GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING #78, Vol. 13, No. 6.  Date of Issue: December 1, 1990.

Some people accuse homeschoolers of sheltering their children and allowing them access only to the views and opinions of their parents.  These critics say that homeschoolers will never get a chance to hear about differing opinions, much less form some of their own.

Of course, this could be true.   Like so many of the criticisms of homeschooling, it would have some validity if homeschooling meant keeping kids in the house all day, noses in their workbooks, unaware of the outside world.  But any kind of closer look at what homeschooling really involves shows how inaccurate this picture is.

When we asked several homeschooled children and teenagers to tell us what they thought of this criticism, and to defend themselves against it by describing how they get to hear about and form opinions that differ from their parents, what was most consistent in their replies was their indignation at the question.  It makes me angry, writes Amber Clifford, Òwhen people who actually know nothing about homeschooling assume that I rely only on what my parents tell me.  The truth is that I am more aware of different opinions now than I ever was in public school. Jeremiah Gingold echoed that feeling when he wrote, I think that the question itself . . . is totally absurd.

Whenever we want to address criticisms of homeschooling, I always enjoy going straight to the young people themselves for answers, because their responses do such a good job of laying the concerns to rest.  If parents were writing about how they made sure their children knew about other opinions, it would be less persuasive than hearing the confirmation from the young people themselves, although it would also be good to hear.  It seems to me that there is nothing as strong as the kids speaking to the issue directly and clearly.  Their surprise at the question because it seems so obvious to them that they hear all sorts of opinions - and the many examples they offer, go farther than any parent’s defense could go.

Reading these letters, I was struck by how much a part of life other people’s opinions really are.  The things the kids described - reading newspapers and magazines, hearing relatives or friends of the family discuss current issues, meeting other people through groups and community activities - are so much a part of ordinary life that it’s not as if homeschoolers have to go to great lengths to set up situations in which they will hear a variety of opinions.  Of course, some kids do make a specific point of seeking out this information, but again, what struck me was how integral to regular daily life in a community most of their examples were.  It shows how limited is the notion that without school, young people will be deprived of a variety of views.  It would be more accurate to say that without a community of other people, and perhaps without access to books, magazines, and newspapers, such deprivation could result.  Or, perhaps even more central, without the sense of oneself as a person capable of having opinions and thinking independently.  This, more than anything else, is what these young people tell us they have.  It’s interesting to think about how they managed to get it.
– Susannah Sheffer

Office News & Announcements

[SS:] We welcome Katherine Doolittle to our shipping department.  Katherine’s family are the creators of the Hitmaster, the gadget that helps children practice baseball hitting (available through our catalog).
By now many of you have probably seen the article about homeschooling in the November issue of Harper’s.  I hope some of you who saw it and liked it wrote to say so.  Time magazine also published a shorter and less comprehensive article in its 10/22/90 issue and ran letters from Pat Farenga and GWS reader Jan Hunt in the 11/12 issue.

As you can see by the photo, New York City Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, whose speech we quoted from in GWS #76, visited our office when he was in the area (speaking to a group of homeschoolers, among other things).  Gatto is very supportive of homeschooling and of bringing children into the workplace.

Child’s Work, by Nancy Wallace, and A Life Worth Living, the book of John Holt’s letters, are off to great starts, and we thank those of you who have already helped us publicize these books by asking your local bookstores to carry them or by offering to review them for local newspapers or magazines.  We hope other readers will follow this example.

Michigan reader Teri Jill Mullen writes, .Your last issue of GWS [#77] inspired me to help someone.  It had an interview with a homeschooler who gained access to a biology lab.  I am acquainted with a homeschooler who is interested in chemistry, and I have a good friend who is a chemist.  I asked my friend if she would allow an 11-year-old boy to just hang around while she worked.  She asked her boss, who was once a college professor.  He was very interested  and now this 11-year-old homeschooler has access not only to a chemistry lab, but to a very educated, friendly chemist.  Certainly a boy his age in school would not find time for just hanging around and watching someone work.

We love hearing these stories, and hope that Teri’s example will inspire others of you to think about connections that you can help set up between adults and children.  You don’t need to find an apprenticeship program; just think about people you know and the work they do.

Whenever we receive a donation, we put the money into a gift subscription fund which allows us to offer GWS subscriptions to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.  This fund is getting low, though, so we ask you to consider helping us make these gift subscriptions available.  Even adding on an extra $5 or $10 when you place a book order or renew your subscription will help.  Thanks very much.

We are beginning to collect material for two booklets that we are considering bringing out during 1991.  For one, we are interested in writing by homeschooling children about their siblings.  We know that homeschooling siblings are often closer than we traditionally expect siblings to be, and that they spend a lot of time together and so get to learn from each other and watch each other grow.  WeÕd like to hear stories about this from the kids themselves.

For the other booklet, we are looking for stories about ways that children have earned their own money, and their thoughts about earning money and the opportunities (or lack thereof) that young people have in this regard.  We’re especially interested in stories from children under 13, because we’re thinking of offering this booklet as a companion to the Teenage Entrepreneur’s Guide  that we already sell.

We’re just in the very early stages of considering whether these projects are feasible, so even if you don’t have time to write us something right away, drop us a note and let us know if you think you will want to write something (or be interviewed) later on.  This will help us gauge how much interest and potential material is out there.

In Memoriam: James Herndon

We only recently learned the sad news that James Herndon died this past January.  Herndon was the author of The Way It Spozed to Be  and How to Survive in Your Native Land, and like John Holt, he had the ability to see through to what was really going on in the classroom.  Here is a passage from How to Survive in Your Native Land that shows this well.  Herndon and another teacher had devised a special class, called Creative Arts, for junior high school students.  They planned to fill the class with all sorts of creative projects, and to eliminate the restrictions of grades and compulsory attendance, issuing Permanent Hall Passes so that anyone could leave the class at any time.  To their dismay, the kids weren’t interested in doing the creative projects that students in their regular classes in previous years had apparently enjoyed.  All these kids seemed to want to do was use their Hall Passes to wander in and out of the classroom:

[A]s a lesson plan, there is nothing I can recommend quite so highly as a Permanent Hall Pass.  After a while, Frank and I, on the edge of complete despair, began to figure out what was wrong with the ideas that had worked so well in our regular classes.  It was very simple.  Why did the kids in regular classes like to do all that inventive stuff?  Why, only because it was better than the regular stuff.  If you wrote a fake journal pretending to be Tutankhamen’s favorite embalmer, it was better than reading the dull Text, answering Questions on ditto sheets, Discussing, making Reports, or taking Tests.  Sure it was better - not only that but you knew the teacher liked it better for some insane reason which you didn’t have to understand and you would get better grades for it than you were used to getting in social studies or English.  But that only applied to a regular class where it was clear you had to (1) stay there all period and (2) you had to be doing something or you might get an F.  Take away those two items, as Frank and I had done, and you get a brief vision of the truth.

And later:

A famous rat psychologist has been trying for some years to conduct experiments which would show him how to raise the IQ of rats.  One might wonder why he wanted to do that, considering that them rats would still be functional retardates no matter how smart they got.  Nevertheless he persevered and set up lab situation after lab situation and educational environment after educational environment and the rats never seemed to get any smarter.  Finally, and quite recently, he issued the statement that the only thing he could discover in ten years which made rats any smarter was to allow them to roam at random in a spacious and variegated environment.

News & Reports

News from Spain

A year ago, in GWS #72, Elsa Haas wrote about homeschooling in Spain.  Elsa publishes the Spanish-language version of GWS (see .Organizations Outside U.S. at the back of this issue).  Recently she wrote again:

I’ve sold somewhere around 700 or 800 copies [of the first edition of Aprender Sin Escuela], mostly at alternative fairs (which include things like natural food, recycling, handicrafts, etc.)  At a fair in Alicante I was invited, along with Waldorf school people and others, to participate in a roundtable discussion on .education based on respect (respect for children, it was understood).  At a fair in Castellon, I gave a three-day workshop on deschooling, and they even paid me for it.  Twelve-fifteen people came each day.  One day, I hardly had to speak because a woman who had homeschooled two of her children showed up and told me and the others about her experiences.

I’ve also sold a fair number of copies through the bulletin of the Asociation Antipatriarchal, an organization in favor of the rights of minors.  I enclose a copy of the most recent article I’ve written for the bulletin, in which I criticized a proposed reform of the education system which would, among other things, raise the compulsory schooling age limit from 14 to 16 (I still maintain that the law really is not very clear about whether it’s schooling, specifically, or simply education, that’s compulsory).

The total of known homeschooling families in Spain with children of school age: five.  Another family has two children who are slightly over 14 but who only went to school very briefly many years ago.  None of these families has had legal problems.  I’ve head about several other families, but haven’t gotten in touch with them directly or confirmed that they really are homeschooling.

One of the fathers told me that his family has good relations with the teachers in the area, but that when he tried to get a certain school official to allow his daughters access to an exam so they can get a diploma of some kind, the official told him not to make trouble.  He said that he was willing to look the other way about the fact that the girls aren’t in school, but not if he gets any publicity about it or has to put anything in writing.

The parents in the homeschooling families I know of make their livings through ceramics, psychoanalysis, translations, teaching in language schools, and working as an emergency-vehicle dispatcher, among other things.  One of the parents is from Austria and another is from Ireland.  One family lives in a middle-sized city, one in a small city, three in towns, and one in the country.  In all of this, IÕm not including the families, mostly squatters living in abandoned villages in the mountains, who are so isolated that the government just sends a teacher a few times a year to give the kids exams.  These people are not necessarily homeschoolers by choice, and some are looking for other families with children so they can get together a group of eight, apparently the minimum needed for the government to open a school.

One of the homeschooling mothers told me that a priest came to her house years ago to ask whether her kids were out of school for lack of money.  When she said that their homeschooling was by choice, he went away.

The fact that there isn’t much persecution of homeschoolers here may make them less motivated to get organized.  Also, since the law doesn’t specifically permit alternatives to school, the families who homeschool have to go out on a limb, and so tend to be independent types who may not feel much need for a newsletter.  The fact that most religious people in Spain are Catholic and there are plenty of Catholic schools means that people who decide on homeschooling do so for secular reasons.

GETTING PERMISSION TO JOIN SCHOOL TEAMS

From Gretchen Spicer of Wisconsin

Our daughter Jessie has been taking gymnastics since she was 5.  In our community they have a young children’s gymnastics club that feeds into the high school gymnastics team, so that when kids reach high school age there is no longer a private club available - all that’s available is the school team.

Jessie faced this situation two years ago, and had to decide what to do.  We thought of driving her to lessons in Madison, but it would have been much more expensive.  We’re a low-income family and Jessie had always paid for her own gymnastics lessons by babysitting, but if she went to Madison the cost would go from $20 a month to $18 a week.

We called the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and asked them if there were any possibility of a homeschooler competing on the high school team.  They were very short and unpleasant with us.  At the end I thought that perhaps they just didn’t understand homeschooling, so I asked them if they had ever gotten a call about this before, and they said they get about ten calls a week.  It was clear that they just didn’t want to deal with homeschoolers.  At the time I didn’t know of any other homeschoolers who had been able to play on a school team in Wisconsin.

Jessie finally decided to go to school full-time for ninth grade, solely so she could be on the gymnastics team.  They wanted her on the team, so there was no problem with getting her enrolled in the school - they rolled out the red carpet for us.  She did quite well that year, both academically and socially.  But when it came time to go back this year, she began to be reluctant.  This surprised us, because all summer long we had thought that she would go back for tenth grade, but about a week before school started she told us about the doubts she’d been having.

She said she had thought she could just go to school for gymnastics and be detached from everything else, but she found that that was impossible.  She knew intellectually that it was stupid to care about things like tests and grades, but she found that she ended up worrying about them anyway.  She also said she felt that she was no longer part of our family, and we had felt that too.  We were always enthusiastic about her gymnastics, but we found that we distanced ourselves from her schooling because, for example, we couldn’t get all excited about her good grades because that to us would imply that we should get upset about bad grades, and we simply didn’t believe in that.  We didn’t want to be critical of her schooling, but without meaning to we became alienated from her.

Her third reason for not wanting to go back was that she’s very involved in professional classical theater, ballet, and music, and she wasn’t having time for those things.  During the school year she had to drop piano lessons, and she was only able to go to ballet once a week instead of two or three.

The night before school was to start this year, she decided not to go.  Within one week she got a call from the gymnastics coach, pressuring her to go back.  This was very upsetting to her.  We set up a meeting with him, with all of us present.  She felt that he hadn’t expected her parents to be there, and that if she had gone in alone he would have tried to intimidate her, but with all of us there he became willing to look at other alternatives, especially when it became clear that she wouldn’t go back.  Also, the assistant coach was extremely favorable to homeschooling, and kept saying, .Now, why can’t she just be on the team?

We started meeting with the superintendent, looking into all the possibilities.  One idea was to have her be a home-bound student in the district, but WIAA wouldn’t go for that.  They said that in order to be on the team she’d have to be in physical attendance at the school twenty hours a week.  They do make exceptions for kids enrolled in technical school, but they wouldn’t give us the same status.

Then we submitted our homeschool plan to WIAA.  Each year the children and I discuss our goals and write them down, so that’s what we gave.  After they saw it they were willing to consider us a school, to consider that our methods of evaluation would meet their requirements.  Another problem had been that you have to have a certain Grade Point Average to participate in team sports, and they didn’t know how that could apply to us, but finally they said they would consider us as having a program that could meet their requirements.

They finally made an offer which we have accepted: they are willing to consider her a transfer student.  She can transfer to the school one week before the first meet, take twenty hours of electives, and thereby be there for the time needed to be allowed to play on the team.  She doesn’t have to take any core subjects, and she can arrange it any way she wants - three full days a week, or four hours a day, five hours a week.  SheÕll continue this through the gymnastics season and then leave, and for now, she can go to practices without going to school at all.

At first we were angry about this.  It seemed ridiculous for her to have to spend all that time there doing things that have nothing to do with being on the gymnastics team.  But she feels OK about it for now, because it’s better than going full-time, and sheÕll take some things she wants, like an art class and driver’s ed, and she can take study halls.  We’re not finished fighting this, but for the time being we can live with this compromise.

SPEAKING TO GROUPS ABOUT HOMESCHOOLING

Tom Berry of Illinois writes:

This letter is prompted by a recent panel discussion that I chaired at our church.  This is the third time that I have participated in a panel discussion whose topic was homeschooling.  The first one was at our local public library.  It was a warm-up exercise because although the discussion was open to the public, the bulk of our audience was made up of other actual and prospective homeschoolers.  The second discussion that I participated in was at a La Leche League area conference.  This was a rewarding discussion.  Each panel member spoke about an aspect of homeschooling that was important to him or her.  The question-and-answer portion was the most rewarding because of the interest in homeschooling that the questions implied.  (As an aside, a woman who had attended this discussion sought out my wife at this year’s LLL conference to tell her that our panel discussion had given her the confidence to start homeschooling.)

At his most recent discussion, at one of the Sunday morning Adult Forums at our Unitarian church, my wife and I assembled a panel of three Moms who attend our church and homeschool their children, and myself.  I knew we would be facing a sophisticated audience that would be made up of many teachers and administrators in our local school systems.  All of us prepared well.

I started things off by spending about eight minutes offering some general demographic and statistical information and discussing some of the ideas and philosophies of John Holt.  I concluded my introduction by reading excerpts from John Taylor Gatto’s New York City Teacher of the Year acceptance speech.  The other panel members followed up by discussing their personal perspectives and experiences.  We then opened the remaining half hour to questions.

The results that I observed from this discussion were very gratifying.  As we moved into the question-and-answer session, the mood of our audience ranged from relatively positive on the part of one woman who attended because she is considering homeschooling, to tolerant but neutral which was the stance of the majority of the audience, to mildly negative and agitated as was a school librarian.  By the end, we had found some surprising allies, including a retired schoolteacher who made the observation, .Most families who send their children to school spend lots of time undoing the undesirable behaviors that their children learn at school.  Even the school librarian commented, .The public schools never did anything very great for my daughters… I am confused.

I’m offering this description of my experiences to give others an idea of what they may expect if they elect to go into their communities to discuss the benefits of homeschooling.  I hope the positive experiences I have had will encourage others to initiate and participate in public discussions concerning homeschooling.

TN Registration Deadline Isn’t So Firm After All

Shannon Stoney of Tennessee writes:

In GWS #77, you discussed the homeschooling law in Tennessee and said that parents who missed the August 1 registration deadline had to either enroll their children in school or homeschool illegally.  This is not strictly true.  I know, because I missed the deadline one year (I misunderstood the rule).  The man in charge of homeschooling in our county said that I could still homeschool if I registered as a satellite school of a religious school.  I called the state bureaucrat in charge of homeschooling, and while she was inflexible about the deadline, she did admit that I could be a satellite of a Christian school.   I was able to arrange this with a Christian school, and while the arrangement was not very satisfactory, it did allow us to homeschool that year.

A friend of mine who moved from one county to another also missed the deadline, but as it was partly because her mail didn’t get forwarded, the county overlooked her missing it by a few days.

I’ve also been told by my county’s school bureaucrats that if my child wanted to try school, I could register him for homeschool before August 1, put him in school, and then withdraw him later if school didn’t work out for him.

State News

Connecticut:  The State Board of Education on November 7th unanimously approved new state guidelines for home education, according to Jan Loomis of the CONNECTICUT HOME EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION.  The board doesn’t have the power to issue regulations, but Jan told us that most local superintendents follow the guidelines as though they were regulations.  Under these new guidelines, homeschoolers file an annual notice of intent, and children will be considered truant if their parents have not filed the notice.  The state is required to notify parents who have not filed of the requirement, and the parents then have ten days in which to file.  Under the old guidelines, parents had to submit a curriculum in addition to the notice of intent, so Jan says that homeschoolers consider the new guidelines an improvement in this respect.

The guidelines also say that parents will maintain a portfolio of the child’s work throughout the year, and will meet once a year with the local superintendent (or someone from that office), who will review the portfolio and determine whether education is taking place.  Nothing is specified about what will happen if the superintendent does not think education is taking place.

Idaho:  Reader Liz Cannon-Hubbell writes that her district, Boundary County, introduced and adopted a restrictive homeschooling policy at the start of this school year.  The policy requires parents to submit a written request for exemption from the compulsory attendance law to the board of trustees, which lists, in addition to basic information about the family, the names of the textbooks and materials to be used, the schedule of instruction by hour, day, and week, and the methods .by which achievement will be measured.  Liz wrote, As of yet, we have no idea how they intend to enforce this policy or even how they’ll let individuals know it’s in effect.  One woman on the school board has changed her mind about the supposed benefits of this policy since talking to some of the homeschoolers here.  As she says, none of the board knew anything about homeschooling really, and this idea sounded OK so they passed it.  Now they’re having second thoughts (a few of them anyway).  I don’t know if it’s too late or if maybe theyÕll decide to get some input from homeschoolers.

North Dakota:  Some public school administrators have imposed requirements on homeschoolers that are not actually in the home school law, according to the September/October issue of the NORTH DAKOTA HOME SCHOOL ASSOCIATION newsletter.  For example, the law requires that public school officials monitor home schools for an average of one hour a week, but it doesn’t specify when or where it will be done; the monitor and the parent must negotiate this.  The NDHSA has heard of one monitor arriving at a home unannounced.  The law also requires that homeschoolers sign an affidavit agreeing to be in session for four hours a day, 175 days a year, but does not require  that homeschoolers submit a school calendar to the county superintendent (as private schools do).  The NDHSA reports that .at least one administrator has demanded that a homeschooler submit a school calendar to the public school.

Ohio:  From the November newsletter of the HOME EDUCATION LEAGUE OF PERRYSBURG:  Under the guise of concern that home educated children may not be receiving the highest advantages in education, the Ohio PTA is recommending that the State Board of Education require monitoring to assure that state requirements are being met.  It would include semi-annual home visits by a truant officer over a two-year period.  The proposed resolution was scheduled for a vote at the October PTA convention on October 21-23.

In a letter to Patricia Mitchell, President of the Ohio PTA, Home Education Action Council of Ohio’s Executive Director, Diana Fessler, states:  Since the proposed observation is to determine if state requirements are being met, such observation is a search as defined by the United States Constitution.  The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.  Accordingly, before invading the sanctity of the home, government workers must first satisfy the Court that there is probable cause to believe that a statute or properly enacted regulation is not being met.  Accordingly, Lake County’s resolution urging the State Board to require ‘unannounced semi-annual observationÕ is a recommendation for the Board to take action that is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.

