Homeschooling or Homefooling Q1: Teacher Qualification February 16, 2008

(Editor’s note: This is one of a series of questions about homeschooling that will all be posted with answers. Eventually.) 

Question 1. The Education/Ability of the Parent/Teacher. In my state, home schooling parents don’t need a teaching degree or even a bachelor’s degree. I believe some states do require this. A person with a bachelor’s degree is not necessarily smarter than a person without one, but there should be some kind of teacher’s training especially for children with special needs. School teachers have to have degrees so that they know how and what to teach, and no matter how great the parent is, parenthood doesn’t automatically make great teachers.

Parental education – or lack thereof – has absolutely no effect on one’s ability to teach one’s own children. The anecdotal evidence for parents successfully teaching their children at home is overwhelming. After all, when Stanford University admits more homeschooled than high schooled teens (relative to number of applicants), you’ve got to figure that those parents are doing something right. Desire to learn and love of learning have a far more profound effect than a teaching credential; and those who choose to educate their children at home have this in abundance. The other thing parents have in overflowing abundance is a desire to give their children the best and a knowledge of their own children’s abilities and interests. (Yes, we all know parents who do not desire to give their children the best, but let’s face it: if you want to bring your children home and spend all day, every day, with them, you are a parent who enjoys your children and wants to give them good things.)

Besides, every teacher and school administrator knows that the biggest predictor of a child’s academic success is the level of parental involvement. And what is homeschooling but total parental involvement! The truth is, if you’re clever enough to be online finding and reading things you want to find and read, you’re clever enough to be your child’s teacher. (And here you are, reading this!)

Completely apart from parental qualification, we place far too much credence in teaching credentials. Granted that the majority of teachers are people who care deeply about children and their education; but there are also more than you might suspect who are there simply because they couldn’t decide on a major, and teaching is easy with summers off; or who couldn’t qualify for a more difficult major (sad to say, in any given university the college of education is generally one of the easiest to get into, and has the fewest requirements [see *comment]); or who thought they wanted to teach and discovered too late, after receiving their degree, that they don’t really enjoy working day after day with someone else’s children, but lack time or money to prepare for a different vocation. So, simply having teaching credentials is a far cry from a guarantee of being a good educator.

As the holder of a bachelor’s degree in elementary education myself, I can assure you, dear readers, I was in classes with all of the above students, none of whom I would want teaching any of my children anything. I can also unequivocally inform you that teacher training does not consist of “what to teach” as the questioner assumes. Since the teacher trainee is in college, the teacher trainee is assumed (baselessly, I must regretfully inform you) to have the basic content knowledge needed to pass on to the students. Without naming names, I would like to state here that it was the extreme dearth of knowledge displayed among my fellow teacher trainees (the inability of many to write a grammatical sentence comes to mind) that first sent me scurrying to the library to discover John Holt, a fellow educator who is often named the father of the homeschooling movement.

No, the truth is that teacher trainees are taught classroom discipline, and crowd management, and record-keeping, and tricks for capturing the attention of thirty bored pupils, and a little (a very little) about child development and learning styles, but zero content. Now, learning about child development and learning styles has some merit, but most of it is common sense, and it is amazingly easy to find anything more you wish to know on your own in any number of accessible books on the subject.

In fact, it was my class on child development that sent me scurrying back to the library to find Raymond and Dorothy Moore, also fellow educators who are frequently termed the grandparents of homeschooling. I was feeling a serious disconnect when I would leave my child development class, where I learned that children develop at different rates (what a shock!) and are cognitively ready to learn skills such as math or reading at different ages, and proceed directly to my elementary language arts class, where I was taught how to start all of my first-grade children on the same material regardless of their ability or development levels.

What happens to a child who is unready to read at age six, but forced to try? The sad result is that by age nine or ten, when his brain has matured to a point of readiness, his educational experience thus far will have convinced him that that he cannot read and wouldn’t enjoy it even if he could; his teachers and parents are convinced also; and he very likely has a mental block about reading and may never read beyond a second-grade level. And yet this is unfortunately what trained teachers are required to do by the nature of their institutional employment: pressure all children to perform at the same level at the same age, and label them as defective if they cannot.

