education

or . . . Our (Continued) Adventures with Home Schooling

I have always embraced the value of supporting and investing in public schooling.

For the vast majority of children in this country, there would be no level of quality education at all if it weren't for this public service - and by public service I mean service for all of us - because without quality education, we can't have a quality society. 

So I've been a bit conflicted when it comes to my own children, and now grandchild. Because my hopes and desires for high quality public education are undermined by the chronic defunding of programs and underpayment of teachers. I have never begrudged a single tax that I've paid for the benefit of education, but I have been repeatedly disappointed by the ability of educational systems to meet the needs of my kids.

Yet, maybe that's not fair. How well can a program - any program - designed to meet the needs of all the children in the system be anything but generic? As hard as teachers and administrators try to develop creative curriculum and dynamic delivery methods, they are constantly hampered by everything from legislative interference to lack of funds to bad parenting to the effects of poverty. So on many occasions, my children have opted out of the system and gone into periods of home or private or alternative schooling. And so it is with my granddaughter.

It's not your mother's home school!

Our granddaughter started kindergarten a year late - the result of a cross-country move that started during her kindergarten year, landing her in a new State (Wisconsin) where the results of kindergarten looked like the results of first grade in our previous home. But now, at the age of 11, she has decided she does not want to graduate when she is 19 years old. She wants to catch up - and move ahead - and have the option to graduate early. The options for accomplishing that in a traditional school environment are very limited, so we evaluated home school.

I must admit, I wasn't crazy about the idea of another go-round of curriculum development and teaching. I've done that several times in the past two decades, and I never felt adequate to the task. My children all ended up doing very well and acquiring excellent higher education, but I think that was more a tribute to their own ambition than my teaching skills! But today we have options that did not exist before.

It's not free. We're paying the cost of a private school education, but for that we get a sophisticated online curriculum, actual teachers, school books, workbooks, and other support materials, and a common core curriculum that's been tested and constantly improved upon for over a decade. Yes, I coach Aubrey, but her daily requirements pop up on her home screen when she logs in for the day. She has six different teachers - and a homeroom teacher - available in seven different area codes and on SKYPE. She will monitor her progress on a daily metric dashboard and be responsible for moving forward in her classes at a pace sufficient to accomplish her own goal of getting done with school more quickly. Most importantly, she will be learning to take control of and responsibility for her own education - something that will serve her for her entire life.

We started school today, and it was different and fun and . . . mellow. Now I am at my desk doing my work and she is across the office in her desk doing hers. I am excited - and nervous - about the year to come. Will we come up with enough extra-curriculur activities to keep her from feeling isolated? Will her motivation hold and keep her focused and progressing? Will I be a good coach?

I'll drop in from time to time and share our progress. It promises to be an interesting year!

We're home-schooling our kindergartner. No, we're not fundamentalists (of any sort), separatists, public school antagonists, or shiftless. We just don't know where we'll be living in the next few weeks.

No, we're not homeless.

We put our house on the market in July. July, 2007, the month the housing market imploded, sending would-be homebuyers everywhere running for the exits, or at least running for their latest FICO score. Suddenly the world of easy credit disappeared, and with it went the era of thinking one could sell their house in something less than five months. But that's a topic for another day, because right now, we're talking about home-schooling a kindergartner. In July, our five-year-old was on track for entering kindergarten in less than five weeks. Kindergarten would not have been the significant milestone it was for our older children, who are 22 and 16.

What to do about kindergarten? We didn't know if we should start her, then yank her out five weeks later (we were highly optimistic despite the daily gloom in the Wall Street Journal), or if we should hold off and start kindergarten in our new home. We opted for the latter. We bought books with titles like "What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know" and "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons," and we began a daily playtime that included reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. From our little one's perspective, it has been a blast. Every morning she dances around impatiently until it's time to start school. She has now had nearly seven months of staying at home every day, hanging out with her family, and attending school in my home office. We're worried that she will not be enthusiastic about attending real school when the time comes. From my perspective, it has been a challenge.

Apparently my skills as a businesswoman are not the same ones required to provide a kindergarten education. I am exhausted at the end of each 2-hour lesson. Did I push too hard? Not push enough? Is she making the appropriate progress? You know – the usual parental questions that always come back to the core issue -- how badly am I ruining my child? I was always relieved to be able to send my older children off to school each day. It was a comfort to know they were someone else's responsibility for the next six hours, and that that somebody else was far more capable than I of preparing my child's mind for the rigors of the future. Once we moved to the southern state in which we currently live (and are moving away from), that relief turned to constant anxiety. The schools are a huge disappointment. The community is small enough that you have to know someone to get into the very limited number of non-parochial private schools (we didn't), and I really don't think most parents – no matter how educated we are – are the best option for educating their own children. So the only option was to turn my children over to someone else's responsibility each day, but no longer with the comfort of believing they were in better hands than my own.

My older children have done fine, due to their strong personalities and undauntable natures. But both of them chose to test out of high school early and proceed with college, rather than remain in the quasi-violent holding tanks that our community calls school. And no doubt that played a strong role in our decision that our youngest would have nothing to do with the schools in this community. When she enters school, it will be in truly top-notch public schools (far from being a public-school antagonist, I am an incredibly strong believer in the system, though it has been damaged so greatly by no-child-gets-ahead and prior administration neglect and abuses that one wonders what we can do to salvage it). But in the meantime, I am gaining tremendous appreciation for those dedicated souls who throw themselves to the kindergarten gods each autumn, to embark on yet another season of teaching them social skills, reading, writing, and creativity. Without ruining them.  

