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December 2014 Unschooling Thread

3K views 89 replies 10 participants last post by  SweetSilver 
#1 ·
Here it is! Anything goes!

Miranda
 
#2 ·
About nine years ago I made a radio show. It was one of a series of homeschooling-related shows called "Home Air," done by the home-learning community. We actually did three episodes, one about our community gardening club, one about our Suzuki music, and this one, our all-time favourite, about Imaginary Play.

Today my ds asked me to post it on-line because he wanted to share it with his college friends. Funnily enough my dd called me from the National Youth Orchestra tour bus two or three years ago asking me to put it in DropBox for her to be able to share it with her orchestra friends.

So I dug it up on SoundCloud and Fiona and I had a listen again. I don't know if it's as entrancing when there's no family nostalgia involved, but we really enjoyed listening to it again. If you're interested, here's the link: Euwy World.

Miranda
 
#4 ·
Nice program, Moominmamma. I wish I'd recorded more of my kids' interactions when they were really little...have tons of photographs, and a few things, like Middle reciting a German poem, but not enough. When my eldest was in 6th grade I became determined to make movies, but the video camera I found didn't work with our Mac, so it fell through the cracks. We have a few small projects from about that time.

that reminds me...with a quadcopter and a gopro, amazing things are possible. We love this video of the Cumbres and Toltec narrow gauge railroad, which railroad we stumbled on by chance when we were car camping (in 1993?)...two of our kids have ridden the round trip of the eastern half of the line:



I love the cheesy music too...

Deborah
 
#5 ·
Sick kid. Crazy weather. It is either frozen or it's 52F/10C. In November. It's supposed to be "High of 42, low of 37" raining or cloudy, ad nauseum until April.

DH, bless his heart, is taking the girls (even the sick one) for a walk in the sunny, frosty forest this morning before heading to work. These days start around 20F make it hard for him to start his gardening work, especially if the freeze has extended and the ground gets really hard. So this morning he's doing me a favor and getting the girls out. I am not a morning person. I can wake up early enough, but I'm not good for much of anything, sometimes for hours. Lately I've been getting my yoga started by around 9:30 which is amazing for me, so it's improving.

I have a huge mental list of things needing to get done. Staring with my yoga.

Now.

I mean it, Sarah, get off this damn thing.

Sigh......... Drag...... Ass......... Zzzzzzzz.............
 
#6 ·
Today for "unschooling" I'm leaving the kids with their much beloved babysitter and I'm going to a movie theatre by myself. I'm not sure I've ever done it before. I really want to see Mockingjay.

We will practice our Hindi before I go. We have been lagging a little in that department. We get solid study in two or three days a week and I kind of wish it were more like four or five but that would take more initiation by me. I'm so lazy. And tired. The tired is a bigger factor.

Minecraft is The Thing of the day. I am actually cutting off screen time after a while because she would play 8 hours a day and that's not good for a developing body. She's made great progress in the game. A week ago she spent more than half of her game time screaming for me to come help her find something. She noticed I didn't come at all and instead hid in other rooms while she was shouting so she has stopped. *phew* I've never played and I am not going to start playing in the position of having to be the one to answer all of your questions. Nope. Figure. It. Out.

Now she occasionally asks me how something is spelled so she can look it up in inventory on her own. I don't mind that at all. :D

Littlest one is still obsessed with her own butt. Poop talk is still full time. This phase can end. *sigh* I try to just ignore it. She's having so much fun. Oh man I'm sick of it.

Oh! My youngest and I got to go on a date last weekend. We went to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, which is a historical reenactment event based on the books of Charles Dickens. There are Victorian dressed actors all over the set which is made to look like an amalgam of his books. Lots of characters run around acting out scenes from the stories. It's a lot of fun. I worked there as a dancer in Fezziwig's warehouse eleven years ago.

We stayed three hours until she turned and said, "I'm tired now and it is time to go home." As usual my response was, "Yes, ma'am! Thank you so much for telling me. I think the quickest way out is this way."

