart was it to make the test easier as a matter of convenience for U.S. military families new to Germany? Time will tell.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to lower standards on tests that measure a minimum competency in a skill or a field that impacts someone’s safety or health. I wouldn’t be happy if the state medical board exams suddenly got easier just so more medical school graduates could become licensed doctors, for example. Making tests like these easier does not necessarily make them any more fair, anyway.

The rest of Hartman’s examples come from her family’s K-12 school experiences. She’s apparently drawing a connection between lowered standards in American schools with the lowered driving test standard. “Why should we expect the adult graduates of American schools to work hard to pass a driver’s test when their school experience taught them that everyone should pass life’s tests?” she seems to be asking.

Unfortunately, these school stories don’t help her argument. First, K-12 schools are not “real” life and shouldn’t operate as if they were. And second, the specific anecdotes Hartman relates are cautionary tales about creating competition between students more than they are about lowered standards.
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Tags: competition in school, teamwork, fairness, bad teaching

What should we do with high school students who skip classes and don’t do the coursework? Fail them? Or let them get credit for the course by completing a study pack provided by an outside vendor?

I say hell yeah to option #2.

The takeaway message from students who say things like, “I want to get done with school the easiest way possible,” is not that the students are lazy or too smart and bored to be bothered with the work. The message is that many high school students don’t see any relevance to their lives and interests in their coursework. They don’t have much, if any, choice in which courses they take, and they certainly don’t have any input into how the school is run. They go to school because they’re compelled to by state law (at least until they’re 16 in most states) and not because they want to.

They’ve lost the desire to learn because the schools aren’t interested in students’ desire to learn. Schools are interested in pushing as many kids through the same program as efficiently as possible, no matter how diverse those kids’ interests may be. For the most part, students are treated the same way and must take the same basic coursework. If you don’t expect some students to be completely uninterested in schools like that, you’re deluding yourself.

In the corporate training world, a basic premise is that whatever training program you’re building had better be relevant to the target audience because that audience seeks out skills and information that are relevant to their careers. They’re extremely tactical in their approach to training, and they don’t suffer foolish training programs gladly.

For some reason, educational theorists assign this premise specifically to “adult learners,” as if relevance and purpose don’t matter to “child learners.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has ever watched a child try new things — like learning to walk or learning to read — knows that children approach everything they do with a purpose. Unfortunately, traditional schools don’t allow children to pursue purposeful activities; all activities are selected by the adults for the children. By the time high school rolls around, who can blame them for wanting to get out of that environment with the least effort required?

Tags: public schools,student choice,course credit,educational theory,purposeful learning,compulsory attendance

Although I guess I should have known — it’s my anniversary, and I’m at the computer taking a nerd test.

Hat tip to Chris.

It’s hard to stay awake all day.

I’m never fast enough to make the bed before someone gets comfy

Sunbathing, the favorite summer hobby. Second-favorite: waiting for the sun.

Tags: dog

To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.

Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”

Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”

The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.

Here We Go ‘Round In Circles

Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”

You know, phonics.

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Tags: educational choice, homeschooling, learning, phonics