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Homeschooling
This is a post I've gone back and forth on making to the point where it's probably pretty useless for people now, given that we're almost done with the school year (edit: here in the US - I appreciate the reminder in the comments that the US school year is not universal!).
Anyway, I've dithered about writing it because I have absolutely zero experience homeschooling children as an adult, or in the modern world with computers and email. I don't even have kids! The other reason why I've been reluctant to talk about it is because ... well. You'll see. But basically, I'm the furthest thing from an expert.
The thing is, though, I have a lot of personal experience with it from my childhood in the 1980s and 90s. Basically, my siblings and I were homeschooled for our entire school-age lives. We used a curriculum provided by the local school district - they emailed us packets of material, we did the assignments and sent them back. Alaska had several options like this in the 1980s. We started out doing it through the state, and were kicked out and given to the county [borough] because of my parents' terminal inability to actually give us the work; see below.
My parents were terrible at it, to the point where I had fallen a year behind by the time I was 11 and that was the point when it became obvious to me that if I or my siblings were ever going to graduate, I was going to have to do it myself. So I took over doing the homeschooling for myself entirely, and to a large degree my younger sister and brother. (This is more or less why my brother dropped out in the 7th or 8th grade, because that's when I left home and I was the only one who could ever get him to do anything.)
Mostly this was a matter of sorting everything when we got it -- it all came in a box or a set of boxes for each of us in late summer, with all 9 months' worth of materials -- by priority and due date, and then making sure they did it, supervising tests, etc. I got my parents to sign off on anything that needed an adult's signature.
This may sound insurmountable for a kid, but what made it work is that home schooling doesn't have to take long. In fact, when I broke down an entire school year's worth of material by month it really only took me an average of 1-2 hours a day to do everything I needed to do. You can pipeline stuff pretty easy -- there is absolutely NO reason, for example, if the smaller kids were on a roll, not to just have them do a whole week's worth of worksheets in one day to avoid having to make them do it every single day, or have them read an entire book (or 12) if they're enjoying it. The only things I considered essential were the things that were going to be turned in and graded. Everything else? If it wasn't fun or necessary for extra credit - meh. No need to bother with it.
So one reason why I haven't talked about this is because I didn't want people to read this and be like, "I'm having so much trouble and look at her, she was doing all of this when she was 12!" And another reason is because my "prioritize the necessities, forget the rest" system is the exact opposite of everything else I've ever read about homeschooling, which seems to rely heavily on extensive enrichment activities and hands-on learning.
But about the 12-years-old thing, keep in mind, my PARENTS, the ADULTS, a pair of adults who had made the actual decision to teach their kids this way (as opposed to being shoved forcibly into it like parents in most countries this spring) absolutely failed at it. They failed at it so apocalyptically that none of us would ever have even made it to high school if it hadn't turned out that the specific skills involved in homeschooling, of organization and self-motivation, were actually things I was really good at. It was within my skill set, and also, I was a kid too, so I didn't have to worry about things like jobs and other adult responsibilities. I could focus on the school part and tune the rest out.
I am not saying that having a 12-year-old teaching themselves and the other children in the household is anything close to ideal, but my sister and I both went to college despite having had literal YEARS in grade school when we fell behind due to the lack of competent adults administering any sort of schooling at all to us.
I guess where I'm going with this is:
- Homeschooling takes a certain skill set. It is HARD. My parents chose to do it and turned out to be terrible at it. I happened to be good at it, but I also wasn't trying to do anything else except just my own lessons too (and like, hobbies and basic teenage stuff), and I did this partly by organizing it down to the point where I had to do as little as humanly possible to check off all the boxes successfully. So the fact that millions of parents are suddenly being flung into having to do this incredibly hard thing they're not prepared for is amazing. It's like if you were suddenly expected to fly a jet plane or run a farm or do any other demanding task you've never done before.