I've got this "thing". I talk to my kids how I want them to talk to me. "Yes ma'am" just rolls off the tongue in this house. It's funny when they say it to their dad. :thumb
 
#7 ·
Still waiting for snow! Only plus side is that I have a little more time to gather money and get ski gear together. I learned backcountry skiing last year on borrowed gear, so it's time to shell out now.

Almost 6 yr old is still all chemistry all the time. I feel, as a former molecular biologist, that I should surely know enough chemistry to satisfy a kindergartener, but his questions are getting rather more baffling. How do different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light? (complete with his own long complicated theory). Why do electrons like to be in pairs? Why is beryllium toxic? What makes a chain of oxygen so reactive?
He was incredibly excited to get his new molecular model kit in the mail, adding new kinds of atoms. I wonder why we usually save those for college students. They're awesome for kids.

Almost 4 yr old is very interested in reading words lately, sounding a few out in her books or watching the adults play bananagrams. She's quickly catching up to big brother (who also figured out sounding out words at 3, but never went further from there). She's also in a happy energetic phase, rather than the super grumpy phase of a month or two ago, so she's much more fun to hang out with.
 
#8 ·
Still waiting for snow!

How do different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light? (complete with his own long complicated theory). Why do electrons like to be in pairs
Too bad about the snow! We had a fair sized dump last week on top of our couple of inches that we still had from early November, so people are skiing here. We still don't have (XC) gear for Fiona, so we haven't been out yet. Downhill is pricey, so we don't do that very often.

re: chemistry questions. I think that at this age my explanations would be mostly in the form of metaphors. Like, for the photochemistry question (if I'm understanding it correctly and that's what it is), if you have a violin or a guitar, you sing the note D above middle C, and with a good instrument you can actually see and hear the D-string vibrate sympathetically. If you sing a D#, nothing. My kids are pretty familiar with this phenomenon. So I'd explain that molecular bonds are a little like strings: they have certain frequencies that they are sympathetic to.

But there's no harm in not being able to give an explanation. Just "I don't know all the answers. I'm not even sure scientists know why. But that's the great thing about science: it's driven by questions, and by the search for answers. If we knew everything, scientists would have nothing to do!"
 
#9 ·
So today, 2 p.m., town time...I find daughter in the passenger seat. "I'm tired of driving." Well, she has added 10K miles plus to the car since she started driving (most of this with an adult passenger, of course)...but I had to laugh.

One of her horse exercise opportunities came to an abrupt end again today, which has happened before with this mentor. I never know quite what to think when I get something like this (my knee jerk reaction is that I've done something wrong):

"Please let J know that C will no longer be available for her to ride. I need to work with her. She has done a fine job with C, has been a big help, and I've enjoyed having her around...I will let you know if the situation changes but it probably will not for at least 4-6 months. Have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year."Anyway, the horse she has been invited to show is still available, and likely to be. There's always a risk when you don't own the horse! At least this is a good time of year for this to happen...it starts getting very cold in town about this time, often ten or so degrees F colder than where we live, because it's in a valley at the mouth of a canyon and the cold air drains down the watercourse all night.

Time to feed Old Cat, who has felt her way to my side...

Deborah
 
#12 ·
Tonight we had our annual employer/neighborhood holiday party. Youngest showed up looking very tall: dressed in heeled Mary Janes, a long swirly black skirt, red tailored shirt, tinkling ornament jewelry assembled from various sources (including pilfered from her sister's room): bracelets, rings, earrings, a straw cowboy hat. She's 5'7 but the extra stuff added six or more inches to her height. After the potluck/catered meal, I found I'd won a door prize, out of 4 stars taped to the bottoms of the folding chairs. It was a meat and cheese box...maybe I will have a party and invite the neighbors, to get rid of it. Then the employees all got stainless steel water bottles with the employer logo on them...I started laughing when I saw that everyone (science/engineering/technical geeks all) was figuring out how the spout worked, reading off the specs (BPA free!), unscrewing the lids and sniffing the insides. I had to take a snapshot...

