Brave Writer

Read this article: Future School

Alvin Toffler of Future Shock fame tackles the failures of public education in this article. What I find so refreshing reading it is how homeschooling, unschooling, charter schools, independent study programs have anticipated the exhaustion of the current model of education. Check out these wonderful comments and think about how you naturally create learning:

For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system — everybody reading the same textbook at the same time — did not offer.

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One of the challenges of homeschooling is that most of us never were. We grew up in schools. We have the voices of a dozen administrators and teachers whispering in our heads as we teach our children. They ask us if our kids are doing enough “school work,” if they are “grade appropriate,” if they could survive if they were ever put in school.

Sometimes even our spouses or parents add volume to these voices with specific questions:

“Did you do anything today?”

“Why doesn’t Katie know her times tables like her cousin?”

I know that for me, these voices get loudest when I’ve been distracted and not attentive to my kids. If a week goes by where I’ve had two dental appointments, a trip to the vet, lots of business and a flooded basement, the routine of activities that reassures me that my kids are getting a better education (or at least, a different one) than their schooled peers is sidelined. When that happens, I doubt my effectiveness as a home educator and all those whispers become shouts.

A personal philosophy of home education is critical to resisting the voices. I’ve noticed that today’s new homeschoolers often start right out with curricula and skip what I consider the most important step in the homeschooling journey: developing a philosophy of education. Brave Writer, for instance, isn’t a system or schedule or curricula as much as it is a philosophy of language arts and writing that then gets executed very differently from what is done in school. The process and results don’t match well with 3rd grade language arts or 5th grade creative writing. The only way to embrace the difference is to believe in and be reassured by the philosophy (and documented evidence of its effectiveness) when you wander down this very different path to your children’s education.

So what should be done to develop that philosophy of education and what good is it at the end of the year when your kids have to take standardized tests (as they do in some states)?

Let’s look at each piece:

The Philosophy
Home education is deliberately not “school.” The home education movement removes children from buildings, teachers and curricula to bring them home to spend the day with parents. Parents’ reasons for this non-traditional educational path have ranged from religious conviction to special needs support to accelerated learning to real life learning (as opposed to learning from a canned curricula). Each one of us must spend time identifying our reasons for homeschooling. It helps to read books, to join email lists, to chat online in homeschool discussion groups, to meet monthly with a local support group. These are the places where you cultivate your convictions about why home education is the right choice for your family.

Remember: there is no perfect educational model that will yield better results in every category, in every condition. You can’t expect kids educated at home who aren’t being drilled to death for standardized tests to do as well as kids whose teachers spend half the year preparing their kids to take those same tests. That some of our kids do better than the kids in school without all that preparation is even more remarkable! If you are a home educator, standardized testing is one good reason to keep your kids out of the system so that all they have to do is take the tests, not be enslaved to them for half a school year. Additionally, no one is going to make your child “go to school” for a low score. Find out what the minimum score is that your state requires to show advancement and then shoot for that. You are educating a whole person, not a test taker.

The Practice
When you’ve determined your philosophy of home education and have developed it to include why you see it as a better choice than the alternative, it’s time to think about how to carry out your philosophy. Here’s the trick, though. The practice is nothing like what you remember from school. That means (pay attention here) the results will look different than what you get in school. Some of what you accomplish will be light years better in an obvious way (snuggling on the couch, great discussions about a book you are reading aloud, trips to the zoo, kitchen science experiments that are bubbly and dramatic, nature walks that lead to blackberry bushes, learning to read at one’s own pace, math facts learned without ever studying them). Other results will seem inferior (not as advanced in math or spelling or writing as age mates in school, timidity in your child, no cool projects to hang on the wall, standardized test scores not as high as you imagined).

Even some schooled kids have low test scores, don’t learn their times tables well, are poor writers and readers, and find it difficult to sustain friendships in the school setting.

Read that last sentence again. For some reason, when we compare our kids to schooled kids, we tend to compare our normal kids to the top of the class in school. We just assume that the norm in school is higher than what our kids are producing, but that is patently false. Think back to your own school career and the friends you had. Some of you excelled at everything, but many of you are painfully aware of your own gaps as an adult. You remember friends who fell through the cracks, or who had to repeat a grade.

