Bi-Polar Home Schooling

I'm home-schooling myself in the art and practice of home schooling. So far I've read two books on the topic, and they are diametrically opposite in many ways. One is an unedited, self-published, self-indulgent 400-page verbal emesis: 60 percent diatribe, 30 percent anecdotes, and 10 percent ideas.

The other is a 700-page, well-organized thesis that documents the history, method, and curriculum of a classical education.

One of them makes me want to hug a filing cabinet; the other makes my stomach hurt from insecurity and anxiety. Is there a Middle Path?

The first book, The Teenage Liberation Handbook, inexplicably gets a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on Amazon. It's inexplicable because the organization, writing, and editing are terrible--but it's also understandable because it has a powerful, counter-intuitive message to teenagers and parents. The message is this: schools don't have all the answers. They may not even have some of the answers for some kids; and many kids will be better off, and get a better education, through home schooling and/or unschooling.

I asked A. Peevie and Mr. Peevie to read "Chapter 16: Starting Out: A Sense of the Possibilities," because it offered a glimpse into the first baby steps toward homeschool, or as I'm starting to think of it, self-directed education. This chapter attempts to describe a different kind of educational structure, one which is goal- and student-directed. I don't find the "morsels of advice" from unschoolers and their parents to be particularly helpful or informative; but if you wade through those, and through the lessons in Chinese philosophy, and if you get past the author's overstated aversion to "school-style structure"--there are one or two nuggets of helpful advice, such as this:

If you are completely confused as to how to start structuring your life, here's one way: do "academics" for two hours each day--not necessarily lots of subjects, or the same ones every day; you are not going to dry up if you don't do 45 minutes every day of "social studies." Do some kind of work or project for four hours. In the rest of your time, read, see friends, talk with your parents, make tabouli. Take Saturdays and Sundays off. Sound arbitrary? It is. I made it up, although it is based on a loose sort of "average" of the lives of a hundred unschoolers, most college-bound. Once you try this schedule for a month, you will know how you want to change it.

The next chapter, "Your Tailor-Made Intellectual Extravaganza," presents a couple of good thoughts as well, explaining the method and value of interdisciplinary studies and offering a few strategies to enhance learning. "Create a small museum that relates to your interest," Llewellyn suggests; I could totally see A. Peevie doing this--although his museum might include gross things like a box of toenails, or things with questionable museum value like used cream soda bottles.

"Write letters to people and organizations, asking thoughtful questions"--also a cool idea. As a member of the Save the Manatees Club, and A. Peevie could initiate correspondence with someone from the Club to ask questions or even organize a fund raiser. I'll bet they don't have very many fundraisers in the midwest to benefit manatees. 

I think A. Peevie might find some useful ideas in the second half of the book, which focuses on "how to study all the school subjects without school." Handbook is over-written and under-edited, but like an all-you-can eat buffet, we will find something to meet our needs, and ignore the rest.

The second book, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home (TWTM), offers a "step-by-step, grade-by-grade, subject-by-subject guide to the classical pattern of education called the trivium." And yes, it is as detailed, systematic, polysyllabic, and guilt-inducing as it sounds.

The classical education is language- and history-intensive; it helps students learn to analyze and draw conclusions; and it requires self-discipline and dedication. The trivium structure "recognizes that there is an ideal time and place for each part of learning: memorization, argumentation, and self-expression." These three stages, or methods, of learning are known as grammar, dialectic (or logic), and rhetoric.

Grammar refers not just to the grammar of language, but in a broader sense, to the building blocks of all subjects: words, facts, and dates. The dialectic, or logic stage, teaches children to "connect the facts she has learned and to discover the relationships among them. The first grader has learned that Rome fell to the barbarians; the fifth grader asks why and discovers that high taxes, governmental corruption, and an army made up entirely of mercenaries weakened the empire." This critical thinking stage builds on the foundation of basic skills and knowledge. The third stage, rhetoric, refers to expression. It is dependent upon the first two stages of the trivium: "the student uses knowledge and the skill of logical argument to write and speak about all the subjects in the curriculum."

