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Brave Writer, afterschooling and public schooled kids (Part Two)

Brave Writer and Public School Part 2

Previously, we discussed the differences between homeschool and public school.

So how can Brave Writer help your kids if they’re in school or if they are used to “school at home” (where homeschool duplicates the learning style of school with text books, workbooks and schoolish expectations)?

The important part of writing that gets overlooked (sometimes) by a school setting is the writer’s natural writing voice. While punctuation, grammar and spelling are important to the finished product of writing, these are not central to the art of writing (that process of dredging up words from the deep and getting them onto paper).

Writing has to make space for risk. Without risk, writers don’t grow. They may learn how to conform to expectations adequately, but they will not flourish as writers. What that means is that if your child is in a program at school that is squelching his or her natural writing voice, where you see writing developing into a resented subject, it’s time to intervene. Here are some practical tips for how Brave Writer can help you help your kids.

  1. Introduce weekly freewriting.
    Freewriting is the process by which kids get to express their written ideas and thoughts without the pressure to perform to someone else’s expectations. For kids in school, the initial feeling about freewriting might be that they are sick of writing and would like a break (not more of it at home). To counteract that feeling, try freewriting in a new setting. Get out of the house, sip a hot drink and freewrite together. You can turn a weekly freewriting time into shared quality time together. Explain that this writing is meant to help the child take risks, explore his or her sense of humor, to write all the silly things he or she wants to get out but can’t in school.
  2. Make use of the Keen Observation exercise.
    You don’t need to do this one every week, but it is very beneficial a couple times a year. The purpose of the Keen Observation Excerise is to help your child see the world more closely giving it language to express what is seen. For afterschooling, this particular exercise offers your kids the chance to slow the process of writing down. Rather than producing full sentences or paragraphs, the child gives full attention to phrases and words that match his or her experience of the item being observed. This exercise then gives you a bench mark for school writing projects. How can your child recall that experience of engaged observation to convey the assignment’s topic?
  3. Read to your kids.
    There’s a tendency to think that if a child can read, that student should read to himself. Schools no longer indulge in reading to children much past age 9. You can do it differently. Rather than everyone finishing an evening together in front of the TV, select a quality work and read it a chapter at a time before bed each night. Fiction is wonderful, but don’t forget about quality non-fiction too. We’ve read books like The Wind Masters (about the flight and habits of raptors) as well as Where in the World? A Geografunny Guide to your Globe as read alouds because they were well-written and entertaining. When you read to a child, you slow the words down so that your son or daughter really hears them. You have the chance to explain processes or plot twists, you enjoy the humor, you live the story together and will naturally find connecting points in your daily life. These book experiences help your child internalize quality writing.
  4. Go easy on school grades for writing.
    Remember that elementary and junior high school grades don’t mean much in the scheme of things. Getting poor marks for spelling or handwriting says nothing about a student’s ability to write. When you read anything your child produces for school, identify what you really loved about the content and ignore any remarks on the paper about the mechanics of writing. Focus all your attention on the language (word choices) and content (what the child attempted to convey). Keep your remarks to the strictly positive. Be specific, “You know so much about hummingbirds. I didn’t know that they ____________. And how funny that you call them “Little honeysuckle suckers” because that is so much what they’re like. The words make music when I read them.” Save and share any writing your kids produce that they like with someone else (spouses make perfect audiences, but so do grandparents, aunts, uncles, close family friends).

The Writer’s Jungle is still an excellent resource for moms whose kids are in school. It helps mothers understand how to facilitate and support a child’s growth as a writer. Certainly there are additional challenges to overcome since school writing is heavy on correction and slight on meaningful praise. Your job is to shore up what the teacher fails to do. Become your child’s ally, not one more critical voice.

If you don’t know how to do that, sign up for Kidswrite Basic. This class can be done in combination with school (we’ve had several public school parents and kids in our courses over the years).

You’ll discover more than how to write, but how to be the person in your child’s life that can overcome the negative influences of poor writing instruction.

Write for Fun!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW and public school, General, Writing Exercises, Young Writers | 1 Comment »

Brave Writer, afterschooling and public schooled kids (Part One)

Brave Writer and Public School

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 retellings 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 your 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.