Home education is not about scores, proving oneself in the arena of “A” students or even meeting the demands of school scopes and sequences. Home education is about nurturing your children’s love of learning so that as they encounter new and interesting aspects of the world around them (the sciences, history, literature, art, music, poetry, theater, nature, astronomy, movies, writing, crafts, gardening, cooking, cleaning up after one’s self, driving a car, making a friend, redecorating a bedroom…), they feel inspired and competent to learn all they need to about the subject at hand.

We are attempting to create a rich educational environment that is not out of a box or canned curricula, but that invites participation! We homeschool because we want to catalyze a love of learning. We homeschool because we value each child’s unique pace in acquiring what he or she needs for a successful, satisfying, meaningful place in the adult world.

So standardized tests? Don’t stress about them. Evaluate your home education by your philosophy and practice, not by how school measures it.

I’ve had several emails asking about how Brave Writer fits with public schooling or if it can be used for afterschooling. The answer is a resounding yes!

I have two experiences to share that might shed a little light on how writing in public school is experienced and perceived.

My roommate friend from college called me to ask for writing help and advice for her then 9 year old daughter. Apparently this natural writer had already lost her enthusiasm for telling stories, doodling, and writing. Her teacher had assigned the class a daily journaling practice. Jennifer’s writing had gone from delightful retelling of the little events in her life to carefully crafted, correctly punctuated two or three sentences that recounted nothing more important than what she had eaten for breakfast.

Upon further inquiry by me, I discovered that this teacher was red-inking these daily journal entries. Each one was graded for grammar, spelling, punctuation and neatness (penmanship). At age nine, little Jennifer had already figured out that she was “safest” if she kept her entries short, avoided any words she didn’t know how to spell and limited her sentences to only a few words at a time.

Cyndy called to ask me: “What has happened to my daughter’s love of writing and her bright imagination?” Cyndy wondered how to rekindle Jennifer’s enthusiasm for language in written form now that school had snuffed it out. I had to wonder: What good is proper punctuation, spelling and tidy handwriting if the contents were tedious to read?

Becky, a homeschooling mother getting her feet wet with Brave Writer, has a different perception of school and sent an email to ask me this question:

Julie,

Why is it that public schools seem to teach writing so much better (or at least more easily) than homeschoolers? What are we doing wrong? What are they doing right? I hear from you and from lots of other homeschoolers to not worry so much and that things then to work out without so much worry. I want my child to WRITE and the public school students seem to do it so easily. What should I change? Should I change?

We are beginning on our Writer’s Jungle journey and are enjoying Freewrites and Teatimes and Copywork/Dictation with the Arrow. My son is nine years old.

I thought maybe you might be able to answer this question in you blog at sometime in the future.

Thanks,

Becky in WA

It is interesting that her son is also nine years old. I emailed her back with a few questions and Becky sent a second email:

I suppose some of the reason that I feel the public schools are doing a better job at teaching writing is based on the quantity of work that the children produce and the ease with which they control a pencil (neat handwriting). Public school seems to do more writing than homeschoolers do and it isn’t a big deal to the students. Sometimes it seems like pulling teeth to get two sentences out of my son.

For example: Public school: write in you journal today; answer these questions (in writing) about the film we just watched, do written corrections in your grammar book of these sentences, write a sentence with each of your spelling words, do this type of book report, etc. My son acts like he is dying having to write anything, and I worry that I have done something wrong by not pushing or requiring more of him. Admittedly, he loves to write on his own (horrible spelling and few capitals or periods) and really doesn’t mind the freewrite/copywork things we are doing with writer’s jungle (sic). But we still do a lot of work orally and his handwriting is awful.

I wonder if my son has more than the usual problems with writing (such as dysgraphia) or if he is fine. But there seem to be a lot of homeschooled boys whose mothers can’t get them to write. What are we doing wrong?