Oregon:  Kim Gordon of the OREGON HOME EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION writes: .In response to fear that Oregon’s State Choice Initiative will pass, the Board of Education is tightening homeschooling regulations.  The new rules will raise the standard for ’satisfactory progressÕ for homeschoolers (tighten testing requirements), shorten time lines, and for homeschoolers with disabilities, expand the school district’s involvement.  Contact OHEA for more information.

GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING #78, Vol. 13, No. 6.  Date of Issue: December 1, 1990.

Some people accuse homeschoolers of sheltering their children and allowing them access only to the views and opinions of their parents.  These critics say that homeschoolers will never get a chance to hear about differing opinions, much less form some of their own.

Of course, this could be true.   Like so many of the criticisms of homeschooling, it would have some validity if homeschooling meant keeping kids in the house all day, noses in their workbooks, unaware of the outside world.  But any kind of closer look at what homeschooling really involves shows how inaccurate this picture is.

When we asked several homeschooled children and teenagers to tell us what they thought of this criticism, and to defend themselves against it by describing how they get to hear about and form opinions that differ from their parents, what was most consistent in their replies was their indignation at the question.  It makes me angry, writes Amber Clifford, Òwhen people who actually know nothing about homeschooling assume that I rely only on what my parents tell me.  The truth is that I am more aware of different opinions now than I ever was in public school. Jeremiah Gingold echoed that feeling when he wrote, I think that the question itself . . . is totally absurd.

Whenever we want to address criticisms of homeschooling, I always enjoy going straight to the young people themselves for answers, because their responses do such a good job of laying the concerns to rest.  If parents were writing about how they made sure their children knew about other opinions, it would be less persuasive than hearing the confirmation from the young people themselves, although it would also be good to hear.  It seems to me that there is nothing as strong as the kids speaking to the issue directly and clearly.  Their surprise at the question because it seems so obvious to them that they hear all sorts of opinions - and the many examples they offer, go farther than any parent’s defense could go.

Reading these letters, I was struck by how much a part of life other people’s opinions really are.  The things the kids described - reading newspapers and magazines, hearing relatives or friends of the family discuss current issues, meeting other people through groups and community activities - are so much a part of ordinary life that it’s not as if homeschoolers have to go to great lengths to set up situations in which they will hear a variety of opinions.  Of course, some kids do make a specific point of seeking out this information, but again, what struck me was how integral to regular daily life in a community most of their examples were.  It shows how limited is the notion that without school, young people will be deprived of a variety of views.  It would be more accurate to say that without a community of other people, and perhaps without access to books, magazines, and newspapers, such deprivation could result.  Or, perhaps even more central, without the sense of oneself as a person capable of having opinions and thinking independently.  This, more than anything else, is what these young people tell us they have.  It’s interesting to think about how they managed to get it.
– Susannah Sheffer

Office News & Announcements

[SS:] We welcome Katherine Doolittle to our shipping department.  Katherine’s family are the creators of the Hitmaster, the gadget that helps children practice baseball hitting (available through our catalog).
By now many of you have probably seen the article about homeschooling in the November issue of Harper’s.  I hope some of you who saw it and liked it wrote to say so.  Time magazine also published a shorter and less comprehensive article in its 10/22/90 issue and ran letters from Pat Farenga and GWS reader Jan Hunt in the 11/12 issue.

As you can see by the photo, New York City Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto, whose speech we quoted from in GWS #76, visited our office when he was in the area (speaking to a group of homeschoolers, among other things).  Gatto is very supportive of homeschooling and of bringing children into the workplace.

Child’s Work, by Nancy Wallace, and A Life Worth Living, the book of John Holt’s letters, are off to great starts, and we thank those of you who have already helped us publicize these books by asking your local bookstores to carry them or by offering to review them for local newspapers or magazines.  We hope other readers will follow this example.

Michigan reader Teri Jill Mullen writes, .Your last issue of GWS [#77] inspired me to help someone.  It had an interview with a homeschooler who gained access to a biology lab.  I am acquainted with a homeschooler who is interested in chemistry, and I have a good friend who is a chemist.  I asked my friend if she would allow an 11-year-old boy to just hang around while she worked.  She asked her boss, who was once a college professor.  He was very interested  and now this 11-year-old homeschooler has access not only to a chemistry lab, but to a very educated, friendly chemist.  Certainly a boy his age in school would not find time for just hanging around and watching someone work.

We love hearing these stories, and hope that Teri’s example will inspire others of you to think about connections that you can help set up between adults and children.  You don’t need to find an apprenticeship program; just think about people you know and the work they do.

Whenever we receive a donation, we put the money into a gift subscription fund which allows us to offer GWS subscriptions to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.  This fund is getting low, though, so we ask you to consider helping us make these gift subscriptions available.  Even adding on an extra $5 or $10 when you place a book order or renew your subscription will help.  Thanks very much.

We are beginning to collect material for two booklets that we are considering bringing out during 1991.  For one, we are interested in writing by homeschooling children about their siblings.  We know that homeschooling siblings are often closer than we traditionally expect siblings to be, and that they spend a lot of time together and so get to learn from each other and watch each other grow.  WeÕd like to hear stories about this from the kids themselves.

For the other booklet, we are looking for stories about ways that children have earned their own money, and their thoughts about earning money and the opportunities (or lack thereof) that young people have in this regard.  We’re especially interested in stories from children under 13, because we’re thinking of offering this booklet as a companion to the Teenage Entrepreneur’s Guide  that we already sell.

We’re just in the very early stages of considering whether these projects are feasible, so even if you don’t have time to write us something right away, drop us a note and let us know if you think you will want to write something (or be interviewed) later on.  This will help us gauge how much interest and potential material is out there.

In Memoriam: James Herndon

We only recently learned the sad news that James Herndon died this past January.  Herndon was the author of The Way It Spozed to Be  and How to Survive in Your Native Land, and like John Holt, he had the ability to see through to what was really going on in the classroom.  Here is a passage from How to Survive in Your Native Land that shows this well.  Herndon and another teacher had devised a special class, called Creative Arts, for junior high school students.  They planned to fill the class with all sorts of creative projects, and to eliminate the restrictions of grades and compulsory attendance, issuing Permanent Hall Passes so that anyone could leave the class at any time.  To their dismay, the kids weren’t interested in doing the creative projects that students in their regular classes in previous years had apparently enjoyed.  All these kids seemed to want to do was use their Hall Passes to wander in and out of the classroom:

[A]s a lesson plan, there is nothing I can recommend quite so highly as a Permanent Hall Pass.  After a while, Frank and I, on the edge of complete despair, began to figure out what was wrong with the ideas that had worked so well in our regular classes.  It was very simple.  Why did the kids in regular classes like to do all that inventive stuff?  Why, only because it was better than the regular stuff.  If you wrote a fake journal pretending to be Tutankhamen’s favorite embalmer, it was better than reading the dull Text, answering Questions on ditto sheets, Discussing, making Reports, or taking Tests.  Sure it was better - not only that but you knew the teacher liked it better for some insane reason which you didn’t have to understand and you would get better grades for it than you were used to getting in social studies or English.  But that only applied to a regular class where it was clear you had to (1) stay there all period and (2) you had to be doing something or you might get an F.  Take away those two items, as Frank and I had done, and you get a brief vision of the truth.

And later:

A famous rat psychologist has been trying for some years to conduct experiments which would show him how to raise the IQ of rats.  One might wonder why he wanted to do that, considering that them rats would still be functional retardates no matter how smart they got.  Nevertheless he persevered and set up lab situation after lab situation and educational environment after educational environment and the rats never seemed to get any smarter.  Finally, and quite recently, he issued the statement that the only thing he could discover in ten years which made rats any smarter was to allow them to roam at random in a spacious and variegated environment.

News & Reports

News from Spain

A year ago, in GWS #72, Elsa Haas wrote about homeschooling in Spain.  Elsa publishes the Spanish-language version of GWS (see .Organizations Outside U.S. at the back of this issue).  Recently she wrote again:

I’ve sold somewhere around 700 or 800 copies [of the first edition of Aprender Sin Escuela], mostly at alternative fairs (which include things like natural food, recycling, handicrafts, etc.)  At a fair in Alicante I was invited, along with Waldorf school people and others, to participate in a roundtable discussion on .education based on respect (respect for children, it was understood).  At a fair in Castellon, I gave a three-day workshop on deschooling, and they even paid me for it.  Twelve-fifteen people came each day.  One day, I hardly had to speak because a woman who had homeschooled two of her children showed up and told me and the others about her experiences.

I’ve also sold a fair number of copies through the bulletin of the Asociation Antipatriarchal, an organization in favor of the rights of minors.  I enclose a copy of the most recent article I’ve written for the bulletin, in which I criticized a proposed reform of the education system which would, among other things, raise the compulsory schooling age limit from 14 to 16 (I still maintain that the law really is not very clear about whether it’s schooling, specifically, or simply education, that’s compulsory).

The total of known homeschooling families in Spain with children of school age: five.  Another family has two children who are slightly over 14 but who only went to school very briefly many years ago.  None of these families has had legal problems.  I’ve head about several other families, but haven’t gotten in touch with them directly or confirmed that they really are homeschooling.

One of the fathers told me that his family has good relations with the teachers in the area, but that when he tried to get a certain school official to allow his daughters access to an exam so they can get a diploma of some kind, the official told him not to make trouble.  He said that he was willing to look the other way about the fact that the girls aren’t in school, but not if he gets any publicity about it or has to put anything in writing.

The parents in the homeschooling families I know of make their livings through ceramics, psychoanalysis, translations, teaching in language schools, and working as an emergency-vehicle dispatcher, among other things.  One of the parents is from Austria and another is from Ireland.  One family lives in a middle-sized city, one in a small city, three in towns, and one in the country.  In all of this, IÕm not including the families, mostly squatters living in abandoned villages in the mountains, who are so isolated that the government just sends a teacher a few times a year to give the kids exams.  These people are not necessarily homeschoolers by choice, and some are looking for other families with children so they can get together a group of eight, apparently the minimum needed for the government to open a school.

One of the homeschooling mothers told me that a priest came to her house years ago to ask whether her kids were out of school for lack of money.  When she said that their homeschooling was by choice, he went away.

The fact that there isn’t much persecution of homeschoolers here may make them less motivated to get organized.  Also, since the law doesn’t specifically permit alternatives to school, the families who homeschool have to go out on a limb, and so tend to be independent types who may not feel much need for a newsletter.  The fact that most religious people in Spain are Catholic and there are plenty of Catholic schools means that people who decide on homeschooling do so for secular reasons.

GETTING PERMISSION TO JOIN SCHOOL TEAMS

From Gretchen Spicer of Wisconsin

Our daughter Jessie has been taking gymnastics since she was 5.  In our community they have a young children’s gymnastics club that feeds into the high school gymnastics team, so that when kids reach high school age there is no longer a private club available - all that’s available is the school team.

Jessie faced this situation two years ago, and had to decide what to do.  We thought of driving her to lessons in Madison, but it would have been much more expensive.  We’re a low-income family and Jessie had always paid for her own gymnastics lessons by babysitting, but if she went to Madison the cost would go from $20 a month to $18 a week.

We called the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and asked them if there were any possibility of a homeschooler competing on the high school team.  They were very short and unpleasant with us.  At the end I thought that perhaps they just didn’t understand homeschooling, so I asked them if they had ever gotten a call about this before, and they said they get about ten calls a week.  It was clear that they just didn’t want to deal with homeschoolers.  At the time I didn’t know of any other homeschoolers who had been able to play on a school team in Wisconsin.

Jessie finally decided to go to school full-time for ninth grade, solely so she could be on the gymnastics team.  They wanted her on the team, so there was no problem with getting her enrolled in the school - they rolled out the red carpet for us.  She did quite well that year, both academically and socially.  But when it came time to go back this year, she began to be reluctant.  This surprised us, because all summer long we had thought that she would go back for tenth grade, but about a week before school started she told us about the doubts she’d been having.

She said she had thought she could just go to school for gymnastics and be detached from everything else, but she found that that was impossible.  She knew intellectually that it was stupid to care about things like tests and grades, but she found that she ended up worrying about them anyway.  She also said she felt that she was no longer part of our family, and we had felt that too.  We were always enthusiastic about her gymnastics, but we found that we distanced ourselves from her schooling because, for example, we couldn’t get all excited about her good grades because that to us would imply that we should get upset about bad grades, and we simply didn’t believe in that.  We didn’t want to be critical of her schooling, but without meaning to we became alienated from her.

Her third reason for not wanting to go back was that she’s very involved in professional classical theater, ballet, and music, and she wasn’t having time for those things.  During the school year she had to drop piano lessons, and she was only able to go to ballet once a week instead of two or three.

The night before school was to start this year, she decided not to go.  Within one week she got a call from the gymnastics coach, pressuring her to go back.  This was very upsetting to her.  We set up a meeting with him, with all of us present.  She felt that he hadn’t expected her parents to be there, and that if she had gone in alone he would have tried to intimidate her, but with all of us there he became willing to look at other alternatives, especially when it became clear that she wouldn’t go back.  Also, the assistant coach was extremely favorable to homeschooling, and kept saying, .Now, why can’t she just be on the team?

We started meeting with the superintendent, looking into all the possibilities.  One idea was to have her be a home-bound student in the district, but WIAA wouldn’t go for that.  They said that in order to be on the team she’d have to be in physical attendance at the school twenty hours a week.  They do make exceptions for kids enrolled in technical school, but they wouldn’t give us the same status.

Then we submitted our homeschool plan to WIAA.  Each year the children and I discuss our goals and write them down, so that’s what we gave.  After they saw it they were willing to consider us a school, to consider that our methods of evaluation would meet their requirements.  Another problem had been that you have to have a certain Grade Point Average to participate in team sports, and they didn’t know how that could apply to us, but finally they said they would consider us as having a program that could meet their requirements.

They finally made an offer which we have accepted: they are willing to consider her a transfer student.  She can transfer to the school one week before the first meet, take twenty hours of electives, and thereby be there for the time needed to be allowed to play on the team.  She doesn’t have to take any core subjects, and she can arrange it any way she wants - three full days a week, or four hours a day, five hours a week.  SheÕll continue this through the gymnastics season and then leave, and for now, she can go to practices without going to school at all.

At first we were angry about this.  It seemed ridiculous for her to have to spend all that time there doing things that have nothing to do with being on the gymnastics team.  But she feels OK about it for now, because it’s better than going full-time, and sheÕll take some things she wants, like an art class and driver’s ed, and she can take study halls.  We’re not finished fighting this, but for the time being we can live with this compromise.

SPEAKING TO GROUPS ABOUT HOMESCHOOLING

Tom Berry of Illinois writes:

This letter is prompted by a recent panel discussion that I chaired at our church.  This is the third time that I have participated in a panel discussion whose topic was homeschooling.  The first one was at our local public library.  It was a warm-up exercise because although the discussion was open to the public, the bulk of our audience was made up of other actual and prospective homeschoolers.  The second discussion that I participated in was at a La Leche League area conference.  This was a rewarding discussion.  Each panel member spoke about an aspect of homeschooling that was important to him or her.  The question-and-answer portion was the most rewarding because of the interest in homeschooling that the questions implied.  (As an aside, a woman who had attended this discussion sought out my wife at this year’s LLL conference to tell her that our panel discussion had given her the confidence to start homeschooling.)

At his most recent discussion, at one of the Sunday morning Adult Forums at our Unitarian church, my wife and I assembled a panel of three Moms who attend our church and homeschool their children, and myself.  I knew we would be facing a sophisticated audience that would be made up of many teachers and administrators in our local school systems.  All of us prepared well.

I started things off by spending about eight minutes offering some general demographic and statistical information and discussing some of the ideas and philosophies of John Holt.  I concluded my introduction by reading excerpts from John Taylor Gatto’s New York City Teacher of the Year acceptance speech.  The other panel members followed up by discussing their personal perspectives and experiences.  We then opened the remaining half hour to questions.

The results that I observed from this discussion were very gratifying.  As we moved into the question-and-answer session, the mood of our audience ranged from relatively positive on the part of one woman who attended because she is considering homeschooling, to tolerant but neutral which was the stance of the majority of the audience, to mildly negative and agitated as was a school librarian.  By the end, we had found some surprising allies, including a retired schoolteacher who made the observation, .Most families who send their children to school spend lots of time undoing the undesirable behaviors that their children learn at school.  Even the school librarian commented, .The public schools never did anything very great for my daughters… I am confused.

I’m offering this description of my experiences to give others an idea of what they may expect if they elect to go into their communities to discuss the benefits of homeschooling.  I hope the positive experiences I have had will encourage others to initiate and participate in public discussions concerning homeschooling.

TN Registration Deadline Isn’t So Firm After All

Shannon Stoney of Tennessee writes:

In GWS #77, you discussed the homeschooling law in Tennessee and said that parents who missed the August 1 registration deadline had to either enroll their children in school or homeschool illegally.  This is not strictly true.  I know, because I missed the deadline one year (I misunderstood the rule).  The man in charge of homeschooling in our county said that I could still homeschool if I registered as a satellite school of a religious school.  I called the state bureaucrat in charge of homeschooling, and while she was inflexible about the deadline, she did admit that I could be a satellite of a Christian school.   I was able to arrange this with a Christian school, and while the arrangement was not very satisfactory, it did allow us to homeschool that year.

A friend of mine who moved from one county to another also missed the deadline, but as it was partly because her mail didn’t get forwarded, the county overlooked her missing it by a few days.

I’ve also been told by my county’s school bureaucrats that if my child wanted to try school, I could register him for homeschool before August 1, put him in school, and then withdraw him later if school didn’t work out for him.

State News

Connecticut:  The State Board of Education on November 7th unanimously approved new state guidelines for home education, according to Jan Loomis of the CONNECTICUT HOME EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION.  The board doesn’t have the power to issue regulations, but Jan told us that most local superintendents follow the guidelines as though they were regulations.  Under these new guidelines, homeschoolers file an annual notice of intent, and children will be considered truant if their parents have not filed the notice.  The state is required to notify parents who have not filed of the requirement, and the parents then have ten days in which to file.  Under the old guidelines, parents had to submit a curriculum in addition to the notice of intent, so Jan says that homeschoolers consider the new guidelines an improvement in this respect.

The guidelines also say that parents will maintain a portfolio of the child’s work throughout the year, and will meet once a year with the local superintendent (or someone from that office), who will review the portfolio and determine whether education is taking place.  Nothing is specified about what will happen if the superintendent does not think education is taking place.

Idaho:  Reader Liz Cannon-Hubbell writes that her district, Boundary County, introduced and adopted a restrictive homeschooling policy at the start of this school year.  The policy requires parents to submit a written request for exemption from the compulsory attendance law to the board of trustees, which lists, in addition to basic information about the family, the names of the textbooks and materials to be used, the schedule of instruction by hour, day, and week, and the methods .by which achievement will be measured.  Liz wrote, As of yet, we have no idea how they intend to enforce this policy or even how they’ll let individuals know it’s in effect.  One woman on the school board has changed her mind about the supposed benefits of this policy since talking to some of the homeschoolers here.  As she says, none of the board knew anything about homeschooling really, and this idea sounded OK so they passed it.  Now they’re having second thoughts (a few of them anyway).  I don’t know if it’s too late or if maybe theyÕll decide to get some input from homeschoolers.

North Dakota:  Some public school administrators have imposed requirements on homeschoolers that are not actually in the home school law, according to the September/October issue of the NORTH DAKOTA HOME SCHOOL ASSOCIATION newsletter.  For example, the law requires that public school officials monitor home schools for an average of one hour a week, but it doesn’t specify when or where it will be done; the monitor and the parent must negotiate this.  The NDHSA has heard of one monitor arriving at a home unannounced.  The law also requires that homeschoolers sign an affidavit agreeing to be in session for four hours a day, 175 days a year, but does not require  that homeschoolers submit a school calendar to the county superintendent (as private schools do).  The NDHSA reports that .at least one administrator has demanded that a homeschooler submit a school calendar to the public school.

