How to Survive a Plague - Homeschooling

Since suddenly everyone is very interested in homeschooling, and I’ve been doing it for about 10

years now, I thought I’d write down a few things that might help. Don’t expect homeschooling to be like a public school classroom. You don’t have the resources, the structure, and the support systems that exist in a well-run school. Also, you’re the parent with a different relationship with your children than a teacher has. Your number 1 job is still being the parent.

In times of trauma and transition, kids need time to detox. When my youngest child started homeschooling, she’d been in a sub-standard school with a second-grade teacher who wound up going to jail! You don’t know all that your child is feeling and they may not be able to tell you, so be patient and give them time to run, draw, make mud-pies, or do whatever they need to do to get their heads right. Creating a space of safety and acceptance has to happen before learning.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Homeschooling rules vary from state to state. I’ve homeschooled in Texas and Oklahoma, where it’s pretty lax. All I had to do to withdraw my kids from public school was to submit a letter to the school district stating my intent. Although I was a certified teacher at the time, it was not a requirement for me to have a certification or even be a college graduate. I have not been required to submit any documentation or comply with any standardized testing. In order to go from homeschooling to college, my oldest had to take the SAT and submit a homeschool transcript. I broke the transcript subjects down by semester and made a pretty document out of it. Then I included a letter explaining that we did not use grades in our homeschooling and why. I also included the official transcripts of her online classes and pre-homeschooling public school classes. This documentation was accepted without question by the admissions counselor at Austin Community College.

There are different flavors of homeschooling, so don’t expect your experiences to match someone else’s. Some people stick to a very structured approach, either buying or creating a curriculum that tracks closely to a public school format. Some people do something called free-schooling, which is a collaboration between child and instructor where the instructor is really in a supportive role, providing resources and assistance but letting the student lead with their interests. And then there is unschooling, which is letting the student follow their own interests without much guidance or support, trusting to the innate curiosity of the child and relying on the educational value of play and experience.

My oldest started homeschooling at age 13. She is a very motivated, driven, and organized person. She created her own education plan, located books and resources, and pretty much drove the whole process. I helped by purchasing textbooks, signing her up for online math classes, and answering questions. When she turned 16, I found that I was having a harder time giving the support she needed for the more advanced material she was learning, and I nudged her gently into college. She started at ACC at 16 and graduated 4 years later from the University of Texas with full honors. By most measures, she could be considered a homeschool success.

My youngest is completely different. She utterly rejected a structured approach, hated online programs, and resisted every attempt to get her to write anything. She abandoned Rosetta Stone and would rather walk on hot coals than solve an algebra equation. Does that make her a homeschool failure? She reads voraciously, she’s watched every science documentary worth watching, she excels at extremely complex, strategic board games, she’s a self-taught expert at Adobe Photoshop, she’s tamed and trained two rescue horses, and she’s had a front-row seat to some really interesting and historical political moments. She’s 17, so it remains to be seen what trajectory her life follows, but chances are it will be very different from mine, or her sister’s.

In retrospect, I think the greatest gift of homeschooling is the freedom that comes with unstructured time and relief from constant peer pressure. Even if you choose a structured approach to schooling, most parents find that they can get through a day’s schoolwork in half a day, leaving more time for playing, sunshine, and creativity. You’re giving your child the time to figure out who they are, what matters to them, what thrills their imagination. Instead of training them to be good employees, you’re freeing them to be themselves. You might find it’s tempting to just push them harder. After all, you’re in charge and you don’t have to track to a class of 25 other students. Some children will want to jump ahead and fast-track their way to college. Some won’t. It’s okay either way, if you let it be.

Here are some resources and ideas for folks who are homeschooling for a little while or longer:

Khan Academy – This is a great site with self-paced programs in math, science, and more. Short instructional videos are provided to help students grasp new concepts. Available in multiple languages.

DuoLingo – You don’t have to pay for Rosetta Stone to get a robust language learning app. I use this on my phone to keep up with my German and French vocabulary as well as starting to learn Spanish. I’ve taught foreign language, but this works as well as classroom instruction.

Crash Course – Fun educational video series by John and Hank Green in multiple topics. I really like the Anatomy and Physiology series, and Crash Course history is excellent too.

Oxford University Press American History Series – Get these from the library if you’re a fast reader, or pick them up used if you can. This is serious scholarship, but a junior high or high school age student can read them alone or together with you. It’ll probably take you at least two years to get through the series, maybe longer, but you’ll know a lot more about American history than you would learn from any American textbook.

