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So... you read it and went "Aaaaahhhhh, I never thought of that." Didn't you? I wonder how many of you felt you were on a train during your schooling years.
We are an unschooling family. Pretty much from around the time my first son was about 9 months old. That's pretty young to start thinking about my son's educational journey, but I new I had to start opening some doors quickly. I live in an "okay" neighborhood" with lousy schools. My options for "just good enough" schools were 1.) Move to a neighborhood where I can be in a posh school district. Or 2.) Continue to live in my "okay" neighborhood and drive 30 minutes one way to spend $18,000 PER YEAR on kindergarten with a school that I am sure I would just love. For $18,000 I better not just love it but I want to see Jesus, Ghandi, and Muhammad walking down the halls and teaching children as they sit under apples trees.
Here's my problem with Option #1: I happen to love my house. Why should I move into a more expensive house that we can not afford to send my kid to a "good" school???? Shouldn't EVERY SINGLE FRICKIN' KID IN EVERY SINGLE FRICKIN' NEIGHBORHOOD get to have access to something so fundamental as a decent education? How are we supposed to advance as a race when more than half of our kids are not being inspired to learn, not being engaged to participate in life, or not being treated as an individual? I pay taxes as a resident of this state, taxes which supposedly go into our school system. Therefore, I should be guaranteed a good school no matter where I live. (Dream on.)
Here's my problem with Option #2: Even if we could afford the money, do I really want my kids to go to a school with other kids whose parents can afford $18,000 X (how many kids they have) = $54,000 PER YEAR???? What kind of attitudes would we have to deal with? What about the sense of entitlement that often comes with being so rich? Have you ever talked to a seven year old that thinks that $18,000 is like buying bread? I do not wish my children to not know what it's like to play with "poor" toys or the "poor" kids, or have a problem with wearing second hand clothes. I do not wish them to live in such a bubble. There's a lot of things our family can do with $18,000 and home educate is one of them.
The system is broken and I don't want my children to be the lab rats that our government is using to find the solution. Look at where "No Child Left Behind" got us. Bored, disinterested, intelligent kids waiting around for the other children that they were not supposed to leave behind. Is that really their responsibility? That program is a whole new rant for me, so I"ll leave it at that.
Anyway, that's how we ended up deciding to homeschool. I guess for the sake of this article, I should be clear: We UNSCHOOL. But I am starting to get bugged by the different terminology out there. The bottom line is that I feel that the educational system in California is failing us so we are taking matters into our own hands. I did not have children to send them away so other people can teach them in a way that is not effective for them. We are guiding our own kids to becoming free thinkers, creative geniuses, self-confident, and resourceful. This is what makes for a well-adapted, ready for the "real world" adult. Not whether they got a 4.25 or a 2.50 GPA, or whether they go to Cal State or Princeton. And certainly not whether they know Trigonometry.
People say, "Wow, that takes a lot of commitment and time on your part to homeschool." My husband's philosophy is you either take the time and have the commitment to guide them through their educational pursuits during their youth. OR you find the time and gather up the commitment to be involved with their six hours of homework every day, help them on reports on the weekends, find the right supplies required by the teachers, call teachers when there are problems in school, play phone-tag with teachers because you can't get a hold of them when there are problems in school, and last but not least DEAL with the problems in school that you didn't know were bubbling beneath the surface for the last semester. And then squeeze in the time to just have fun as a family, IF you are not too tired do that or if that's even important to you.
I started talking to a mom at the beach the other day about her 1st grader who just finished his first week of school in a very posh neighborhood. This is a neighborhood which they specifically moved to so that her kids could go to this particular school. After one week, this mother is considering pulling her 1st grader out because she is astounded by the amount of homework her seven year old son has. She says that he's in school for eight hours every day and then they have to work on homework together for three more hours when he gets home. That's completely absurd, she tells me through tears. When is he supposed to play? Just FREE play? Not organized sports, not art class, not recess where they have no choice but to inhale their food before they are forced to go back inside? (This is her rant, not mine.) And then asks where I send my kids to school to see if my school is any better. We homeschool, I tell her. So, yes.... it's better.
This is September, so the buzz is all around us about how or if Johnny likes school this year, how they're changing schools because they can't get along with the teacher, how one school has 32 kids in a classroom and the school across town has 40 kids in a classroom but they are blessed with a teacher's aide. Oh yeah, then there's the ever popular: We lie about our address so that we can go to the best school this side of the hill. (That's the best lesson of all... Teaching your kids to lie to get what you want.) After one month of hearing this at every corner, I am a firm believer in my husband's philosophy. The time and agony and money spent and sleepless nights trying to fix the school's problems I will never have to deal with. I get to spend the same amount of time and money finding really fun things to do for my kids.
I was talking to my son's soccer coach, who by the way totally rocks for coaches out there! He knows kids like no other teacher I've seen. Anyway, this amazing soccer coach and I were talking about education reform and how desperately we (as a country) need to make some serious changes. I think it's really ridiculous how we over-use the word "alternative" when it comes to education. Alternative to what???? Alternative as an escape, a loophole, a "back up" plan, a surrogate, a replacement, a substitute to what is considered the norm? Obviously we need an alternative because what we have now is not working. Why should I have to look for a school that labels itself "alternative"? My son's coach said, "What about just calling it LOGICAL education?"
After reading "Mind the Gap", I felt completely validated about my own childhood feelings going through school. All thirteen years. I went to a private Catholic elementary and middle school. We are not Catholic. My mother sent me there so that I could have a better education. Even she got caught in the rat race. So, for all those years I grew up having to pretend we were just as good as those Catholics so that I would be allowed to sit in their church during masses. I had to learn religious stories that didn't pertain to us as a family or as a culture, just so I could have a better education. I remember in the second grade Julie Parker said to me, "You're going to go to hell because you don't believe in God." I replied to her, "Well your god is stupid then if that's what you believe." College was really just about getting out as fast as I could- my train could not have been fast enough. Who cares what I learned, who cares how I learned it, and who cares how I regurgitated it back to the teacher.
