Let me begin this by stipulating the following: I think people who choose to homeschool their children are largely insane. I say this with some affection. I know people who homeschool their children and I know adults who were homeschooled as children. These people appear reasonably sane to me. Still, I think it is utter madness to willingly take children out of our educational system and take on the burden of delivering copious amounts of knowledge without the help of professionals. Our educational system may not be perfect, but I have found it to be largely full of men and women striving to give their best to my children. We have yet to contemplate removing our girls from public education for that very reason.
So, it is no small wonder that I sit here typing up my experiences as a homeschooling parent (the schoolmarm in this case). Taking this trip was, by default, a decision to homeschool our children. You cannot unenroll your child from a school in the state of North Carolina without having an education plan. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there isn’t much oversight beyond officially registering your homeschool. The only real qualification is that the person teaching has a college degree. My undergraduate degree is in Political Science, Dan’s is in Aeronautical Engineering. Neither degree has been a lick of help with transitive verbs or Spanish grammar!
When we started planning this trip years ago, I didn’t give much thought to the schooling part of the adventure. I assumed that our girls, bright little sponges, would soak up experiences they would never learn at a school desk. It seemed like that might be sufficient schooling in itself. Even as the trip started to get real, as we started to think about leaving our normal life and adopt an RV as home, I didn’t worry that much about school. I did however call an old colleague at Dell and ask for his advice. His family homeschools and while I have never met his children, I think highly of him and thought he could steer me in the right direction. He pointed me to a math and English curriculum that his family uses. Dan and I proctored a couple of placement tests, purchased the appropriate curriculum and officially hung our homeschool shingle.
I thought the math and English curriculum, along with experiential learning, would basically get us through the trip and leave our girls no worse for educational wear. We also purchased a subscription to Rosetta Stone to help our girls keep current with their Spanish. All and all Dan and I were feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves. Until. Until the day that Hazel asked, well into our “schoolyear,” when we were going to start teaching them. I was a little confused by the question. I said something like “well honey we are teaching you. You are doing math and English and are getting a great history education during our trip.” Frankly I was getting a little feeling of parent superiority on that last count. Learning about the 19th Amendment by actually going to Seneca Falls to see the site of the first convention on women’s rights. Studying the life of John Adams (with a little help from the HBO drama based on David McCullough’s excellent biography) and then going to his house! Surely these were better than some online history course. My feelings of parent superiority notwithstanding, Hazel was not buying my reply. “Mom, you aren’t really teaching us, not like our teachers at school teach us.” I was getting politely called out by a 10-year-old. Ava, not one to stand on the sidelines of a family debate, took the position that the math we assigned her wasn’t very challenging and she was concerned about high-school placement. Really? When did my children become so educationally demanding!?
Once we peeled apart what Hazel meant by “really teaching” and calibrated against Ava’s mathematics expectations we ended up adding a standalone science and history curriculum [see side note below] along with weekly curriculum reviews for both girls. Ava’s outstanding math teacher from 7th grade is also pitching in by sending her the 8th grade assignments. The weekly curriculum review and milestones have been helpful. Giving the girls a bar to measure themselves against seems to have satisfied them. Though, to be honest, I am not entirely sure they trust us as they keep calling friends in Charlotte to check if we are teaching them what their friends are learning in school. They are basically taking the “trust but verify” approach with their homeschooling. Smart cookies.
Side note: Finding a science curriculum was difficult, turns out many of the ones I found were “religious science.” Who knew science depended on one’s religion? I thought an atom was an atom was an atom regardless of which god one worships. Apparently, others do not see it the same way.
And so here we are, slogging our way through split infinitives and polygons, trying to keep up with our daughters. Card carrying members of the homeschooling insane. I have no idea if this will work out in the end. Upon return the girls may test into a repeat of the grades they are missing – or they might test two grades ahead. At some level, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they care about their own formal education as much as their parents care about experiential learning. Stay tuned for the post-trip school dispatch to confirm that our children do in fact get promoted to 6th and 9th grades!
Have you considered online lessons to supplement your coaching? Ex: Khan Academy, https://www.mathfactcafe.com/, http://www.eduplace.com/ etc…
Yep! We use several of those sites. Amazing how excellent the quality of the instruction is. According to our girls their teachers (their “real” teachers at home) also use Khan Academy for some specific purposes too.
Dear Carolyn,
This is, after a long silence, Jim Nechas,, an old friend of your father-in-law’s, and I’m writing to tell you how much I enjoyed your piece on home schooling. During my last bout of teaching (20 years at a Pennsylvania State University in Kutztown, PA) I went through a fairly long patch with kids who had been home schooled. This being Pennsylvania, there were quite a few who had been dealt with by seriously (or even wildly) religious parents, and my experience matches your original expectations: Most of them suffered no lasting effects of inviting God into the schoolroom, even the kid who’d been raised by ex-hippies and thoroughly indoctrinated with an atheistic curriculum. In fact, he was one of the best writers I had in my magazine writing classes over the years and suffered only from his ability to talk his mother out of any assignment or deadline. He seldom finished a project for me, but once he was on this own and facing poverty, he became a very reliable marketing writer. On the other side of the ledger was a young woman who was the best writer I ever had in any of my classes at any college. By the time she entered my orbit, she had entered and fled (without graduating) 5 or 6 colleges of varying quality and was determined to die uneducated. For reasons that were never made clear to me, she showed up at Kutztown and immediately indicated that she needed no help from me. She wrote naturally in a slick, fast-paced magazine style and needed only one piece of advice from a teacher, which was that her stories needed endings.” She quickly mastered that and once again left the campus after two years and moved on to Temple University in Philadelphia, where she finally got a diploma. While she was going thus straight, I got her a job at a magazine where I was then reviewing restaurants, and after two spectacular years there, she moved on, first, to Philadelphia Magazine, and then to New York Magazine, where she has stayed. Her latest accomplishment is selling the rights to a magazine article she’d written to a movie company, the one that became “The Hustlers,” Jennifer Lopez’s current film and a thriller cum sex romp that surely embarrassed her parents, who are a college teacher a psychologist. It’s an old saw that kids tend to educate themselves, and while I have some doubts about the universal truth of that statement, I do believe that a student gets out of her education what she puts into it. Both of my model students had been trying to turn themselves into useful citizens (and perhaps writers) for years, and when somebody (me) told them that they were already more than half way there, they took off like gangbusters. In the same way, your daughters have taken over both the thinking about and overseeing their educations, and they will no doubt prosper from this year both inside and outside the classroom.
On another front, I want to call to your attention a comment I made weeks ago on your note about Kansas City. In it I recommended a restaurant called Arthur Bryant’s in one of the two twin KCs, a place that Eileen and I have long loved. If you’ll be going back that way during the rest of the year, take a look at my post and give it a try.
Jim
Thanks Jim. Unfortunately we won’t make it to Kansas City. One regret of this trip, a year isn’t nearly long enough to see the country! We have had to miss so many of the great recommendations we have been offered. Alas, another trip will be required!
You have two very special girls! I’d also like to point out that they are CLONES of you and Dan. So, yes, they most definitely will be amazingly educated adults, but I’m not surprised at all that they are giving you a run for your money!!
Love to you all,
See you soon!
Bekah
I guess order, deadlines, and measures are a part of daily lives whether or not in school or a day-to-day job. Ha! I have the same feelings about home schooling and always appreciated the teachers who kept my kids on track. I remember well feeling very inadequate helping them with math homework because they changed the way math was taught! Wow! And I loved math! How could they do that to my favorite subject? :-).
Yeah I am equally confused about the changes to math instruction!!!