Archive for the ‘Homeschool Advice’ Category

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 »

Why I Gave Up the Unschooling Label

Why I gave up the unschooling label

The themes of this week’s email: Help! I want to be more relaxed but then I worry that I’m not doing enough and besides, I know there are requirements for the future that must be met and after all, my kids are struggling with learning issues…. how do I know when to push, when to hold back, when to follow a course of study, when to let kids lead the way with me running along side cheering and supporting? And I had no idea you were such an unschooler.

Let’s start right there. Unschooling.

That word conjures less consensus than the correct waist-height of mid-rise jeans, and generates far more passion.

Pair it with “radical” as in “radical unschooling” and the waistline drops about four inches. And get real. Who can wear low rise jeans after four kids?

That’s pretty much how many moms feel about radical unschooling – Looks sexy, but who can get away with it?

While I love many things about the unschooling philosophy, one thing I don’t love is the label. When the definition of a word becomes more important than the nuances of your particular life, you run the risk of becoming a slave to upholding an ideology rather than a responsive mother. Let me just add that the purists (those who are genuinely committed to an unschooling lifestyle) often are tuned into the nuances of their relationships (which is one easy way to define unschooling in its ideal form).

Unfortunately, to get there, many moms twist themselves into pretzels trying to fulfill an imaginary ideal of unschooling rather than imbibing the philosophy that might change them one bit at a time.

In our home, I’ve given up the labels. They stopped helping me. I felt I was being called on to critique or defend the notion of unschooling rather than being known for how I live with my children. So this morning, with a little time on my hands, let me give you a window into how I see learning and family.

Relational peace is a priority in our home.

That means when a child is in distress, we move to eradicate the source of the stress (we don’t resort to punishment or rewards to overcome it). I take seriously pouting, dawdling, eye-rolling, tears, moodiness, and resistance. These indicate to me that there’s something wrong with the world for that person/child.

My aim is to find out what it is through empathy first. Then we work to create a context that relieves the source. Sometimes that means dropping the day’s activities. Some days it means eating protein before whatever the activity is. Other times it means wading into emotional territory until a level of relief makes it possible to continue with the pre-planned activity. It never means forcing a child to do a task for the sake of “teaching a lesson.”

Learning takes two.

While relaxed, eclectic and un-schoolers all promote the idea that a child’s interests make for the best learning opportunities, I’ve also found that a parent’s personal educational trajectory is equally important to the family lifestyle of learning. Too often moms spend a lot of energy trying to figure out what their children want to learn (wringing their hands hoping a “real” interest pops up) while they themselves have no idea what they would enjoy knowing or learning. Whenever a mom expresses anxiety over her kids, I suggest she take up knitting. 🙂 Really. Pick a hobby, area of study, or latent curiosity and pursue it with genuine vigor (even if it takes away from your homeschool schedule).

Live your interests before your kids. Watch the DVDs of the “Story of Painting” right in the middle of your homeschool day, listen to the Lord Peter Wimsey books on CD while making lunch, set up the easel in your dining room and paint during the afternoons while your kids play the X box, hang bird feeders and count the birds that come to your backyard for Project Feederwatch. Be an interested learner with passion for life and your kids will benefit from the run-off.

Drop what you can; do what you must.

One challenge for those wanting a more relaxed lifestyle is that when moms squelch their anxiety and let go of the reins, they freak out a few weeks later when it looks like their kids are laying around with the TV remote and not doing anything of observable value.

Let’s apply “one-thing” to this scenario. Let go of one thing at a time. If up until now your kids throw hissy fits over a particular practice (workbook, math drill, grammar lesson, sitting in the kitchen rather than lounging on the couch), let one of those go. Just drop it. You can always come back to it.

Today – say to your kids, “We’re putting math away for awhile since it’s going poorly.” By the same token, if you feel concerned about grammar, turn that concern into practical action. Focus on it. Find ways to make it meaningful. Become the student of grammar you hope your kids will be. Incorporate it into all of your lives through conversation, observation, identifying typos, reading a humorous grammar book, practicing sentences in a foreign language, playing grammar games.

Both attitudes matter. You can let go of what is trying and embrace what causes you anxiety. The letting go may even be temporary and the embracing may turn out to be easily satisfied. In both cases, you are honoring the emotional temperature of your family. Pay attention to both your kids (what they need, hate, love, want, cry about, resist, crave) and to yourself (what you fear, need to satisfy, hope, wish, imagine, overemphasize). Somewhere between these two is an education that you will find satisfies you both.

Drop the lingo. Unschooling is just one more word. Focus instead on reality in your home.

The Homeschool Alliance

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice, Unschooling | 8 Comments »

“One Thing” High School Style Part One
(or what happened to Cozy Learning?)

Lots of moms are very comfortable with what I might call “cozy” learning during the early years. “Cozy learning” is that unhurried longer look at a topic of interest using our natural appetites to guide us in our study. So, for instance, if bird calls entice, a cozy learner packs an apple and a bottle of water in a backpack, loads the stroller and sling into the car and ties the shoe laces of her other three under-ten year old kids as they head out to the hills to hike. She hands out the free field guides she got from National Geographic when she renewed her subscription. When the four-year-old exclaims, “Mom, look! That’s an American Crow!” pointing simultaneously to the photo in the book, the happy homeschooling mother contentedly reflects on the day as a success. Learning happened.