Ohio:  From the November newsletter of the HOME EDUCATION LEAGUE OF PERRYSBURG:  Under the guise of concern that home educated children may not be receiving the highest advantages in education, the Ohio PTA is recommending that the State Board of Education require monitoring to assure that state requirements are being met.  It would include semi-annual home visits by a truant officer over a two-year period.  The proposed resolution was scheduled for a vote at the October PTA convention on October 21-23.

In a letter to Patricia Mitchell, President of the Ohio PTA, Home Education Action Council of Ohio’s Executive Director, Diana Fessler, states:  Since the proposed observation is to determine if state requirements are being met, such observation is a search as defined by the United States Constitution.  The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.  Accordingly, before invading the sanctity of the home, government workers must first satisfy the Court that there is probable cause to believe that a statute or properly enacted regulation is not being met.  Accordingly, Lake County’s resolution urging the State Board to require ‘unannounced semi-annual observationÕ is a recommendation for the Board to take action that is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.

Oregon:  Kim Gordon of the OREGON HOME EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION writes: .In response to fear that Oregon’s State Choice Initiative will pass, the Board of Education is tightening homeschooling regulations.  The new rules will raise the standard for ’satisfactory progressÕ for homeschoolers (tighten testing requirements), shorten time lines, and for homeschoolers with disabilities, expand the school district’s involvement.  Contact OHEA for more information.

Where Do You Go To School?

A California reader writes:

We recently ran across a couple we had not seen since our oldest child, now 8, was just crawling.  He is a retired lawyer, and to them education means attending the most prestigious schools from preschool through post-post-graduate level.  Almost the first topic of conversation was addressed to the children thus:

Let’s see, some of you must be in school now. Our 8 year old promptly piped up, We homeschool.
Mrs. B responded, .The Wee Home School.  I haven’t heard of that one before.  It must be somewhere close to where you live…?

Watching a Child Teach Herself

Sue Radosti (IA) writes:

I have trouble explaining to people - even other homeschoolers - that I don’t feel a need to teach Adrianna (almost 4) the basic .preschool skills.  in the first place, we have a 4-month-old daughter now also, and frankly, it’s all I can do to get Adrianna dressed and fed most days, let alone worry about teaching her the alphabet.  She is also a typical 3 year old, resisting any adult help that she doesn’t first request, so any efforts on my part to instruct her are met with indignation (at best!).  Sometimes I try to explain things that we encounter in our reading or in the world, just because I think she might be interested or to clear up some obvious confusion in her mind, and she usually accepts that as a matter of course.  But when it comes to academic-type skills, the only teaching I do is to answer her questions, basically because she doesn’t need me to teach her when she is teaching herself more rapidly than I can keep track of.

Adrianna practically lived in our bookstore for her first two years, and there’s no denying the influence that has had on her development, in terms of her vocabulary and her sentence patterns.  It’s been easy to learn the many ways she imitates and learns from the books we read her, but it all seems to flow so naturally.  We don’t read to her because we want her to have a precocious vocabulary.  We read to her because we like to read and she likes to listen, and sometimes for the very practical reason that we need to be familiar with the books on our store shelves!  We also like to talk, so she’s been surrounded by words, words, words from birth.  I won’t try to pretend she’s not a bright child, but I think that only speeds a process that she would be engaged in anyway: fitting into her environment.

It makes me sad when I try to explain this to people, and all they can see is that they should be reading to their children more.  They usually say it with a little sigh of resignation, as though they are thinking of it as a duty they are neglecting.  Even when I tell them that Van and I almost never initiate our reading times with Adrianna, they don’t seem to understand that it isn’t an .activity we engage in, any more than we set aside time to listen to the music that is always playing in our home.

I’m also confounded by an artificial approach to skills like color and shape recognition.  Personally, I can think of very few times in my life when it was important to me to know that a triangle is called a triangle, so I have intentionally avoided teaching shape concepts to Adrianna, but she has picked them up anyway from the toys and games given to her by a grandmother who believes that all toys should be Òeducational, bless her well-meaning heart.  As for colors, Adrianna learned these quite easily from normal day-to-day exposure to them, through conversation, her artwork, and stories we read.  She went through a period when it was obvious that she understood that different colors had names, and she wanted to know what they were, and she would ask about them as she used her crayons.  It would have taken a much more conscious effort on my part to stop  her from learning them than to teach them!  But of course when she could identify turquoise at age 2, people would always say, You can sure tell that you work with her at home.

Which brings to mind another funny thing I’ve noticed.  We get the most pressure from people to put her in preschool when she is demonstrating that she has no need of it.  If she already knows about turquoise, why would we send her somewhere to be drilled in the recognition of red and blue and green?  Yet we have frequently been told, She’s so bright, she really should be in preschool.  My response is usually something brilliant like, Oh,simply because I can’t figure out how on earth to explain something that seems so obvious to me.  And if the speaker has children of his or her own in preschool, it seems so arrogant to say that Adrianna doesn’t need it.

These past six months, Adrianna has been learning how written language works, and it’s been fun to watch her.  I was busy being pregnant when she started coming to me with scraps of paper with crude letters printed on them and asking what they spelled, and I didn’t really think about how she got started writing.  She has an alphabet puzzle and magnetic letters on the refrigerator (both from Grandma, of course) but we’d never worked with her with them.  Again, I had purposely ignored them.  So I’m not sure how or even when the writing bug struck her.  Her name was the first word she expressed interest in, so A was the first letter I remember her trying to write, but then she just seemed to pick the ones that were easiest to draw: H, E, F, T, L, I - the ones with just straight lines.  (I love the way she still makes her E’s.  She adds as many bars as she wants, so that it often looks like half of a centipede when she’s done!  And yet, when she asks how to make an F, and I respond that it’s an E without the bottom bar, she knows just what I mean and draws a perfect F.)

I had read what John said in Learning All the Time  about Òreading the strings of letters that children write, so I would do my best to pronounce the words Adrianna brought to me on her scraps of paper.  One day when we were packing clothes for our move, Adrianna wanted to label the boxes for me.   She would write some letters and then ask what they said.  One Òword was ÒHHRH and when I tried to say it without inserted vowel sounds, her response was, Oh, it says breathe!  Similarly, when I pronounced ÒBRR for her, she cried, Oh, it says cold!  It took me a moment to figure out that she was simply associating the sounds with familiar words, doing her best to make sense out of nonsense.  I didn’t comment, and now just five months later she has progressed to where she’s saying things like P is for Peter, and E is for eater.  If she can’t think of a word that begins with a sound that is like the pronunciation of a letter, she makes one up: R is for arter.  Needless to say, she’s a way from understanding that E can also be for elephant, but the important thing to me is that she is exploring and experimenting and sharing her ideas with no artificial notions of learning.

What is interesting to me in watching these processes is that there isn’t necessarily an orderly progression of skills.  Adrianna can now write her name, and she loves to sit on my lap when I’m typing and let me dictate the letters I need (which was definitely her idea - it’s not my idea of a good time, taking ten minutes to type one sentence), but she can’t recite the alphabet correctly.  Similarly, she can read numbers well enough to dial the telephone but is likely to mix up the names of the numbers.

Which brings us to numbers and counting and adding.  Grandma proudly taught Adrianna to count to 10 when she was only 18 or 19 months old, not noticing or caring that the words were only so much gibberish to her and that she couldn’t really count anything.  It’s only been in the past four months or so that she has had a firm grasp of the idea of one-to-one correspondence, but once she understood that, she quickly began playing with addition, saying things like there are four people in our family.  When Daddy goes to work, there are only three, but when he comes home, there are four again! She comes to me often to ask how many fingers she is holding up.  She was thrilled when I told her that she could figure it out herself by counting them all together, and so now she comes to announce, You know what, Mom?  Two fingers plus five fingers makes seven fingers!  Now she wants me to add numbers in my head for her entertainment: What’s 2 plus 2?  Then what’s 4 plus 4?  Then what’s 8 plus 8? and so on, doubling the equation each time.  I insist on quitting when the numbers get so big that I can’t remember the one I’ve just recited, usually around 32,000 or something.  I wonder what her mind makes of those huge numbers!  Again, here she is playing with addition and subtraction, and yet she can’t count to 20.

I recently shared a lot of these experiences with a friend who asked about homeschooling, and after I had talked and talked, she still insisted, but then you really are  teaching her.  I don’t know how to make the distinction clear to such people.  I’ve seen Adrianna grow very quiet and resentful when a school-teaching aunt tries to make a nice lesson out of every game they play together, until she finally tunes out entirely, and I know the same would happen if I tried to teach her about adding fingers.  Participating in a conversation about numbers is so different from instructing.

The ready answer I’ve finally come up with when dealing with home education vs. preschool is to explain that Adrianna loves to dance and is so free and spontaneous about it - qualities that I fear could be destroyed by formal dance lessons.  Most people understand that, and so I go on to say that she takes the same open, joyous approach to all of her learning and doing, and that I would likewise not want to make her self-conscious about it by enrolling her in preschool - or even by formalizing our home learning environment.  The arguments don’t necessarily end there, but I feel satisfied that I’ve expressed the essence of what home education is all about for us.

A funny story: Once last spring, when Adrianna was just over 3, I saw her trying to cut with a pair of child-size scissors.  She was holding them very awkwardly and wasn’t having much success with her task, so I said something to the effect that she might find it easier to hold them thus (demonstrating), and walked away.  A few minutes later, she called out to me, ÒMommy, is it OK if I hold them my own funny way?

She isn’t always so polite about it now.  Yesterday she was writing her name on a thank you card we were preparing to mail to a friend, and I could see that she was going to begin too near the center of the page and would run out of space before completing her name.  I mentioned that fact, and she sighed with exasperation and said, I’ll do it my way and you can do it your way.  She did indeed run out of space after only four letters, but it didn’t seem to worry her.  She just started over again.  The process seemed much more important to her than the result, so while I was cringing over the mess she was making of the card, she was quite satisfied with it.  It made me realize, ashamedly, that I had been thinking more about impressing our friend with her writing ability than about the actual purpose of the thank you card.  Kids can humble you so deftly!

Observing Without Interfering or Judging

Finding Things Out

Wendy Martyna of California sent us the ÒHome School Report she’d written at the end of the year.  Some excerpts:

We often play what we call,The Question Game,where one of us poses a question (usually of central philosophical importance) that the others each get to answer in any way they like.  Examples:  What is truth? Why do people not know that the Earth is alive, and hurt her? What is time?  The other day, 7-year-old Miles question was, What is smart? and our answers reflected a deep sense that knowledge is only part of smartness.  Bryn (10) said that some people think smart is knowing lots of things, like things you memorize or learn in school.  We all agreed that smart is knowing how to find out things, and knowing what you do not know, and being willing to not know.

I recently read parts of a book by Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety, which assesses the overwhelming quality of the information we are confronted with daily, and defines Information Anxiety as the gap between what we know and what we think we should know.  He says his father taught him not that he should know everything in the encyclopedia, but that he should know how to find it.  When I observe Bryn’s and Miles learning process, I see no anxiety about what they do not know (except in the momentary frustration of trying to solve an immediate problem before them), and I see great skill in finding out what they need or want to know.

I also see an intense commitment to learning, and an individual sense of timing that guides them.  Miles can spend an hour or more immersed in reading a TinTin adventure book, and not even hear us calling him.  The next day, he may spend that same intense hour experimenting with a mylar dancing ribbon on a stick, watching and controlling the many patterns and motions it can make (and telling me about it as he does).  Both of them follow their heart when it comes to learning - which may mean wanting to do a math workbook in the car on Sunday when we’re driving somewhere.  You never know.  What you can count on is that they are doing, most of the time, what they want to be doing, for their own reasons, and finding meaning - a sense of internal purpose - in doing it.

. . . Both the children like to have assignments when they ask for them, or when I offer them and they agree.  They do not resist structure or evaluation, but rather are free to enjoy its pleasures, because it comes purely, without strings.  When I make up a worksheet for them - one on TinTin books, one on Madeleine L’Engle - they couldn’t wait till they were printed off the computer to start on them.

. . . When we are watering the garden, weeding the strawberries, bemoaning the gophers holes, studying the rebirth and unfolding of a calla lily, we are often taken afield (or  a garden) into other discussions or experiments.  And we end up learning quite a bit, learning in a way that might take us back into a book, or a drawing.  But that was not the point, or even the purpose.  The point was to water the garden, or weed the strawberries.  The learning, ultimately, is not extractable from the unfolding of the experience, so that to tell about it is different than it was.

But to tell about it in these other ways also carries a truth - it is a truth that belongs to reflection afterwards (as when one, at 38, comes to understand in quite a different way what one was doing at 19).  This is why we don’t hear ourselves saying, ÒWell, now we are having a lesson in physics with that ÒLet’s turn to chapter 3 tone of voice, but rather find ourselves looking well into the learning itself, as it emerges out of the truth of the moment.  Looking back and reflecting on it, the lesson may well have much beyond physics in it - what might be called literature, and philosophy, and biology, and much more.  That doesn’t mean that the children - or Bill or I - wouldn’t hear ourselves saying (in wonder, sometimes, or just as a comment on the situation), ÒWell, here we are talking about geography now!  But it wouldn’t be that sneaky kind of creeping up and pouncing on Òthe teachable moment, still assuming that learning needs to take a specified form and be caught in the act before it can be said to have occurred.  In fact, the phrase Òthe teachable moment seems to imply that some moments are not teachable; or worse, that teaching is something that needs to be added   to the moment, rather than discovered within it.

. . . Retention.  Comprehension.  These things become natural byproducts of the kind of learning they experience.  I was reading a book aloud to both of them, and Miles had read to himself another of the books in that series.  I had wondered if that book was too difficult for him to read, but he sat and read it right through.  I wondered if he had retained it, but I found out without asking or testing.  As I read the other book aloud, he continually told us all that had happened to each of the characters in the other book, and his opinions on what had happened.  And Bryn recounts plots in compelling ways, when she is done with or even midway through her books.  And Miles is the master of TinTin detail - if we play Ò21 Questions about a TinTin fact, Miles is the acknowledged master of us all.

TinTin reminds me of something that’s also fundamentally important to our homeschooling process.  That is the role that Bill and I play, as teachers and learners and parents and companions.  A mix of roles that alters according to mood and context, but that reduces down to a deep sense we both have that we are privileged to all be on this journey together.  When I found myself wondering what Miles was seeing in these many TinTin books, what was absorbing him so, and found also that I was worried about the racial stereotypes in the books and the occasional use of violence.  I did some research.  Of course, we talked about the racial stereotypes and that became a chance to recognize them when they occur, especially in subtle form, and in historical context.  But there was more I wanted to know, that he was not interested in explaining (why  he liked them was not interesting to him at the time, only that  he liked them).  In the library reference room I looked up the author and xeroxed pages of biographical information, and then found about twenty pages of critical essays concerning TinTin in the Book Review Index.  In reading these, I learned a lot, and what I learned deepened my understanding of the mythic quality of the TinTin adventure, and helped to answer my questions, to stimulate my reflections, not Miles.  It was to satisfy my need to know, not his.

Because we try to keep that view in mind - that it is our questions and our learning that are also involved in homeschooling, we help ourselves avoid the trap of feeling self-sacrificing, given the enormous commitment required.  We try to keep the sense of privilege alive.  It is the same as with being parents - cultivating not a sense that we are doing all this for you, or even the opposite, that they are doing it all for us, that we are only awed witnesses of the magic that children offer.  It is, rather, something integrated, something inseparable.

From a later letter Wendy wrote us:

You asked me to tell you exactly what the ÒHome School Report was written for.  Our Independent Home Study Program is affiliated with the Loma Prieta School District.  They require that we submit monthly or quarterly reports, and these need to include the things the children have been doing or working on in science, math, language, etc.  I have always listed events and activities in a long list under each category (always struggling to reconstruct what I should have kept more careful track of), and then felt so much was missing from that kind of report.

So, last June, I was working with some writing I was doing about our lives, and decided to submit that along with the lists.  This report, then, was submitted as an official report, and occurred in response to that assignment.  But it went beyond the bounds of the assignment and was truly done for me.

Not on Display

From a larger paper that Jutta Mason of Ontario sent us:

Inside our house, activities are not noted down, nor are they marked.  If one of the children does a puzzle or reads a book there are no congratulations or prizes; if someone makes a mistake there may be regret, but without public humiliation.  The children look out at the world without a sense of being on display.

As I write this, on a Friday morning, I’m sitting in front of the fireplace beside my daughter, who is reading a novel.  Her brothers are at the table, playing chess.  Outside the window the dog is gnawing at a stick.  We’re at a cottage, in the woods.  If I were at home, I might be typing into the computer, and the kids might be walking over to the grocery store to do the weekly shopping (the store delivers).  Or my younger son might be roaming around the back lane with his friends, with me making supper in the kitchen.  The Magic Flute  on the tape deck, the older children mimicking the opera singers for my amusement.  We pass in and out of one another’s occupations and nobody is noting down the hours of music appreciation, physical fitness, literary studies, grocery math, or geography.

My younger son comes to me with his hands full of matchboxes, to tell me that if all the boxes are full, he has 210 matches.  He shows me, grinning, how he figured this out without counting each one separately.  Every since he was quite small he’s always looked out for numbers and the ordering of things.  This doesn’t mean heÕll one day be a mathematician, nor even that heÕll be recognized as Ògood at math.  It means nothing except what it is: his pleasure at figuring out the number 210.  In the same way, our comings together in the household at various times of the day mean nothing more than just the pleasure (or, at other times, the difficulty) of each other’s company.  The space inside our household is personal, not public, and unmonitored for productivity.  But all of us can do things there that interest us very much.

This is at our best, and after some struggle.  As a graduate of years of compulsory schooling, I am used to looking outside myself for professional sanction and approval of what I do.  I used to monitor my children as though  there was an invisible school official looking over my shoulder.  The children’s comments about numbers or stars or insects would often be channeled into further questions about mathematics or astronomy or zoology.

This slowed down when I noticed the children were avoiding me.  My daughter didn’t mention numbers for over a month when I once used a question she asked me as an opportunity to show her the ministry guidelines of primary grade mathematics.  I took her reaction as a caution rather than a challenge.  School officials came to our house to check our children’s math proficiency.  The kids were mystified by the strange plastic money the officials brought, and could hardly add six and six (after months of the most complex allowance transactions).  I took this as another caution.  My daughter resisted even my feeble attempts to get her to read, until she was 9.  Then she began to read, not ÒDick and Jane books, but her favorite novels.  Now she reads faster than her father, who reads for a living.  My next child, in the meantime, sat in his room, and figured out how to read by himself, before I really noticed.  I’m not sure what his method was.  Here was a third caution to me.  In our family, learning to read turned out to be like learning to walk and to talk - everyone just eventually does it.

As my instructing diminished, our conversations expanded.  The conversations flourished the more they were unplanned.  An engaging topic could strike at any time: while walking the dog, driving somewhere, winding down for bed, having lunch, digging in the garden, opening the mail, having an argument.  As the years move on, I am sometimes astonished at the privilege I have of seeing how these three young ones unfold and take in the world around them.  They learn next to me but only sometimes, at their own choosing, because of me.  And they learn plenty.

Some people may wonder how we can satisfy the homeschooling regulations without noting down our children’s activities and evaluating them.  In Ontario the regulations are still pleasantly vague.  The ministry of education is required to make sure that Òsatisfactory education is being provided for each child, but satisfactory is not defined.  So the school superintendents of each area have to interpret this themselves.  They are very busy people, as are the consultants they send out to visit homeschooling families.

I have tried to take advantage of this busyness by preempting any school initiatives to structure our activities.  Twice a year I send a fat essay to the school officials, a rambling tale about what the kids have been up to in the previous six months.  They didn’t ask me to do this - I decided on the routine myself.  I divide up my narrative any way I like.  At the beginning I sorted our activities by school subject category; later on I sorted more by my own inclinations.  Writing these reports has been fun for me because I have chosen to be fairly frank, and also because I get to go on at length about our adventures.  It’s not often that you have a captive audience to talk about your kids.  Because each of these documents has been at least ten pages long, I imagine they give a pleasant bulk to the school’s files on the children, hopefully satisfying the bureaucratic requirement for well-filled files.  I don’t have the impression that the school officials read what I write very carefully; it’s the form, not the content, that counts.