I'm having trouble writing this because White Paws is helping. (BTW, found out that someone has been sharpening claws in my violin case. Not. Happy. At. All. About. This.) Anyhow, when we got home, and I was thinking how to get something productive done without having to exert myself much, Youngest shows up with a violin and asks to play. For the first time ever, I think. Not play play, but lesson play. Sooo...gave up my idea for a nice quiet stress free evening, and we had a fairly intense practice.

Time to feed cats!

Deborah
 
#13 ·
Beethoven, baking and Ballet. This is what is consuming her.

Holiday baking. Thus far pfeffernusse, almond crescents, rum balls, chocolate-peppermint spiral cookies, penuche. This weekend, plans for marbled chocolate almond bark, cashew brittle, cranberry spice biscotti and gingerbread. Her sister has been part of some of this. It's been great for me! I used to try to lead all of this stuff myself, and get the kids to help. Now I do a couple of my favourites (cranberry white chocolate truffles and fruitcake) but other than that I'm just the person charged with driving to the store to buy ingredients. Butter. So much butter.

Beethoven's Spring Sonata. Unlike most of the pieces she's learned in the past, she's never heard any of her older siblings play this one and wasn't familiar with it by ear. She fell in love with it herself as she came to know it, and asked her teacher if she could learn it. The business of discovering it from scratch was a new experience for her. I think it's helped her take complete ownership over the learning. She's been at it for a couple of weeks and the first movement is well under her fingers. If we're lucky we'll be able to twist her oldest sister's arm over the holidays and have her play the piano part. If Fiona gets comfortable playing it with piano by her first lesson in January, she might be able to convince her teacher that she can do it on the end-of-January recital. Because it's a proper and very conversational-style sonata, there's a lot of intricate togetherness stuff that has to happen with the pianist. This will be something new for her.

Ballet. Last class before Christmas was today and the only thing that's helping her face the 4-week gap is the excitement of shopping for pointe shoes. I shot some video for my mom during this week's classes. The tutus were just for a bit of pre-Christmas fun: the teacher decided to teach the girls a bit of Nutcracker choreography so she let them throw on tutus. Not a very polished thing since they only spent about 20 minutes learning it, but they looked pretty cute in their dresses. The other class, where Fiona is wearing the blue wrap skirt, is ballet technique class. They learn a few sequences like these from scratch every class. At 1:30 you can see her with a couple of seniors doing a pretty impressive first try at a complicated sequence. She picks this kind of thing up really quickly. I'm in awe: she certainly didn't get that from me!

That is what has been keeping her busy. There's no room in the Enthusiasm Centre of her brain for anything else.

Miranda
 
#14 ·
Beethoven's Spring Sonata. Unlike most of the pieces she's learned in the past, she's never heard any of her older siblings play this one and wasn't familiar with it by ear. She fell in love with it herself as she came to know it, and asked her teacher if she could learn it. The business of discovering it from scratch was a new experience for her. I think it's helped her take complete ownership over the learning. She's been at it for a couple of weeks and the first movement is well under her fingers...If Fiona gets comfortable playing it with piano by her first lesson in January, she might be able to convince her teacher that she can do it on the end-of-January recital.
The last kid I knew that did that was a bit older (16)...he picked a Mozart sonata, the Spring...I forget what else, a couple of pieces (maybe Kreisler P&A & a Sarasate piece?) for his first real solo recital...he's now a professor of violin at a small liberal arts college. So, you never know where that may lead...at the time I thought he might be a wilderness outfitter or something some day.

And so nice that your daughter has the ballet opportunity. My youngest was in a modern dance troupe for a while when very small, then took ballet lessons in a town about an hour away (37 miles is an hour where we live)...was committed, worked very hard...but just not enough students to support a dance studio. The teacher fled to a Big City. And daughter switched to horses...even that has been difficult to keep going.