- Homeschooling does not have to take long, unless you actually need the busywork to fill your kids' time. Stuff that will be turned in and graded = necessary. Everything else = optional. If you can find something they enjoy, that occupies them for hours, just let them do it. That was literally our entire childhoods. (I could spend 12 solid hours a day writing; my sister had a vast array of home science projects going, and now works in a lab. For both of us, these self-guided activities that we chose for ourselves were far more applicable to our eventual adult careers than most of our actual schoolwork.) If you enjoy doing school-type stuff with your kids, that's great, but you do not have to MAKE yourself do anything just for the enrichment of it. As a kid, I used to wonder how school could possibly take 7 hours a day; what on earth were they DOING? To be fair, after going to college, I realized that being shown how to do something in a classroom, with redundancy and plenty of explanation, is actually a lot more effective than learning it from a book, even though it takes longer. But still ... a lot of classroom learning is busywork, and a lot of it is paced for the slowest kids and bores the pants off the fast learners. If your kids are fast readers and can breeze through a whole week's work in an hour, good for them; why not?
- Even if this means they do almost no schoolwork at all this spring, no matter what age they are, a few months of it will not hurt them in the long run. I missed a year of grade school and my sister missed two, and I got straight A's in college and she has a Master's, and we both have good jobs - I mean, grades and money are FAR from the only measure of success, but the point is, if your child's future success is what you're worried about, we are both successful by almost any metric. (My brother's a whole other story, but I still think he would have done much better if I'd been there for more of his life; it wasn't JUST the homeschooling issue that was a problem, it was also having both his sisters move out and leave him supervised by a couple of well-intentioned but not very competent alcoholics.) If your kids play video games all spring and nothing else, they will be fine. Eventually arrangements will need to be made if this situation continues into next winter, and if your system is working for you by all means carry on, but if you can't keep your head above water, just prioritize the necessary stuff and find LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE for them to do the rest of the time, whether it's playing video games 24/7 or building an enormous model of New York City out of Legos or watching Netflix' entire supply of cartoons, because your life is important too, and there is no need to use up your supply of Parenting Cope trying to force your kids to do busywork that they don't want to do anyway, when you can supply them with cartoons for part of the day and then have some fun learning later by having them bake cookies with you or go for a walk to look at birds, which is literally how humans learned EVERYTHING for most of human history anyway.
... and all of this might have been VASTLY more useful if I'd made this post back in March when I first thought about it. Oh well.
Anyway, I've dithered about writing it because I have absolutely zero experience homeschooling children as an adult, or in the modern world with computers and email. I don't even have kids! The other reason why I've been reluctant to talk about it is because ... well. You'll see. But basically, I'm the furthest thing from an expert.
The thing is, though, I have a lot of personal experience with it from my childhood in the 1980s and 90s. Basically, my siblings and I were homeschooled for our entire school-age lives. We used a curriculum provided by the local school district - they emailed us packets of material, we did the assignments and sent them back. Alaska had several options like this in the 1980s. We started out doing it through the state, and were kicked out and given to the county [borough] because of my parents' terminal inability to actually give us the work; see below.
My parents were terrible at it, to the point where I had fallen a year behind by the time I was 11 and that was the point when it became obvious to me that if I or my siblings were ever going to graduate, I was going to have to do it myself. So I took over doing the homeschooling for myself entirely, and to a large degree my younger sister and brother. (This is more or less why my brother dropped out in the 7th or 8th grade, because that's when I left home and I was the only one who could ever get him to do anything.)
Mostly this was a matter of sorting everything when we got it -- it all came in a box or a set of boxes for each of us in late summer, with all 9 months' worth of materials -- by priority and due date, and then making sure they did it, supervising tests, etc. I got my parents to sign off on anything that needed an adult's signature.
This may sound insurmountable for a kid, but what made it work is that home schooling doesn't have to take long. In fact, when I broke down an entire school year's worth of material by month it really only took me an average of 1-2 hours a day to do everything I needed to do. You can pipeline stuff pretty easy -- there is absolutely NO reason, for example, if the smaller kids were on a roll, not to just have them do a whole week's worth of worksheets in one day to avoid having to make them do it every single day, or have them read an entire book (or 12) if they're enjoying it. The only things I considered essential were the things that were going to be turned in and graded. Everything else? If it wasn't fun or necessary for extra credit - meh. No need to bother with it.
So one reason why I haven't talked about this is because I didn't want people to read this and be like, "I'm having so much trouble and look at her, she was doing all of this when she was 12!" And another reason is because my "prioritize the necessities, forget the rest" system is the exact opposite of everything else I've ever read about homeschooling, which seems to rely heavily on extensive enrichment activities and hands-on learning.