Brave Writer Kidswrite Basic

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How the six principles apply: Writing and teens

I’ve elucidated some of the ideas that have been meaningful and useful to me in raising teens and working with them over the years. What I wanted to do now is to move into how these ideas connect to writing (and by extrapolation, perhaps, other subjects you are teaching).

I’ve suggested that teens need adventure, they aren’t lazy, but bored, they have interests that interest them, and that teens deserve a social life and live in a wired world.

These principles have to do with honoring your teens’ evolving sense of personhood. As we know from all the Brave Writer writing advice given over the years, the place we start in writing is with the writer, not with writing forms or skills. We begin by recognizing that the writer is someone whose mind is already brimming with experiences, ideas, thoughts, hopes, information, insight and humor that deserve to be recorded and shared with others. We yield to the process of nurturing writers, not requiring writing. We look for ways to validate that emerging writer’s voice. We celebrate successes, we minimize errors fully confident that over time, fluency will come through repeated excursions into written language, just like we saw spoken errors as passing phases on the journey toward fluency in speaking English.

With our teens, then, writing at this stage of development ought to be (if at all possible) the flowering of greater and greater self-awareness and ease in the act of writing. In other words, just like your 10-13 year old never thinks about speaking (does so easily, in his or her own voice, speaking what’s on his or her mind freely), so your high school writer ought to be more and more able to use written language to communicate ideas, thoughts, arguments and insights. Fluency (ease) comes earlier than competence (effective argument or communication), just like in speaking. Kids can talk easily even if they can’t yet enter a debate or give a speech or teach a class.

Teens need adventure, they need not to be bored, they need stimulation in areas that interest them. Use these principles to your advantage in writing. It’s easier to write an argumentative essay about animal rights when your teen volunteers at the local zoo or vet, than it is to write about the death penalty, a topic he’s never studied. Literary analysis goes better when the teen writes about an author that she loves. If Jane Austen is her favorite, why write about Hemingway? The same skills can be learned using the material she knows best.

Remember the value of direct experience in adding depth and insight to writing. Trips to foreign countries, service to others, working in a political campaign, a part-time job, serving on the library literature board for teens, varsity sports, musical performance… these experiences contribute to your teens’ growing expertise and competence level. Allow these to show themselves in their writing.

Likewise, don’t forget the value of peer relationships and technology in nurturing your writers. Writing and literature discussion groups create natural spaces for sharing writing. Classes (whether in person or over the Internet) offer opportunities to mix with peers as well as to compete with them while working on writing. Writing also benefits from teenagers’ hunger to master technology: skillful use of search engines, reading other writing online, facility with Word and PowerPoint, online courses and so on.

What it all boils down to really is this: see the world through your teens’ eyes. Don’t forget what it was like to be a teen. While they may do “dumb” things occasionally due to the underdeveloped frontal lobe, they also benefit immensely from deep engagement and investment into ideas, people and experiences that cause them to make connections between their world and the larger world around them. Writing is one tool that serves to integrate those disparate bits of information into a more thoughtful whole. When your teens take what they know (or think they know) and put it onto paper, they are required to slow down, examine their ideas and submit them for examination to others who can guide them in the process. Teens who feel the support and enthusiasm of their parents during this odyssey are the lucky ones.

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One Thinging High School: Johannah

So we wandered down Noah’s labyrinthine path to college. Let’s take a short cut to Johannah’s.

Her journey answers the following question: How do you do “one thing” at a time when you have to fulfill college entrance requirements? Or as my daughter so aptly put it in 10th grade:

I don’t get the saying that you should live as though you only have a week to live. That’s a stupid idea. We are required to live as though we’ll be alive next week, next year, in four years, in twenty years. What teenager can say, “I will live like I only have a week to live so I’m not going to spend it doing Algebra 2…”? But then, oops: “Uh-oh. I’m still alive and I need to put Algebra 2 on my transcript except, well, I went skateboarding instead.”

Johannah was bugged that she wanted to do all those little things that make life interesting but felt the press of requirements crowding out that spontaneous desire to make origami cranes for three weeks straight.