Wherever the kids could be seen as noticeably Òbehind standardized school learning schedules, such as in their late reading, the absence of formal math learning, and their lack of French, I try to explain this as a careful decision by David and me.  Being on the offensive rather than the defensive seems helpful here.  When the absence of reading, math, or French instruction are presented as an intentional part of what the school officials can imagine as our Òcurriculum (a word that I avoid like the plague), they can file us under the category of eccentric educational philosophy, rather than child neglect.

So far this has worked out for us: we have been left in peace.  There’s no insurance that it will continue to work, but I have chosen to appreciate the grace of the present rather than to anticipate the troubles of the future.

[SS:]  Readers often ask us how they can claim to be teaching reading, and thereby satisfying that part of their state’s homeschooling regulations, if their child isn’t reading at all.  We usually give just the advice that Jutta gives: you want, above all, to avoid giving the impression that you haven’t noticed that your child isn’t reading (or whatever the subject may be), don’t think it’s important, etc.  That’s just too much for school officials to understand or accept, even if it may be true.  You don’t want to seem to be neglecting your child, as Jutta says.  But if you can make it clear that your child’s late reading (or, at any rate, your belief that it’s OK if children read at later ages) is an integral part of your educational beliefs, supported by the following studies, sources, and so on, that makes a difference.  If this isn’t true - that is, if you really do wish your child were reading - you can still protect him or her from further pressure by making clear what you plan to do about reading for the following year: ÒFor Johnny’s fifth grade year, we will be reading aloud from the following books, visiting the library regularly, discussing the daily newspaper. . . Ò etc.  The point is, you can make it clear that you are giving reading some time and attention without making any promises about exactly when your child will be reading on his own.

Challenges & Concerns

The Socialization Question

Larry and Susan Kaseman’s new book, Taking Charge Through Homeschooling, includes a section about socialization by their 18-year-old daughter, Beth, and we excerpt that section here.  The book is mainly about homeschooling as grassroots political action, and is subtitled, ÒPersonal and Political Empowerment.

When I was about eight and had just started homeschooling, I thought that if I went back to public school (or any school, for that matter), I would have about ten really good friends (the kind that you tell everything to and who are always nice to you and you never get sick of).  It was that simple.  But I decided that maybe there were bad parts about school too, and that I did already have some friends, so I let the idea drop for a while.

Now at eighteen I have come to view meaningful friendships as something that requires a lot of time and effort and is an ongoing process which going to school will not necessarily help at all.

Socialization in our society has become equated with having a lot of peers with whom one has minimal contact (because of such limited time, etc.) but from whom one can claim friendship.  In the area of tons of friends and lots of pressure from them, I have missed being socialized, but healthy friendships (and sometimes it takes a long time to find/create one) requires a lot more than simple acquaintance through school.  The need for positive contact with other human beings is universal.  Often people view it as something that one is either given or not.  By going to school one is given the socialization necessary to be a socialized person, people think, and yet we have a hard time figuring out what that means, and an even harder time becoming Òsocialized people.

As a homeschooler I have always been asked about socialization and making friends, more than any other question, and it has had many implications.  You’re not going to be able to function in society because you have been kept away from it.  Well then you don’t have any friends.  Because of you the society will be less able to get along.  But most commonly, Gee, it’s too bad she doesn’t have a chance to make lots of friends and have all the fun of school.  At times I haven’t minded the question; at other times I’ve hated it.  But often I’ve wondered what will happen to this society if the way of being socialized is by attending school.  Our society might be worried about anyone who isn’t socialized because by not being socialized in the regular way, the person could also be free from the trap that makes them conform within our society and thus not threaten its structure.

My idea of socialization includes being able to get along with people of all ages, races, cultures, etc. and in many different situations in which I am able to get away from being the peer or the daughter or the student or whatever and play other roles.  Maybe I should call this culturalization.  In this area I feel that I have had a much more complete exposure to people, human interaction, and friendships than I ever would have had if I hadn’t been homeschooling.  I’ve been able to work, learn, instruct, help, play, explore, etc., with all kinds of people at all ability levels, and these friendships I value very highly.

Homeschooling has sometimes been thought of as something that keeps children separate from lots of peers and prevents peer pressure (it does, to some extent), but basically homeschooling opens up a person’s opportunities for interaction and helps people learn to interact in a society where we seem to have few good friendships, partly because people are labeled and categorized and put into boxes.  This seems like a dangerous thing to have happen, and somehow as homeschoolers we have to take on some responsibility for changing it.  Human beings are meant to be integrated, not kept in boxes by age or other categories.  But in order for integration to occur, children need to be given more respect and trust than they are today.

As with any alternative, homeschooling will always be looked upon as something that should be inspected, especially in the area of human relations.  And being Òsocialized is not as simple as knowing the alphabet, or being able to add.  It is something that one has to continually relearn.  A homeschooler has to accept that especially because she has been homeschooled, she will be asked about it.

But really, I feel that my social interaction with people is what I value the most and the area in which I want to work the most.  If people can get along and interact well together, then there must be hope for the world.

K. Paxton wrote in the October/November issue of  Education Otherwise, the British Homeschooling publication:

I have three children at home, two who have attended school.  I found that while they were in school, the children did appear to have lots of friends, but the friendships were very transient, and now they have fallen by the wayside altogether, although we did try to keep in touch.

I do find that with them being at home they get lonely and they have to make a real effort to have friends, as there is not the day to day contact of school.  But, I find now that the friends they do have are very special to them.  The socializing that they do now is different too: it is much friendlier; they are more interested in people as people, and not the ÒI’ve got a so-and-so mentality of school contact.
I have found that since they left school they are more in touch with their feelings, as before they seemed to be bombarded with emotional experiences of all kinds and coped by cutting themselves off to a certain degree.  While my son was at school he did not socialize, he just fought a lot; since he left school, he has learnt, and I’d also say felt able, to talk and cooperate more with other children.

I feel that yes, children do miss out on the socialization they would have a school, but that Òmissing out is a very positive thing.  I know my children would not wish to return to it.  I know for a fact that keeping my children away from school has made them better able to handle the rough and tumble of life, because they have time to recuperate.  While they were at school they became overloaded; they did cope in their own ways, but to the detriment of part of themselves.  They had to hide their softer, kinder sides to keep Òin with the other children.

My youngest daughter has never been to school and I find that she is the most capable and resilient of all my three children.  When she has been wronged, she is much more confident and determined to see justice than is my thirteen year old, and she is only five.

And from Chai Love (CA):

I wanted to tell you how we have somewhat solved the problem of social isolation.  Solon is an only child, although he has a step-sister whom he now sees one weekend out of the month.  We live in the country with no neighborhood in which to forge friends.  But every weekend we go to the local, fairly large, flea market, where we work all day selling clothes.  We have been doing this for nearly four years now.  Solon has lots of friends there of all ages and nationalities, who go regularly.  There is a video game room there where he spends a lot of time with his friends and a pond/ forest in the back where they can play games and catch frogs and lizards.

We also find the flea market a great place to find all kinds of educational material.  I already have collected textbooks for the next few grades in all subjects - 25-50¢ each.  We also find inexpensive art supplies and costumes for dress-up, drama, and picture-taking.

We don’t believe in separating the family for work or school.  We do not attend adult functions that exclude children.  We are told that we are somewhat like the Asians who take their entire family with them everywhere they go.  Solon does, of course, choose to go on excursions with friends away from the family, but he is always welcome to join us.  Because of this, he is often with us to experience real-life situations that most children are not allowed to experience or observe.

For instance, he attended the many family court sessions with us in the past years in which our ability to be responsible parents for his step-sister was disputed by the other parent, with Solon’s homeschooling and the lifestyle around homeschooling a focal point.  Since we are on a very limited budget we could not afford a lawyer, so Michael represented himself.  This gave Solon a chance to read every court paper from the other party as well as all the responses Michael prepared for court sessions through the years.

Solon was totally fascinated with the judicial process, although he sometimes had to sit without us (we were up front) in the court room, which I’m sure was a little scary.  However, the judge actually commented during the last court session that lasted all afternoon on how Òwell behaved Solon was, Òbetter than most children.  This was music to our ears after having had to listen to an afternoon of critical remarks from the other party about Solon and his lifestyle.  We were very proud of him that day, and he proved to the judge that homeschooled children can be quite socially adept.

Two-Career Families
Andrea Rusin (IL) writes in response to Tammy Maltby’s letter in GWS #76 about homeschooling with a two-career family (for more on the subject, see GWS #77):

We too are a two-career homeschool family with no nearby relatives and a tight budget.  Believe me, there are days when I share Tammy’s feelings of frustration.

My husband Dave is a math professor at the local university and I am a social worker.  Until last November, I was the director of a shelter for the homeless.  Now I have resigned from that position to start a new social service agency to empower individuals to move from homelessness as far back into the mainstream as they can.  Since this agency is just beginning, it is really only a little more than half-time.  However, since I am also a graduate student I am committed to essentially full-time activities outside the home.

Managing the lifestyle requires a curious blend of flexibility and rigidity.  In part, our situation is workable because of the flexibility of our employment.  The only hours that Dave must be at the university are when he is teaching or scheduled for office hours or committee meetings.  Of course, he is committed to performing a certain amount of work - and really enjoys it anyway - but no one is watching over his shoulder determining how the work gets done.  Consequently, he is available to pinch hit for child care and school-time.

I use the mornings to be with the children (Victoria is 8 and Nicholas is almost 6) and do school-time.  I really do believe that children are learning all the time.  I am by no means convinced that this school-time is the most educational part of their day.  Nonetheless, it is the time that I have scheduled to be available to the children with my full attention.  Under other circumstances I probably would not be so rigid about this school-time, but it is not as though there is another time-slot to put it in.  If we don’t do our work in the mornings, it just doesn’t get done.  The afternoons and evenings are my times for school and work.  Three afternoons a week, Nicholas goes to the child care center on campus for a few hours.  Victoria helps me in my office, works on her own things, or visits with friends.

Tammy’s situation is somewhat different, but there are also parallels.  If the nursing shortage is for real, it seems as though you might be able to negotiate some flexibility into your schedule.  A friend of mine - a single mom - works as a nurse very close to forty hours all on the weekends.  Clearly such an arrangement is not without drawbacks, but it leaves the week free for her to spend with her children.

Flexibility is important again with regard to curriculum.  We don’t use a pre-packaged curriculum.  There are days when I am so muddled that I feel like I want someone to tell me what to do with the children.  I know, however, that I really couldn’t stand another stack of overdue paperwork and assignments.  We devise our curriculum together and it is more or less an ongoing process.  Sometimes the children simply have no idea of the breadth or importance of a particular subject.  For these topics, I don’t feel comfortable waiting until they ask for information.  Other times, the interests of the children are so clear that to do anything other than study those topics is absurd.

But then, if I am not absolutely rigid about some things then I know from experience that we will start running in circles.  School-time is when I am available to the children; I am ready and willing to give them my undivided attention.  When I am at work - even if I am sitting in my office at home with both the children on the floor at my feet - I am not available.  It works the other way as well.  Many of my colleagues know that I am at home in the mornings, and feel comfortable calling me there.  After all, I’m not at work so I can’t be busy.  The wisest investment we ever made was the answering machine.  I just don’t answer the phone before 1:30.  This arrangement sounds more harsh than it feels in practice.  The line that I have to walk is that I want to offer my children everything that they need, but I also want to be recognized as fully professional in my chosen field.

One question that I have to ask myself is why I continue this way.  My income makes so little difference in the family finances that there must clearly be another reason.  If I were to stay at home full-time with the children, in a very few years I would be all alone.  With luck, the children would be the independent, capable adults that I know they have the potential to become, and where would I be?  Too old to start something?  Maybe not, but I think I would feel some bitterness.  Because I feel that I too have contributions to make completely aside from the contributions that I make as a parent, I let this craziness continue.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that as families we all have to devise ways to take parenting - and educating our children is part of that - seriously.  We know that models of dropping six-week-old babies at full-time child care are unsatisfactory.  Yet I - and all women - need to be taken seriously as well.  Both the work world and family life are going to have to adjust while we figure out models that work.  I saw a bumper sticker in California that said, ÒSubvert the dominant paradigm.  It makes me laugh, but isn’t that really what we are doing?

I have to say, too, that sometimes none of this flexibility or planning works at all.  Sometimes I have to scramble to get a babysitter because, perhaps, Victoria refuses to go to one more boring meeting.  And then there was the time when they both had chicken pox - not at the same time, of course, but separated by a few days in order to prolong the frustration.  On those days, I am not creating new paradigms at all; I am just plain old nutty!

And from Lindsey Halpern-Givens of Illinois:

I am homeschooling four children, ages 8, 6, 4, and 2.  I work a number of part-time jobs that I have been able to schedule around my children and/or include my children in.  I am sharing a part-time job as a Director of Religious Education at my church (five hours a week).  I teach classes for adults studying to obtain a GED and non-native English-speaking adults at my local community college.  This schedule varies, and at certain times and/or locations, childcare is available (four to eight hours a week).  I was also asked to coordinate a family literacy program at my college (fifteen hours a week), but my boss allows me to do all my paperwork at home.  Finally, I teach CPR, First Aid, and childbirth preparation classes at a local hospital.  This schedule always varies and can be as many as twenty hours a month, or as few as four.  These classes are taught in the evenings or on Saturday mornings, and my husband stays with the children.

This schedule has seemed OK, but I have lately been feeling extremely stressed.  While we are not structured in our school approach, what disturbs me most is the lack of time we have to sit down and read a book.

As far as other children for your kids to see - are there any parks nearby?  A local park district with daytime classes?  A local homeschooling group in our area has tried organizing a daytime class for homeschoolers.  We have a small group that consists of homeschooling moms and kids who meet once a week to play, do a craft project, or perhaps share favorite stories.  Do you know of any other homeschoolers in your area?  If not, maybe a La Leche League leader would know of some.

We have no help from our families, or really anyone else.  Most of the schooling is left to me, although my 8 and 6 year old take a private art class with other homeschoolers.  We have been using literature in place of basal readers, and have been primarily focusing on the Little House on the Prairie  books as our curriculum.  We have supplemented this with other books found at the library such as Joshua’s Westward Journey and Patty Reed’s Doll.

The bottom line for me, though, is that I feel totally swamped.  I have just been to the library and found some books on working at home.  I feel I must change something, or at least cut back.  I will probably give up my position as family literacy coordinator by December (even though I do some of it at home, it is the largest time commitment).  I am looking for time to explore my options and come up with a business or job I can do at home and involve the children in.

As for Tammy: could you possibly work as a visiting nurse going to people’s homes, providing in-home care?  Or could you work at assigning such jobs to other nurses?  I know an R.N. who did that.  Could you teach some children a particular skill or offer some other service and barter with someone who could provide you tutoring?
As frustrating as this type of situation can be, think of yourself as a trailblazer - how you manage, and the fact that you share your concerns with other GWS readers, is helpful, as we all learn from each other.

Recovering from School
Riada Roch (PEI) writes:

I am prompted to respond to ÒHelping Kids Recover by Jim Bergin and Judy Garvey [ÒFrom School to Homeschooling, GWS #76], as I am somewhat disturbed by the statement in it that Òeven the most tender, loving parents cannot undo what has already been done to their children [in school].  I think that if I’d had this pessimistic view, I might never have taken my three sons out of school last year, at ages 12, 9, and 6.  I would hate for other prospective homeschoolers to be so negatively influenced, as I firmly believe every child is worth rescuing at all costs.

I cannot prove my children’s individuality is the same as it would have been had they never set foot in school.  I’m also the first to admit that there were many things my children needed to be healed of when they left school.  But it was, and still is, my firm conviction that the damage done could be undone.

My children’s spiritual well-being seemed to suffer in school, as does many children’s.  I witnessed this malaise among students when I taught.  Natural learning systems cannot function properly when the totality of the child’s being is under duress.  There are those whose systems have been damaged before they set foot in school through harsh treatment or similar dire circumstances.

Over the years, the division between the healthy atmosphere at home and the not-so-healthy one at school became increasingly intolerable to my children.  Much of my time with them was spent trying to undo the damage done to them at school.  This usually meant trying to rebuild crushed self-esteem in some way.  Inevitably, something had to change.  As it happened, we felt that it was right to remove them from school, no matter how long they had been there.  We also felt that their bruised and battered spirits would heal naturally as they found themselves in a situation which lacked insensitive treatment.

This in fact is what happened, and I do feel I have back the happy, enthusiastic individuals it was once my privilege to know.  Last year, our first year at home, the boys spent a lot of time bringing out into the open and going over again and again the incidents of cruelty they had either witnessed, been victims of, or at times been perpetuators of themselves.  They literally spent hours rehashing all the little and not-so-little traumatic incidents they were involved in during their school lives.  This included going right back to their earliest school days.

I let them talk, wondering when they would be able to put it all behind them, as these incidents had nothing to do with their present reality.  As the peaceful days grew into months, they became more and more able to engage themselves wholeheartedly in the present.  The process was completed, and I’m grateful we undertook this venture if for no other reason than this.  The removal from the deadening and insensitive behavior that goes on in most schools has released them from the constant pressure that goes with living in an atmosphere against which one is unable to protect oneself.  That this atmosphere has permanently damaged my children, though, I cannot accept.  I have only to look on their bright eyes, faces shining with enthusiasm, boundless energy and zest for life, to know this is a lie.

They do not feel they are failures for leaving school - quite the contrary; they feel more happy, more alive, more truly themselves than they have been for ages.  It was in school that they were made, too often, to feel like failures, and this, interestingly, in spite of the fact that they got high grades.

The suggestion that older children get involved in some work they enjoy is a good one.  I made the mistake of more or less having school at home at first, but I’ve learned from this and I think children are remarkably resilient.  When you’re honestly trying, they put up with and forgive an awful lot.  As time went on, the rigid structure began to crumble as the boys began to initiate more and more, and, by consequence, to resist what I thought they should be doing.  We could perhaps have speeded up the process of deschooling had they embarked on work projects like Jim and Judy’s son Matthew, but nonetheless the process began in spite of me.

After the institutionalization they have already been subjected to, I realize the need for me to take my lead from them, rather than they from me.  How else can they rebuild confidence in their views, visions, and skills?  However, as an eternal optimist, I am sure it can be done, and I implore others never to give up hope of doing the same.

Riada’s sons added their own thoughts.  First, from Nicholas:

Homeschooling is very different from school.  There is no time limit to do things, no speed tests, no fights, it’s not as noisy.  When you homeschool you can go on nature walks and morning bike rides.  There’s no putting you down a grade; if you fail in homeschool you fail yourself.

Kids who go to school say to me that they wouldn’t homeschool because you don’t have many friends, but what about enemies?  When I went to school, as soon as I got there I was tested - not a test on math, English, art, or music, but a test on how strong, tough, or aggressive I was.  If you were not tough, strong, or aggressive, you would be considered a dropout.

And from Colin:

Being a homeschooled pupil, I am much freer to make my own decisions rather than consistently being told what to do, how to do it, etc.  Comparing me to those who are conventionally schooled is like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot.  In Ònormal school (which really is completely abnormal), you are stuffed with facts whether you really want them or not.  In homeschooling you learn what you have been motivated to discover.  In other words, you learn what you earn.  The information you have acquired is yours.

From Reggy Lauzon of Massachusetts:

It’s 9 AM and Chandi (8) has already read two chapters in her new chapter book, leafed through the 1985 Pontiac Parisienne Service Manual for twenty minutes, equally divided breakfast food into four portions with one left over for sleeping Noah, taken (in writing) a phone message, discussed with Hannah the difference between cooling with a fan and heating with the oven, and inspected our live caterpillar collection for changes in cocoon status.  She then picked up a yellow pencil and announced, This pencil says, Also Ideal for Marking Blueprints.  I’d better study.

She sat down at the table, straightened her chair, and then sat stiffly upright.  She opened the service manual again, and with a jerky motion and voice said, ÒUm hum, and made a checkmark, Òum hum and then another checkmark, and so on for about two minutes.  ÒAh, that’s enough studying, she said, and dropped into bed with her chapter book.

It never fails to amaze me how much her two years of (staggered) formal education have influenced her attitude about learning/studying.  She still occasionally asks when we will Òstart our program, and then we remind her that we are all learning together, because life is our program.

