Look at What My Hubby Did!

Allow me a moment to crow. My fabulous husband has published a book - a real live hardcover book with this sexy, glossy cover. Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins) made its debut in bookstores nationwide today. We celebrated with homemade vegan chocolate cupcakes after Michael completed his NINTH radio interview of the morning. The media is really digging this book! Check out the stellar review in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal.

Is that cover some kind of sci-fi fantasy, or what? It should serve as a bit of proof that if we homeschool Amelie she will at least have some science exposure from her artsy Woodstock parents. Maybe she'll be the first kid in town to ride a rocket-powered tricycle. Look out, world!

homeschooling
Rocketeers
Michael Belfiore

But What about College?

I loved college. My school was a beauty, with a rambling, finely manicured campus lorded over by old-growth trees and darkly Gothic buildings with leaded windows. The library looked and felt like a cathedral to the life of the mind; it was impossible to enter without hushing your voice in reverence. I loved padding around the dorm with my friends or holing up with a pile of books, hopped up on caffeine in an all-night studying binge. To me the yearly course catalog was as enticing as a box of chocolates - the class descriptions sounded that good. Now let's see...what will it be this semester: Italian Cinema (dark hazelnut ganache) or 19th-Century Novel (raspberry fudge truffle)?

Recently at the Denim Jumper a homeschooling mom wondered how the rest of us felt about college regarding our kids. Was college consistent with a homeschooling ethos that's often distrustful of big faceless institutions and bureaucracy? Would sending our kids there be a kind of selling out? And if we wanted to our kids to pursue college, did we worry about how homeschooling might affect their chances of getting into a range of schools, as they would have no formal grades or class rankings to distinguish them?

My concern is with the latter question. I absolutely do want college in my daughter's future - only if she is willing, naturally, though I will strongly encourage her to go. I'm sure it's true that universities can get bogged down in bureaucracy and other nonsense (I experienced this in graduate school, at an institution much larger than my cozy liberal arts college). Yet college can be just the place to challenge the so-called establishment. To me, college stood for freedom, creativity, original thinking, autonomy, joy in learning. In short, it was everything that high school was not. College was where I "unschooled" all the BS of my prior schooling.

The other day I called the admissions office at my alma mater, Vassar College, and asked about their policy on homeschooling. It turns out they don't have an official policy; they welcome homeschooled applicants and recently accepted a "handful" for the incoming class. But they do have a few caveats. They want to see that a homeschooled candidate has covered the same kind of material as a conventionally schooled applicant, with no one subject neglected, like math or science. And the applicant has to be "competitive," whatever that means. They mentioned SAT or ACT scores, which I've heard weigh more heavily for homeschoolers.

Interestingly, the admissions officer told me that she's seen an increase recently in homeschooled applicants. Though before receiving my call, she'd never heard from the mother of a two-year-old prospective homeschooler. I laughed. It was true - I was jumping the gun. In the name of research, of course.

homeschooling
college
Vassar College

What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?

A friend of mine recently told me about two boys she knows who were homeschooled partly in New York City, where at an early age they had incredible experiences like working backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and studying martial arts in Chinatown. Yet when comparing these boys to her own son, who attends our local high school, she said she believed they were "not as well-educated."

I didn't question this comment at the time, but I wish I had asked her what she meant by "well-educated." Is there a measuring stick for a so-called good education, and if so, what is it? Who gets to decide? Is the meaning of "well-educated" the same across cultures? Across time?

I did a quick Internet search today, hoping to find something like an Oxford English Dictionary definition of "well-educated," but I found something better. I found an article by Alfie Kohn called What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? In it, he completely deconstructs the word "well-educated," asking those same questions posed above along with many more, until the jig is up and "well-educated" is revealed as the emperor who's wearing no clothes.

Kohn is incisive and thorough, looking at such yardsticks as standardized tests (which he connects with short-term memorization and "a shallow approach to learning") and labels like "cultural literacy" (which "have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think"). Instead he favors schooling arranged around in-depth projects, problems, and questions - schooling that involves active participation with the larger goal of having kids think for themselves. Imagine that.

