This list is both last and this academic year. So he’s been doing most of this for at least 12 months, and continues this year. My larger point is that nothing we’re doing is unusual, and it’s all applicable within traditional schools. It’s not some sort of specialized learning course or environment; it’s going back to the cliched ‘instill a love of learning’
Elsewhere you asked our son’s involvement in the planning piece, but I answered here.
So, the academic pieces this past year: science, math, history, English — he had input re the topics he’s interested in, which are the above, except for math. So science, history, English:
Science: he’s very eager re chemistry; we tried several teachers and approaches, started out with a biology / earth sciences POV/component — it didn’t work; we switched to a chemistry tutor at home — that was OK, but less than ideal; labs were hard. We got lucky [punk] and he was able to enroll/audit in a local college course, where he’s in way over his head. For him, in this context, that’s great. The teacher of the course isn’t concerned, she just wants to snag another student for science, and is glad to have an eager kid there [who also motivates the older students -if this kid is here and excited, we should be doing more]. He’s taking it as a survey, no tests, minimal papers plus being entranced by 3+ hours of labs, wherein he’s a top performing student, and a lab partner in demand. Why is he so relatively able in the lab? Because he’s been our helper in the kitchen, ‘oui chef’, and a garden helper, rough construction helper [household projects, nothing huge] etc. He has some weighing and measuring skills from working for the family. There’s your interdisciplinary again.
History: for last year, we discussed what he was interested in, found source material (colonial era / pre colonial era US history), and were fortunate enough to find a great tutor who I mentioned elsewhere.
But what I didn’t mention, is again the interdisciplinary part, which arose naturally and which we followed, though it was not in the plan. Our tutor saw, and we agreed, that our son’s writing could improve. Every week then: small essays and reaction pieces to the reading. Until he was writing to a satisfactory level, ie a level his instructor felt our son capable of, his instructor would rip apart his pieces and show our boy how to improve. It was brutal but facinating, but since our son could see that his teacher was right, he took what could have been a blow to his ‘self-esteem’, essentially saying, ‘I get that you care about this and me, and I’m going to suspend my own 11 year old’s typical high opinion of myself’. THAT is a good teacher.
The live editing process: with pen and paper, no technology needed — took 5–7 minutes of each weekly class; he’d resubmit the 2nd draft next time, along with a new piece. Extend that to a class of 25: 2–3 hours a week. Not sustainable for 1 teacher, but for older student mentors plus a school writing lab — 4 people could whack through that in no time. Therefore possible to do in schools, if organized for writing. And individualized for each student’s level and ability. Why are we not doing this in schools?
More interdisciplinary pieces: he’s interested in fabrication / blacksmithing, etc. So colonial architecture and devices looked at as a part of this, which led to history of trade and commerce, market town development in Europe as a model of finance, understanding of letters of credit in trade, learning about how banking developed. And sidebars about the behemoths banks turn into in different eras. Just touching on these concepts for him, but putting the information in there to circle back around to later, maybe on his own, maybe as a piece of critical thinking when exposed to congruent topics and ideas.
So…history was a relatively easy one. And this year he’s auditing an history class in high school, but continuing reading on his own as well. Without difficulty, he is keeping up with the reading and writing requirements of this high school class.
English: he’s a voracious reader [which we engineered from early on and I think can be replicated [he struggled with learning to read and was a late reader even]]. We worked on that curriculum together with him, and found an English teacher, who as it wound up, wanted to stick to a traditional middle school reading list.
So the first tutor we hired, though an accomplished middle school teacher — did not work out. Not quickly enough, but very fast by school standards — we said, ‘this isn’t working’ and that was that. Instead of dooming kids to a year of an incompetent / non-connecting / personally troubled or whatever the issues may be, teacher, we simply said thank you, explained why we were incompatible, disengaged, and regrouped. No harm, no foul.
In a school, this teacher could have been switched to the above writing lab or perhaps another appropriate place. Or just let go, fired, for not being what kids needed. I’m not anti-teacher or anti-union, by any means, but schools have a responsibility to students first, and THEN teachers. To saddle children with known underperfomers / mis-matched is criminal. To burden kids with “next year you’ll have a good teacher”, teaches them what? Mostly to look out the window in disgust.
Our son then took a little hiatus from “English class” but continued writing with his history coursework. We did a small film component during the winter for which we required he write reviews, and then he hooked up with an online course of daily writing prompts, which were fantastic for him; and he enrolled in a 7 week creative writing program at an arts center near here, which is a weekend ‘enrichment’ program since there’s no creative writing in middle schools. [Who excised creative writing from the middle school curriculum? Should we get them in here?]
Both those creative writing components had a lot of peer review; the kids were all different ages and different levels, and to see and hear them working together, honestly, compassionately, but unsparingly, made me remember that perhaps there IS some hope after all. Schools could put together similar programs (they have to be headed up by great teachers though, not just with great titles)
Math: not so much. He has no interest yet in math [he’s a very difficult kid which I will get to in another piece] and we had to engineer that one, but that has been a sticking point since the 3rd grade when he likewise went on strike. So we said, “you will do this; here is the carrot, here is the stick”. He usually chose the carrot, but the [metaphorical] stick did get used. Math tutors were the easiest to find and most qualified; teaching and learning math is a mechanical process; here is another area where peer tutoring would work in schools as well — eg 12th graders with 6th graders for instance.
