NEA Hates Homeschooling

I wonder how they like Unschooling! I was alerted to this excerpt from a recent convention.

The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs
based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive
education experience.

When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state
curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to
ensure adequate academic progress.

Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate
family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians.

Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate
state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state
department of education should be used.

The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not
participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools.

The Association further believes that local public school systems
should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned
toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting
from a home school setting.

Wow. Quite a statement. Or a set of statements. I’ll sort of move line by line through the words they use.

1. Isn’t one of the signs of a “good school” one where the student-teacher ratio is low? Well for us, our ratio is 2:1 right now, soon to be 3:1, but not likely to reach 20:1. I may not have the child psychology background a general teacher gets, but I do have a college degree and I know how to guide my children so that they can learn for themselves.
2. Taking tests is fundamentally against our purpose as unschooling homeschoolers. Tests don’t prove anything except a person knows how to take a test. I got great grades in school, and don’t remember anything I haven’t used.
3. So we must bear all expenses of homeschooling, even though half our local taxes go to schools, which we don’t even use. Great.
4. Again, the licensing and curriculum are totally irrelevant. We are teaching our children how to learn, not teaching them specific information. This is clearly the union trying to maintain control over their domain.
5. Now why should the teachers care if homeschool kids participate in public school activities? Do they prohibit private school kids from participating? And even with our kids young ages, it seems that school makes kids mean, and I don’t necessarily want my kids participating in those events. However, should they choose to be involved, they should be allowed to do so. We pay our taxes like anyone else, yet do not use the majority of the school services. We should at least be allowed to do drama club or sports or whatever other activities they’re talking about if we want.
6. Hey, I found a point I agree with. Sure, if we were to send our children back to school for some reason, it is reasonable to allow them to run their diagnoses and put our children in whatever grade they feel is best. We’d be handing back responsibility for the majority of raising our children back to them.

Just the whole premise of this statement from the NEA is kind of silly. I guess it is what we should expect. It’s not like they’d say “yeah, keep your kids home, we don’t want ‘em here anyway!” But they could have just said nothing. I’ve probably written this here before, and I’ll say it again. If you want your children to grow up to work for a good company, send them to school. If you want them to create a good company, homeschool them. School creates worker bees. Homeschool, and in particular unschool fosters an enduring love of learning.

My Daughter is a Math Wizard

So my daughter just turned four two weeks ago. We let her choose her own learning. When she wants to learn about letters, we encourage her and let her go as far as she wants that day. When she wants to learn about numbers, same thing. Same thing for every "subject".

She is really into letters, writing and reading individual letters frequently. That's cool. She gets excited about it, and watches shows like "SuperWhy" and is really into it (even though my wife and I hate that show, since the characters have absolutely no facial expressions, especially the fairy princess character).

The funny thing is that she is somehow secretly into numbers. A few weeks ago, she suddenly asked us "two and two is four, right?", "three and three is six, right?", all the way up to like "nine and nine is what?". We never told her that, never even really taught her there was such a thing as addition as far as I can remember. But when she asked us that first 2+2=4, we were like "uh, yeah, you're right!" And we answered her questions about the higher numbers, and didn't push her to be like "and 20 + 20 is 40". We let it go as far as she wanted to take it, which was still a few sums beyond numbers she really understands.

Then today, she was making muffins with my wife, and suddenly asked my wife "what's three fours?". Our muffin pan, like most, holds twelve muffins, in three rows of four (or vice versa if you like). She was doing multiplication! My wife called me while I was working to tell me about it, and it is quite remarkable. I was on accelerated math in elementary school, number one or two in the class, going to the next grade up for math class, and I remember doing multiplication in like third or fourth grade. Or was that fractions? But anyway, definitely not in kindergarten, which would be one grade level up for her right now. In kindergarten, I remember things like Mr. M Munchy Mouth - the letter people. She would be totally bored with that after like ten seconds right now in her life.

I think this is a perfect example of how schools work. They have to teach to the lowest common denominator (not to overdo the math thing), or at least to the median (OK I will stop I promise) level of the class. In some cases, even working at a grade ahead, this is way too slow. This to me supports our decision to let our children learn what they want when they want when it comes to traditional school subjects.

On a side note, our almost-two-year-old son is really into counting and letters thanks to our older daughter's interest in it. He shouts letters at SuperWhy and "writes letters" - albeit far less accurately or proficiently than the older one. Even if he thinks every number is "one" or every letter is "eight", he really gets a kick out of it. After all, that's what it's all about - getting a kick out of life, at every age.

"School is not a happy place"

To quote the great Dave Barry, "I am not making this up."

I heard a 14-year old kid from Texas say this on the radio herself. The context was a story on NPR about school shootings, and basically asking "why?" The girl said that basically unless you are among the top 10% "cool" people, school is not a happy place.

Well, yeah - duh! That was my experience. As an outsider that never could figure out how to be a part of the cool kids, school was not a very fun or happy place. Add on to the popular issue the fact that you have to go to a different class every 40 minutes or so, and have to do stupid homework that you don't care about, and have to get good grades so you can get into a good college and get a good job, and school is not a fun place. And it turns out I didn't even want their "good job".

Fun was skipping first period to just go get breakfast or do nothing. Fun was getting out at noon because you crafted your schedule so that you had no afternoon classes. Fun was hanging out in the graphics and photography area of the building, where everyone was just hanging out doing graphics and photography.

Not Fun was wondering why Justin and Matt were laughing, seemingly at you. Not Fun was having to read Shakespeare or Wuthering Heights (although I now might read Shakespeare) and take tests on it. Not Fun was carrying a ton of heavy books all the time.

Now I am not in the homeschool department to protect my kids from the possibility that they may not be popular in school. My wife was socially successful in school, and I'm pretty sure my kids already have the social savvy to be able to make it very well in large groups of people (e.g. at school). For me, it is more the forced learning angle that I am against, and the strict scheduling and intense pressure and testing (even though I was awesome at taking tests). These are all the things that make school an unhappy place.

Colin Farrell

Well last time I thought about Colin Farrell, I pictured him drunk snorting a line of coke at a bar, then punching a guy in the face. Not that I didn't think that he was cool and tough, but maybe not quite what I was. Now my perspective on him has changed. He has a 4-year old son with Angelman Syndrome, which apparently is a developmental disorder with symptoms such as the kid just learned how to walk. Colin is clearly very proud and dedicated, and this quote stood out to me:

Farrell, who has reportedly introduced James to his current girlfriend, Dublin college student Muireann McDonnell, believes his job is to help his son achieve his "individual potential" and be "as happy as he can be." (full article here)

Helping our children reach their individual potential and be as happy as they can be should be all of our mission. It should not be reserved for children with special needs, nor for rich celebrities. As a parent, this is perhaps our one job - to maximize the enjoyment our children get out of life and enforce their ability to set and meet goals that are right for them. Whether that is to be President of the US, win a Nobel prize, or just be able to cook a meal for themselves.

Unschooling Intro

For those of you that don't know, unschooling is a branch of homeschooling where the learning is student-driven. So rather than putting kids through cirriculum and testing and things, forcing them to learn what I want them to when I want them to, I am letting my kids tell me what they want to learn about and when. Whatever it may be, and only when they are interested in working on it. The underlying theory is that you learn much better when you are engaged. The goal is to create people who love to learn, and seek out the knowledge that they need to conquer daily issues in their lives. This translates to a self-motivated person in the workforce, who know what they want and how to make it happen. Join me as I talk about homeschooling and specifically unschooling news, techniques, and stories (and whatever else I think of).