The massive text of TWTM applies the trivium step-by-step to each subject in each grade. Most chapters include comprehensive reading and resource lists that will make your eyes water, plus examples of daily schedules, methods, timelines, and activities to create the most perfectly educated robotic child ever known to mankind.

OK, that was a bit harsh. I'm sure that anyone who chooses to apply TWTM will nurture well-rounded and well-educated children--but if you check the index, you won't find any reference to child development, play, or fun--except for Fun With Hieroglyphs on page 311. In fact, the authors go so far as to say that if you find yourself hooked up with a group of unschoolers, you may want to find yourself another group (p. 617).

I'm sure this kind of home-schooling is great for some people--but on the continuum of unschooling to classical education homeschooling, we will fall far closer to Liberation than Well-Trained.

One More Reason to Hate School

I was looking through M. Peevie's online grade-book, and noticed a big fat zero for her latest assignment in reading, a short story. I knew she had worked hard on this story, as she always does on her homework assignments. I knew that she wrote a messy first draft and had copied it over neatly on another sheet of paper.

"M. Peevie," I said, "Why do you have a big fat zero on your short story assignment?"

M. Peevie's normally cheerful countenance clouded over. "When Ms. Swamps asked me for it, I didn't have it at my desk. I said, can I please go to my locker to get it, and she said I had to give it to her right that second or I would get a zero."

"You are freaking kidding me," I said.

"No, Mommy," M. Peevie said, worry lines creasing her forehead and tears filling her eyes. "I had one more sentence to copy over from my rough draft, and she wouldn't let me go get it. I wanted to turn it in, but she wouldn't let me!"

Grrr. I would like to know what philosophy of education, what principle of child development, this punitive stance is based upon. I'm guessing it comes from a German authoritarian and Lutheran dogmatic perspective that elevates discipline, responsibility, and obedience above all other developmental goals.

Don't get me wrong: I want my children to learn discipline and responsibility. But this hyper-punitive approach completely negated the effort, compliance, and creativity that M. Peevie had brought to the assignment to that point. Couldn't Ms. Swamps mark M. Peevie's paper down a grade or two for being late, instead of giving her a zero?

Mr. Peevie has addressed this very question to the teacher, and we await a response. I will keep you posted. I'm not optimistic.

Freelance Woes

I'm looking for freelance writing jobs, scouring the Internets, visiting job boards, and generally bemoaning the economic conditions that have put me into a state of virtual unemployment as an independent writer for nearly eight months. Where is my stimulus package?

I've even submitted a love poem to a greeting card company. Now that's desperate, because I am the least sentimental person you will ever meet. Wanna know how bad it gets? Here's the first line:

Our souls touched long before our eyes met.

HA!

But hey, I've read the drivel on greeting cards in the drug store, and someone's making money on it. It might as well be me. I can write sappy love messages with the best of them.

Another way I could make some money--if I didn't have a conscience--is by writing college essays, book reports, and term papers. I would like to hear from you--anonymously, of course--if you ever paid someone to write a paper for you in college. Did you have any qualms about it? Did you get a good grade? Does it bother your conscience today? Would you want your own child to pay for a term paper? How do you justify it--or don't you bother?

Ironically, the companies looking for writers of term papers have strict guidelines about plagiarism -- and some offer their clients free plagiarism reports along with their research paper. It's a whole industry based upon cheating! Incredible.

One company is looking for a gullible fool to write articles for $3 per article--plus a bonus dollar for real good quality. Another one offered two cents per word. A 300 - 400 word original article, including research, would take a minimum of 2-3 hours. That means these writers will earn anywhere from $1 - $3 per hour. Who is willing to work for these kinds of slave wages? Are they freaking serious?

And yet, these jobs have dozens of bidders. One writer, a former newspaper reporter, is willing to write 30 five-hundred-word articles for $30. I...I...I'm speechless. I made more money 30 years ago when I was cleaning houses during the summer.