For a while, after she left school, we had to heavily monitor the type of tyrannical school play she would subject her siblings to.  We actually said to her, If we wanted Hannah and Noah to experience that, as you did, we would’ve sent you all to school!  We took you  out to protect you from that, and we do not want them to be hurt like that.  But we’ve been able to life the moratorium off the game Let’s play school, although occasionally I still jokingly interject (imitating her exaggerated hand-on-hip and shaking finger), Now class . . . .

Her volatile behavior toward her siblings is diffusing daily. No more Hannah, look at your paper.  No more, Noah, don’t scribble out of the lines.  No more, Finish your spelling or you’ll miss funtime!  Her tone of voice is becoming less condescending.  She is rarely irritable anymore, unless hungry or tired.  She laughs raucously again, something that had stopped for almost two years, and we thought at the time that she had simply outgrown it.

The other day she made a curt, demanding comment to Hannah, who began to cry.  Chandi retorted with, ÒWell that’s the way life is. . ., and then cut herself off, looked at me and said, Oh Mom, I sound just like Mrs. E (one of her old teachers).  She then comforted Hannah and they went outside together.

The changes are slow and steady.  Every day shows improvement.  Her lively imagination is resurfacing, her eyes are bright and clear, her self-image is again strong.  As her parents we have become grateful for her tremendous capacity for self-healing through self-teaching.

And from Jean Rezac (MA):

I haven’t been to school since kindergarten, but this year I decided to try ninth grade.  I wanted some more friends, I wanted to play soccer, and I wanted to try school and prove that I could do the work.  I guess I also just wanted to see what it’s like.  I was worried because I’m used to being on my own, but I knew I could always quit.  If I hadn’t had that option, it would be awful now.  I only went to school for four days.  I wanted to leave after the first day, but my dad said go for a couple of days and see if it gets better.  I just couldn’t imagine the idea of staying for four years, though - I just couldn’t take it.  I knew I didn’t want to stay, so I left.

It was really strange.  Each day was so long; it felt as though you had lived a whole day before lunch.  I was so tired when I got home at night, and then I had a couple of hours of homework.  All the other kids were used to it, but I wasnÕt.  It’s funny - my brother goes to school now, and he has adjusted really well, but I didn’t want to.

After I left I realized that I really don’t need that many friends.  I have a couple of good friends and I’m satisfied.  When I compared the options of going to school or maybe having a couple more friends, going to school didn’t seem worth it.  I found out that school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  When you read about it or see it in movies it looks like a great time, all these friends palling around, but it’s not like that, and I had to see that for myself.

I’m sorry to lose soccer, but I can play in the town league in the spring.  Unfortunately, there’s no town league here in the fall for kids my age.

Homeschooling Children With Disabilities

Rosemary Firstenberg (WA) writes:

We are enjoying our seventh year of homeschooling.  Many of my twenty children have disabilities, as I am an adoptive parent.  Their ages run from 2-24.  Only five of them are in the 8-18 range, who must be registered with the state.

Only recently have I been able to find much written by or for parents who are homeschooling children with disabilities.  Society tries so hard to brainwash parents of children who have a disability, it’s a wonder anyone ever dares to challenge it.  At birth, the mother-child bonding is often interrupted by well-meaning professionals who teach the new mother that her mother-instincts aren’t good enough for this child.

When children are young, the school programs (called infant stimulation) involve the parents.  By the time the child is 3, however, somehow the parents aren’t important anymore, except to get their child out the door to the bus and to reel the child back in eight hours later.

I sent my children to school because I believed, like most, that I had no choice.  For fourteen years, I had contact with over 144 teachers, as well as aides, therapists, bus drivers, and all the others involved in my children’s education.  (That’s leaving out all the doctors, nurses, etc. who kept in contact with the school from the hospital clinics!)  I hated it all the way, but I kept silent.  I lived for summers.

I had a burning desire to have time to enjoy my children, to know each one well.  In the summers we read books, went camping, talked endlessly.  We played together in a kind of non-stop marathon to make up for lost time,  We all slept together in our huge living room at times, in a giant slumber party, just for fun.

Each child made progress in the summer, especially with speech.  They grew close to each other.  They had time to become true friends with each other.  They stopped sitting like lumps in front of the TV.  They began to play creatively, to show interests in things that they hadn’t before.  Joy sparkled in their eyes.  They dropped all the weird behaviors they had learned from their classmates and from the children on the buses.  They became interested in stories I read them.  They no longer acted exhausted and burned-out.

Every fall, they all slid downhill again.  I knew something was terribly wrong.  Why would they learn all these good things, and make these marvelous changes, in the summer, when all we were doing was playing?  Why did they NOT make these improvements during the nine months I struggled to keep them well, in their classes, color-coordinated, and with a warm breakfast inside?  Was all this effort worthwhile?  i knew the answer was no.  The only thing missing was a solution.

A crisis brought it all to a head.  One son had been sexually molested in his mainstreamed middle school by normal boys.  After we kept him home as he sobbed out his anguish for weeks, a lady at church happened to tell me that she homeschooled.  I knew immediately that this was what I had waited fourteen long years to hear.

I felt excitement, filled with hope - hope that it was, after all, possible to change the wrong to right.  And it has worked out just that way.  It is a great privilege to watch my children learn at home.  They have learned better, more, and with wider experiences than ever before.  They have learned to be kind and good friends with each other.  We have all the benefits of summer, and more, year round.

My mother and three relatives are all teachers.  I greatly value their help and support because of my family size.  Children with disabilities are children first, and handicapped second.  Any parent who is interested and concerned, and who wants to homeschool, should feel secure that it will work.  Each family develops the style that works best for their child.

I’ll briefly cover our style.  We spend a lot of time preparing and looking forward to each new season, each new holiday, each new family activity.  We work together, play together, love each other, and learn together.  My mother, a certified teacher, does all the required professional assessments.

Thanks to GWS, we have learned how to make learning fun and natural.  Every day I keep careful records of time spent, year round, for the children who are in the age range for which the state has time requirements.  Reading together every day is one of our most important activities.  We learn math in many different ways.  We have countless books and textbooks.  We own well over two hundred educational videos, as well as videos for enjoyment.  We almost never watch TV anymore.  Our computer is almost always in use.  A lovely find was the free books-on-tape program through the mail for the disabled.

We love to sing together, though many of the children cannot carry a tune.  We dance, and have a rhythm band.  We enjoy regular dress-up times, and never seem to outgrow them.  We color, paint, and work with different art materials.  We go to church, and our faith in God has a very vital part in our lives.  A favorite activity is visiting friends who are also homeschooling, often children with disabilities too.  We walk to the library, love the science center downtown, and have a rich and varied assortment of other places to go.  We use our playground equipment and a 14-foot sunken trampoline a great deal.

I have, over the course of the years, enriched, changed, and improved each child’s homemade curriculum until I can say each is excellent.  This is the Individualized Education Program at its best!

I would be happy to write to anyone who would like to correspond.

Queries

These readers have questions they would like other readers to answer.  We will forward mail addressed to them, and will print the replies that are of the most general interest, if you give us permission (please tell us whether it’s OK to use your name, too).

From Diane Cross of California:

What does GWS offer to someone who is not homeschooling?  Well, I am homeschooling in a way - as do most parents for a time - since I have a 3 year old.  And even though my 12 year old is in public school, there are a lot of hours when she is out of school and so I’m also homeschooling then.  Above all, I’m really enjoying reading a forum for people writing about alternative (to the mainstream) ways of thinking and living.  It’s exciting!

I have toyed with the idea of no public schooling for my daughter, but she is on the shy side and I think a place where she can see a lot of the same kids year after year is reassuring and comfortable for her.  In the many groups outside of school she’s been in, people come and go a lot more (although she’s now attending a ballet school where it looks like she might have that continuity of friends as a lot of the girls have been there for years).

I’m curious as to whether there are other GWS subscribers who are not homeschoolers but who find value in reading independent, thoughtful remarks regarding the rearing of children.
(continued on page 27)

JOHN HOLT’s BOOK AND MUSIC STORE

NEW WRITING AND HISTORY BOOKS

Market Guide for Young Writers- by Kathy Henderson

Have you ever dreamed of getting a poem, story, or book review published?  Of people reading it and saying, Hey, that’s pretty good?  I have, many times, and that dream came true for me when I got ahold of Market Guide for Young Writers.  I used the listing of magazines that like to get kids material and found out about Stone Soup.  Stone Soup  is a magazine for and by kids which is put out by the Children’s Art Institute in California.  I have gotten a book review and some drawings published already and I’m still submitting stuff.  And I’d never heard of it before I found Market Guide for Young Writers.

But this book isn’t just a book of magazines and contests.  One of the sections is ÒProfiles of Young Writers.  This part has interviews with kids who are doing very well with their writing.  I liked this section because it got me motivated.  I said, Hey!  I could do that, too!  It’s also neat to know that there are  other kids who love to write as much as I do.

Another helpful section is the ÒHow to Prepare Your Manuscript section.  That sounds pretty boring, but really it’s a lot of things you should know if you’re going to submit some writing.  It tells you how to edit your work, what to send where, how to keep track of what you’ve submitted, and much, much more.

I liked Kathy Henderson’s easy-to-read style.  She obviously knows what she’s writing about and has surely had lots of experience.

All in all, I think this book is an invaluable tool that everyone who loves to write must have.  Then you, like me, can make your dream of becoming a published writer come true.
– Mika Perrine

How Writers Write- Pamela Lloyd, ed.

When I talk to groups of parents about children’s writing, I say that we should let children see that adult writers struggle over early drafts, revise their work, rely on the help of others.  If kids only see published books, it’s easy for them to conclude that written works appear by magic.  They may think that only children have to write several drafts and make changes and corrections.

There are many ways to read about how writers work and to see facsimiles of early drafts.  We had never seen a collection in which authors of classic children’s  books described how they worked, though, until we discovered How Writers Write.  In this wonderful book, well-known and beloved authors such as Madeleine L’Engle, Beverly Cleary, Lloyd Alexander, and Arnold Lobel talk about how they get their ideas, what they do when the writing isn’t going well, why they write in the first place, and how they revise their work and use their editors.

Here is Arnold Lobel:

The ideas for my stories are always related to my own life.  They come from a collision of all different kinds of things, like a patchwork quilt.  The Frog and Toad  stories began when my daughter had a pet toad, but all the incidents in the books are expressing good and bad feelings that I had about my life.

And Beverly Cleary:

My characters come from both what I’ve seen and what I’ve imagined.  Henry Huggins is really a composition of some boys I knew in school when I was growing up.  In early childhood, I was very much like Ramona, but once I started school I quickly turned into Ellen Tebbits, the most autobiographical of my characters.

How Writers Write  includes authors of picture books, humor, fantasy, historical fiction, adventure stories, poetry and non-fiction, so there’s something for everyone.  I can imagine parents reading to their young children about authors they will already recognize (like Lobel), and older children reading about some of the other authors on their own.  It could also be fun for families to read aloud a favorite book together and then dip into How Writers Write  to see what the author has to say about that book.

One of the most useful parts of this book is the chance to see how different writers handle tough spots.  Picture-book author Steven Kellogg says, Ò[Sometimes] I can’t think of the words, or the words and pictures don’t tell the events and the feelings the way that I want the reader to see them.  If that happens, and I can’t work my way through it on the spot, then I stop and do something else.  Usually I do something totally away from writing a book.  It may help children to know that adults do this, and that it’s a fine way to handle being stuck.  Humorist Max Dann, on the other hand, says, ÒWhen I can’t get any ideas, or nothing is happening, I always push on anyway.  It means, nevertheless, that I might write for two days or two weeks and hate everything I do.  But I know I have to push myself to go on, because eventually it’s going to break and IÕll be happy with what I’m writing.  So there are many ways to handle the same problem.

I don’t want to give away any more of these interesting insights and revelations; I hope you will enjoy discovering them for yourselves.  IÕll just add that I don’t think this book will be interesting only  to children who like reading and writing.  It would be valuable to any child who is curious about the process behind finished products and who would appreciate reassurance that adults don’t always get things right the first time.
– Susannah Sheffer

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

I have been hooked on how to write books for as long as I can remember.  Sometimes I seem to spend more time reading about writing than actually writing.  But for the first time ever I’ve found a book that had me picking up pen and paper to write - not worrying about how  I was going to write, but just doing  it.  In fact, I could hardly decide whether to continue reading, or to put the book down so I could write.  I finally decided to try out Natalie Goldberg’s fifteen-minute Òpractice sessions in between reading chapters of this wonderful book.

Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,  comments on Writing Down the Bones:  ÒThe secret of creativity, Natalie Goldberg makes clear, is to subtract rules for writing, not add them.  It’s a process of uneducation rather than education.  Most people are baffled as to how to teach this, since teaching and uneducation appear contradictory.

Advocates of homeschooling can understand this concept easily, and this is the perfect book for those who advocate unschooling - letting kids experience, rather than learn about, how to write.

Although the book is aimed at adults, urging them to follow an unlearning process, I see children benefitting from parents who realize that they don’t have to encumber their offspring with their hangups about spelling, punctuation, and editing as they write.  The author pierces through the layers of apprehension that keep us from writing down the bones - that simple, clear, writing from our hearts that is so hard to do.

I used to sit down with the intention of doing some important writing, and would quite literally freeze up.  Sometimes after trying to get started on a big project, like the book I long to write, I couldn’t write anything at all, not even letters to my friends, for days.  Needless to say, I have never been able to write a book.

I think I was always reading books about writing in the hope that someone would give me some magical instructions on how to write.  Although they write books loaded with rules about how not  to write, most authors wind up telling you that writing cannot be taught - that either you have the talent or you donÕt.  Natalie Goldberg, on the other hand, tells you how to free yourself to write.  I know my worst fear has always been that I’ll write something really bad; I think that’s a fear most would-be writers share.  This fear has kept me from writing what I really want to write.  This book gave me permission to write badly - to get the garbage out of my system so that I will be able to write good stuff.  The author sees bad writing as a kind of fertilizer for the good writing that will eventually come with enough practice.  She calls it composting:

Our senses by themselves are dumb.  They take in experience, but they need the richness of sifting for a while through our consciousness and through our whole bodies.  I call this Òcomposting.  Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grounds and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil.  Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories.  But this does not come all at once.  It takes time.  Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

I’ve learned so much from Natalie Goldberg: to trust in myself as a writer, to allow myself to fail, not to expect great writing right away, and to give myself time.  Those are the same lessons I’ve learned in homeschooling my kids, but I had never been able to apply them to my writing until I read this book.
– Pam Gingold

Sing for Freedom by Guy and Candie Carawan

I’d almost forgotten, till I opened this book, what a powerful and important force music was in the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties.  Editors Guy and Candie Carawan, musicians, educators, and social activists, have given us the history of that movement through the songs that emerged from and inspired it.  The spirit of the era is brought further to life through eloquent firsthand accounts and 135 stunning documentary photos.

All of the 115 songs include lyrics, melodies, and chords.  Some of them, like ÒWe Shall Overcome and ÒIf I Had a Hammer, are world-famous.  Others are little known, and might have disappeared forever but for the CarawansÕ foresight in recording them.  Many were made up spontaneously, on the spot, to boost morale along arduous protest marches or while serving prison sentences.  Often they were written by adding new lyrics to old hymns, blues melodies, labor songs, and even rock “n” roll tunes of the period.  They reflect the emotions of people in the act of struggling for social change - the passionate idealism, the furious defiance, the stubborn belief in the possibility of a better world.

No words can do proper justice to the photographs, which more than once brought me to tears.  But here are excerpts from one of the personal accounts, a letter from a young freedom fighter in Mississippi:

Dear folks,

Last night I was a long time before sleeping, although I was extremely tired.  Every shadow, every noise - the bark of a dog, the sound of a car - in my fear and exhaustion was turned into a terrorist’s approach.  And I believed that I heard the back door open and a Klansman walk in, until he was close by the bed.  Almost paralyzed by the fear, silent, I finally shone my flashlight on the spot where I thought he was standing.  I tried consciously to overcome this fear.  To relax, I began to breathe deep, think the words of a song, pull the sheet up close to my neck.

The songs help to dissipate the fear.  Some of the words in the songs do not hold real meaning on their own, others become rather monotonous - but when they are sung in unison, or sung silently to oneself, they take on a new meaning beyond words or rhythm. . . .  There is almost a religious quality about some of these songs, having little to do with the usual concepts of God.  It has to do with the miracle that youth has organized to fight hatred and ignorance.  It has to do with the holiness of the dignity of man.  The God that makes such miracles is the God I do believe in when we sing, ÒGod is on our side.

Sing for Freedom  recalls vividly an important era in American history.  Yet these songs are more than just history; they are part of a continuum; they are still alive.  ÒWe Shall Overcome began as an Afro-American spiritual and became a theme song for union activists before its appearance as the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.  Since then, it has been adopted (and further adapted, no doubt) by South African freedom fighters, Chinese students, and striking Appalachian miners.

It makes me happy to imagine that somewhere a kid with a guitar will discover Sing for Freedom, try strumming one of the songs, and go on to give it new lyrics that will inspire a whole new movement for social justice.  It makes me hopeful to think of these songs re-emerging in different forms, among different people in different parts of the globe, as part of a common, ongoing struggle to create a better world.

The Sing for Freedom  documentary cassette tape includes 26 of the songs from the book, with extensive liner notes.  Although the cassette wasn’t available to me at review time, I am sure that hearing these songs, as they were actually sung at meetings, marches, and rallies, would be a valuable enhancement to the book.
– Katherine McAlpine

Maus by Art Spiegelman

When I grew up in the Bronx I knew an elderly couple who ran a candy store down the block from my dad’s office.  I spent a fair amount of time in their store while I waited for Dad to finish his work.  I remember the delicious egg cream sodas they made for me at their fountain, their big inventory of candy and comic books, but what I remember most of all was when I noticed that each had serial numbers carved into their arms.  I must have been about 12 then, and I was aware of World War II from TV and games, but this was how I gained my first awareness of the Holocaust; it made an indelible impression on me.  Now that the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust are quite old, I am struck by how important books, tapes and films about the Holocaust are, since they will become the primary way our children will be able to learn about this terrible chapter in modern history.  Books like The Diary of Anne Frank, Man’s Search for Meaning,   and all the other first-hand accounts of the Holocaust are therefore even more important to us now than they were when they were first published.  But among all these fine books, Maus  stands out as an incredible and different one.

Art Spiegelman, the author/artist, has created a unique personal memoir, not a political polemic.  The book focuses on political events from the point of view of the Òlittle people who are affected by them.  The story unfolds as a series of flashbacks told by both father and son.  It starts with the son’s visiting his father in present-day Queens, NY.  We learn that he and his father really don’t get along, but that he wants to write a book about his father’s life in Poland during World War II.  The father finally agrees to tell his story.

The words and pictures shift back in time as they do in movies - sometimes with the present-day father’s voice being heard over the past-tense scenes we view, more often with the characters from the past speaking and acting as if they were living out their stories before our eyes today.  When the story gets too intense, or the father gets tired, we shift back to present-day Queens, and find the son now grappling with his conflicting emotions about his father.  His view of his father as an obstinate authoritarian is gradually tempered as he gains insights into the difficult and sometimes gruesome times his father survived.  But the tensions between father and son are more difficult to resolve than this facile description might make you think; while this book has wonderful narrative clarity, it does not slip into simplistic comic book presentations of family relations or of the Holocaust.  The subject matter is very mature and the comic book format should not lead parents to give this book to children who are not ready to handle this topic.

The father’s tone of voice and dialect are beautifully rendered throughout this tale, and the black-and-white illustrations add a force and dimension to the words that I cannot describe.  The Jews are drawn as mice, the Nazis as cats.  All else, like the story itself, is presented realistically and actually took place.

The page I’ve chosen to give you the flavor of this book illustrates the registration of Jews at the Dienst stadium in Poland.  Jewish families with lots of kids, old people, and people without work cards are sent to the left side of the stadium; the others have their passports stamped with a big ÒJ and are sent to the right.  Vladek, the author’s father, and his wife Anja are sent to the right:

As you can see, the reader encounters huge swaths of humanity in this tale, presented as vignettes, subplots, or as part of the main story.  For instance, we see the Spiegelmans get their business running successfully, only to have it ruined by the Nazi occupation of Poland; the friends of the family slowly and subtly avoid and turn against the Spiegelmans as anti-Jewish propaganda floods their city; Poland’s gradual slide into the Nazis power; the reluctant but often kind and unexpected assistance of people who aid the Jews in their attempts to avoid being sent to the concentration camps; and, most distressing of all, the betrayals of those hiding from the Nazis.