This morning my daughter was supposed to take one of the foster kittens for eye surgery; I drove husband to work because he has a cold & then got hung up helping a colleague with failmerge...I mean, mailmerge (I don't know anything about it either, but have to pretend I do)...came back to find the power to the (piano) keyboard still on, and daughter returning my violin to its case. My violin, notice, not hers. (I've told her she could play it. I don't think she could do any more damage than I have...I have an unpleasant habit of putting little nicks in my varnish, whether with my fingernails, bow, or whatever. My viola scroll/back have taken a direct blow from a cello bow more than once. My husband has put possibly one tiny ding in his violin in ten years, and he still broods on it. Here's hoping I get the varnish repaired on the viola we share before he sees what happened to it...out in the dry boonies we don't have any repair service, so I glue a lot of seams. Only somehow when I did the only one that really counts, on an expensive instrument, the glue ran in a stream down the back of an instrument and left a long discolored trail.)

So, back to the office for a while...this afternoon is lessons (me) & Ultimate (daughter) in town. And for her, horse work and vet job for the weekend.

Deborah
 
#15 ·
Hello
I am Anna
I have been lurking for a while and have worked up the 'courage' (found enough uninterrupted time) to introduce myself.
I live in Toronto, I have 4 kids: 23, 16, 12, and 9. The 9 year old is at home, the 16 and 12 are voluntarily at school, the 23 year old lives on her own.
And now uninterrupted time has come to an end.
Have a great day.
Anna
 
#17 ·
My girls have been sooooo grouchy recently. DD9 can be very single minded, and her sister won't play a particular game and the battle has simmered for days. I am so done with it, but they are no getting the picture.

Yesterday was the annual Waldorf Winter Faire. Always fun, they put the Treasure Hunt back in (they did something different last year thinking that kids would want a change, but there were complaints and even some tears on the part of my girls. I spoke to one of the Waldrf moms I knew from gym and she helped pass my message on, and said that many parents commented on how much they missed it.) The treasure at the end was the tiniest gnome I've ever seen. We made gnome houses and some earrings for family gifts and a "pocket baby". DD9 was disappointed that there were no wand crafts (I swear between this event and another we have about 50 of them!) I also think she is starting to outgrow the event just a wee bit. The puppet play was as beautiful as ever, but last year's shadow play was the show to beat, and this one didn't quite pull it off. But Waldorf does everything beautifully and this was no exception.

I ran into some friends at the the faire's craft market. One makes amazing, artistic, upcycled clothing. Perfect timing. I'm cornering her into making me a coat for next winter.

On our way home we stopped by the local Christmas tree farm to cut a tree. Living where we do, we have our pick of no less than a dozen on the direct route from the Waldorf school near Olympia to our house. They tied the tree on the top of our car with twine. The taut string on the inside proved an irresistible instrument for plunking out Jingle Bells (or something that sounded like it when you really thought about making it sound like that) when suddenly it went slack and my heart fairly leaped out of my chest. Thankfully it didn't really come untied and we were only on the highway for 2 miles before hitting the back roads for the last 4 miles.

Nobody warns you about that! Why don't they warn you about that?? Am I the only person in the world who has thought about playing Christmas carols on the twine?? "We've never lost a tree" said the guy tying it on to our roof. Well, because you never tied one on the top of MY car. I will have my fun... :p

I've been playing my guitar every day now, playing around with songs I know, pushing myself to step out of my comfort zone. I started making myself slog through transposing chords to fit my voice and I've been encouraged by my success. I've started playing the full chords for F and B instead of the abbreviated ones that fit my small hands better. I've had to relearn some songs and that was hard to accept but the improved sound will be worth it. Ever since a bad cold this summer, my voice craps out in about an hour. First, I'll get that nice rock'n'roll cracking (there's a term for it that I don't remember) but that winds up with me straining to sing a song that is in the perfect register for my voice by the end. This truly pisses me off.

But it's been so joyful on the whole. I've been able to work out most of the music in the acoustic video of Here Is the House, though there are still gaps, and it's retraining my ear nicely. I've peeked shyly at the chords for Walking In My Shoes and Cole Porter's Night and Day. I remember a lovely version by Everything But the Girl in the mid-80's and we did a little exploration of the different versions of the song including from the Delovely soundtrack I am so fond of. Alas, some songs are still beyond my skill to play, but if I listen to the EBTG version, the guitar arrangement is relatively simple so perhaps it's just the chord names that are fancy. I still play with my Sing Out songbook for the girls.