Becky

From the inside, school writing feels stifling, contrived and sometimes, overwhelming, particularly to kids who struggle to write (and there are plenty of those types of kids in public school). From the outside, that reassuring stack of completed writing assignments with happy faces, stickers and the requisite red ink creates the impression of cooperative, effective writing instruction. Not so fast Charley.

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between school in a building and school at home. First, classrooms hold some 20-30 children with one teacher. That teacher doesn’t have time to hold rich conversations with each child about his or her reactions to a film, book, play or art project. The teacher can’t sit side by side with each kid discussing writing conventions, accommodating learning styles, giving unlimited time to complete a project, tailoring an assignment to fit the individual strengths and weaknesses of the child. She might want to. And many of the good ones figure out how to do as much of that as they can within the confines of school. Still, logistically speaking, school is about managing a large group and moving them through pre-designed steps that must be covered by year’s end.

The truth is, what counts in school is performance on year-end district or statewide tests. Those tests measure the measurable. They aren’t looking at how rich the imagination is, or how sophisticated the vocabulary, or how intensely that student mastered a specific area of interest (like art from the Renaissance or why an owl’s head can turn 360 degrees or how Pokemon cards are organized). Paragraphs organized according to formula (for easy grading), spelling, grammar and punctuation get top billing. Training kids to tolerate a lot of writing is top priority.

In a controlled environment where mothers are not present, students learn how to manage their anxiety around writing. Some shut down the creativity (like Jennifer), some are funneled into special needs groups (even kids who don’t have special needs but who just need a bit more time to mature), some begin to hate school. (Of course there are some kids who enjoy school and writing and don’t have these reactions too. Those kids would do well in any learning environment and make up a smaller percentage of the whole.)

Public school does what we can’t do at home: It sets a normative daily practice that kids feel compelled to obey despite their abilities, interest level or needs. They are trained early on that success in that environment requires compliance, coping, and copying (the models, the methods and the manner of learning).

Home education is less coercive by nature. Phone calls, dental appointments and holiday preparations interrupt “school,” mothers are warm and cuddly (usually) and responsive to complaints. Parents can know that a child is learning without a worksheet, they can enjoy and savor a child’s latest in-depth exploration of a topic because there is time enough, space enough, caring enough for those conversations to occur. Writing is a part of a whole life, not a requirement to finish so recess can begin, so the report card will be good, so the teacher will be satisfied.

In short, writing at home has an entirely different character and quality than it does in school. It develops more the way talking developed in your children. A nine year old boy may really feel that handwriting is torture (just so you know, lots of nine year olds in school feel that way too however they have no options but to do what they hate anyway). As parents at home, we have the chance to do it differently.

As I told Cyndy, writing has to become a means of communication that the child values in order for it to ever be more than the execution of duty on behalf of someone else’s agenda. I sent Cyndy some of the exercises we use in Kidswrite Basic as well as The Writer’s Jungle (I’ll write more about these in Part Two). We talked about how to get the joy and life back into her daughter’s experiences. I suggested that Cyndy talk to the teacher and ask her to let journal entries be free of corrections so that kids could take writing risks while they are developing. I suggested books that she could recommend to the teacher about how writing develops in children.

As home educators, we can do all of this and more. We can give space for freedom in writing (without corrections), we can take time for our kids’ hands to develop so that they don’t hate the physical act of writing which then sets the pattern of hating written communication. We can celebrate the insight despite the spelling. There’s no crime in having bad spelling at age 9. Think of it this way. When your toddler misspeaks, you don’t worry that other kids from daycare are better “talkers.” You chuckle when he says “mazazine” and means “magazine” because you know over time, he’ll learn to say it correctly. Same thing is true when he writes “becuz.” Jot it down in the baby book as evidence of a “cute stage” he’s in.

The point is this: homeschool and public school are profoundly different in their outlook and methods of education. Don’t expect home to mirror school and vice versa. However, given the limitations and strengths of each, there are ways to preserve and cultivate a love for writing. Tomorrow’s entry will discuss how to create a space at home (either for afterschooling or homeschooling) that releases the writer within your child.