But about the 12-years-old thing, keep in mind, my PARENTS, the ADULTS, a pair of adults who had made the actual decision to teach their kids this way (as opposed to being shoved forcibly into it like parents in most countries this spring) absolutely failed at it. They failed at it so apocalyptically that none of us would ever have even made it to high school if it hadn't turned out that the specific skills involved in homeschooling, of organization and self-motivation, were actually things I was really good at. It was within my skill set, and also, I was a kid too, so I didn't have to worry about things like jobs and other adult responsibilities. I could focus on the school part and tune the rest out.
I am not saying that having a 12-year-old teaching themselves and the other children in the household is anything close to ideal, but my sister and I both went to college despite having had literal YEARS in grade school when we fell behind due to the lack of competent adults administering any sort of schooling at all to us.
I guess where I'm going with this is:
- Homeschooling takes a certain skill set. It is HARD. My parents chose to do it and turned out to be terrible at it. I happened to be good at it, but I also wasn't trying to do anything else except just my own lessons too (and like, hobbies and basic teenage stuff), and I did this partly by organizing it down to the point where I had to do as little as humanly possible to check off all the boxes successfully. So the fact that millions of parents are suddenly being flung into having to do this incredibly hard thing they're not prepared for is amazing. It's like if you were suddenly expected to fly a jet plane or run a farm or do any other demanding task you've never done before.
- Homeschooling does not have to take long, unless you actually need the busywork to fill your kids' time. Stuff that will be turned in and graded = necessary. Everything else = optional. If you can find something they enjoy, that occupies them for hours, just let them do it. That was literally our entire childhoods. (I could spend 12 solid hours a day writing; my sister had a vast array of home science projects going, and now works in a lab. For both of us, these self-guided activities that we chose for ourselves were far more applicable to our eventual adult careers than most of our actual schoolwork.) If you enjoy doing school-type stuff with your kids, that's great, but you do not have to MAKE yourself do anything just for the enrichment of it. As a kid, I used to wonder how school could possibly take 7 hours a day; what on earth were they DOING? To be fair, after going to college, I realized that being shown how to do something in a classroom, with redundancy and plenty of explanation, is actually a lot more effective than learning it from a book, even though it takes longer. But still ... a lot of classroom learning is busywork, and a lot of it is paced for the slowest kids and bores the pants off the fast learners. If your kids are fast readers and can breeze through a whole week's work in an hour, good for them; why not?
- Even if this means they do almost no schoolwork at all this spring, no matter what age they are, a few months of it will not hurt them in the long run. I missed a year of grade school and my sister missed two, and I got straight A's in college and she has a Master's, and we both have good jobs - I mean, grades and money are FAR from the only measure of success, but the point is, if your child's future success is what you're worried about, we are both successful by almost any metric. (My brother's a whole other story, but I still think he would have done much better if I'd been there for more of his life; it wasn't JUST the homeschooling issue that was a problem, it was also having both his sisters move out and leave him supervised by a couple of well-intentioned but not very competent alcoholics.) If your kids play video games all spring and nothing else, they will be fine. Eventually arrangements will need to be made if this situation continues into next winter, and if your system is working for you by all means carry on, but if you can't keep your head above water, just prioritize the necessary stuff and find LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE for them to do the rest of the time, whether it's playing video games 24/7 or building an enormous model of New York City out of Legos or watching Netflix' entire supply of cartoons, because your life is important too, and there is no need to use up your supply of Parenting Cope trying to force your kids to do busywork that they don't want to do anyway, when you can supply them with cartoons for part of the day and then have some fun learning later by having them bake cookies with you or go for a walk to look at birds, which is literally how humans learned EVERYTHING for most of human history anyway.
... and all of this might have been VASTLY more useful if I'd made this post back in March when I first thought about it. Oh well.
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My work colleagues are all homeschooling kids ranged from 5 to 13 - I might send this to them.
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I have to say "pare down to the basics, let them do what they like the rest of the time" is what I've been rolling with out of necessity, so it's great to have that reassurance. Luckily the secondary school don't seem to be assigning too much "busy work" to my teenager: they've pulled together enough to give us a consistent list of tasks to get done by end of May and teen is working through a bit each day with what support I can offer. We've also dropped all but the six subjects he'll be continuing with next year.