The quote at top? That's Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University. Now that's wisdom.

homeschooling
Alfie Kohn

In Memoriam

I had a perfectly good childhood. Here I am at four years old, lit with happiness, as any four-year-old should be. Yet I can't help but feel lately, after delving into this subject of homeschooling and looking critically at the state of education in our country, that I was gypped as a kid. I can't help but feel that school as I experienced it robbed me of countless golden hours from childhood, what Rainer Maria Rilke called "that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories." And what school didn't take, television snatched right up.

Funny, isn't it, to put school and television in the same category this way, when we are supposed to see school as the vitamin and television as the junk food of our culture. Yet to me the two look more alike every day, with a similar narcotic effect on the mind and spirit.

I would like to write more on these themes when I am feeling more rested. (My two-year-old kept me up last night from 2 to 5 am, fighting sleep, and then she boycotted her nap today. I am completely flattened.) But for now I wanted to acknowledge a strange feeling of grief for a lost piece of my childhood. And in acknowledging it, I would like to let the feeling pass.

homeschooling

On the Move

My girl is always in motion. Even as an infant she found ways to get around. When she learned to roll over she used it as transportation, sometimes rolling across an entire room.

I've been reading about the connection between movement and learning in a book called Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, and it makes perfect sense. Maria Montessori recognized the absurdity of sitting kids down at desks all day and "learning at them." She championed mobile, hands-on schooling - the kind that actively engages kids. Take a look into a Montessori classroom and you won't see any desks; instead kids move about to work at different stations, alone or in groups, throughout the day. How refreshing. The kids seem like artisans, absorbed in their chosen tasks, instead of like factory workers on auto-pilot. Where was Montessori when I was a kid? Not in my town.

If school taught me anything, it was inertia. I was not allowed to leave my desk so I had no choice but to master art of utter passivity. Even gym was, in a sense, passive: It did not teach me joy in movement. And television after school strongly reinforced this lesson of inertia over and over again.

At two my daughter literally dances with life. There is a freedom to her limbs, a sense of boundless energy entwined with joy. Am I going to let her dance card run out when school age hits? Not if I can help it.

homeschooling
Montessori

Where Are All the Men?

Okay, I know there are some homeschooling fathers out there. I'm just not meeting them.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, once I entered the world of babies and kids I realized pretty quickly that despite a supposed feminist movement in our culture, home life is still very much divided along gender lines, with care-giving mamas and bread-winning papas. Once in a great while I meet a couple that has managed to reverse this, but for the most part these roles seem etched in stone, a fact of nature.

Just as scarce, it seems, are couples who practice a tag-team parenting style. My husband, Michael, and I fall into this unusual category. We both work at home with fairly flexible schedules, so this largely untried way of life is possible for us. After our daughter, Amelie, was born we developed a parenting strategy called "pass the baby." We continue to work and to parent in shifts and have made an art of dividing up our time fairly and evenly.

Naturally, homeschooling Amelie - should we commit to doing it (and we are both leaning strongly toward it) - will also be a fifty-fifty affair. Since we've managed to tandem-parent successfully for two years now, I'm pretty confident that we'll succeed at this collaboration as well. I do worry, though, about the biases and prejudices that a homeschooling father would encounter along the way. It seems that homeschooling folk have to explain themselves to death to everyone from Great Aunt Sally to that random stranger in the grocery store. And stay-at-home dads have to explain themselves with equal fervor. Imagine combining the two in the form of the (drum roll, please...) Homeschooling Dad. Is the world ready for him?

homeschooling
homeschooling dads

Big Pile o' Books

I've got some reading to do. Here's my list-in-progress. Now I just need to get me some TIME to read them. Have I left anything out? Let me know if you have a favorite.

Teach Your Own by John Holt. They say this is the unofficial treatise for homeschooling from the granddaddy of the homeschooling movement. I expect it to be an empowering read, filled with encouragement for parents who've "got the bug."

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson. A former English teacher, Guterson also wrote the evocative fiction bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars. I hear he has issues with the word "homeschooling" (me too - see my last post!). I'm looking forward to getting his dual point-of-view as a teacher both at home and in a traditional classroom.

Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence by Nancy Wallace. Thanks to Tara of Eames Learning Project for telling me about this in her comment to one of my posts. She says, "Rather than a how-to guide, it's a slice of her life as a homeschooling mom in the 1970s in New England, back when homeschoolers had to deal with much more pushback than we do now." I'm looking forward to learning about Wallace's "unschooling" philosophy.