We've also been singing a lot of Christmas carols in the car. I am so glad that we can do this alone because my girls do not have the early pitch control that I had and they can still sing joyously despite sounding a "wee bit" off. I occasionally encourage dd9 to sing a little lower, closer to her speaking range, and as natural as she can, because the higher she gets the more she loses her ability to hear where her voice should be. When we sing together I let them start and I try to match their pitch as difficult as it can be to maintain it. Luckily the car rides end before my voice does. They take turns making up songs.

Oh JFHC* my cat threw up all over dd9's dragon flyers and now the house is filled with screaming. Gotta go. Bloody hell.... good morning, I guess.
 
#19 ·
Logging in after a very long time - for the past month or longer I haven't been able to access this site at all! I think the non-neutral internet has already started because I am finding around half of the sites I want to see slow to load or not at all loading. Big sites like youtube and google load but many newspapers, university sites, etc are quite unreliable. It has wrought havoc with my MOOC work - and dd and I just got excited about joining the Berkeley book club at edx. This months book is A Christmas Carol. Well, by a miracle the site loaded long enough for me to complete the assignment just in time today. I have taken several MOOCs but this is the first time I have completed the homework, owing to the fact that dd is interested in trying out a MOOC - I suggested that she watch one course and then consider signing up on her own next time.


>I've got this "thing". I talk to my kids how I want them to talk to me.

Same here!

> "Yes ma'am" just rolls off the tongue in this house. It's funny when they say it to their dad.

Funny! That hasn't happened here ;-)


nice to be able to log in again! Let me quit before the server does:smile:
 
#20 ·
Went to the Dr. to catch up on how DS was doing ( she was off on maternity leave) she finished up by saying she was concerned about socialization!
I had to laugh, TBH I thought that was a myth that people thought that way, surprise surprise they really do! I told her that, that is a big joke in the HS community, but she just looked confused.
Good grief is all I can say

Anna
 
#21 ·
They really do think about socialization. But I think that's a good sign, that people are starting to see that home-based learning might be superior in many ways. So what is left is "socialization" and "accepting that you have to do what you don't always want". And "get used to a schedule."

Believe it or not, I see this as progress.
 
#22 ·
Getting used to a schedule... -- somehow, I think that our DS6 will not choose a type of living style where he needs to conform to a schedule. Of course, I may be wrong.

We've been doing a lot of cooking, making chocolats, learning about good nutrition. Getting used to changing our diet around and avoiding grains (oh, why am I only learning now that my body can't handle grains; what a difference it makes). That transition takes up a lot of time.

DS is still very much into building models of space crafts, airplanes. He built a pretty huge crane out of cardboard pipes, etc. He's still showing his creations around to local artists and they are so very supportive! (so, he may not be interested at all in socializing with people from his age-group, but he sure knows how to 'network' and get what he needs/wants, such a materials and instruction).

We're playing a lot of chess! It's fantastic, really, that DS is showing an interest in this. He's got a good brain for it.

Schooly stuff, like reading to him, etc. -- not so much at the moment.
 
#23 ·
I'm 35, and school was the only place I've ever had to "get used to a schedule." Not entirely true, of course, but all my post-school employment has been in science (where you can mostly choose your start and end times) and contracting/self employment (where you can completely choose them).

Socialization and "dealing with other people" are the objections I usually get. But the most vehement is "You're so selfish not to support the school! What would happen if everyone did it?!" (public schooling in general, and/or this school in particular). That one gets me up in arms more. Of course, you could call my almost 6yo unsocialized--a quirky little kid who loves lecturing adults and rarely plays with kids other than his sister. But my almost 4yo could make friends with any kid on earth in about 30 seconds. It's nothing to do with our lifestyle.

You are all making me wish we had some speck of musical inclination somewhere in our family. Singing the ABCs or "Let it Go" on hikes with the kids (where no one can hear me!) is about what we manage around here.