BYU High School – When my oldest was still in public school but had exhausted all the coursework our rural school could offer, we turned to BYU classes for structured classes in math and science. If you need a structured approach and a transcript from a reputable school, this will meet your need, but it’s not cheap. We used this primarily for math. There may be better alternatives out there now.

Reading/Writing – The key to learning how to read better is to read more. The key to learning how to write is to read more. The key to learning how to speak well is to read more. Just read. It doesn’t matter what. Let them read anything and everything they’re interested in. Graphic novels. Fantasy. Science fiction. Murder mysteries. Romance. Economics. I have a shared Kindle account with my daughter. I’ve discovered that if I download it, she’ll eventually read it. You can download e-books from the library too. Particle physics? Forestry? Jewish history? All the President’s Men? The Underground Economist? It’s all good. Take time to read together out loud, especially harder stuff. They love being read to at any age. Maybe they’ll read to you too.

Experiential Learning – Most people learn best by doing. When we moved school districts and my oldest daughter suddenly had to take a standardized science test, she was nervous. But afterwards she told me “It was really easy. I’d learned all that stuff hiking and attending ranger talks.” Take your kids places and talk about what you’re seeing and doing. Even if museums are closed and concerts are cancelled, you can go explore local trails and parks. Look for bugs, take pictures of the flowers, explore cloud formation and weather, look at the rocks and figure out how they were formed. Encourage their curiosity and look stuff up together when you get home, because you won’t know how to answer all their questions. You’ll be teaching them a skill that they may not learn in a classroom, how to see the world with questioning eyes and how to teach themselves.

Most importantly, trust yourself, trust your kids, and accept that you’ll make mistakes along the way!

A Boy in a Gray Hoodie

Photo by Jannes Jacobs on Unsplash

Among my other career adventures, I was for one year a full-time middle school teacher. It was probably the weirdest, most exhausting, and most frustrating year of my life. Towards the end of the year, all the teachers were asked to submit the names of their top students from each grade for an academic award. There wasn’t any guidance given on how those top students should be identified. I looked through my class rosters and considered what metrics to use. It became obvious that if I based the award on grade average alone, all my top achievers were girls. So I decided to recognize the boy and girl from each grade who had the highest average. This was a difficult decision to make, but I decided that it was a bit like having male and female competitions in the Olympics so that contestants are competing on an equal footing. After all, girls are 70% of high school valedictorians. Clearly, in secondary school academic achievement, the girls have the advantage. Since the class I taught was one semester long and I taught three grades, I submitted 12 names for recognition.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the awards assembly; my class schedule didn’t permit it. But one of my fellow teachers reported that when my eighth-grade boy honoree (I’ll call him Jay) was called to the stage to get his certificate, he looked around him in stunned silence, turned red, and stumbled up to the podium to claim his award in complete confusion, blinking back tears. Apparently Jay had never, in his entire 9 years of school, been recognized or rewarded for academic achievement.

Since Jay had been my student in the fall semester, and the school year was drawing to a close, I never saw him to speak to again. I’ll never know if or how that moment of recognition affected him beyond the immediate moment. But I do know what I learned.

1.      Metrics matter. They don’t replace creative thought and decision making, but they can provide new insights and open our eyes to things we might be missing. Jay was not an outstanding student in any way. He was frequently disruptive. He showed little enthusiasm in class. He had to be nagged to finish assignments. It wasn’t until I sat down and looked at the metrics that I realized he had outperformed his peers.

2.      Compromise your principles. My first inclination was to limit the reward to the top performer in each grade, regardless of gender. After all, don’t boys get enough advantages in this patriarchal world? But then I thought, what if I am biased? What if I am, by reason of gender and sentiment, giving girls the benefit of the doubt when I grade assignments? I don’t know why girls outperform boys in school, but clearly they do. What harm does it do to extend my recognition to more students? Jay’s stunned gratitude more than confirmed that my compromise was the right choice.

3.      Be fair. Once I decided on the rules to apply, I did not allow myself to be swayed by other considerations, such as absenteeism or deportment. Those things are heavily impacted by outside considerations like family situation and health issues. I kept it strictly to grade average as recorded on the school computer system.

4.      Recognition changes things. During the semester, it didn’t occur to me to praise Jay for his efforts. Mostly I was trying to keep him awake, in his seat, and on task. I noticed when he came to school on a snowy day in a light hoodie and pointed out to him privately that the school had a coat closet where he could get a donated coat. How much better would his learning experience have been if I had taken more notice of his efforts in class? Giving praise for small achievements, saying thank you for minor favors, can have a transformative effect over time, and it just makes everybody happier.