Home Schooling It Is…

I haven’t given this too much specific thought lately, but when I do pause and focus, I realize that home schooling and school-schooling tend to lurk in my mind at the same time when I imagine Nat’s education.

I suppose I have a vague map in my head that we’ll home school for the early grades (K-3) or for as long as we live in this particular spot on the prairie and then perhaps send her to my fantasy private progressive school or fancy prep school when/if we move near such a thing and if we can afford it and if she wants to go.

“Why not public school?” you ask?

I confess that I am a product of Catholic parochial school and Catholic girls’ prep school having only attended public school for one year—Kindergarten—so I have a hard time envisioning my daughter in public school. (The reason for my schooling was that we lived in one of the worst school districts in the country—the public schools have been on notice and de-certified for years at a stretch.)

I have taught in a couple of different public high schools, one in a middle-class, white suburb of Princeton, NJ and the other, supposedly the best non-magnet school in Washington, DC. (There were school shootings among both student bodies [though not on school grounds], by the way, during my one-year tenure in each school.) The NJ school was freshly painted and brightly lit, had plenty of access to up-to-date technology, nice playing fields, good teachers, small(ish) class sizes and a golf team. The DC school was dim and falling down—paint peeling, ceilings dripping when it rained, rotten food in the cafeteria for the kids who qualified for free breakfast programs and I ran the computer center myself, which, I must tell you, was a joke. Separate and unequal, folks. Martin Luther King Jr. is turning over in his grave.

But it isn’t lack of resources or the existence thereof that really makes or breaks public school for me. I think I was in college when I went to pick up my brother from his shiny, well-funded, golf-team-having suburb (where my parents moved when they could no longer afford two kids in the Catholic schools)—located high school. That is when I decided that I could never send my kid to a public school.

It was the advertising. There were ads up and down the hallways for junk food, as I recall. Snicker Bars and Coca Cola. That sort of thing. I was horrified. Then I learned about Channel One, where, for selling the souls of their kids and curriculum to big corporations, poor schools could get “free” t.v.s and other a/v equipment. Then they started the charter schools and the magnet schools and later, in Washington, Newt Gingrich’s Congress forced vouchers on DC against the votes of the people—which they could do since they control the DC budget—and my tax money earmarked for public education started going to Sister Mary Joseph’s Academy for Tots or Brother Billy Bob’s Anti-Semitic Institute or where ever else and the kids in the public schools who still couldn’t afford those alternatives (even if they wanted them)—$3K voucher or not—got stuck in whatever gets left behind when you skim the cream off the top and rich people sending their kids to $20K/year prep schools got a little summer vacation bonus.

Then came No Child Left Behind which in fact, penalizes schools by taking away funding if their students don’t score well on standardized tests. Oh, THAT will help failing schools! Take away their funding! Now why didn’t I think of that? And the testing itself is something that few teachers I know agree with. Teachers complain about it all the time—how their curricular plans are hi-jacked by pressures to teach kids to perform a certain way on a test rather than teaching kids to learn and to love learning.

Okay. I will now pause while you yell at your computer screen because you disagree with some or much or all of what I said.

But I am not up for debating this. You can believe what you like and educate your kids accordingly. That is fine with me. Leave a comment about your perspective. I am not going to argue with you. This is a democracy and our kids can debate the relative merits of their respective educations in their first-year college English classes. This is just how I feel. I have a strong anti-capitalist bias, so I hate the corporate encroachment upon public education. I am a teacher whose philosophy is strongly anti-testing, so NCLB is the opposite of my idea of good pedagogy.

Now after the experience with the developmental specialist who seemed to look at Nat and see negative stereotypes and “risk” categories and statistics instead of…Nat, I am wary of subjecting her to any more institutional scrutiny than absolutely necessary. Knowing her as I do, I think the freedom to follow her incredible sense of curiosity and delight with the world will serve her better than the mental and bodily discipline that must be practiced in primary schools in order for learning to occur among larger groups of children. When she’s a solid reader and writer and add-er and subtract-er and multiplier and divider and creative thinker who knows and can stand up for herself, I will be willing to entertain her entering a school if she is passionately interested in trying it out.