The subject? Literature. The lesson topic? Heroes. When asked who she would name as heroes, Aubrey immediately named Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk. Would I have known this about her if we weren't doing school together? I don't know, but I'm SO glad I do!

and the Not-So-Subtle Shift it Heralds

Anyone with a Facebook page and a modest command of the English language can be quickly disheartened by the appalling lack of spelling and grammar skill in our society. Even taking into account the percentage of people believed to have dyslexia or other impediments to reading and writing (10% - 15%), the results seem to be damning.

But are they? Or are we simply seeing something that always existed?

Consider that a mere 100 years ago much of the US population received a 6th grade education, if that. Only 72% of children even attended school in 1910. The high school movement took on steam in the 1920's and 1930's. By the 1930's, 100% of children were enrolled in primary schools, and by the 1940's there was meaningful enrollment in high school.

OK, but still, that means we've had 70 years to get our grammar and spelling under control, right?

Now let's figure in social factors. In 2008, the US had a 78% graduation rate from high school, and 27% - 29% of adults had an educational level of "bachelor's degree or higher." Statistics indicate that less than 50% of all students intend to enter administrative, professional, or managerial work - work that demands proficiency in written expression - and less than 38% actually do. Factor in concerns related to poverty, race, state budgets, and antiquated curriculum models, and it's not terribly surprising that so many people do not express themselves well in writing.

We Just Didn't See it Before

In the early 2000's I was CEO of a large business-to-business corporation. Like most corporations at that time, we were working hard to implement modern technologies and embrace modern ways of doing business. As our internet site became increasingly popular, we recognized the need to offer "live chat" services to our online visitors. At the same time, we realized we were doing an increasing amount of customer service via email. The thing that kept me awake at night was how difficult it was to find employees who could express themselves effectively (even adequately) in writing. Our employees were the best-of-the-best in our market - jobs at this company were coveted and we never had a difficult time finding applicants. Still, within an employee base that distinguished themselves on a daily basis for excellent verbal communication and customer service skills, we had an extremely difficult time finding candidates for the jobs that required proficiency in writing.

In the not-so-distant past, relatively few people ever expressed themselves in writing after they completed their primary education. Perhaps an occasional letter was written, but otherwise there was little demand for writing skill. Today we face a world in which much of lives are lived online - both personal and business - and our skills at the keyboard are on display for all the world to see. So this isn't a new problem, it is new visibility to an old reality. And only now - as manufacturing jobs are replaced with service jobs and our worlds switch to the written word - is it becoming a significant, visible, problem.

As the debate about public education rages on, and we dither about solving underlying problems like poverty and access, I hope that some attention is being paid to the fact that we need to address the ways in which we teach writing skills to our children. I know with my own granddaughter (whom I home-school), the traditional methods of teaching grammar elements leave her daydreaming about what she could be doing on Instagram, though it is never difficult to get her to curl up with a good book. We will continue to explore and experiment with teaching good writing skills at home, and hope that, as a society, we also seek answers to what is sure to become an increasing concern with economic impact for individuals and businesses alike.

I have long been critical of religious fundamentalists who homeschool to buffer their children from the influences of popular culture. It seemed like an indictment of the rest of us, and I had a rather emotional - even visceral - reaction to it.

I also sincerely doubted the value of the education those children were receiving. Creationism? Bigotry backed by uninformed theology? Were their parents educated enough to actually produce a new generation of intellectually engaged and informed citizens? I had given a lot of thought to this.

I'm not anti-religious. I am personally a product of a truly fine Catholic education - an education that I credit with helping me become the strong critical thinker and social participant that I am today. The combination of my Catholic education and my Jewish background have given me a rich platform from which to live my life. Now I know that my criticism is more about their belief systems and not of their desire to buffer their children.

I come to this conclusion based on new insights as I provide learning assistance and coaching to my grand-daughter. No, I am not her teacher - as well-educated as I am, I do not consider myself sufficient to develop a strong curriculum. We rely on K12 International Academy for that, and they are well worth the money. But the act of being with her each day, of discussing her lessons with her and observing her learning process, has created in me a strong awareness of how much of her social experience we are buffering her from - and how excited I am about that.

She's not exposed to the bullying - of herself or of others. She's not hearing people use racial, religious, sexual identity, or cultural slurs, or words that speak meanly of people due to their weight, social class, intellectual abilities, or family situations. When we discuss history, we have rich discussions about not only what our country has done right, but also what we've done wrong and how we have to work as citizens to correct those things. When we discuss literature we can delve into the human condition and explore issues of motivation, ambition, mental health, sexuality, and all of the characteristics that make people so complex, interesting, and memorable. We can learn real science and still hold a place for the wonder of spirituality. I want my grand-daughter to be exposed to the richness and diversity of humanity, and I am highly desirous of her exploring the ambiguity and subjectivity of life in general. I don't want her to grow up on rules - I want her to grow up with principles and character.

This makes me exactly the same as the fundamentalist home-schoolers in terms of motivation if not in terms of belief systems. We didn't come to this educational approach because of the desire to buffer - rather, my grand-daughter wants to skip ahead a few years and this was the most effective way to do so. But now that I've arrived at this conclusion, I'm not sure I could let it go easily.

Of course, she will have to learn to deal with social conflict, racial bias and bigotry of all sorts, cruelty, and situations with a rock on one side and a hard place on the other. But at the tender age of 11, I am excited about the opportunity to help her explore these concepts through history books, literature and science, and not first-hand. I am hopeful that this opportunity to conceptually grapple with these ideas will arm her with the conscience - and consciousness - to respond with grace and strength to inequity, ignorance, cruelty, and small-mindedness when she experiences them in the real world.

Yes, I have joined the ranks of people who wish to buffer our children from the world. Now I have to grapple with whether or not that is the best thing for us to do.