The book ends with Vladek and his wife Anja being loaded onto trains to Auschwitz, and the son and father - well, I don’t want to give everything away.  The book promises that Part Two, 1944 to Present, is forthcoming.  After reading Maus  I think you will anxiously await, as I do, the last half of this incredibly moving and unique book.               – Pat Farenga

FOCUS:
Learning About Other Opinions

Some people worry that homeschooled children and teenagers never get a chance to hear about views or opinions that are different from the ones their parents hold.  To show that this is often not the case, we asked several homeschoolers to describe how they are able to hear about other people’s opinions and, sometimes, to form differing opinions of their own.

We Don’t Live in Glass Bubbles From Amber Clifford of Missouri

I have been homeschooled for six years.  I was in public school through the fourth grade, and then my parents took me out.  It makes me angry when people who actually know nothing about homeschooling assume that I rely only on what my parents tell me.  The truth is that I am more aware of different opinions now than I ever was in public school.

My parents have always taken special care to see that I knew different views on a subject.  I also realize that most people my age (I’m almost 16) are already learning about different views by themselves.  Those things don’t change the fact that ill-informed people still think that I live in some sort of sheltered environment.

I learn different views from lots of places.  I belong to a large 4-H club, where we all talk about almost everything.  I don’t think that any of us hold the same opinion.  I also read newspapers and books, and I watch news programs all the time.

I have lots of discussions with my friends and family.  Recently my Aunt Vicky came to visit.  She has a definite opinion about everything.  Some of the talks my mother and I had with her about politics, family, and school have changed the way I think about those things.  On this visit we had lots of talks about the Persian Gulf crisis, and its similarities to the Vietnam War.  My mother and I have talked many times about Vietnam, and it was interesting to hear another person’s point of view, whether I agree with it or not.  I also have a close friend whom I talk to about Vietnam.  Neither one of us will have to go to war (hopefully), but we still talk about our worries about the Persian Gulf, and our knowledge of the Vietnam War.

I take special care to see that I don’t have a one-sided opinion.  I have known many homeschoolers, and only a handful of them were not open-minded.  I think that a person who thinks homeschoolers rely only on their parents opinions should get to know home-taught kids and their environment better.  We don’t live in glass bubbles.

Listening to Discussions

From Ariella Atchison-Nevel (FL):

I’m 12, and only briefly have I ever been to school.  Before I got your letter I never really gave any thought to the subject, but now that I think about it I realize I get many other views and opinions from many things, such as the newspaper, TV, friends, relatives, and books.

Here’s an example of a time I got to hear another’s opinion.  I was in my grandfather’s restaurant when a friend of the family came and sat down with us.  Somehow the issue of the death penalty came up between my dad and the family friend, who is an assistant district attorney.

The assistant DA said that in the Bible it says, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and to him that means a life for a life.  But my dad said that if the Bible had meant a life for life it would have said it, and that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth means a certain limit of what the punishment may be.

This has happened many times on many different subjects.  Often when we have family gatherings all of my relatives have political discussions and most have different opinions on all the subjects.

Disagreements Within Family

From Amber Heintzberger of Pennsylvania:

Difference of opinion occurs quite often in our family.  It may be a simple thing, such as deciding what to have for lunch or what movie to watch, or it might be different opinions about the situation in the Middle East.

The day before we received the letter from GWS inviting us to write about this, my family had a discussion about this issue.  My mother is concerned that my brother and I think for ourselves instead of simply accepting her opinions.

We read magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and National Geographic.  We watch the evening news and read the newspaper.  All of these resources help us to develop our own opinions about current events.

A few weeks ago we read The Prince and the Pauper.  My mom didn’t really like the story or the use of olde English, but she liked the social message Òbehind the story.  I happened to like the story, and I enjoyed figuring out the words and phrases that we no longer use.  We agreed, however, that Twain’s story is as important to read today as it was when it was written.

I have a horse that I ride in combined training.  It is a really fun sport, but it can also be dangerous.  I would like to complete in the upper levels of combined training some day, but my mom worries that I might get hurt.  I understand her point of view, but I think that if you take it one step at a time and never try to do more than you are capable of, it’s pretty safe.  Our opinions differ on this, but we are taking it one step at a time, too.

Individual opinions are important to us, as they should be for everybody.  I mean, if everyone thought the same way, this would be a pretty boring world to live in!

Thinking for Yourself

From Land Heintzberger of Pennsylvania:

I feel that the idea that homeschoolers do not have their own opinions is wrong.  I think that homeschoolers have more opinions of their own than kids who go to regular school, because they do not have to deal with so much peer pressure.

My parents think that it is very important for my sister and me to have our own opinions.  The day before we received your letter, we had a talk about how important it is that we think for ourselves.  Right now we are considering moving to North Carolina, and my parents often ask me what I think about this.

We receive many magazines, such as Newsweek, which I enjoy reading.  I also watch the news and read the newspaper.  It helps to know about what is happening in the world if you are going to have an opinion on it.

Right now we are studying World War I, and my mother is often asking our thoughts on things ranging from the Germans sinking the Lusitania to the Fourteen Points, President Wilson’s plan for peace.

Earlier this month I had to take the CTBS test.  I thought that it should be an essay-type test, instead of multiple choice.  I feel that multiple choice tests are a very inaccurate way to determine a student’s intelligence.  The pleasant way that the test was given changed my opinion about taking it.  It was not as boring as I thought it would be.

It is very important to think for yourself and to have your own opinion.  Without that you are not your own person.

Different Religious Beliefs

From Becky Cauthen (GA):

I find others opinions in many ways.  By reading the paper and watching the news you learn the journalistsÕ and reporters views.  Being in clubs such as Girl Scouts, youth groups, 4-H, and others, you often have group discussions and special speakers.  Older friends and neighbors usually have different views and often don’t mind sharing them.

I’ve found religious opinions are the ones most different.  My parents believe in going to church and are strong Baptists, while several of my friends don’t believe in church or even God.

Every day I’m in contact with others opinions.

Everything Isn’t Black and White

From Eleadari Acheson (WA):

I noticed that different people have different ideas when I was 13.  It kind of frightened me.  There was a time when even my Dad scared me because I was afraid my ideas were different from his.

At that time I lived in a secluded part of town that consisted mostly of retired people.  I didn’t know many people and I spent most of my time on a nearby wildlife refuge.  I had thirty pen-pals but most of the time we wrote about our pets or collections, and the ones who did write about their ideas I found a little intimidating.  There was one public schooler living next door who was the same age as me.  He gave me the impression that public schoolers are not, in general, nice people.  I didn’t consciously think about it but I avoided contact with school-age people.

When we moved to a more populated area, my family joined a homeschooling support group.  I was the oldest student (besides my sister) and one of the few non-religious homeschoolers there.  I felt slightly out of place but I still enjoyed myself.  I liked listening to parents talk about their experiences and theories.  I asked my parents about these theories and although I got objective answers they were still from my parentsÕ point of view.

When I got a job in retail, I soon discovered whole areas of ideas I had never heard before.  Working at a used bookstore, the best thing I did was become a good listener.  People love to talk.  I soon realized not everything is black and white, nor as easy to assimilate as my parents make it seem.  Then the bookstore started selling baseball cards and I got my first real exposure to public school kids.  They came in after school with a wide variety of opinions and some went out of their way to tell them.

Recently, I met a girl at my gymnastics class who invited me to a school football game.  It wasn’t as fun to me as hiking or exploring, but I did enjoy myself and I met some neat people.  I’m starting to mingle with different types of people and, for a change, I’m enjoying it.  I still have most of the ideas my parents have, but I’m learning to appreciate others opinions as well.

Access to Information

From Jeremiah Gingold (CA):

I think that the question itself, of whether or not homeschoolers can get opinions other than their parents, is totally absurd.  It should be obvious to anyone that there are as many opinions on any given subject as there are people in the world.

I am 14, I have been homeschooled for my whole life up until this year, when I started attending a small alternative public high school part-time.  I have been extremely aware of others opinions for as long as I can remember.  My parents are political activists, and I always have access to a lot of information, from all sides, on any subject from abortion  to the current crisis in the MIddle East.  I get my information from books, TV, radio talk shows, magazines, newspapers, and, more often than not, my parents.

My parents have always been major providers of information, either by directly answering my questions or by referring me to places where I can find my own answers.  They have always done their best to make sure that I get all sides of an issue.  They have taught me that nothing is black and white, and you must explore each subject thoroughly to develop your own opinions.

In my family we all develop our opinions together, giving each other lots of input as we discuss issues.  We literally saturate ourselves with information from every possible source.  We listen to liberals, conservatives, and moderates talk on the radio and on TV.  Even after our views are formed, they are still subject to change, or at least modification.  When we hear our opinions challenged we are forced to reidentify them in our own minds, and clarify them by putting them into words.

Living in the Real World

From Serena Gingold (CA):

I’m really surprised that anyone would think homeschooling kids don’t know that other people have other opinions.  In my experience it’s the school kids who don’t realize that other people have different opinions.  Perhaps it is only like this here, but I’ve found that the kids who go to school choose their opinions in the same way they choose their clothes - the same as everyone else’s.  In school the teachers are not encouraged to give their own opinions, or the parents around here complain.  And now they are censoring books - how will these kids ever learn different ideas?  I think that school should  be a place to learn different opinions, but in many cases this just isn’t so.

My family and I run a homeschooling newsletter called Homeschoolers for Peace Pen Pal Network.  The kids who write for it have many different opinions.  They share them with others who may or may not agree with what they say.  The kids read what their fellow members write and get several different opinions.  This, of course, is not the only way they get their views.  In order to write about your opinions you have to be really clear about how you feel.  Sometimes this takes a lot of work - research and discussion.

I think most homeschoolers learn about opinions at an early age, just because they ARE homeschooling, and many people disagree with that.  Most parents have to explain to their kids that these other people have different opinions.

One of the first times I can remember learning about different opinions is when I first got interested in politics.  I must have been about 5 years old, and we were watching the Democratic National Convention on TV.  I already knew that my parents never agreed with Ronald Reagan, and I was totally amazed by Jesse Jackson’s speech.  I remember being struck by the fact that he had many of the same opinions my parents did.  That got me so excited.

When I first learned about the political parties I used to look at them in very simple terms, like the Republicans were the Òbad guys and the Democrats were good.  But soon I learned to listen to what the people were actually saying, and I found that there is a lot more to opinions than just labels.

Sometimes my grandma says to me, But of course you believe this or that - our family has always believed that! and I have to explain to her that in our family we all have our own opinions.

Lately I’ve become involved in local politics, due to an election for school superintendent (my friend ran for and won the office).  There’s been a lot of disagreement in our town about the election.  I’ve written letters to the editor about my opinions.  You really learn a lot about opinions when you publicly voice your own.  I’ve also been publicly criticized, and my county fair projects were censored because they were too political (actually because I  was too political for a kid!).  One letter in the paper criticized me for being a kid and having  opinions!  People always say I should go to school so I can learn about the real world, but I’m living  in the real world!

Disagreed About Ice Skating

From Jamie Smith (MD):

I do so many activities that I’ve always gotten to know a lot of different people.  Also, just from reading newspapers and magazines, I see so many different opinions.

My parents listen to classical music, and to the oldies station on the radio, and I know a lot of other people think that’s stupid.  They think that you should listen to what’s new.  I hear that opinion all the time, even though I like the same kinds of music that my parents like.

I know there’s lots of controversy among parents about violent toys.  Some parents say you get violent feelings out when you use them, others say you shouldn’t let children have them.  We’ve never had a lot of violent toys in my family, but my parents don’t forbid them.  When I was really into Robin Hood years ago, I had different bows and arrows.  I think it’s not that the toys are violent, it’s the way children use them.  I know that a lot of children do use them violently, but you could use water guns, for example, so they’re not violent - you could just squirt a drink of water into someone else’s mouth or something.  But I know that many people have a different opinion about violent toys than my parents do.

A couple of years ago I was doing a lot of competing in ice skating, and I was spending a lot of time at it.  My Dad kept saying, I never see you anymore, you’re always traveling around and not spending enough time with the family, and it’s so expensive.  I didn’t want to stop competing, though.  Dad talked with someone else about it, and ended up saying it was OK.  Now I’m competing less, but because I’m moving in different directions in ice skating, not because I changed my opinion to be the same as Dad’s.

My Parents Let Me Be My Own Person

From Ami Carnahan of Washington:

I may not be of any help in answering this question because I do take two classes at a public school in the area.  But when I homeschooled, there were many reasons that I developed my own set of opinions.  My parents encouraged me to do so, and I had my own friends.  If I’m lucky, some of their ways, beliefs and values rubbed off onto me.  I also had church, books, youth group, and oh-so-many other things.

My homeschool group, the Bible, friends, common sense, church, and my parents as well, helped me realize that mine and my parentsÕ views weren’t the only existing truths.  Also, I went to a regular school ’til seventh grade.  Not, however, that that helped matters. . .

My parents, though, they helped me develop the vital principles and my high standards, let me be my own person, to develop my own character.  Some parents wouldn’t do that.  I’m a lucky one in every ten or so, I guess.

Learning Through Music

From Nica Christensen of Wisconsin

I don’t think I’ve got any political views that are different from my parents, but I do have different musical interests.  I don’t know how I got interested in Woody Guthrie, but I think it was a Larry Long tape, Larry Long, Tribute to Woody Guthrie.  After listening to that tape, I started really getting into different musicians who I learned a lot from.  For instance, Pete Seeger is always fighting for the rights of working people, and often he does it through song.  So, listening to his and other folkiesÕ music, I learned a lot about unions, strikes, and women’s rights.  I realized also that there were many opinions about these things.  I enjoyed learning about them, and since listening to music at least once a day is a habit of mine, I really feel like I learned a lot.

Woody also wrote about the dust bowl and the Depression, and being interested in him, I read his books.  By the way, it might be helpful to know that I play banjo and fiddle.  I have researched many books on the dust bowl and Depression and it is one of my favorite time periods in U.S. history.

I’ve developed these interests on my own, and because I homeschool I’ve had time to follow them.

Rethinking Mathematics: Interview with William Higginson

[SS]:  In GWS #63, Aaron Falbel wrote about how mathematics could be seen as part of ordinary, everyday life.  Then, in an interview in GWS #65, educational theorist Seymour Papert (author of  Mindstorms) talked about why people in our culture are so afraid of math, and what might be done about it.  Both Aaron’s and Seymour Papert’s comments generated a lot of response from our readers, and in the two years since then we have continued to receive, and to print, letters about what math really is, how some people become afraid of it, and parentsÕ concerns about teaching it.  To generate some discussion of these issues again, incorporating several of the questions that parents have asked over the past couple of years, we interviewed William Higginson, a mathematics education professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and a frequent visitor to Papert’s Learning and Epistemology group at MIT, and asked Aaron Falbel to join the discussion as well.

Susannah Sheffer:  Do you make the same distinction that Seymour Papert makes between school math and real math?

William Higginson:  Very much so.  ÒSchool math is a strange and not very wonderful collection of rituals and perversities that are inflicted on almost every child.  There’s very little in common between what the vast majority of the population thinks of as mathematics, and what the discipline really is.

SS:  How did that happen?

WH:  There’s a number of possible answers.  One is a political power issue: mathematics has become a way of erecting a barrier for a lot of children; it has served the purposes of some members of the culture who need ways of convincing other members of the culture that they’re not capable of certain ways of thought, shouldn’t feel they can understand things but should sit down, shut up, and do what they’re told.  School math has become the way of learning that message.  And then, as John Holt so sensitively documented, we get this result: children desperately trying to get out from under the pressure of having to be right, in a terribly arbitrary and decontextualized situation.

Aaron Falbel:  Seymour Papert has a different interpretation of why school math is the way it is, which doesn’t in any way detract from Bill’s.  He says that if you look at the technology of school, and the environment, you essentially have a classroom, a desk, a pencil, and paper.  What type of mathematics can you realistically do with that?  Well, you can do sums, you can do all sorts of figuring on paper.  That type of mathematics - or, actually, arithmetic - is what predominates in school.  It’s easy to organize, to grade, to give tests on - it’s the type of mathematics that best fits in with the way school works.

WH:  Much as I admire Seymour’s insights in many ways, I think it’s somewhat naive to think that technology is automatically going to make a big difference.  The teacher who is going to be able to use the computer in imaginative ways is probably already using the paper and pencil in imaginative ways, but the teacher who feels that mathematics with paper and pencil is about sums, and lots of emphasis on technique, and right and wrong, and dividing kids into smart and dumb, is not going to change that perspective just because there’s a computer in the classroom.  That computer may be capable of running some marvelous software, but it’s also capable of running software that is consistent with the old Òpaper and pencils and quizzes mentality.  In this sense, it seems quite likely that putting computers in classrooms will just amplify what already exists there.

AF:  Yes, it may have been true at some point that school math derived from the nature of the technology that was available, but just changing the technology won’t necessarily change the mindset of the people in school.

SS:  For people who have trouble imagining any of this, can you give an example of how school math differs from what mathematicians really do?

WH:  I think the general public has a hard time getting a grasp of what it is that mathematicians do these days.  If being good at mathematics means being good at sums, then surely Texas Instruments has put mathematicians out of business in recent years.  One can’t blame people for thinking that.  But the reality is that being good at mathematics has much more to do with a sensitivity to pattern than it has to do with calculation.  Now, those of us who take this perspective don’t mean that we don’t want children to be good at doing sums, but we want them to be good at doing sums because they find them intriguing, because they look for patterns and try to prove that these patterns must be structured in particular ways, and they notice them occurring in nature - like the example of patterns occurring in pinecones, in that nice book by Mark Wahl that you sell [A Mathematical Mystery Tour].

For better or for worse, our society has become mathematized in recent decades, and I think that instead of asking, ÒWill my child have a reason to use mathematics?, we need to ask, ÒIf children don’t understand some fundamental mathematical ideas, are they in a position to make informed decisions about a number of significant issues that are going to face society in the next few decades?  The result of the traditional teaching of mathematics is to convince a large majority of children that they are not competent, that this is an area where they should not attempt to understand what is going on.

SS:  When Aaron wrote, back in GWS #63, that mathematics was about noticing pattern, this excited many of our readers, and one reason it did, I think, was that people who thought their children had not been doing much math could now see math in other activities.  They might say, ÒMy child loves music, or puzzles, or quilting, and feel justified in seeing that as mathematics.  But I think some people wonder whether that’s cheating, whether it’s really OK to list those activities under ÒMath in a report to school officials.

WH:  I don’t think merely observing the pattern is enough to call it mathematics.  I think you must have some degree of analysis or attempt to understand why the pattern is generated in that particular way, and how it’s likely to continue.  But if you’re doing that, with weaving or quilting or computer graphics, that would be a good example of doing mathematics.  Rather than thinking, ÒI can do these marvelous, open-ended, creative activities with my child in music, art, and language, but for math I have to go back to the textbook, parents should realize that mathematics has the same potential as these other disciplines.

SS:  If parents want to do math with their children in more interesting ways, what might they do besides sitting down with a textbook?

AF:  Here’s a good example:  I was sitting in the living room of a family in Denmark, none of them would have at all described themselves as mathematicians.  One member of the family had a large coin collection, and someone else spontaneously wondered how many coins she had.  We all began thinking of different ways that we could determine how many coins there were, without actually counting them.  That seems to me to be exactly the type of thinking about pattern, thinking about structure, wondering about a formal way of figuring out an answer, that we’re describing here.  Some people said maybe we could weigh the box, and then weigh a few coins and extrapolate from there.  Others tried to calculate the geometry of the box: if the box is so big, and the coins take up this much room, how many coins would there be?  I think this type of mathematical wondering does happen naturally a lot of the time.

SS:  It seems to me that even parents who were not particularly comfortable with math could take up a question like that and try to answer it with their children.

What about kids who have had a bad experience and been turned off to math?  This unfortunately happens to kids who don’t go to school too, sometimes.