And that is how I feel and what I think and why I want to home school her.

How do I plan to home school?

I’m not sure yet. It’s kind of hard to think of “school” as something separate from “life” since I am teaching her, literally, every minute I’m with her and she’s awake. I can’t imagine that changing for any reason, at any age. Teaching is just second nature to me. I don’t think of it as teaching until I watch other people interact with her and realize the slight differences. It isn’t that they aren’t teaching her in the sense that she is learning from them constantly (you can no more stop a kid from learning than stop a kid from growing) but that what I do is look for opportunities to show and tell and encourage her to practice stuff every second of the day. It’s just communication, really, because she is always “asking” in her 16 month-old way, for information and opportunities to experiment. (Cole does a lot of teaching with her too, it also being her second nature.)

So I guess my heart leans in an unschooling direction. Yet I also think that for myself, I’d need a little more planning, documentation and record keeping than unschooling seems to focus on. Nat may not need (in fact may very well resent) tests or assignments to check off in boxes with gold stars, but I am a teacher and trained as a teacher and also a bit of a control freak, so I will probably have my own secret curriculum somewhere in the back of a notebook, even if it’s just a big long list of things I want to accomplish every month. Or am I wrong? Do unschoolers do that anyway?

I sort of envision a few hours three days a week of sitting down and doing “school” work in a planned and scheduled way and then taking a couple of days a week to spend mostly in free-reading or field trips or lessons or sports or other hobbies Nat discovers and wants to pursue. I liked the Classical Home Schooling book, but it was overly rigid and moralistic for my tastes and I wouldn’t embrace it fully. I do want to do Latin, though, and I want to diagram sentences.

I also plan to enroll her in programs that do teach test-taking skills. I want her to be able to ace the SATs if she decides she needs to (and her Godfather Wayne wants her to go to Princeton, so if he convinces her, she’ll need to). I just want those skills placed in proper perspective—a dumb trick we have to learn in order to Get Over on the System.

What exactly we end up doing will depend on how long we home school and that will depend on money, location, and of course, Nat herself. I can imagine her loving school and I can imagine her hating school. So it could go either way. But I feel pretty certain that we will start her out at home.

Post your judgments below if you must. I am ducking.

Comments

[Lisa V]

NCLB also makes everyone take the same test- including kids on IEP's - usually given to kids with developmental or intelligence or learning problems- and these scores get factored in with everyone else. So your "good" schools with involved parents and gifted kids get the boost from everyone being thrown in together, yet struggling schools get penalized for their students.

However, it is possible for kids to test well and in no way have them learning by "teaching to the test". I have seen it done in our school. Teaching kids to think rather than memorize is the key. You can do that for Nat on your own.

[Cari]

Hi ladies... I won't condone your choice as I support it VERY much... Homeschooling is great... I just wanted to encourage you on it, and tell you that Justmommies.com has a subforum especially for mommies considering homeschooling and it could be of some help in a few years!

[T]

Hey, hello!
Me and my sister both graduated from a excellent college on the west coast with a BA and BFA and we were both unschooled. Our other sister who is 19, is a deans list college student who was also unschooled and our other siblings (there are six of us!) are also all unschooled. I highly recommended all of the books by Grace Llewellyn, she runs a camp every summer called “Not back to school camp http://www.nbtsc.org/” . Also, Rudolph Steiner is pretty loved within the unschooling community it seems. Just know that Nat will learn from living and having the desire and passion to investigate and explore is really a life long gift. My husband went to public school and hates to read because he was forced too in school. I had a choice and love liteature…
Anyway, if you have any questions feel free to email me at travelingsistertms@hotmail.com
(You answered my question about our soon to be adopted daughters hair care a few months ago…)

[Suz]

I live in a state that's MANIC about the EOG tests. They terrify me. I don't want the twins stressed out, categorized, and labelled any more than they have to be. I don't know if home schooling will be realistic for us, but it is something that we will have to consider.