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. This guy turns a traditional schooling model on its head, pointing out the failures of using punishments and rewards (like gold stars and A's) to promote lasting change and real learning. Instead Kohn champions collaboration (teamwork), content (meaningfulness), and choice (autonomy).

The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling by Rachel Gathercole. Imagine: A book that says homeschooling is the right way to socialize your kids! This book is coming out at the end of July.

The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. I hear this book offers a game plan for a Classical approach to homeschooling based on the "trivium" (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook by Dr. Raymond & Dorothy Moore. This was suggested to me on a message board at the Denim Jumper. Apparently the authors have an approach that's low on stress/cost and high on creativity/initiative.

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Out and About

We're already doing it, aren't we - this homeschooling thing? Amelie at just two already has a full schedule: gymnastics for tykes on Monday, library story hour on Tuesday, social time and art at the Sunshine Club on Wednesday, playgroup on Thursday, toddler music group on Friday. Michael took this picture at Little Gym today, catching Amelie in a rare pensive moment between swinging and tumbling.

This is the kind of life I want for my little bean: rich, full, active, completely engaged with the world. My heart is telling me not to coop her up in a school, but if we do homeschool Amelie I don't want the "home" part to take over. I have a fear, perhaps irrational, of what I call "festering around the house." So can we think of a better word than "homeschool," please? Lifeschool, loveschool, getmeouttadahouse school?

homeschooling

Inspirational Pages, Explosive Ideas

Blame it all on this skinny little book. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling is what lit a fire in me about homeschooling. The author, John Taylor Gatto, was a New York City public school teacher for 30 years. Each time he won an award for his exemplary teaching (and he won quite a few of these), he would accept it with a brilliant and incendiary speech critiquing the system and even the very idea of school.

School is passe, says Gatto. Its original purpose was to regulate the poor, to teach the underclasses not to think for themselves but to obey orders. School as we know it teaches not ideas, self-reliance, and character-building but confusion, indifference, and dependence. Through Gatto's eyes school looks strange and oppressive - a place where you need a pass just to go to the bathroom and move your bowels, a place where the ringing of bells shuts off intellectual curiosity like a light switch.

Gatto likes independent study - the idea of giving kids time, space, and privacy to figure things out for themselves. It's a kind of study you're never going to find in school, but its available in spades for homeschooled kids.

You might not want to agree with Gatto, who says things like "School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned." But you can't say the guy's not talking from experience. And bleak and Dickensian as they are, his descriptions of school sound eerily familiar, don't they?

homeschooling
John Taylor Gatto
Dumbing Us Down

Finding Community

The other day I set out into the world of cyberspace to meet some homeschooling folk. After a few minutes of web surfing, I was starting to feel very low. I found some homeschooling blogs and message boards, yes. Quite a bit of chatting going on. But the conversation seemed to always get around to Jesus somehow. Now I have nothing against Jesus, but this was a little hard for me, a Jewish girl from New Jersey. Where was the new wave of homeschoolers, the more mainstream and secular (dare I say sexy?) bunch I'd been hearing about?

A little more digging around on Technorati and I hit pay dirt. It arrived in the form of a smart, funny little blog called Like I Have Time For This? The author calls herself RegularMom, a self-described "Reader. Writer. Thinker. Homeschooler. Insomniac." A kindred spirit - I don't sleep so much either! A link from her blog took me to a place called The Denim Jumper, billed as "your sassy, secular home away from homeschool." The home page promised, "If you don't fit in at other places, chances are you'll fit in here." I signed myself right up.

Community, I'm finding, is crucial for the homeschooling kind. You're up against a lot: stereotypes, prejudices, funny sidelong looks. It helps to link arms (virtually or otherwise) with the like-minded and draw support from one another. When I told the DJ that I was getting a lot of flak for thinking about homeschooling my daughter, I got this great reply from Katherine of Our Report Card, who imagined telling the naysayers: "If you don't like it, go have your own babies and throw them into the huge anonymous meat grinder of institutional education. That's your business and these children are mine!" You tell 'em, sister!


homeschooling
homeschool
homeschooling community