The 7yo who turns up his nose at worksheets is entirely happy to play maths-based puzzles, or work his way through Khan Academy, or watch an entire Kurzgesagt playlist about space. He's getting learning done; he can catch up on specific curriculum later.
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Schools are still closed in my state (Victoria) except for kids who have no other options or would be endangered by missing out, but they're slowly opening in most other states now.
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Did your parents ever realize that you were taking charge of school, or did they remain oblivious?
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I'm sorry he didn't take you up on your offer. *hugs*
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I also think that what you had was clearly a well-planned, well-thought-out curriculum that had taken a lot of planning to even exist. What most teachers, god love them, had was a few days to take face-to-face learning and make it as accessible as possible online. I saw someone, the other day, talk about this kind of teaching as lifeboat teaching - the Titanic is sinking, and we're all in a lifeboat, and we're trying to make the best of it, but it's not a cruise liner anymore.
I agree with you - I think parents should get through this as best they can, any way they can, which is how most teachers are getting through it too. If we have to go online in the fall, there'll have to be better, bigger conversations and teacher training to make that happen, and there'll have to be a lot of attention paid to digital divide and disability issues. And it's going to take money, so we need to be paying attention where our school districts - and the state houses - are putting said money.
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Covid-19 isn't bullying or lack of recess or anything like that, but it's a stressful situation. A break is not going to kill a kid.
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Yeah, I think that there's way too much of that busy work (especially in NA schools) that really poisons the enjoyment you can get out of doing interesting stuff.
Anyway, this was a really interesting read!
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I hated reading aloud because other kids read so slowly (and so poorly); if I started off on page 10 with them, three kids later when it my turn to read the third paragraph on page 10, I was on page 27 and got in trouble for not following along. I used to hide novels under textbooks and read my way through boring classes. One year my mother had to swear to the librarian that I really had read all the books I listed as read for the library reading program, because the librarian thought I was lying.
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My daughter had to read a specific "difficult" book (I think it was Abundance) and write comments in the physical copy for one of her classes (AP Human Geography). She was expected to write definitions of any words she didn't know or couldn't figure out from context. My daughter's been reading at college level since middle school. She didn't query any words. The teacher flunked her on the assessment, daughter protested, teacher allowed her to make up the points by taking a vocabulary quiz (which she aced). I was pissed off, but I told my daughter that in the future just fake that she didn't know some words to make the teacher happy because apparently the life lesson here is that BS is a way of life.
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"Just fake being less skilled than you are (rather than expect your teachers to know and work with you as an individual)" is the kind of attitude that apparently a lot of schools prefer to teach.
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My high school junior, who's always been a fast worker, says he likes this distance learning thing -- he gets to go at his own pace, instead of the pace of the slower kids in the class (and mind, "slower" in his case is mostly honors classes at an academic magnet school, so he's not exactly suffering, but he's a very efficient if not always careful worker/learner, and gets impatient with people who aren't. Which I actually think *is* a valuable skill to learn to deal with people whose minds work in different ways than yours, but I'm not surprised he's enjoying this way of instruction more. And he gets to chat with his teachers about Star Wars in Zoom session, so it's like the best of both worlds?)
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Home-schooling is certainly a big umbrella that contains multitudes of modes/experiences (even if we're not talking about switching en masse to teaching remotely in the midst of a pandemic), I think parents/guardians aiming for "good enough" right now is admirable and the most anyone can expect, and I'm absolutely not saying that in person schooling gets everything right!
But curricula/syllabi are generally speaking constructed according to underlying pedagogical principles and built from an educator's expertise. Do kids need to do, say, do 45 minutes of maths at a set time every day Monday-Friday in order to build their skills? No. But burning through a bunch of worksheets all at once as interest/ability allow and then not returning to the subject for a while isn't a good idea either. All the best pedagogical practice I'm aware of (whether we're talking about little kids or college-level work!) would stress the importance of little and often, revisiting a concept in order to build comprehension and competence.
I could spend 12 solid hours a day writing; my sister had a vast array of home science projects going, and now works in a lab. For both of us, these self-guided activities that we chose for ourselves were far more applicable to our eventual adult careers than most of our actual schoolwork.