Cozy learning, then, is that wonderful intersection of real studies combined with natural lifestyle (yummy snacks, walks, long looks, snuggling under blankets, fires blazing, soft music, enjoyment of art – both admiring masterpieces and finger painting-cheerful enthusiasm when learning the structure of the ear canal or the shape of a teepee or how to skip count 7s).

By junior high, the coziness starts to disappear. It happens slowly. This odd notion called, “Now it really counts” moves in and takes the cozy learner hostage. With the gun of college prep requirements aimed at the homeschooling parent’s transcript generator cautiously saved on the hard disk, panic and doubt ensue.

Sure she knows a Picasso from a Monet, but will that really help her get into college?

He’ll read any novel I hand him, but I can’t get him to take interest in current events. Doesn’t he need to care about his world and understand how to interpret the events of today to make it as an adult?

And math. Oh. My. Toothbrush! What will I do? My kids stopped loving it and I stopped knowing how to teach it and don’t they need at least three good years of it to get to college?

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the concerns. Writing, history, economics and believe it or not, some moms even stress over PE and Health. They look at the college admissions list, remember their own high school days and immediately lose all the love of learning they’ve cultivated for the last eight years. Enter Madam Textbook and Master Year-Long Program.

I totally get it. I yielded to the pressure like any good mom. When my oldest two were in 8th and 10th grade, I got “serious” and planned a program that would have them studying like good students for several hours a day, writing narrations, reading meaty books, preparing oral and written reports, all while being tutored in math, of course. Within eight weeks, my daughter (the 8th grader) told me she hated her life. My 10th grader looked at me one day and said, “If this is what college will be like, I don’t want to go.”

Good thing my hearing is fine. My nerves, however, were not and I did what I do when my plans fail. I freaked out. You see, the one thing I’m not good at – looking at a miserable child and doing nothing. We started over. I went back to what I really believed about education. Deep down I knew that what you hated to do did not educate you. It harmed you and your relationship to that subject (and the person requiring it). I also knew that any subject could be engaging if the learner bought in (believed he or she needed to learn it) and the delivery was compelling.

So I rethunk a lot of things at that point. My “rethunkings” will be posted in installment two: How I turned four years of fulltime “college prep requirements” into four years of doing one thing at a time.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing | 5 Comments »

The “One Thing” Drum Beat

The One Thing Drum Beat

For two years, my kids got stuck in Ancient Greece. Try as I might to drag them into Rome, they dug in their heels and kept reading myths. We read them in every version we could find them. Correction: my kids read them. I read the first myth book aloud to them and then they took off finding alternate versions of the stories.

They not only read myths, they wrote them. They drew the gods and goddesses. They discovered myths from other cultures and compared them to the Ancient Greeks. They found references to gods and mythology in Shakespeare. They were overjoyed when they realized that painters love Greek mythology and became expert in identifying the stories in paintings and sculptures when we went to the art museum.

In short, they saturated themselves in mythology. I fretted a bit at the time. Shouldn’t we be reading Plato? Wouldn’t it be better for them to understand the role of the city-state and democracy as conceived by the Greeks? What about moving ahead to Egypt and Rome and into the Middle Ages? They wouldn’t budge.

I gave in. (I’m like that.) So over the course of two years, mythology dominated our homeschool experience. We certainly continued to do the things we usually did (math, language arts, reading aloud, poetry tea times, trips to museums, parks and the zoo, science-y projects, co-op). We watched the history channel occasionally. But for the most part, if you ask our older kids about those years, they will tell you: we studied mythology.

One day, they were done. We moved onto Ancient Egypt, Rome finally fell and we trundled into the dark ages. A highlight of that period: listening to Seamus Heaney recite “Beowulf.” A deeply satisfying period.
—

Sometimes when we look at our homeschools, we want to be able to check off the chronological list of historical moments. We imagine that if we read the historical fiction, tie it to a timeline and discuss the major events in history, our children will be educated. We move them along, making sure we “cover” the whole Middle Ages in one year, or whatever.

Yet education has to do with investment and retention, the ability to generate meaning from what is being studied.

Many kids can’t make heads nor tails of time. Last week feels like a month ago. Christmas is ten years away. But history is all about time and imagination, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s place and know it as it was. If we move too quickly through history, we risk information overload and a deliberate disconnect from the material in favor of “getting through it.”

We have a running joke in our family. I majored in history, but Jon recalls historical dates and events better than I do. I can tell you a lot about trends, the philosophical conditions of each period of history, how people lived and what they wanted or knew. He can tell you what year the government was overthrown in Guatemala. (And a lot more than that too.)

Even as a history major, though, knowing the facts of history has not been key to my success as a student, as an adult, as an educated person.