Mazamet-- sounds fun! My son went through a big airplane phase a year or so ago, and then got into space. Our entire house was drowned in paper airplanes for awhile.

My son spent his evening using stuffed animals to demonstrate chemical reactions -- paying no attention to their animalness, but arranging them by size to appropriately represent different sized atoms. He's also been into doing mental math lately--not sure where it's coming from, but out of the blue he'll decide to do something like figure out how to count by 6s to 312 as we're walking to the beach, or tell me that 10 divided by 4 is 2 and a half as he's eating oatmeal. This low-level math seems so effortless--it does make me wonder what on earth the school kids spend all their math time doing.
 
#57 ·
I'm 35, and school was the only place I've ever had to "get used to a schedule." Not entirely true, of course, but all my post-school employment has been in science (where you can mostly choose your start and end times) and contracting/self employment (where you can completely choose
When people say that school accustoms kids to a 9-5 workday, I think back to job I had once working 4am until noon. Nothing prepared me for that, and yet I did it because I was being paid! I did not mind at all getting up at 3am but as a kid I detested getting up at 6 to catch a bus to a place I detested. Funny how that works.
 
#24 ·
We don't formally do music like some of the fancy-pants here, but I find that if I make up a song to give directions they listen better than if I talk.

Like:

It's time to load the dishwasher,
the dishwasher, the dishwasher,
It's time to load the dishwasher,
So it can get washing.

It rhymes. I swear.

Most of our life sounds like an ongoing musical interlude from a bad Disney movie. I make up the stupidest songs about cleaning up the floor. But they help!

It has really helped me work on my word fluency and my rhyming words. I wasn't good at it when I started trying. (Mostly I sing because that way I don't get grumpy. It's a way of tricking my PTSD-reactions. Otherwise when I repeat the same direction over and over I start sounding pretty nasty.)
 
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#25 · (Edited)
This fancy pants music person is guessing the tune is the same as "Here we go Round the Mulberry Bush" ... ;)

We used to sing to our first:

I'm gonna wash this baby good
I'm gonna wash this baby fine
I'm gonna wash this baby all the time
I'm gonna wash this baby because he's mine!

I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash wash wash
I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash wash wash
I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash, I'm gonna wash wash wash

(back to beginning, ad infinitum)

(This one doesn't go to the Mulberry Bush...It's sorta jazzy...)

and

Open your mouth, sweet (name here), open your mouth!

(an enticement to feeding song. Does it work? No.)

Deborah
 
#26 ·
mikittre, that is math in our house. Suddenly one of them feels like thinking about math and it happens. The other day dd8 was asking me what 9+9 was. She knows this. "You know that one!" "Oh right, let's see..." And she doesn't just blurt it out, she reorganizes the numbers somehow and says "18!" Then a few minutes later she declares, like finding a dollar bill in her pocket or a forgotten goodie, "Wow, mom, 18-9=9!!!!" "!!!!!!"

Seriously, what 8yo gets to groove on the discovery of the inverse of 8+8?? School kids are *robbed*! It makes me feel better about not pushing math, even though I feel like dd9 is getting "behind" a bit. They still love math, when it comes up, and they are doing what's real. I'll postpone worrying for a little while more, but 10 is coming up fast and I think I will have some new flavor of anxiety waiting for me.

This is my philosophy of music, using the words of another:

"Sing, sing a song,
Make it simple to last a whole life long
Don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear
Just sing
Sing a Song"

Thank you, Karen Carpenter! (Or whoever wrote that.)
 
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#27 · (Edited)
I play music only for the sheer mad fun of it!

edited later...

While writing an outraged rebuttal, to my political discussion group in response to someone who is arguing that we ought to keep on doing just what we've always done,

I heard an odd tuneless plunking coming from the living room, which I identified as a cheap coconut ukelele inspired instrument being "played" by Youngest...but now it seems that *my* violin has been pressed into service, first for a somewhat shaky jig, and now a nice waltz (I notice that each measure has three beats in it, unlike my rehearsal with my old chamber music buddy yesterday...without the quartet to keep him in check, he sometimes dispenses with the spaces). Very interesting what happens when you "look away" when what you'd really like to do is Force Practice someone. (I didn't squeak when Youngest dropped voice lessons this fall...the other day I overheard her say that she was "too busy" (true) but will resume next semester now that she has more time. Haha.

