Since we’ve gotten back from vacation, things have been very hectic. Just catching up on work has been a huge task, and the process of unpacking, and getting the house ready for winter are adding to the load.

So, David has been on his own for most of the last week. We’ve missed play dates, and I wasn’t even able to get him to his Beavers meeting yesterday.  He’s had no friends over for more than a week, and while he’s not complaining, I feel so guilty it’s driving me nuts.

I can’t figure out why a temporary glitch in the scheduling of our lives is giving me this much anxiety.

I’m not going to pretend to know both sides of the story here, but here’s the way the article outlines it…

1) Kids are/feel harassed at school
2) Mom complains to school but gets nowhere
3) Harassment escalates to the point where mom feels children are physically threatened
4) Mom pulls kids from school to homeschool
5) School says mom can’t adequately teach and files a complaint of educational neglect.

Now, maybe there’s something else happening here, but I have a hard time seeing this as anything close to educational neglect. Wasn’t she neglecting her children more when she kept them in school despite frequent bullying?

Technorati Tags: bullying, bullies, homeschool public_school

A a report on home schooling released today by The Fraser Institute should make you more confident in your ability to educate your children, even if you don’t have a university degree.

Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream (2nd edition) by Patrick Basham, John Merrifield, and Claudia R. Hepburn is a current survey of many peer-reviewed homeschooling studies that have been published recently. While true statistics are impossible to come by, a survey of all the existing data can be helpful to come to some general conclusions about the value and efficacy of home schooling.

The report covers the history and regulation of homeschooling, the growth of the movement, the socio-economic characteristics of homeschooling, academic successes, and socialization concerns related to homeschooling.

Some interesting stats in the report:

• Home schooling parents have above-average levels of education. 75% of homeschooling parents have studied beyond high school vs 56% nationwide
• 81% of homeschoolers are two-parent households vs 66% of American families with children
• Having at least one parent who is a certified teacher appears to have no significant effect on the achievement levels of home schooled students.
• Homeschooled children of university graduates perform significantly better than do children whose parents do not have a degree, BUT the educational achievement of the homeschooling parent has LESS impact than the educational achievement of the parents of public schooled kids.
  “…regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the [home schooled] children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.”
  
• Home schooled kids watch less television than their public school peers
• Home schooled students enjoy a life satisfaction score considerably above the score of their public school peers

Overall, nothing but good news. Home schoolers already know they’re making the right decision, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little encouragement from researchers now and then.

Watching the hockey game tonight, instead of the regular hollering and yelling at the Leafs to get in front of the net, and SHOOT for goodness sake!, this is what you would have heard in our living room…

“How many points do the Leafs have, David?”

“How many points does Ottawa have?”

“How many points have been scored altogether?”

“How many goals does Ottawa have to score to win the game?”

Not to mention the discussion of thirds when discussing periods, and the various reasons there might be intermissions between periods… like giving the players a chance to go to the bathroom… and the need for the television network to show advertising to show the game on TV.

What are we becoming, turning Canada’s sacred national sport into a learning experience, rather than the bloodthirsty team rivalry it ought to be?

Ann and Bob Smith are a devoutly religious couple who choose to homeschool their seven-year-old twins Susan and Sam. In accordance with their religious beliefs, they teach their children only religious doctrine, refusing to provide their children with a basic education in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Thus begins a lengthy article authored by Kimberly A. Yuracko from Northwestern University School of Law (available in PDF form here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1016778)

Of course, Ann and Bob Smith are simply a figment of Yuracko’s imagination. While some of the Christian homeschoolers I’ve become aware of are teaching some dubious stuff and calling it science, they are (at least from my experience) far more likely to follow a strict and challenging boxed curriculum than secular home schoolers.

Yuracko’s article is based on a few different premises I completely disagree with:
1) that parental control over children’s basic education flows from the state (rather than vice versa).
2) that a good education necessarily includes indoctrination in such liberal values as sex equality, gender role fluidity, multiculturalism, etc.
3) That the state’s obligation to ensure children receive the abstract values mentioned above in their educational regimen overrides the parent’s rights to transmit their own family/cultural values to their children.

Yuracko begins by asserting that homeschooling puts children in danger of not receiving a minimum education.

“Much has been written in the popular press about the superior academic achievement of homeschooled children. However, the widely-touted studies showing that homeschooled children outperform their public school peers deserve skepticism. They generally suffer from selection biases among homeschoolers and do not control for the family characteristics of the homeschooling and non-homeschooling families being compared. With only half of all states requiring standardized testing or evaluation of homeschooled students, and with poor enforcement of such requirements where they do exist, there is simply no good data on what and how much homeschooled students are learning.”

In a scientific journal the writer would be expected to establish, from the numbers that do exist, upper and lower boundaries in order to better estimate the true achievement of home schoolers in general. But this is a law article. We can just ignore the numbers, however inaccurate, that have been collected and proceed to anecdotal evidence.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some homeschooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education. The fact that one cannot know for sure how rare such occurrences are is itself a problem. I contend in this Part that, as a matter of federal and state constitutional law, states may not permit such deprivation.”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that at least some public schooled children, by design or accident, may not be receiving even a basic minimum education, but that’s another matter.

Lets look at the anecdotal evidence she cites in her footnotes. The first two anecdotes are quotes from unschooled teens that indicate that they spend most of their time doing things they like — dance and snowboarding, in these instances. This alone does not in any way indicate that those teens were unable to do other, more ‘educationally acceptable’ things.

My son, for instance, has spent most of his time in the last month building and enacting elaborate medieval battles with plastic knights and cardboard castles. While it doesn’t sound like he’s being thoroughly educated, he also happens to read at a third grade level and is starting second grade math, which is a tad better than his public-schooled age peers who have just begun senior kindergarten.