Now, explain to me why any caring parent would want to have such training?

keeping up with the bob joneses January 18, 2008

Many homeschoolers, often newbies but sadly often not, panic if their child is not exactly on the school’s schedule, is “behind.” Let’s leave the question of just what “behind” really means for another day and assume for the sake of argument that every child really does need exactly 12 years of schooling before starting college or adult life, and address the question on the face of it.

What if your child really is behind? What if you have a 2nd grade child who is exactly one year behind, but doing okay, or one year behind, but really struggling? Again assuming, for the sake of argument, that every child really needs exactly 12 years of schooling, if you teach your 2nd grader at a 1st grade level, or even [pause here for your horrified gasp] give her a year off and then start teaching your 3rd grader at a 1st grade level, well …

… SO WHAT?

Yes, really. So what? If every child needs exactly 12 years of schooling, then all that means is, your child will graduate at age 19 instead of 18. Or maybe 20 instead of 18. What is so awful about that? My goodness, just think of all the kids in college who take far longer than four years to complete their degrees, finishing college at 26, 28, or later. Does that hurt them? (Let’s not even begin to talk about others, like the VP, who finished their doctoral degrees well into their 40s, with four children in tow!)

Well then why would it hurt your child to start college a year or two later? She’ll still be finishing college when about half of the rest of them on the “6 year degree plan” are finishing. So what would it hurt? Especially if, by relaxing a bit, you can help your child to be not only knowledgable in “book learning” but in life learning, if she can learn that she is important first as a person and not as a grade in someone’s gradebook.

If your child is struggling with some elementary school concept, try relaxing. Try remembering that you are teaching a child, not a curriculum. Try remembering that raising her to be a caring, compassionate individual who has a strong sense of her own self-worth is more important than the number of answers she got right on a quiz. Try remembering that teaching her that you care about her more than her grades will give her the best start in life, and is the best way to motivate her to get good grades. Try remembering that, even if her “exactly 12 years of schooling” starts a year late, or even two years late, all that means is, you get the blessing of another year of her company before she starts her adult life.

It is not worth destroying her vision of herself as a strong and capable person who enjoys learning, just to keep up with the Bob Joneses.

And later, we’ll talk about those “exactly 12 years of schooling,” okay?

Pecans = Math January 14, 2008

About seven years ago … 

“Look, Mom, I broke my pecan in half.”

“Mmm-hmmm. Does it taste better that way?”

“Now I broke both halves in half. Now I eat them!”

“Wow! Do you know that when you break a half in half, it’s called a fourth?”

“A fourth?”

“Yeah, look. I’ll break this pecan in half, and then both halves in half. How many pieces do I have?”

“One, two, three, four.”

“Right, four. So each piece is one-fourth. Get it?”

Without responding, she eats the pecan. Okay, maybe it’s a little over her head; she only just turned five. We eat a few more pecans, then …

“Look, mom! This pecan is in thirds!”

Sure enough, there in her hand is one pecan in three pieces.

So does my daughter, at five years and three months of age, understand fractions? No. But is she gaining a good basic understanding of real world math? Yes.

Will she remember this tomorrow? Unlikely. But has she gained a concrete experience of fractions that she can build on when fractions show up again in her young life? Absolutely.

Did I set out to teach her fractions? No. Did I use a concrete opportunity to help her put a name to something she is beginning to understand intuitively? Yes.

Will I run out and find some fraction worksheets to help her build on her knowledge? Not on your life. Will I keep an eye out for more concrete, real-world experiences that I can use to help her expand her own world? You bet.

Not bad for a Christmas Eve morning, sitting in your mom’s lap eating pecans, and wearing your dad’s sweatpants as a shawl.

that time of the quadrennium January 11, 2008

It’s that time of the quadrennium when politics can’t be avoided, try as we may. If your kids are curious you might like to check out the online Time for Kids, a junior version of Time Magazine. There’s no chat feature or any sort of message board, so they can surf safely. National and international news, as well as entertainment news, is reported on a tweenage-ish level. Some topics may be disturbing for younger kids, as they do discuss what is happening in the news though graphic details are left out, so be warned.

More free civics lessons are available at the New York Times, as well as American history, current events, economics, geography, math, science and other topics from the Times. These are actual lesson plans, using the NY Times to explore the topics.