So let’s back up a bit and look at how Johannah tackled her future one thing at a time.

In eighth grade, I designed a schedule for Johannah to follow that would train her to work through a course of study with assignments and due dates. She had co-op classes (including biology, logic, theater and literature discussion), my writing courses, history and math. I felt really good about the carefully laid out plans, the weekly assignment sheet, the check list, the way each item neatly fit our targets for high school prep (when things would “really” count).

One morning, about six weeks into our carefully crafted plan, Johannah picked up her stack of books, moved to the living room sofa and declared, “I hate my life.” That comment, so utterly uncharacteristic of my daughter, stopped me in my tracks. What could she mean?

Over a cup of tea, I found out. She loved us, of course, but she knew all about us – what we ate for lunch every day, how we brushed our teeth, which TV shows we couldn’t miss. She knew how Liam and Caitrin bickered and made up. She knew how I’d present a lesson and what I would expect and what I wouldn’t. Childhood had been a Disneyland ride, but that ride was over. The little car had come to a full stop and she wanted me to release the metal bar clamped over her body so she could exit like the other travelers and head out to a new ride somewhere else in the park.

I got it. I saw the four walls of our house through her eyes: limits, boundaries, familiarity that no longer comforted, tedium. That wasn’t how the four walls appeared to me! I saw them as canvases for paint, as the boundaries that kept my kids protected, as the warm backdrops to teatimes and snuggled up read alouds. For Johannah, they were barriers to seeing the big wide world right outside the door.

That conversation led us to consider part time enrollment in the local high school for her. While that decision for Noah had proved to be completely incompatible with who he was, it seemed that Johannah could imagine nothing more wonderful than the inexhaustible opportunities to people watch. So we made a promise: get through 8th at home and come 9th grade, she could go to school a couple of hours a day. We modified her 8th grade program (she found some of my terrific ideas tedious – imagine that!). But what made the difference in her attitude was knowing a day would come when she’d get out of the house a couple of hours a day.

9th grade included to two school classes: Honor’s English and French 1. At home, we turned a corner. I had the following conversation with Johannah:

I want you to have a great four years and your dad and I will do everything you need us to do to make that happen. We’ll coach you in writing, Dad will help you with literature, we’ll provide you a math tutor, we’ll pay for extracurricular activities, I’ll create a transcript for college, we’ll invite your friends to our house.

What we won’t do is nag you, coerce you, tell you what to do and when to do it. If college is your aim, we’re happy to collaborate to make it a reality, but we won’t harass you into fulfilling requirements. That will be your job – finding out what they are (with our help) and then following through.

This strategy was perfect for Johannah. I stopped following up on her school work or even assigning it. She would come to me for advice about how to organize her time, what classes to take and would ask for help in fulfilling those objectives.

One Thing Lessons
Because Johannah was college bound, we did want to ensure that she fulfilled the requirements for her transcript. However, because we are a family much more interested in learning that checking boxes, we tailored her education to fit her personality and learning style.

For instance, math. Algebra had stumped Johannah in 8th grade. We waited. She didn’t start algebra until the spring of her 9th grade year. Then she did math year round with a tutor through algebra 2. We found out that Johannah was good at math when taught by someone other than me. We discovered that with a tutor, she could skip a week when she had too many other requirements, when the plays were in full swing. She could cover a chapter in more depth when it was challenging or she could move ahead quickly when she understood the ideas. Because math had not been her favorite subject nor her strong suit, using a tutor meant that math became manageable with the rest of her life. She did math one unit at a time, fitting it to her life (not the other way around).

She studied Latin one year starting in the summer (with a tutor) to see if she’d like it. By starting in the summer without any other subjects, she could give it the attention it needed and a fair chance of success.

She participated in a Shakespeare company that included summer camps and year round acting training. This program also included textual analysis which provided her with her best vocabulary development of all the things she did during high school. As a result, we didn’t do a formal lit program her sophomore or junior years of high school.