And as he’s getting more comfortable with math and developing a relationship with his tutor, he’s now wanting to perform; finding it easier; and realizing that if he’s interested in science — and sailing — that his math has to improve. So we’ve roped in some interdiscplinary pieces there as well.
A quick aside — one of the best teaching tricks for getting a scared of riding a bike kid to learn to ride — is to play a game where they try to run you over as you dodge away from them. They start off pushing with their feet, steering weakly, but if you are fun and laughing enough, they take so much pleasure in this slightly dangerous subversive play, that they forget about having to ‘learn to ride a bike’ and soon they are chasing you all over, laughing. I’ve taught many a stymied kid to ride in a short afternoon.
Re accountability: while we’re not fans of testing, in this experience, we did not want to solely rely on the opinions of his tutors, so he took the SSAT, doing several test runs and then an official one. We were not permitted to take state standardized tests, because they would have counted in our local schools scores relative to it’s peers, and we could have brought the score down. There’s some child centered policy for you! Or we could have paid any of the 3 not for profit testing agencies who administer the standardized tests within our region — between $2,000 and $5,000, even though we are tax-payers and pay already. And that’s some more child centered policy, right there! So…we paid for the SSAT, which was useful in that it gave him entree this year to audit both the college science class above, and a history class at the high school. For math, he had weekly quizzes, and if he failed them, the amount of math practice went up [is that negative reinforcement? oops]. So he had incentive to learn and get it right; and if he really didn’t understand something, he’d get some help. He quickly learned when to say, ‘this is incomprehensible’ VS when he was being an obstinate math refuser. History — his weekly papers were graded when marked up. Science — his writeups and notes were graded; he quickly learned how to take proper lab notes.
The other pieces: blacksmithing, welding, bee-keeping, homestead/farm work, ceramics, jujitsu — these are interests of his, not entirely ours (though we keep a farm sized garden including bees and a fruit orchard). So to support those as part of the curriculum is not hard. There are many things he’s interested in that we can’t really do, so we don’t!
Things that are NOT of interest to him, but IN his best interest — self-defense, physical culture, ie strength training, self sufficiency re maps, planning, finance, music, yoga, meditation, etc, we have to push him through like any other parent. Sometimes by modeling, sometimes by cajoling, sometimes by coercion. We have a few good videos of him imitating me describing the differences between coercion and bribery, as well as donning my dark glasses and stridently declaiming, while waving arms, “run two times around the yard! do 3 pull ups! drink water, don’t eat snacks! do your homework! write your prompt!” and then lots of hysterical laughing — so in fact, no different than any other kid who doesn’t want to do what his parents or school set out.
There’s a lot more to be said re the life-skills components in our curriculum and how it integrates, but it’s pretty self explanatory. We all need to know how to cook an egg, how to sew a button on, how to use hand tools, etc. Your original article regarding “Lord of the Flies” and building a tower, is what prompted me to write in the first place. In pulling back from letting kids figure out how to bang a tower together, even if it collapsed, an opportunity to open up a new vista and perspective was lost. Those life skills, and how they relate to literature — that’s one of the real values of literature; from the tower building to the understanding how relationships work — it’s a tiny step. But not made, only seen as an academic explanation if it’s not experienced first hand. And again, not faulting you at all — school fears of liabilty, lack of support, challenging environment — it’s completely understandable, and completely changeable.
My personal experience as a kid learning life changing life skills did not come from parents or school, but from the disreputable Boy Scouts of America — they were disreputable then for different reasons; and of course in recent years, despite their recent shifts, they are still despicable — but to be in an environment where kids had agency, and we were doing things with our hands, and talking about and acting upon reasonably complex social issues — that is something missing from local curriculums. No matter how many “service based learning” modules there are. Those are directed by adults who seem to be looking for photo ops. Kids get what’s sincere and what’s not; the photo op mindset is teaching kids the wrong thing.
There is nothing magical about homeschooling — actually for us as parents, it mostly sucks, though it’s great for our kid — there’s no special sauce that makes it effective. What makes schools ineffective are layers of bureaucracy, jargon, plastered over incompetence, and ‘curricula’, shoved between the kids and learning; holding them off from finding a love of learning. We’ve built and accepted mediocrity for so long, we don’t recognize it when we see it; the contrast with our modest homeschooling program is huge; we didn’t understand the differences until we experienced it ourselves.
Because I’ve talked about this a lot with people in our school community — it took us 2 years of conversation before we pulled him out of school — I’m a local face of homeschooling, and am asked all kinds of questions from ‘how to do it’, to queries about local education requirements, to being asked to run for school boards, and often I get — 10 of us want you to start a charter school. I don’t think either homeschooling or a new charter school or a new private school is the solution — changing the school culture — that’s the solution.
During a prior tech booms, a flavor du jour, like today’s “user experience”, was the “Trim-tab effect”. A trim-tab is a small rudder inset into a much larger rudder; the small rudder moves first, in an offset direction from the main rudder; by creating drag, this trim-tab swings the huge rudder with it’s own leverage, and then the gigantic ship turns. How to turn this school vessel — the Titanic — then? [I have some thoughts]