What’s been useful to me is knowing how to learn, how to analyze, what to do with the information once I have it, how to make connections. By allowing my kids to wallow in mythology for two years, they discovered a way into history that helped them imagine other times and places, that prepared them for other literature and religions from historical periods of the past. It created an anchor point from which to examine other cultures.

In applying the “one thing” theory to other aspects of homeschool, pay attention to what “hooks the jaw.” If one of your kids becomes utterly fascinated with weapons, use that fascination as the access point to look at history. I remember when Noah spent six months watching World War 2 movies with his dad. He also drew tanks and guns into a sketch book. We read some historical fiction from that time period as well.

“One thing” implies trusting that the immersion in one topic that really interests will lead to all the learning necessary. There’s that spill over of developed vocabulary (genocide, Aryans, socialism), calculations about numbers of people (Holocaust, Normandy) or years (when the war started for whom and when it ended) and months (military campaigns) or distances (how far is it to fly from Japan to Pearl Harbor and on how much gas?), geography (which countries existed where and when and for how long), alliances, philosophy, and economics….

Knowing how these fit together in one period is enough for a long time. It provides the right frame of reference for future historical studies. When absorbed, the next war or period examined will automatically be internally compared to this first one. Momentum is gained when you yield to interest. Real learning takes place and created connections point to the next phase of study.

Brave Writer online class: Writing a Greek Myth

Posted in General, Homeschool Advice, One Thing | 8 Comments »

Scheduling The Writer’s Jungle

Scheduling the Writer's Jungle

Some of you wonder how to use The Writer’s Jungle once you’ve got it. You wonder how to make a schedule that will help you execute your intentions yet also allow you to realize that you have in fact covered material that benefits language arts and writing. I’ve given the following advice when emailed or asked these questions.

The Writer’s Jungle is set up so that you can do one chapter per week (particularly the first 9 chapters). The first chapter focuses on language arts. I usually suggest reading the chapter and then actually doing the suggested practices (just one or two to get started).

So often we homeschool parents are in such a hurry to “get through” stuff, we miss the chance to really take our time and learn how to do things, to really enjoy them and make them successful one thing at a time.

From chapters 2-9, you will want to schedule (to your heart’s delight!) a week for each one. You can read the material and then execute the task, exercise, or writing idea that goes with each one. These chapters focus on the writing process and they are the ones you will return to again and again as you repeat writing tasks (like forever…).

The rest of the manual can also be used one chapter at a time. Read it over the weekend, think about how it would be useful to you in the coming week and then *actually do* what it suggests.

  • Word games
  • Poetry
  • Reports
  • Turning an assignment into a high quality writing topic

…these are all worth doing and can be scheduled.

For parents and kids who struggle with writing and the teaching of it, I suggest in the intro to the second edition a practice that has helped lots of Brave Writer parents: the eight-week freewrite.

Here’s how it works

  • You and your kids freewrite once per week (a Friday works well).
  • On the Thursday before that first Friday, have everyone freewrite a list of topics he or she knows really well.
  • Then on the next day and the seven Fridays that follow, select from the list a topic for writing (or use a freewriting prompt from the blog posted every week) or the writer may choose a totally different topic that means something to the writer that day.
  • Set the timer for a length of time that is reasonable (younger kids – 5-6 minutes, older kids 10-15 minutes). When it dings, stop writing.
  • Offer to share your writing (as modeling) and invite the kids to share theirs. *They don’t have to.*
  • When sharing is done (with or without full participation), thank the kids for writing and have each of you (parent included) put the freewrite into a manila envelope.
  • Do this for a total of eight weeks worth of freewrites.
  • On the ninth week, have each writer open the envelope and take out the eight pieces of writing.
  • Ask the writer to select the freewrite he or she would like to work on for the revision stage of writing. That’s the only one that will go through the revision process.
  • You can then spend the next three weeks revising that one piece.

Effectively you could do this process all year and wind up with four or five high quality writing products that have gone through the revision process while having promoted writing every week of the school year.

One more “check list-y” idea

Sometimes the science and math types are used to measuring school in terms of quantifiable work (grammar, pages, spelling tests, paragraphs written, punctuation taught). I like to recommend making a different kind of check list.

Example:

  • I had a long conversation today with one child about a topic that really interested her.
  • I laughed at something in a magazine article and shared what I thought was funny and why with my kids.
  • I watched TV with my kids and we talked about what we watched (including new vocabulary, the campy dialog – isn’t it always? – and stereotypes).
  • I complimented one child for a great use of a new word, an insight, his sense of humor or the clarity with which he expressed himself.
  • I let one child teach me how to do something I didn’t know how to do.
  • I read aloud to my children.
  • I read one poem with my kids.
  • I paid one child a quarter for identifying a typo in published material. (We’ve been doing this since my kids were little and my 20 year old still calls me to tell me the typos he finds in books! Still wants the quarters too.)
  • I provided stimulation for new ideas, beauty or experiences (cool new book, artwork, nature…).

Sometimes if we just put the intangibles in a list, we’ll be more likely to execute them and believe we’ve actually done something worthwhile.

Brave Writer Online Classes

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, BW products, Homeschool Advice, The Writer's Jungle | 1 Comment »