She continued French, took chemistry (hardest class of the four years), and electives like AP psychology, sociology, human sexuality, acting, economics, and government at school spread out over four years. Chemistry was a bear. I wanted her to quit about six times. Jon had a different point of view. He felt that rather than think about learning chemistry as the objective, Johannah could use that class to learn how to pass a class when it was hard and not interesting. So he helped her think of test-taking strategies, she used the teacher’s tutorial times to help her learn the material (every week), she did all extra credit and I sat with her going over the chapters she read each night during the first quarter to be sure she was understanding what she was reading. We adjusted our other expectations to make extra space for chemistry that year.

It worked. Johannah not only passed chemistry, but she learned how to learn in a traditional setting even when it didn’t suit her temperament or interests. Because she was not carrying a full load (at school or at home), she could give that extra time to this challenging class without hating her life.

Johannah was heavily involved in extra-curricular activities: color guard, plays, psychology club, Darfur Awareness Week planning committee. I often wonder how she could have done all she did with a full load of traditional schooling.

What about history? Interestingly, Johannah doesn’t enjoy the study of history. Which stumped me. It was my major; I was a Sonlight mom. So we put it off.

Because we had done ancient history in 8th grade (and in some depth), I didn’t worry about it early on. But by senior year, she did need to have studied US History for admissions to the colleges she chose. So we did a crash course. I taught her every night for six weeks using the SAT 2 prep book. Then she took the test and got a better than passing score. I happily checked that box at the end of it. It struck me that she may not have had the level of depth in history that some people consider necessary. However, even with a major in history, I noticed that I have not retained all the details of history over the course of my adulthood. It’s been a process of layering. I grasp it better and better as I age. She will too since learning is not limited to the years under 22.

What we discovered with Johannah is that we could organize her learning into blocks. Rather than having to take seven courses every day over four years covering all of the subjects, we figured out how to manage the stressful courses one at a time, how to stagger the expectations so that she could learn the subjects that challenged her most with the greatest support that she needed, all while meeting her social needs through school.

So Johannah took math with a tutor during summers and during the years she didn’t take chemistry. The year she took chemistry, she wasn’t writing papers for an English class. When she wanted to try Latin, she did it with a tutor in the summer to get started to see if she’d like it. In her sophomore year, when she discovered that the Honor’s English class in school felt like a dud (she couldn’t bear students hating on Shakespeare), she dropped the class. She and her dad set up a lit discussion group in our home with four of her best guy friends. They met every other week, reading a great book and discussing it together over the year. No writing, as a matter of fact. Does this approach to learning remind you of anything? College! That’s how it’s done. You take a few classes at a time, intensively.

She built her tolerance for school classes going two hours a day in 9th grade, then three in 10th, then four and four in 11th and 12th. She never did go full time so that she could still pursue her own interests outside of school (which included a daily date with Oprah and a nap :)). Interestingly, Johannah earned a 5 on her AP pysch test and had her highest GPA during the last semester of her senior year. She made a great comment:

I never got senioritis. I wanted to do all my homework right up to the end and did it. I still liked my classes. I wanted A’s. I guess I never burned out on school. It still interested me. I wanted to learn the content and I liked being there. I didn’t understand why other kids were so glad to be done. Then I realized I hadn’t been “doing school” the way they’d been doing it for 12 years.

We’ll look at what I make of all this in tomorrow’s blog.

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One Thinging High School: Noah

I have so much to share about high school that I thought I’d take it a child at a time first. I have two who have “finished” (a relative term as you will see) high school and they couldn’t have tackled it more differently. The principle of “one thing” in the teen years is expressed in the following idea: Momentum is gained when a child is allowed to build on his or her interests and skills one thing at a time. It doesn’t mean that multiple things aren’t going on at once. It means that the center of life (the things that animate and motivate your teens) will get a lion’s share of attention… one at a time. It means that some things (some subjects, requirements etc.) will not be addressed with the same level of commitment as others. This will look different for each child, by the way, just to make it more complicated.

Without further ado, let’s look at Noah, my now 20 year old son who lives in an apartment and goes to University of Cincinnati.