WH:  One of the things about homeschooling that has always intrigued me and simultaneously saddened me is the extent to which parents who have rejected a system which does not treat their children as whole people, which is fragmented, competitive, unattractive in many ways, then import some of those things into their home, through the medium of mathematics.  This may be conscious or unconscious.  It’s understandable, of course: we have the problem of getting out of a cycle, since parents have been taught math in just this way.  There are some very good resources around, though.  Harold JacobsÕ books are very good.  There are some public television programs that attempt to lessen the fear associated with mathematics.  Marilyn Burns, the author of The I Hate Mathematics Book, has produced some good materials.  We’re in a transitional stage, though; there’s a tendency to overplay the fun elements, the motivational elements, without following up on them or understanding the powerful ideas that are embedded in those activities.

There are many children’s games that embody quite advanced mathematical ideas - tic-tac-toe, for example.  If you look at it in a particular way, thinking about what the various starting moves are, and given a particular starting point, what the next moves are.  Questions around mathematical ideas of symmetry come up very quickly.

SS:  Going back to school math for a minute, it seems to me that a big problem with it is that math teachers aren’t always mathematicians, and may not even know what’s wrong with the way they’re teaching.

WH:  As someone who works with teachers professionally, and has many friends who are teachers, I tend to be charitably disposed to them as individuals.  But having said that, I do think that more than in other subjects, people who teach mathematics don’t do mathematics.  And unfortunately I think mathematics often attracts authoritarian teachers.  If you’re teaching literature and a child has a different opinion about a book, there’s not much you can do - that’s the child’s view.  But if a child says that 3 plus 4 is 2, the child is wrong and the teacher is right.  Too often mathematics becomes a way for a teacher to assert authority.

SS:  I’m not even sure that teachers of other subjects do practice what they teach, but I guess the really important point is that even if they do, children in school have so little opportunity to see them doing it.  When a parent comes to me and says, ÒI’m not comfortable with writing, I can respond with several suggestions about how that child might have access to practicing writers.  What would be ways for children to see mathematicians at work?  Can children apprentice themselves to mathematicians?

AF:  Right now it’s hard to imagine a child wanting to do that, because so much of the math that children come in contact with is so offputting.  But suppose a child starts asking questions about probability, and suppose you as a parent can’t answer that.  Where do you go?  There are mathematicians, scientists, engineers, who could answer that, who could work with the child, and in answering the question might lead into all sorts of other things, and a relationship, an apprenticeship, might develop.

SS:  I think in our culture we have to work extra hard just to enable children to see people who love math, who aren’t afraid of it.

WH:  People are generally fascinated, across age and social class, with puzzles of various sorts.  Often the skills which are required to solve puzzles are precisely those which children are finding so unpalatable in the authoritarian context of the classroom.

SS:  I think it’s safe to say that homeschoolers generally understand that there are real-life uses for basic arithmetic.  They tend to be comfortable saying that their child will learn fractions through cooking, and so on.  But then when it comes to high school math - often the point at which the parents themselves began to have trouble - they have a harder time finding those real-world connections.  It’s harder to see how one uses algebra, or trigonometry, in daily life.

WH:  One could function on a day to day basis with words of one syllable, but it would be preferable to have a broader way of expressing oneself, and I think the same is true with regard to mathematics.  Maybe you could get by with very little, but the more you understand, the more you can do, or say, or understand.

One way to look at this is to ask, ÒWhat are the problems that face the world today, and what do I need, as a citizen of the world who is trying to cope with these problems?  People wonder how calculus is used.  Well, at the root of many of our environmental problems, for example, lies a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of growth.  If calculus is about anything, it’s about how things change over time.  Another example is that it’s very easy to be misled about all sorts of things if you don’t understand some statistical ideas.

AF:  Of course the words Òdaily life are a bit tricky.  If you mean them in the most literal sense, then I would have to say that I don’t use algebra or calculus every single day.  But if by daily life you mean the world around us as opposed to the artificiality of the school curriculum, then of course even Òhigher math is all around us, and we can use it to understand the world better.

Before, I mentioned probability, and just now Bill mentioned statistics.  Every day we are bombarded with statistics warning us about the risks involved in eating certain foods, or the chances of being in a plane crash, or the Òsafety of nuclear power plants, or the chances of contracting some sort of illness.  How do we evaluate all of this?  How do we know what to believe, what is statistically relevant?  Should we believe what doctors say about cholesterol?  This is as much a mathematical problem as it is a nutritional one.

WH:  Most people have the experience of driving a car.  When it gets dark - which, by the way, is totally determined by geometric principles - we turn on our headlights.  How do those headlights operate?  That happens to be directly connected to quadratic equations.  Or suppose you take a carton of milk from the refrigerator and open it up.  Inherent in that act are a range of mathematical principles, some of which we’ve known for thousands of years and some of which we’re still struggling with.  An example of one we’re still struggling with: when you pour that milk out of the opening in the carton, you’re dealing with things like fluid dynamics, and we don’t yet understand many aspects of that at all well.  If you look at the shape of the carton, you can speculate about how it was produced, what sort of machine was used, or try folding paper to get the same shape.

SS:  So if adults have the perception that they haven’t used, say, algebra, since high school, is that true?  Of is it just that they haven’t used school algebra?

WH:  They haven’t used school mathematics, probably, but every time you make a decision about whether you’re going to be able to cross the road without getting run down, you’re making a very sophisticated series of mathematical calculations about speed, distance, acceleration, stopping ability.

SS:  Of course, you may be doing that without knowing how to write it out or think about it in formal terms.

WH:  We’ve had a tradition in the Western world for quite some time to say that the unexamined life is not worth living, but what we’ve succeeded in doing is convincing a high percentage of the population that a certain strand of our life is so painful and so difficult that it shouldn’t be thought about, and I don’t think it’s too strong to say that that has aspects of tragedy about it.  Mathematics could be another area in which people feel they understand how the world works, and how they work, and yet it’s being systematically denied, and I think that’s very sad.

Enjoying Mathematics

Math Games

More from Shannon Stoney:

You asked to hear from people who enjoyed math and did it in other ways than textbooks.  Since I became a homeschool teacher, I have been enjoying math more than ever before.  It may be because my son Will particularly enjoys games of logic and because he’s good at math and likes making money.  But I think it’s also because using the new math materials, especially manipulatives, has shown me the fun side of math, its beauty and symmetry, and the element of play in real math as opposed to mere arithmetic.  I’m starting to see that mathematicians who work with pure math theory at the higher levels are probably mainly spending their time playing.

We started out with Cuisenaire rods when Will was 5.  Many GWS readers know about these, but I can’t recommend them too highly.  Will and his friends played with them a lot, just making designs that were sometimes inspiring to the quiltmaker in me, reminiscent as they were of the Log Cabin patterns.  We also used them more formally, to learn about the properties of numbers.  I remember Will’s delight when he lined up three two-rods above two three-rods and saw that two threes was the same length as three twos.  ÒI can’t explain why it is, he said, but I can see that it’s true!

One of the most fun Cuisenaire games is Hidden Rods, Hidden Numbers.  You play it using a book of that name (available from the Cuisenaire Company, 12 Church St., Box D, New Rochelle NY 10802; 1-800-237-3142).  The book gives you clues about a set of rods, such as Òno two alike, train adds up to 25, the longest rod is twice as long as the shortest.  Will got good at this, and introduced the game to other kids.  One junior-high-school-aged boy was entranced by it and spent a lot of time off in a corner by himself with the book and the rods.

Another favorite game as Go for Broke, played with Powers of Ten blocks, which are a little different in that there are only four kinds of blocks: a one-centimeter cube, a 10 cm rod, a 100 square cm flat piece, and a 1000 cubic cm cube.  You start out being given the cube, or 1000 cm, sort of like being issued Monopoly money at the beginning of the game.  Then you roll two dice of different colors - one is tens and the other ones, so that when you roll them you get  a two-digit number.  You then have to subtract that number from 1000, by trading your cube in for 100s and 10s and 1s and making the necessary subtraction.  The object is to get to zero.

We’ve also enjoyed pattern blocks and the activity cards that go with them. Those activities mainly stimulate the aesthetic mathematicians in us - we copy each other’s designs or start a sequence and let the other person continue it.

For a while we were also really into tangram puzzles.  These are a little more austere than pattern blocks and Cuisenaire rods, being one color, so the pleasure of solving the puzzle is more an intellectual logical sort of satisfaction.  Yet it requires leaps of intuition and I suppose what psychologists would call right and left brain hemisphere cooperation.

Our favorite game is Equations.  This can be played at virtually any level of mathematical sophistication, and I can see that we will use it for years.  You roll up to twenty dice, which have numbers and operations (+, -, x, etc.) on them.  The goal-setter selects a cube or cubes to be the goal - say, 8 - with an equation in mind that can be made with the other cubes to equal 8 (like 4 + 4 = 8).  The other players think up equations to equal 8 using the cubes, write them privately on their scratch paper or in their heads, and then take turns placing the cubes in the forbidden, permitted, or required section of the board.  If someone places a cube in the required section that is not part of the equation you were thinking of, you have to either rethink your whole equation, or challenge them.

This game has really advanced Will’s understanding.  It has taught him the idea of writing equations to show the order in which operations should be done, and it has motivated him to learn math facts (which I haven’t made him learn by rote).  When he was working on his regular workbook math the other day, he looked up from it and remarked, ÒYou know, Equations has really helped me with my math.  He couldn’t explain exactly how, but I think he meant it gave him a sort of context or global sense of what math is all about.

The inventors of the game say not to worry if the square root or Òto the nth power sign comes up and some people playing don’t know those concepts - that those people will just put them in the Òforbidden part of the board.  Will and I just roll again if those come up.  The inventors also say that if one person playing knows those concepts and uses them, she will gradually raise the consciousness of the other players about the uses of those operations.  That would be interesting to see.  I have seen it happen to some degree in our games - I started using zeroes to complicate my equations, and Will thereby learned pretty firmly that anything multiplied by 0 is 0.

Part of Everything I Do

Kate Volhein wrote in the September 1990 issue of The Learning Edge, the newsletter of the Clonlara Home Based Education Program:

It wasn’t until I started keeping track of hours spent Òdoing math that I realized mathematics is a part of just about everything I do: managing horses, scouting, being a 4-H member, maintaining cars, woodworking, cooking, working puzzles, playing card games, shopping, banking, budgeting, using the library, solving problems, organizing, classifying, shooting darts, learning to juggle, using secret codes, learning magic tricks, working Rubik’s cube, using maps, shooting pool, playing chess, sewing, quilting, knitting, weaving, making hunches, exploring musical rhythms, keeping a time sheet where I volunteer, tallying grids, caring for pets, and using computers.

For example, in 4-H we had to figure out the amount of sheeting we needed to cover the back walls of six stalls at the state fairgrounds in Richmond for the State Horse Show.  We also needed to figure out the amount of paint to purchase to cover six bushel baskets and the amount of lumber to order for building our tool racks, tack boxes, and saddle racks.

In Girl Scouts we’re involved in a lot of business math connected with our fundraising project selling calendars, windsocks, and cookies: keeping records, calculating orders, and handling money.  (We have fundraising activities in 4-H, too.)  As an assistant leader of a brownie troop, I also had treasurer duties.  And this year I’m treasurer of my senior Cadette troop.

When I helped Mom refinish the porch we had to figure out the amount of paint to purchase for the area to be painted, the amount of screening to purchase for the area to be screened in, the dimensions of the screen to be cut for the areas to be covered, the lengths we needed to cut the half-rounds in the miter box, etc.  And when I helped Dad rebuild the Karmann Ghia, we used metric tools.

In horse management I keep records of hours spent training and doing general care as well as the cost of feed, tack, board, vetting, farrier work, dental work, etc.  At times, I need to add a certain amount of medication to a horse’s feed depending on its condition (its weight and the kind of work it does).

In February of 1989 I watched the PBS Computer Science Course titled ÒThe New Literacy: Introduction to Computers.  And although Mom says it’s busywork, I like to practice doing problems from my dad’s algebra textbook (he taught night courses) and in the GED preparation book I checked out from the library.

Playing With Numbers

From Judy Tompkins of Illinois:

Rebecca, now almost 7, enjoys everything, including math.  When she was 3 and 4 we would do mental math when traveling in the car.  I would encourage her with easy (1 + 2; 2 + 3) problems and lavish praise.  We progressed to Òdoubling - an invented game where she would start a number and I would double it, and she would double that, if she could.  Now we go up to the millions.  No paper allowed but counting on fingers is OK.  She’s learned to Òspeak numbers - saying Òtwo two two two is not allowed; she must say, ÒTwo thousand two hundred and twenty-two or ÒTwenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents, which in turn facilitates reading numbers.  She has memorized the multiplication tables by being challenged, ÒCount to 20 by 2’s or ÒCount to 60 by 6’s.  It’s always fun (and catching Mom in a mistake when it’s her turn adds spice).

I give her homemade xeroxed grid paper so she can multiply 3- or 4-digit numbers - I give perhaps half a dozen written problems a week, just so she can keep their mechanics in mind.  Many times I write for her as she dictates: 3 - 7 you can’t do so borrow one, now 13 - 7 is 6; write a 6 there.  She directs each step.  We do this only three or four times a month.  Stickers (a favorite reward) are often given for written work for we both know how hard her muscles must work.

We use math daily - rulers, tapes, etc. are always at hand, and sewing, carpentry, cooking, etc. all provide opportunities to use this math.  Graphics, timelines, fractions, geometric shapes, and all the other Òmath lessons are touched upon as a natural part of everyday living.

OK to Explore from all Angles

From Ronder Thomas Young (GA):

A 7 year old asks questions about Pearl Harbor, the way the brain works, or Charles Dickens, and weÕll tell him (excuse my masculine pronouns - I have three sons), or we make a trip to the library or the encyclopedia, or we have the pleasure of reading Great Expectations together.  We do not say no to Pearl Harbor until you’re thoroughly familiar with Antietam.  We do not say weÕll talk about the brain once you can diagram meiosis, or that we’ll get to Dickens once you’ve finished Shakespeare (or Frog and Toad ).
Learning is a creative process of making individual connections that lead us from one place to another.  This summer we planned to do a survey of major American wars.  We had read and talked quite a bit about the Revolutionary War already, so we managed to get to the Civil War fairly quickly.  World War I, however, led us from the Archduke’s assassination to the battles to the life of Woodrow Wilson (homeschooled!) to the Russian Revolution to the history of Europe’s political geography to defining Democracy and Marxism.  So much for the summer and surveys.  The fall brought the PBS series on the Civil War, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and we keep pushing further back.  Not unusual progressions and regressions for homeschoolers.

Except, that is, when it comes to math.  Families that long ago abandoned textbooks and workbooks as unnecessary - including us - continue to cling to them for math.  It’s not really such a bad idea to have all those ready-made problems to be solved.  Families - including us - who would never consider following a preset chronology often do so with math.  Questions about calculus and trigonometry are apt to get a vague response like, That’s something youÕll get to later on, rather than a trip to references.

Despite the constrictions, our boys have always liked math well enough, but one day my oldest son, William, was doing some Òrows and said, ÒThis stuff is all connected.  ÒOf course it is, I responded.  ÒI told you.  But of course, telling him wasn’t enough; I should have been allowing him to make his own connections, to skip forward, backward, and sideways.

My middle son, Alec, recently completed a workbook in one month that took his older brother about seven months to complete.  This wasn’t because of a particular difference in ability, but rather due to more excitement and control.  That’s due, in small part, to an attitude adjustment on my part, and, more important, to Alec’s having an older brother’s shoulder to peer over, giving him more places into which to dip and choose.  If he should dip into some difficulty, he can always take a few steps back.

Mathematics is more than calculation.  It has history, philosophy, politics, colorful characters, just like everything else.  Albert Einstein annoyed his schoolteachers with his slow calculation; it didn’t stop him from being a stunning mathematician.

My children have never disliked math, but now they are excited by it.  Alec, whom we can only describe as math-mad, wanted to write you himself, but there is a new comic book to be written and division to be done, so he put this task to me.

Love at First Sight

From Marion Cohen of Pennsylvania:

I want to respond to your call for people who enjoy math.  ÒEnjoy isn’t the word.  ÒLove would be more accurate.  And love at first sight!  I was hooked the moment I opened my first algebra book, about thirty-five years ago, back in seventh grade.  Before then I had always found math to be fun.  I remember noticing patterns in the 4-times tables and experimenting with them in my notebook, while the teacher was explaining something else.  What I noticed was that the sum of the digits of the multiples of 4 went in sequence: 4, 8, 3, 7, 2, 6, 1, 5….  I might have been trying to find a generalization to ÒMr. Magic 9 (you know, how the sum of the digits of the multiples of 9 is always 9).  The thing is, until I was in seventh grade I had believed that mathematical patterns in general were coincidences; I think I just sort of took that for granted.  When I took algebra I realized there were reasons for all the cute little math tricks I knew.  This was the beginning of taking math seriously.

Although I did spend a fair amount of time in at least some of the Ònormal teenage activities, the time I actually preferred was spent in doing math.  I even wrote in my diary about it, things like, ÒThere are two things that fascinate me: (1) Any three points can be the vertices of a triangle; (2) Two circles can intersect and ÒYou know, falling in love is something like solving a polynomial equation and ÒEverything I look at makes me think of math.  I like it that way.  Yes, math definitely deserves a large chunk of the credit for helping me survive adolescence.

So serious were my feelings about math that sometimes I could hardly bear to talk about it, had to even write about it under cover of darkness, and didn’t particularly like answering questions aloud in math class or telling people that I planned to Ògo into math when I Ògrew up.  It seemed to me then that uttering math-words spoiled their fragile beauty.

To this day I feel grateful to my parents and teachers for respecting these feelings, and for not invading them by thrusting advanced math books on them, or encouraging me to audit college courses, and so on.  Instead they stood aside patiently while I did things like construct an ellipse out of cardboard, thumbtacks, string, and pencil (even though I already knew what an ellipse looked like), or, rather self-centeredly, titled my first math paper, ÒMy Very Own System, and wrote what I called my ÒTreatise, inventing new Òaxioms like ÒA circle is curved and not straight, ÒA straight line has two endpoints, and ÒSpace exists, is three-dimensional, and can be filled.  They let me go my own way, let me write and find my own books, let me browse for hours in the math sections of the largest bookstores I could find.  I wanted and needed to be alone with math, and they knew it, and I thank them.

I did go on to major in math at NYU, to get graduate degrees at Wesleyan University, and even to publish a few papers in academic journals.  But I was in many ways still isolated; I remember writing, for example, that if a particular math idea turned out to be wrong, or obvious, I still found it beautiful.  And I never felt that I had truly learned a subject unless I had completely rewritten the text, in my own way, leaving out the parts that seemed less relevant to me, and of course adding plenty.

Eventually - gradually - this poetic side of my interest in math predominated.  The adolescent diary-excerpts found their way into poems, and I also wrote new poems, and prose, which were inspired by math, and some poems and prose not inspired by math.  In short, I ‘ve become a poet and writer.

If anyone asks, I explain this emotional involvement with math by saying, ÒIt’s like science fiction; it expresses, at least for me, the same wonder, same anguish, same order, same disorder, and probably some personal and psychological stuff too.  I teach a Math Anxiety workshop and sometimes I bring in my math poems for students who seem interested, or who might benefit from seeing that it’s possible to feel something for math (even if they donÕt).

I’m writing this because I feel I’ve not only learned math in some different ways, but also, perhaps, view it in a different way.  I also want to communicate that it isn’t always Òenjoyment or Òfun that both children and adults can get from an interest in math (or anything else); it can also be something profound.

Watching Children Learn

OK to Use Other Teachers:  For Math…

Parents sometimes ask us what they should do if their child wants to learn something that the parents don’t know much about, or if for some reason parent and child find it difficult to work on a particular subject together.  There are of course several options in such cases; one is to help the child find someone else to work with.  Sometimes it takes a young person to remind us that this is indeed a viable option and doesn’t in any way reflect badly on the family’s homeschooling.  The following story from Amanda Bergson-Shilcock (PA) makes this point well:

Last May my parents and I talked it over and decided that it would be good for me to be getting some more math experience.  Mom has helped me with math through the years, but I felt like I was ready to move on to a different person to help me with the more advanced math.  On some days Mom and I would work really well together, but on other days we would both accidentally irritate each other, and when you’re crabby and tired it’s much harder to understand a math concept.  We still worked together on lots of things, but I just felt like having someone else for math.  Also, when we first got the math book that we were going to use from the local school, Mom said, ÒI’d like to read through this book and do these problems on my own for a while, first, because I’d like to refresh my memory.  I said, ÒWell, you know, I’m really ready to learn some more right now, and you’re so busy that it will be difficult for you to find that time, so would it maybe be easier if we found somebody else who was already involved in math.  Mom was really nice about understanding that and not getting offended.