And finally, a former client just offered to "hire" me to work on a grant proposal with him--but he can't pay me unless he actually gets the grant. Seriously. Not only does fundraising on a contingency or commission basis violate the ethics of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, but he is essentially asking me to be willing to work for FREE, with only the possibility of a paycheck sometime in the future.

If I'm going to work for free, I'm going to blog--and someday, my blog and I will RULE THE WORLD.

So there.

Reading Enrichment: Easiest v. Best

I'm slowly getting the information I need to make decisions about the reading enrichment dilemma that I blogged about on Monday. Mrs. K was a little slow on the uptake about best practices and the concept of added value: she seemed to believe that relatedness (i.e., a Curious George coloring sheet, or a word search that included words from the book) equals added enrichment value. My perspective is that those kinds of assignments merely add busy work, which is the last thing either M. Peevie or I need.

At one point we were discussing the "sheets" method of reading enrichment, and poor unsuspecting Mrs. K said, "Well, that's the easiest way to give an assignment and track the work that's being done."

You will not be surprised to hear that I jumped all over that. "Bingo!" I said. "It's the easiest way to make and track assignments. But is it the best way? Does it really help M. Peevie read better, or comprehend better, or add vocabulary, or add to her enjoyment of actual reading?"

My little first grader and I have enough trouble being organized with the regular homework, let alone even more optional assignments that do not add value. I plan to talk to Mrs. Sheets, but if we can't see eye to eye, Mrs. K agreed that I'll be M. Peevie's reading enrichment instructor. She can use the enrichment time to read books that she chooses and track her reading in a journal that she and I will talk about once a week.

Sounds like a plan to me. Thanks, readers, for your comments and emails and links to quotes and studies about how to teach reading. I'll keep you posted.

Reading Enrichment for Amateurs

Gentle readers, I need your help. I'm about ready to pop the reading enrichment instructor at M. Peevie's school, because I think she's actually hindering M's advancement rather than helping it. I'm not sure what to do, but I'm pretty sure that smacking the teacher is not the most helpful approach to the problem.

Background: M. Peevie is very bright. She's in first grade at her little private Lutheran school, and she's reading well above the level targeted by the first grade curriculum. So her teacher, Mrs. K, has put her into a special reading enrichment group with a couple of other girls from her class who are also advanced readers.

The reading enrichment instructor, we'll call her Mrs. Sheets, seems to think that reading enrichment consists of reading a story and then completing several assignment sheets related to the story--coloring sheets, word search sheets, and how-to-draw-Curious-George sheets. On a recent day, the only assignment that had any enrichment value was the instruction to write a paragraph telling what you're curious about.

So M. Peevie did all her assignments, including writing a really great paragraph describing what she's curious about; but somehow, she misplaced one of the coloring sheets. When she showed up at enrichment class one coloring sheet short, Mrs. Sheets sent her back to her regular class for being "unprepared."

Now she--and all the other kids in the class who don't want this to happen to them--are all focused on and anxious about whether they have all of their materials in their folder--not on anything remotely related to reading enrichment. And I am ready to pop a blood vessel in my brain.

I'm not a reading expert, or a teacher. I don't have any expertise in this area at all--but it seems intuitively obvious to me that a reading enrichment program should at minimum encourage confidence in and enjoyment of reading, build vocabulary, and encourage writing because of the writing/reading connection.

So, dear readers, and especially those of you who do have expertise in this arena, here is your assignment, should you choose to accept it: Could you send me links to articles, or quotes from experts, articles or books, that describe best practices in reading enrichment? Could you confirm or deny my intuition about reading enrichment that coloring and word search sheets do not add value, but that confidence and self-esteem building are important components?

Please forward this post to your colleagues and others who have expertise. I know it doesn't have the same urgency as an Amber Alert, but there's a window of opportunity here, and I dont want to miss it.

I await your wisdom.