Full disclosure: Jon and I are hopelessly committed to college education. We think it’s the elixir of life. I wander through university quads with my palms up expecting “collegiate smarts” to rain from the skies and bless me, Ultima. So while we always prided ourselves on letting our kids be who they were, are and would be, rock star or plumber, the one silent coercive expectation in our home is that kids go to college. Period. Just like some parents expect their kids to take over the family business, go into the ministry or join the military…. Only see, we didn’t know we were like that. I mean, we thought we were being normal and friendly-like. We never saw that our passionate cheering for UCLA football and slobbering gushes over university professors invisibly cajoled our kids, telling them, “We like people who go to college more than people who don’t…”

Translation: The not-so-hidden-from-our-kids agenda (though well-concealed from ourselves) meant that my educational decisions were directed by the inward push to see our kids get to college. And I would still say that is a reasonable approach to high school education assuming you have kids who show academic aptitude and an interest in traditional modes of education. Assuming… which is just what we did.

Train on wrong track: So while the ideals were noble (college for all our beloveds, and even paid for by us!), the reality that we faced as our oldest made his way through high school and college prep revealed just how stubborn our hidden agenda really was! Noah has never been one to follow the straightest path to our expectations for him (probably because he has enough internal spirit to have his own ideas of how to spend his life). So freshman year of high school looked like a check list of courses that would sweeten his high school transcript not the portrait of a highly creative, curious linguist in the budding. Resistance to school work? Understatement. The high volume tug of war had begun between my anxiety over his future and Noah’s commitment to his valuable present. By midway through sophomore year, Noah pulled the plug. He told us he couldn’t do it any more.

Rerouting the train: Noah knew that he didn’t like traditional education (evidenced by the fact that he wrote poems during his math tests at the local high school where he was enrolled part-time) nor did he feel motivated by the dire predictions that without college, he’d have no future. Instead, he poured himself into the study of Klingon, he read widely, he learned some computer code, taught himself guitar, played the piano, acted in a Shakespeare company, worked for a pizza place and then Barnes and Noble, watched movies, played RPG’s and skipped: chemistry, US history, English in its traditional structure, a second year of foreign language and math beyond Algebra 2. He also hung out with friends and slept a lot. By what should have been his senior year, he stopped anything resembling traditional education.

Getting on board with who he was: It took me three full years to adjust to this new reality: Noah was not college bound, not worried about it, not interested in a graduation or homeschool diploma or party to celebrate the end of homeschool. What interested him? Living one day at a time, one interest at a time. I had to let go (so hard for me to do!) and trust that if college were in his future, he’d discover that without my constant prodding and pushing. I also had to accept (and still do) that college may not be for him. Once Jon and I got past our need to direct him, we enjoyed him! We found his interests truly stimulating. He knew more than we did about grammatical structures, the IPA, Shakespeare and math (he developed an interest in math as a language) than we ever would.

The surprise! At 18 Noah decided to move out to live with friends. We were thrilled for him to feel ready to take on paying rent and living on his own. Then as an after thought about a month later, he said, “If I’m going to live down the street from college, maybe I should go.” Come again? It did not seem possible to me that he would be able to meet the admissions requirements for college. But what do I know? We put together his transcript which included a list of linguistics books he’d read as well as all that stuff he did on his own. UC not only took him, but they waived the courses he didn’t take saying that his linguistics profile combined with what he did study was enough. (He did have one college level Greek class on his transcript, something he took “for fun” during his year off.) And I had been worried…

Today: College is a challenge to Noah. He loves it (just like we hoped he would). But the structure is not conducive to his learning style. He’s not a natural academic. He’s a natural learner. I don’t know if he’ll finish. It no longer matters. What is more important now is to stay tuned into him as he figures out what makes him tick one thing at a time. Backing off in high school made it possible for him to reconsider college because by the time he went, he had not burned out in high school. Additionally, he sought help at the learning center and is able to take advantage of accommodations designed for him (he discovered that he has some auditory processing issues).

I share this story in part to set up conclusions I will post after I share my daughter’s on Wednesday. So stay tuned if this feels like you are still trying to figure out where I’m going. I also have observations to make based on working with hundreds of teens over the last eight years through Brave Writer.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing, Tips for Teen Writers | 8 Comments »