[Brooklyn Mama]

I don't think I could manage to homeschool (even though I'm a teacher) - and things are somewhat different on all counts here in NYC. But I think it's a fabulous choice for many people, and I am completely in agreement about the quagmire of the pubic school system and the utter absurdity of NCLB. I am dreading the choices we face when my daughter is ready for kindergarten.

[Islay]

My mother is very lefty-leaning, state-school-should-be-good-enough-for-everyone. However, both me and my sister have ended up in a private school, and having a much better time there than we ever did in the public sector. However, I've NEVER done well in group-schooling situations - it's a people, problem, really. I react very badly to pressure and to peers. My mum now says (when I only have one year left of school anyway) that, had she not had to work during the day, she would have taken me out of school entirely when I was about ten (when it became clear I was utterly miserable in state-school and the decision was taken to transfer me to a private-school in the hope I would fair better) and home-schooled me. My sister does well with rues and structure and 'teaching to the test' (as demonstrated by her fantastic test and exam results this year). I do not (as demonstrated by my fairly low ones, despite our IQ scores being pretty equal at around 105 a piece and the fact that school STILL makes me miserable the vast majority of the time. The only reason I'm marginally happier in private school now is because I, purely by chance, stumbled across a few like-minded people who had been taken out of state-school by desperate parents for similar reasons as I had).

I think home-schooling Nat sounds like the right choice for you at the moment. It really depends what sort of child Nat turns out to be. If she's someone like my sister, who really needs rules and boundaries and deadlines and pressure to be able to function properly, a (good) school would work for her. If she's more like me, someone who really completely shuts down under school-like presure and who can be very socially awkward if not among people who are similarly minded, than, for God's sake, keep her home-schooled. I would NOT want her to go through anything like I have in my schooling experiances.

[Meira]

I started considering homeschooling when Big Kid was an infant-- mainly because I got such a crappy education, and also because I was looking at him and the way he LOVED learning, the way he was endlessly curious, and thinking about how the stereotype is for school aged kids to HATE learning. How they are "selling" school in every show on PBS-- because of course kids hate school. I didn't want that for him.
We've been bad unschoolers for the past couple of years -- "bad" in the sense that unschooling very much believes in free access to all media, and I limit media quite a bit. I believe my state has the second highest amount of documentation required, I had planned on "going under the radar" but that got screwed up in a giant drama with my mom. So in researching how to meet the state need for documentation, I read Well Trained Mind and loved the way she lays out that this, this and this are the back bone for everything else. I will not be following her program, but it inspired me as far as what I do want to be "strewing his path" with this year.

[trista]

I feel exactly the same way as you on this matter. I want to make certain that my daughter gets to learn the basics as well as how to think, how to argue, how to stand up for herself and her values. And then, when she's got that, if she wants to go to public school, I'll allow it.

I just don't want her to go somewhere she'll only be a statistic, a body, a consumer, and stereotype.

[Rachel H.]

Do you read Selkie's blog? (http://selkie.typepad.com/)

She wrote a long entry recently about her approach to homeschooling.

[Tam]

I was homeschooled as a child. While the whole socialisation topic is another (and problematic) kettle of fish altogether, I did like the way my mother structured the day. We worked from nine in the morning until twelve, four days a week, with a half hour play-time in the middle, and still got more done in that time than kids stuck in school from eight until three. Then, after twelve, the afternoon was all ours. If we needed to blow off steam during the morning, we could get up and go and run around the house and the orchard provided we were back in our seats within ten minutes.

Fridays we went on field trips - when we were older, this involved going up to the local university and sitting in on whatever lectures took our fancy. I have to confess though that the School of Science never saw hide nor hair of me, while I knew the Arts and Humanities buildings inside and out.