Again, in the current circumstances, I think letting kids go with what they're interested in is absolutely fine! But I'd push back a little against the idea that having to grapple with something you're not naturally good at isn't something that's worthwhile to do in an educational context. I could coast through languages but I needed to work at calculus, and that taught me something that's still of use, even if I haven't had to calculate a derivative since I finished secondary school. Not to mention that when you're 6, or 8, or 11, you don't necessarily know what's out there for you to be interested in, or the importance of being well-rounded, or how you can take the skills you learn in one field and apply it to a seemingly unrelated one. The value of an education shouldn't be reduced to its mere utilitarian/economic outcomes.
As a kid, I used to wonder how school could possibly take 7 hours a day; what on earth were they DOING? To be fair, after going to college, I realized that being shown how to do something in a classroom, with redundancy and plenty of explanation, is actually a lot more effective than learning it from a book, even though it takes longer. But still ... a lot of classroom learning is busywork, and a lot of it is paced for the slowest kids and bores the pants off the fast learners.
Nothing I do in a classroom is busywork. Now, if I don't explain well enough to a student the reason behind an activity or an assignment, that's on me. But nothing is busywork. What educator has time in their schedule for busywork?
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Well, from anecdotal evidence and my own experience, a lot of teachers do have time for it. Let me give you an example that stands out in my mind even after so many years.
I'll never forget how, in grade 10 math class I was expected to write out long form of (a+b)^2 for some odd reason, even if I already knew the end-result since I learned the formula a while back.
The teacher would not accept that I knew the final result of the problem when I wrote down the final answer on the blackboard, and wanted me to "show the work" by returning to something that I found incredibly trivial, multiplying out each variable etc. She agreed that I knew the formula, but she wanted me to keep doing the long way anyway. This is just one example of many where instead of skipping the gruntwork and getting on with easy things to the more interesting stuff, teachers force the student to slow down because they have a lesson plan to follow. There's no possible reason that actually working out that formula the long way could benefit me (obviously I could multiply and add by then). I was so bored.
That, to me, is an example of busywork and the ways it harms kids.
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I think a lot of what stressed parents are dealing with right now is that a lot of public schools are essentially state-subsidized daycare for parents with a job or more each, and so a lot of what goes on in classes up to high school is busywork and babysitting because that's what the economy demands.
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We're in a good place in that daughter is very easy to motivate and smart, so she can grind through her work for the day in less than an hour with very little help, and her teacher was organized, so we have a clear and very easy set of goals for each week. I think the thing we miss most about school is socialization and recess - she's a little extrovert and I am an introvert at the best of times, so I'm less interested in entertaining her the rest of the time than she'd like.
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I second the idea of it being little to no problem to miss even a whole year of schooling; I spent my 11th grade in the US, after all, and then 12 and 13 in Germany to finish with a perfect-score Abitur. (Yes, I took AP classes, but US History isn't exactly a subject tested in Germany, nor is English-language literature by and large; much of our canon is after all Germanic or European. The subject where I did actually benefit was my AP Calculus class, THE HARDEST CLASS I EVER TOOK PERIOD. I only took the mandatory base-level class calculus, just differential and integrals etc. in Germany and did well.)
Of course, a lot of this has to do with the individual children, and undoubtedly their socioeconomic background. My sister wasn't a motivated student, but she was naturally bright and boosted by parents' efforts, much as sis resented that. I was a motivated student, and the rest is history, but especially given my anxiety I doubt I would have done well unless being very well-loved and attended for at home.
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A lot of the advice I've seen leans really hard into the 'take this opportunity to do these 57 labor-and-time-intensive enrichment activities!' And I think that's very well-intentioned for the most part, but after an hour of school-work, my kid is about ready for a sobbing meltdown. So she's been spending a lot of time watching cooking shows on Netflix and making me learn how to bake elaborate cookies with her, and I figure that's probably fine.
(I mean, also, she's 6, so.)
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I did get into that headspace of learning stuff I wasn't automatically good at, like reading Aristotle or doing algebra, but it took a lot of work and was more emotionally difficult than it probably would have been if I'd learned how to do it in a school setting. Literally no school I was ever in was set up to do that, though, partly because this was the late seventies to the mid-eighties, and I was just such a terrible fit with every single learning style.
//helpful anecdotal rambling!