She asked around and found that one of her friends had a friend, named Cheryl, who was a tutor for kids who are having trouble with math in school.  Mom said to her, ÒMy daughters aren’t having trouble with math, but they would like to have another person to help them along, go through this book with them and go as fast or as slow as they need to.  Cheryl ended up coming over for an hour-and-a-half session with me and my younger sister, Emily.  We both thought she was really nice, but Emily decided that she’d rather keep working on her own, and with Mom, and I decided that I’d like to go on working with Cheryl.

She comes once or twice a week for an hour, now.  We go through the math book that we got from the school, and also use some other materials that she’s brought because she thought they might interest me.  Sometimes she gives me homework, and sometimes I do it, sometimes I donÕt.  She teaches math at her local middle school, and because she thinks I have a kind of logical mind, she asks me to help her figure out ways to explain things to her students.  If she’s having trouble explaining a certain concept, sheÕll ask me to help her think of a way to rephrase it, since I know how you can hear something over and over again in the same words, and it won’t get through to you, but if you hear it in different words then all of a sudden it’s like a light bulb going on, and you understand it.  Usually the concepts she asks me to help explain are concepts I’ve learned a month or so ago, so they’re still pretty fresh in my mind.

I know kids my age are doing a lot of math in school, and wanted to feel that if I worked on a little bit each week I’d be keeping up with them.  I’m not trying to compete with everybody else, and I don’t care if I’m exactly at grade level or anything, but I wanted to know that I wouldn’t get to the end of high school and suddenly have to catch up.

I like to play around with algebra, making up problems in my head.  Sometimes I play games with Emily and her friends - Emily will say, ÒAmanda, give me an algebra problem, and theyÕll just work it out for fun, like a puzzle.

. . . And for Reading

Pamela Haines of Pennsylvania writes:

I’m discovering that a child and a parent, home alone, with parent trying to teach child, regardless of how hard we work or how well-intentioned we are, is not always the best situation.  Other aspects of our relationship can get tangled up with the learning process - our disappointments in each other, our fears around the implications of not succeeding.  It was very useful for us, this summer, to arrange for our son to spend some time with a friend who is a reading specialist, getting some tutoring (we called it Òspecial time with her).  I don’t think she actually did much that we couldn’t have done, but the context was different.  Their relationship wasn’t as loaded, and it was easier for him to focus on the skills.  We traded time by having her son over to play, and everybody was pleased.  (And his reading is going better with us this fall.)

Finding an Internship

[SS]:  Last winter, Jean Rezac (MA) wrote asking for help in finding an internship in which she could work with horses.  I replied with several suggestions, and the next time I spoke with Jean I learned that she had managed to arrange an internship herself, close to home.  Recently I asked her how it had worked out, and she replied:

I ended up doing that internship this past summer.  I’ve always liked horses, and I had taken riding lessons when I was little.  I wanted to get back into it, and I was looking for something to do outside of home.  My Sunday School teacher has a horse, and I talked to her about what I was looking for.  She said I could help with her horse in exchange for lessons, because she was soon going to have a baby and wouldn’t be able to spend time taking care of her horse.  So during the summer she gave me lessons and I took care of her horse for three weeks.  She had showed me how to do everything.

Then she introduced me to another lady who buys horses who have been mistreated, trains them and sells them in a few years, for a good profit.  I spent three weeks helping her with the barn work, and got lessons in exchange for that.  I had a wonderful time.  I learned so much - there were other people working there too, and so whenever I didn’t know something I just asked questions.

If other homeschoolers are looking for something to do outside the home, I’d say find something and go for it.  At first I was really nervous.  I thought, ÒWhat if she says you’re no good with horses?  But it worked out really well, and next summer IÕll probably go back.

Enjoys Writing Group

Geoffrey Litwack (PA) writes:

You asked about the writing group I attend.  I met another homeschooler, Jonathan Appel, during testing by the Richmans last year.  We had a lot in common and a lot of fun.  My mother and his mother talked to each other and we discovered they ran a writing group.

I asked if I could come for a couple of times and just listen.  The group met the first and third Monday of the month from 1:30 to 3:00.  After everything had been read there was a snack and time to play.  There were approximately fifteen children, at the most, and their ages were 6 to 13.  The younger children who couldn’t write drew picture stories.

After I went for a few times I decided that I wanted to be part of the group.  I found that listening to other people’s stories and listening to the other children’s and parentsÕ positive comments and interesting questions opened paths of ideas in my head - e.g. ÒWhat happened to the fairy? or ÒDo you plan to continue this story? or ÒDo you think it’s possible for a car really to have levitation powers?  All of these comments were in good spirit and never a criticism.  I feel that because of this the children always wanted to write more and read their works to the group.

After I went to school for half of my fourth grade year, I left because I didn’t like it at all.  I didn’t write as much as I had before, but I started to read even more than was normal (sometimes 1000 pages a day).  When I look back upon this I realize that it was kind of strange and probably had something to do with my school experience, which was horrible.  I found that in school ideas were stifled - ÒSit down and write something about life as a candied apple as an example - not the stuff great literature is made of!  It took a long time for me to want to write as much as normally I did before.

Reluctant to Study History

From a larger letter in which Michaele Maurer of California was discussing her son’s reluctance to study history:

I found out that Joel’s distaste for history is partly based on emotional pain.  Reading about slavery hurts.  No more Reconstruction or Book for Judges for a while, thank you, Mommy.  No wonder he is so immersed in the development of Batman and Spiderman comics.  I suppose we had better stick to hero stories for a while longer.

There is some potential here for serious going-wrong, for headlong flight from the real world.  I made the same sort of flight in childhood and have not burrowed my way out of it yet.  I’m not the most capable guide when it comes to fortifying tender minds against the existence of war and racism and other evils.  Refusing to learn about them is not the answer.  I mentioned this to an historian I know, and she said, ÒThere is absolutely no need for a child to read about the horrors.  She promised to send me a reading list of historical novels.  I’d like to hear anyone else’s ideas on this subject.

[SS:]  I replied:

About history and retreating from the real world: certainly the real world is not only the horrors.  I can think of some very important reasons for learning about bad things that have happened - to try to understand them, to think about how human beings can live together and what makes things go wrong sometimes.  But why is slavery any realer than Laura Ingalls Wilder (for example)?  History is about things that have happened, and all sorts of things have happened.  Maybe Joel would be interested in the history of comics - how did they begin, what were the artistsÕ lives like, what problems did they encounter - whatever.  There are some good historical novels and books, too, as your historian friend will no doubt suggest to you.  We sell a book called This is the Way it Used to Be in the Early 1900s that is extremely popular with our readers.  And of course there’s also more recent history - your own childhood memories, the history of where you live.

As for Joel’s sensitivity to the darker sides of history, I wouldn’t be quick to force him to deal with questions that cause him too much pain right now.  One thing that may help is to let him know about things people have done, or are doing, to make things better.  Children who are upset about the existence of nuclear weapons or wars that are being fought, for example, often very much like to know about peace movements, and even to join in that work.  Children who are upset about hunger in the world may be relieved and interested to know about what work is being done to address that problem.  And so on.

We’ve added a book to our fall catalog (and review in this issue) about the songs of the Civil Rights Movement.  It’s interesting to approach the study of racism from that angle, because music was very important to that movement and may be an easier way for Joel to begin to learn about it.  If you like this sort of thing, you might be interested in folk music, like Pete Seeger’s, which deals with some difficult things in a positive, strengthening way.

But, again, it can be overwhelming to a child to think that when we say  history, we mean wars, oppression, etc., only, as though that’s all that ever happened in the world.  History can just as easily be the study of how people lived, worked, played, dressed, ate, etc.  That’s what the history books in our catalog generally focus on.  So, again, how did the Spiderman character develop?  How did the comic book industry grow?

From a later letter of Michaele’s:

Your comments about the study of history are well-taken.  For record-keeping purposes, I am counting as history any attention paid to anything that happened before Joel was born.  This week alone, that includes watching Kiss Me, Kate, on video tape (highly recommended for people who don’t like musicals, as I donÕt), examining a collection of Little Nemo comic strips, and checking out an adult book on Leonardo da Vinci.

Weapons interest Joel.  I got him to read about Japan briefly by finding him a couple of lavishly illustrated books that featured samurai weapons and armor.  He is careful to explain that he enjoys guns as machines, but does not approve of their purpose, let alone their use.

How Adults Can Help

[SS:]  In GWS we often talk about how adults can help young people achieve their own goals, as opposed to setting goals for the children and then trying to get them to achieve them.  We also talk about how adults can suggest or introduce things to young people without being overbearing or requiring the thing in question.  When Kim Kopel (MO) wrote to me about joining a local choir, I thought her story illustrated both these processes so well that I asked her if we could print that part of her letter:

I am now a member of the St. Louis Children’s Choir!  I’ve always liked singing and music, although I’ve never had any voice lessons, music lessons (except for Suzuki violin when I was 6), never sang in public, can only sort of read music, and play the piano by ear.  I’d talked with Mom off and on about doing something with singing, and a while ago - maybe six months - she cut an article about the St. Louis Children’s Choir out of the paper and gave it to me.

I thought it sounded interesting, but I didn’t do anything more about it at the time; I filed the article away.  Then a couple of weeks ago I began thinking seriously about joining a choir, and I went and got that article, read it again, and asked Mom to call the phone number listed for information and auditions.  The last audition for this year was the very next day!  I wasn’t sure about going to it - I hadn’t figured auditions would be coming up so soon, and I’d planned to work on reading music better and stuff like that before I auditioned.

I surprised myself, and decided to go.  I did pretty well at the audition (which was my first).  I was surprised that I could read music and sing from it, without hearing someone else sing it, or hearing it played first.  The woman who auditioned me said I had a very wide range, and a great ear, but that I couldn’t read note timing very well.  So since the audition I’ve been working with Mom on reading the timing - rhythm - of notes, and now I know I could have gotten right the rhythm I had to read at the audition.  Until rehearsals start, I’ll be working on that - reading music and singing from it, and just plain singing.

The King Brothers at Work

From Cathy King, mother of the King Brothers (whose tape, ÒNo Covers, we sell here:  #1504, $7 + post.):

Your description of No Covers in your fall catalog mentions that you don’t know how Billy and Kenny came to be making their own cassettes.  Although Billy has shown some interesting musical ability since age 2, it’s mostly a story (now familiar to you, I’m sure) of kids being given space and resources to pursue their interests and discover their strengths.  Because my husband Ken and I tend to value creativity over material goods, we did make some choices that probably encouraged Billy’s musical path - like buying a piano before we had indoor plumbing!

If Billy had been in school, he probably still would have been musical (maybe!), but he certainly wouldn’t have had the time and energy to take it so far by this age.  For example, their latest tape is largely the result of a ten-day loan of a sophisticated keyboard by a very nice musical acquaintance. Billy had ten days to figure out the machine (the musician was out of town so couldn’t be asked questions) and create the music.  His concentration was awesome - he was 12 at the time.  But he was having a great time and I think the music he created reflects his pure enjoyment of the entire process.  His brother Kenny sat by his side and they giggled through much of the process.

As an interesting homeschooling detail, I thought I would mention that Billy and Kenny are not really a musical monolith.  Kenny enjoys the music and writes great songs, but has a rich artistic and imaginative personal life that we value just as much as the obviously successful musical accomplishments (that are so connected to Billy’s energy).  Many times Kenny prefers to draw or just think rather than do music, and our desire is to stay sensitive to the space that he needs.

Practicing Marathon

Ellen Pearce of Virginia writes:

Today I found a fall, 1985 issue of Mothering magazine, as I cleaned house.  I showed Miles (12) the photo of Ismael and Vita Wallace and told him that they had inspired me to homeschool originally.  Miles read the article and said, ÒWow!  Ismael practices for five hours a day!

I remembered how much I’d desired that Miles could live a similar sort of life to the life that Ismael and Vita led when they were little.  They always seemed to have a lot of space and privacy, and time alone.

After reading the article, Miles asked permission to have a Òpracticing marathon for one month.  He wants to drop his other schoolwork and practice guitar for five hours a day.  So we looked at the calendar and marked a day in November when Miles would return to the algebra and language arts required by Virginia.  (He always scores a year or so above his grade level on standardized tests, though he only works for two or three hours a day.)  For the month of October, he will only work on music.

Miles, almost from the time that he began to learn the classical guitar at 9, has played beautifully, so he actually has done many of the things that I had come to believe he would.  His brother, James (6), is attracted to violin music, and insists that he wants to learn now.  The children have been able to live very creative lives because of the support of others, and because they have their own ideals.

Scared of Wrong Answers

Rebecca Loven of Maryland writes:

My son attended kindergarten last year (because he insisted), though he is homeschooled this year.  My primary reason for homeschooling has always been the self-esteem issue.

I jotted down the following statement he made last year because it so alarmed me:  ÒYou know, I don’t really know any answers I should know, I don’t know all the answers I should.  I am not really very smart.  Inside, I am just a scared little kid.  When will I know all the answers, and not be scared anymore?  The source of this fear and anxiety turned out to be group question and answer sessions in his classroom.

More subtly, the next day, he began a game with me where he was the driller of questions and I was the student.  There was ÒIf you have five things (holding up five fingers on his hand, exactly as his teacher does), and you take away three, how many do you have left?  When I responded correctly, he kindly and enthusiastically exclaimed, ÒRight!, and this went on for several minutes before he tired of it.  This game was very satisfying for him because it empowered him; he was the Teacher.

I have now read the following words from John Holt’s How Children Learn.  I was shaken to realize how much the relatively little schooling had already negatively affected my son: Ò[Children] live in perpetual uncertainty and wonder, and - unless adults are always asking them fool questions to test their knowledge - thrive on it.  And again, later: ÒHe is bold.  He is not afraid of making mistakes.  And he is patient.  He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense.  He does not have to have instant meaning in any new situation.  He is willing and able to wait for meaning to come to him - even if it comes slowly, which it usually does.

My son’s teacher was very kind, maternal, and physically affectionate toward her students.  However, the damage to self-image is inherent in the typical school setting, where there is constant questions with some children responding correctly while others respond incorrectly or not at all.  My son, though only in kindergarten, was already suffering from the pressure to please Teacher with correct answers.
To be fair and to take partial blame, I confess that when my son states a mathematical (or other) truth, I sometimes well-meaningly say, ÒRight! and ÒYou’re so smart!, setting myself up as the authority on what is truth and what is not.  Though I try very hard to go together to outside resources for answers or to say, Yes, that is true, without all the emotional extras, I still occasionally slip.

I think it is important to note that my son felt fear when he did not know the answers.  I suspect this stems from the emotional excitement, on the adult’s part, which accompanies correct answers from the child.  After all that praise and approval, a child is very aware that there is none forthcoming when he does not know the answers.  The natural confusion when facing unknowns is no longer tolerated well but instead turns to fear when the child feels he will lose adult approval if he doesn’t know all the answers.  This is the opposite of what John Holt describes when writing about the healthy learning style of young children.

A solution might be to respond in a more low-keyed way to my son being Òright or Òwrong.  Instead, it would probably help to simply share the excitement I feel in my own learning, that I do not have all the answers and that I feel OK about that.  Of course, making his education even more of a partnership, with both of us equal partners, ferreting out information from resources and sharing in the excitement of learning things together, would also make me much more realistically less of an authority (full of right answers) in his eyes.  I can imagine and hope this problem will get easier as my son grows older and naturally begins to see adults as fallible, and himself as more powerful than when he was younger.  I do not assume all children are as sensitive to adult approval as is my son but I feel for him a less authoritative response would be helpful.  Any suggestions?

[SS:]  I think you’re on the right track.  The key, it seems to me, is not holding children accountable for knowledge before they feel sure of that knowledge and ready to talk about or demonstrate what they know.  Children in school are frightened of uncertainty because they know they will be penalized for it.  They can’t live with it because they aren’t allowed to live with it.  A child reading silently to herself, coming across an unfamiliar word, can easily skip over it, or let its meaning become clear through context, or even spend some time trying to figure out what it says - but there’s no pressure to come up with the right answer immediately.  A child reading aloud in school is in a very different situation, one in which the uncertainty is agonizing.

Serious About Ballet

In GWS #73, Lillian Sly (BC) wrote that her son Matthew was thinking of auditioning for the National Ballet School, and that she was concerned about having him go from being a homeschooler to attending a boarding school 3000 miles away.  We asked Lillian if Matthew had gone to the school and how that had worked out, and she replied:

Matthew did audition for the National Ballet School and was accepted for their summer school program.  One hundred students go to the summer school and about thirty of them are asked to attend the full school year.  What would we do if they wanted him full-time and he wanted to go?  Staying here on the west coast and only seeing him six weeks a year was unthinkable.  Moving to Ontario was problematic.  The cost of living is high, the vacancy rate is zero.  I’d have to abandon my midwifery practice just when it was expanding nicely with two new apprentices, and we’ve lived there before and didn’t much like it.

I was concerned about the school part, too.  The NBS follows the Ontario public school curriculum, though academic success is not necessary for continued acceptance.  Skipping classes or pursuing independent study are not considered to be options.  (The people I asked couldn’t seem to believe or understand what I was asking.)  I was very uncomfortable with the thought of Matthew leaving home, and becoming involved in something so structured, time-consuming, and intensive.  But what about Matthew’s say in the direction his life took?

In the spring we got a packet of information about the school.  A schedule was included.  The summer sounded great: three hours of dance a day, lots of outings to places like the Science Center and the museum, optional crafts, drama, swimming, etc.  The school year sounded grim.  Every minute from 7 AM to lights out was accounted for.  There was some free time on the weekend.  This sounded to me like way too much for an 11 year old who has always had scads of free time.  I decided that if Matthew wanted to attend a full year there (if they asked him to), it would have to wait until he was older - 14 or 15.  I rehearsed a ÒI’m sorry but I think he is too young speech.

We sent him off on the airplane for the summer program and missed him more than I expected for the six weeks he was gone.  He had a great time and was disappointed not to be asked to attend the full year there.  I didn’t have to use my prepared speech.  This isn’t totally resolved.  Matthew wants to audition again, and I’m not going to say no.  I still feel strongly that full-time attendance at a school on the other side of the country will have to wait until he is in his mid-teens, but we have not yet had to deal with a situation where he is wanted by a school and strongly desires to go.  I think I would say no, but I realize it would really come down to which of us was most determined.

Matthew comments:

I’m glad I went.  I had a good time.  I had lots to eat and my body felt like it was having a good time.  Most of the girls thought boys were yuck - that wasn’t nice.  I think it would be nice to go there for a whole year.  I might miss being home for holidays and birthdays.  The grade 6 work seemed very easy.

Ballet is a lot of work but it makes you feel good about yourself.  I like the challenge.  The shows are always fun.  I had three different teachers and two helpers who were training to be teachers.  At first one class was really boring, but I figured out it was helping me quite a bit.

The kids were different from homeschooled kids.  They watched lots of TV.  Most of the shows I didn’t like.  Most of them couldn’t believe that I was homeschooled.  They said, ÒThat’s impossible!  That’s illegal!  If the government found out they’d fine you!

There were a lot more girls than boys.  The boys were expected not to do things with the girls.  I didn’t get to go to Chinatown - some of the girls did, but the boys wanted to go to the park.  It was the same with cooking.  I only got to do it once ’cause they told only the girls.

Sierra Club Wants Young Environmental Activists

Pam Gingold (CA) sent us a notice from the Sierra Club’s newsletter saying that the club is looking for young environmental activists.  The notice says, ÒWe would like to start producing a little four-page magazine-type newsletter with articles written by kids or teachers/youth leaders and for kids/teachers/youth leaders…  The purpose of a newsletter… would be to put young activists in touch with each other.  It would be a way of keeping these children together and making them feel a part of the Sierra Club and its purpose.  We would encourage them to become junior members.

The notice doesn’t specify what sorts of work or projects would count as environmental activism, but if you’ve done anything that you think fits this description, write to Bob Vlakahis, 8 Glen Hill Ct, Shoreham NY 11786.  The notice asks that you include your phone number so they can talk to you as soon as possible.

GWS was founded in 1977
by John Holt.
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