[Susan]

I've been reading your blog for a few months, but this is my first comment. As the daughter (and granddaughter and niece and great-niece and, well, you get the picture) of public school teachers, I'm not generally a fan of homeschooling. I've known homeschoolers from across the religious perspective and I no longer think it's just for the crazy conservatives anymore. But I have to admit that while homeschooling is often a very good option for the kid(s) in question, it often takes away good students from public schools that would, frankly, benefit from having them there. I'm the product of a pretty bad public school system in the South, where every time they tried "innovative education reform" things got worse, so I sympathize with you, I really do. You've obviously put a lot of thought into this, and since you're a public school teacher yourself, you're obviously informed. All the comments on this entry have been positive, and since you've thought this out so thoroughly, I don't really mean this to be a negative comment. In fact, I agree with you that all the things wrong with the current system (NCLB, soft drink companies, inequality) seem to be getting worse before they're getting better. And I probably would have been a good candidate for homeschooling myself, as I was terribly shy and unchallenged in school (I ended up skipping a grade, which didn't do wonders for my social life but I made it through fine) and the discipline in my schools was terrible. But here are the issues I have with homeschooling in general:

1. I see homeschoolers as being immensely privileged; my parents would not have been able to afford to homeschool us had they wanted to, and private schools were out of the question. To me, it looks like a further divide between the haves and the haven'ts.

2. Teachers are trained professionals, whereas parents are not. If parents are equally capable of educating children as people who spent 4-5 years in college (plus grad school, for some) learning how to do so, what's the point of training teachers? I wonder about the overall competence of homeschooling parents, especially after the elementary level. (In your case, I guess this is a moot point, since you're a teacher and don't necessarily plan to homeschool past grade 3.)

3. Homeschooled kids are not in as diverse an environment as kids in public schools. Yeah, I know that rich suburban schools don't have much, if any, diversity either. But it's still an issue.

4. There's only so long one can protect one's child from the realities of life by keeping him/her out of public schools. I learned a lot about the world by watching my peers and living among them.

Sorry this is so long. I just thought your comment roll needed a slightly different point of view.

[rabi]

oh, this makes me so sad. not because you are wrong about the shortcomings in the public school system, or because you won't be able to give your daughter a fantastic education/unschooling at home. but because if you turn away wholly from public schools, that's one more intelligent, thoughtful, progressive critic/advocate that the rest of us will have lost. for people (yes, like me) who are throwing our whole careers into public education reform, not to mention all the families without so many options, it is a painful blow.

I wish you the best in your homeschooling endeavors with nat, and I hope that you find a way to support the best interests of her public-school-going peers, too. (after all, they'll be the people who make up the society she lives in.)

[Peg]

You hit the nail right on the head with your whole post. All of those reasons and more contributed to our decision to pull our kids out of public school after 2nd and 3rd grade. That was 3 years ago and it has turned out to be the best decision we have ever made for our family.
Best of luck to you.
Peg
www.freerangefamily.com

[Amy in KC]

I live in Kansas. I am a blue girl in a red state. I cringe over the "evolution" vs. "creationism" debate (this is SCIENCE class, people, not religion class) and other various attempts to mess with my kids' education in this part of the country.

My husband and I plan to send our (currently six-month-old) twin boys to public school even in the face of "Conservatism Gone Wild" because if we do not stand up and demand that public schools be inclusive, progressive, and functional, who will?

This being said, I understand that it will be our responsibility to be aware of the curriculum, fill in the gaps where necessary, and help our boys to interpret the things they learn in a way that reflects our beliefs.

Also, I agree with other posters who appreciate your decision but feel sad that your progressive voice will be lost to the public schools.

I am not what I would call a political activitst, but I feel passionately about my responsibility to raising compassionate, tolerant, well-educated men.

[Ottawa Gardener]

I do hope you homeschool only so I can read another lefty homeschool blog. I gave up looking for them. Not that I don't like other homeschool blogs, au contraire. It's just nice to read something like minded. As it is, I nearly gave up on the leftschool blog and use it as storage for my math ideas at the moment.