Deborah
 
#28 · (Edited)
Okay, I'm back here because I'm avoiding work for a little while...it's going to take a block of time & concentration, and I'd rather sit here typing and listening to my kid play one tune after another, including some that she learned by listening to recordings.

But I've been frustrated by this recently, even though it is absolutely none of my business. I have an online friend/acquaintance whose blog I've followed for years who has hit the "next" stage with her kids (that two of mine have already gone through). What they did was pretty unschooly in the early years, and then became more structured as time went on, so by the time the kids were in the sixth grade or so, they were pretty much doing school at home. I'm going to speak generally because I don't want to compromise their privacy, but basically their kids have pretty much followed the trajectory of my eldest, who was sent to public school as a ninth grader. Issues these kids have had include not completing online courses, breaking family computer use rules ("too much" video game play), giving the impression that they're working on school work when they're not, missing deadlines, refusing to read certain books, forgetting assignments.

The kids are borderline gifted (not the very top, but close). So homeschooling has been declared a failure after a poor fit of a kid to school, and draconian measure are being considered to get one back in educational line (military boarding school).

So I've been followed this whole thing as it unfolded, with eerie sense of deja vu. (I could tell that part of the story wasn't being shared, and because I'm who had "been there", I could pretty much guess what was going on.) This mom is actually going to give up spending time before the holidays marketing for a business she has started, in order to salvage something out of their homeschooling "failure", to get the kid back on track for the second semester of high school.

My kid, the one who acted just like these, graduates from college on Saturday. I think he's still recovering from his public school experience in some ways, but he's made the trip with decent grades and got a lot of new skills in addition to his history major/biology minor: he's been manager of the campus TV station, and also seems to be in the process of replacing his car bit by bit, as well as having assembled an impressive amount of computer equipment into usable systems.

By the standards listed by my friend, my son was a total failure following homeschool, the same label that's getting slapped on hers. I have a little something to say here: I see the cognitive advantages granted by homeschooling all the time. Of my kids' homeschool group, most of the kids (aside from one special needs child on the autism spectrum) and my mildly dyslexic youngest were academically ahead...way, way ahead. Neither my husband nor I are intellectual sluggards, but the variety of gifts, determination, curiosity, etc. our children demonstrate, all of them, are not solely the result of biology. There's an active element of nurture in there.

Her having borderline gifted kids demonstrates (to me) a "homeschool advantage"...and the fact that the kids haven't taken to formal education like a duck takes to water tells me that MAYBE there could be something wrong with the expectations.

"The focus on making learning fun with homeschooling for the earlier years and doing so much that was of personal interest (unschooling) or being able to select fun co-op homeschool classes seems to not have had a good effect...[my child] has not been held to hard deadlines and forced to read books that [my child] has little interest in...I am wringing my hands here...My husband has declared homeschooling as a failure and says he would not recommend it to anyone. I don't know what of this situation is about being a teen or being in the throes of puberty or being lazy or is apathy or what."

(I didn't share the list of corrective measures a counselor came up with for "a bright student lacking motivation", but I'm sure you can guess....basically along the lines of "the beatings will continue until morale improves"...but including a lot of parental/adult oversight.)

I've found watching this whole process very disturbing, for several reasons:
1) I knew the outcome, could have almost written her posts for the last few years. They're on the wrong track, beyond the scope of this post to explain why, but still...on the wrong track.
2) Articulate parents who have done their research cling to a very primitive understanding of what education is. These are not low IQ people; the dad's job requires substantial education & he makes plenty of money. People at that socio-economic level actually have a chance at influencing public policy...that "husband has declared homeschooling as a failure and says he would not recommend it to anyone" is just short of saying that homeschoolers should "be held to the same standards as public schoolers" and "should not be allowed". (My paranoia is sticking out here, I'm sure. On the flip side, I'm now in a book club that reads a lot of history and historical fiction, people of my age and old, who ALL seemed to think homeschooling is a great idea. I confessed to one that my 17-yo is just starting her higher math journey. The response? Perfectly okay.)
3) It perpetuates the myth that kids like mine are "accomplished" in spite of homeschooling, not because of it
4) And so on...