I want to have children who LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE learning. I want to have children who learn because they are inspired and passionate about what they see in front of them. I rode the "train" my whole life, and now I'm ready for a different experience. I was usually on the front of the train, but always wishing I was on the back because I wanted to "dilly-dally". I wanted to take my time. I was interested in things that teachers didn't even have knowledge on because it wasn't part of the curriculum.
I remember in the 8th grade during "silent reading" time I had questions about the meanings of words in a fairly advanced book. (She was a former English high school teacher and her reading list was representative of high school level reading despite the fact that we were in 8th grade.) Anyway, I went to her desk while she was busy trying to grade her stack of papers. Clearly, "silent reading" time meant "Leave me alone so I can get some work done." I went to her desk not once, not twice, but three times to ask her about three different words and to please explain it to me in the context of the different sentences. After the third time, she just glared at me and said that I needed to move on, and not ask questions every time I don't understand a word. She told me that I don't need to understand every single word all the time. Thank you, Ms. Leon. My lesson for that day was don't bother the teacher during "silent reading" time and when there is something that I don't understand I should just move on and pretend like I understand. Also, what about the underlying lesson of it doesn't really matter what I understand as long as I can fake it. Also, what about the other lesson no child should have to learn: Don't bother asking, no one really wants to help you anyway. To her, I have to say, many years later, "Why in the world are you giving 8th graders a reading list more appropriate for 10th graders and then not helping us with it when we seek help??????"
And Ms. Leon was one of my better teachers too.
We are a bike-riding family. Well, not really a bike-riding family because my sense of coordination is a bit out of whack so I crash pretty easily on real bikes. But in the vain of this article, we are a true bike-riding family. And it starts from when my boys are infants. Even now as my not-quite-two-year-old wants to buckle the big buckle on his car seat. Does it take him forever to buckle? Yes! Does he do it incorrectly half the time? Yes! Is it boiling in the car and I want nothing more than to turn on the air conditioner so that my other child doesn't melt? Yes! But is it soooooooo important for him to fasten this buckle all by himself? YES!!!!! And what's amazing is the amount of patience my older son has for his baby brother while he learns things. Around here, everybody gets to learn their own pace. That's what it's like in my house. We stop when something interests us. We change plans often and at the last minute because something else caught our eye. We drive all over town to have that amazing experience to milk a cow, hear some Taiko drumming, see an Alvin Ailey concert, learn about Jazz, sit on my lap to watch in detail how my teeth are cleaned at the dentist's office, sit and listen to the LA Philharmonic play Mozart, and then come home to see how much their pumpkins have grown in their gardens. And we do most of that in one week.
There is not one "train" in any country in this world that can guide my children better than I. I like to think I know what they like and with that I gently guide them towards those areas. And I am sure these areas are not on any curriculum for any school we can afford. When I'm wrong in some areas then they tell me so, without fear of being told they are wrong. Who am I to say what they must like and don't like? And for that matter, who am I to say what they must learn about and when they have to learn it? And why should they have to try something for a whole month before really knowing they don't like it? I just listen to them and let them guide themselves to find their own interests. And just like with food, something they may love and be obsessed with for a whole year can quickly change into something they are completely sick of. My son ate avocado almost every single day for about a year, getting as much of it as he could, filling his tummy to his content. Now, he barely eats it. He's ready to move on. The beauty of our learning environment is that it can often times work in the other direction. Something that they don't want anything to do with all of a sudden is what they are crazy head-over-heels about. And I don't tell them we don't have time to learn about what interests them. We will always have time to learn because we are learning every single time they breathe in. And they spout off everything they learned to their daddy every single time they breathe out. They learn while they live, eat, and breathe and this is what it should be. Not learning limited to the hours of 7:30am - 2:35pm.
I love this connection that I have with their little growing minds. I love that they trust themselves so completely to dive into areas they don't understand without fear of being told they're too young, too old, or something is too complex for them. Sometimes, as homeschoolers, you have to have a name for your "school" so you can apply to do some things that regular schools get to do, like see shows, go on field trips, etc. The name I came up with is the School of Curious Adventures and Risk Taking. Doesn't that sound so much more fun then Jefferson Elementary?
Am I ashamed that my 4.5 year old can't write, or read, eat like a normal person with a fork, or tie his shoes yet? Not at all. He knows all kinds of other things that other 4.5 year olds don't know. Does that make him better? Not at all. It just makes him unique.
There was a great cartoon illustrating the difference between regular schooled kids and homeschooled kids that I saw a few years ago. The illustration of the "class" who were in regular school was a can of sardines, half opened. Some of the fish were struggling to squeeze out the sides, but most of the sardines had no choice but to just stay squished together. All the sardines looked exactly alike and very unhappy. The illustration of the homeschool group was of life underwater where there were several different types of fish, shellfish, sharks, seals, sea anemone, a whale, and beautiful coral, etc. This is the diverse environment that I wish my children to grow into.
My sister was visiting last spring and looking through a book called "Big Book of Why" with my older son. They stumbled across the word "bioluminesensce" and had a nice long conversation about it. He really likes sea creatures so the word really stuck with him long after she left. Since then we have gone on to explore that word, and that world for that matter. Our bathroom is slowly starting to look like an underwater scene as we draw and cut out sea creatures and paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint. Then we have fun being silly sitting in our dark bathroom and imagine we are in the midnight zone of the ocean.
Yes, he knows what the midnight zone is and one days hopes to visit as a deep sea diver. I love our family bike rides.
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