Okay, I've ranted and raved quite enough over here...I wonder what's doing in my political discussion group? ;) (Really, time to work.)

Deborah :eek:

p.s. And I almost feel like these kids are my own...I've watched them grow up. Now it's turned into a sort of terrible accident that one can't tear one's eyes away from. Military school? Ai yi yi...
 
#29 ·
I'm going to assume that the fancy-pants term was not intended in the sense of "high class, elite and pretentious." My kids study musical instruments because in a family that's been playing violins for four generations it's as natural that they'd want to learn that as that they'd want to learn to bake brownies or to read. I hope that people in this forum don't feel defensive when I write about my dd's violin playing. I write about it because it's an interest that engages her and is therefore a venue for her learning and growing. The thing about unschooling, though, is that it doesn't particularly matter what it is that engages a child: it matters only that they are engaged. Violin, Lego, animal husbandry, entrepreneurship, karate.... anything works.

Funny thing. When I was growing up there were three activities that I would have characterized as "fancy pants," because from what I saw it was primarily ostentatiously wealthy and pretentious families who engaged in them: downhill skiing, golf and ballet. Now, where I live, things have certainly flipped for me. If I had to create stereotypes around who is engaging in these things I'd say downhill skiing is poor hippie kids, golf is the *******-logger-family kids, and ballet is ... me :innocent despite never imagining in a million years that I'd have a kid who was drawn to it. And here's the kicker: she's going to get pointe shoes fitted next week at a dance supply place called Dancy Pants.

About Anna's doctor commenting about socialization. I have a hard time looking upon that as silver-lining-type progress. I've been involved in homeschooling circles for about 17 years now -- almost a generation! -- and the mainstream attitude was exactly that back in 1998. There was begrudging acknowledgement of the fact that it was certainly possible to hot-house kids to the point of impressive academic skills through homeschooling, but homeschooled kids would miss out on learning to work in groups, the development of strong friendships and social skills, and exposure to diversity of cultures and points of view. I find it a bit depressing how little has changed. I take small comfort in the fact that often comments like this are followed by qualifying comments like "but not you guys," or "not the kids around here so much, but ..." There you go, though. I think arguments and statistics won't change people's views. Relationships and experience will, but the effect is very gradual. Old stereotypes die hard.

Miranda
 
#30 ·
My kids study musical instruments because we have a house full of them. My husband and I were the first generations of our family to study music seriously, although various relatives could play hymns on the piano, and we had a reed organ that my dad played "Rock of Ages" and "Work, for the Night is Coming" with all the stops pulled out, every now and then. My music was totally my choice...I asked to take violin lessons when I was in the 8th grade...wanted to play piano, but because my younger sister (fifth grade) had got a high score on a test of musical aptitude, she was recruited for the orchestra. As soon as I figured out that the violin could play more than 4 pitches (one for each string), I asked if I could play too.

Deborah
 
#59 ·
My dd12 is like this. She is the only one of my three that takes music study somewhat seriously. We also have a house full of instruments, but we're more into folk type instruments - think kitchen party/ceilidh rather than chamber music.
Dh and I never had much in the way of musical training outside of a few lessons here and there but we both gravitate to music so we had guitars, ukuleles, a mandolin and various kinds of drums and keyboards that we tinkered with. I actually let the kids play with some of these and some toy instruments from the time they were very little. I was intentional about making these things a part of their culture. We also will take in music shows of all kinds from bluegrass festivals to orchestral performances. And we listen to just as broad a range at home.

Now dd is taking up xylophone in her spare time. It'll be interesting to see how she translates what she knows of other instruments to this one.
 
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