The other anecdotal evidences in her footnotes could more easily be described (and prosecuted) as child abuse. And as sad as it is that these things happen in ‘home schooling’ families, they no more indict home schooling than anecdotal evidence of molesting teachers and bullying peers indict public schools. And there is no need for further legislation to protect these children when the existing legislation, if applied and enforced, is fully adequate.

Let me just make this little analogy to illustrate why Yuracko’s argument doesn’t fly with me:

I don’t think I need to say more on this point.

Yuracko’s second issue with home schoolers is that homeschooling parents with peculiar beliefs may provide their sons with far better and more sophisticated educations than their daughters.

I have never heard of this particular problem occurring with home schoolers, and, perhaps aside from some self-enclosed religious circles, I don’t think it’s a common occurrence. Even among religious groups that set themselves apart– like FLDS, Amish or Old Order Mennonites– you’d be less likely to find undereducated HOMESCHOOLED girls than undereducated girls in a separate, group-run school system. The primary reason being that if the tradition of homeschooling is to be continued, the girls need an education sufficient to educate the next generation of patriarchs, lest illiterate girls produce illiterate sons and the whole sub-culture goes up in a social darwinian flame after a few generations.

And, to be honest, I don’t think I can see the benefit of the state forcing an Amish school to teach sexual equality. It would hardly prepare those children for the life they are most likely to live.

But this leads, I guess, to the next objection … that home schooled children might not be taught “liberal values” — or worse — that they be taught values considered anathema by the bulk of liberal society.

And as much as it might get me in trouble with my fellow secular home schoolers, I don’t think it’s wrong that fringe groups, or any group, educate their children with values outside the norm. After all, the values of any society are fluid and constantly changing. If certain groups wish to try to influence the direction of that evolution, I believe they should be free to do so, as long as the values they are promoting do not promote physical, actual harm to other people or property.

So, from my libertarian viewpoint, if they want to teach their own children that all non-Christians, gays, and left-handed people are going to hell, that’s fine with me. If they want to teach their kids that the earth is flat, that Jesus had a pet dinosaur, or that the earth was created two weeks ago, that’s fine with me too. While I believe all those things to be false, in most professions one’s belief in the shape of the earth or the origin of the universe are pretty irrelevant. I don’t care if my dentist believes in intelligent design. I don’t care if my accountant is a member of the flat earth society. I only care that they can do the jobs I need them to do.

But perhaps my belief that religious home schoolers should be given all the freedom they want to instill their particular Christian values to their children comes partly from the fact that as a Libertarian, my own values and political views are as anathema to the political mainstream as the values and views of Christianity.

Might sound like strange bedfellows, but I’d rather hang with a freedom loving Christian than an authoritarian ‘freethinker’ any day.

David went digging through the workbook shelf today and uncovered the AEP’s “The Complete Book of Our Solar System “. It’s a tough book to work through, with lots of copy work, but he kept at it for a lot longer than I anticipated. I have to admit that there’s a good variety of activities and puzzles, so that it seemed worth the effort to get through the more dull pages to get to the games or riddles.

After working through about 15 pages, we went outside and collected autumn colored leaves. We put them in his nature journal, then spent time identifying them with a leaf identification book I didn’t even know we had.

Then he decided it was craft time, so we made some monster  paper lanterns that turned out kind of cute.

Now it’s nearly nine o’clock, and I’ve still got a bundle of work to catch up on before I can get some sleep, so I sent David off to watch a few shows on TV before he heads to sleep. I hate to condone TV, but sometimes I need the solitude to pay the bills.

I still can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to watch him grow and learn. As much as it can be exhausting some days, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Beverly Hernandez from About Homeschool has asked for nominations for the seven wonders of the homeschooling world.

My first thoughts ran through John Holt and Susan Wise Bauer as possibilities, but then I figured out my #1 wonder, and it’s got to be the World Wide Web.

Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t say anything when their youngest son (about 6 or 7) sat at the bottom of the slide at the playground and started throwing sand. The playground wasn’t full, so I just took my son to a different area to play for a while.

I didn’t say anything a while later when we saw the same family at the Dairy Queen, where their kids were standing on the tables. Yes, standing on the surface where other people expect to eat.

I held my tongue when the oldest boy told his father to shut up. And the father just accepted it.

I cringed when the mother approached my son and asked him what school he was going to go to this fall, but I let him answer for himself.

But when she turned to me, after hearing  that he was being homeschooled and said,

“Aren’t you worried that he’ll grow up unable to interact properly with other people?”

all I could say was “You have GOT to be kidding!”

Pirates of the Caribbean!

Reading:
Pirates are popular around my house, and stuff about pirates litter every imaginable surface. We’ve got pirate pop-ups, pirate costumes, pirate puzzles, pirate swords, pirate ships and who knows what else. I do have a few favorite books about pirates that I prefer over all the others.

• What If You Met A Pirate? by Jan Adkins is a good place to start. The book begins by describing the popular stereotype of a pirate, then proceeds to show how a peg-legged, one-eyed pirate bogged down by cutlasses, swords, guns, jewelery and a parrot isn’t likely to be a very successful pirate at all. In the rest of the book Adkins explains what pirates were really like, what they wore, and what they did all day.
  Read the rest of this entry »
  
  
  
  read comments (2)

I think David first became aware of ancient Egyptian history from a Little Einsteins video, “Disney’s Little Einsteins - The Legend of the Golden Pyramid,” we rented one weekend. It was there that heiroglyph and sphinx were added to his vocabulary. Serendipitously, his Grandma gave him a computer game called “Scooby-Doo: Jinx at the Sphinx,” at about the same time as I purchased a cheap damaged copy of Ancient Egypt Dot-to-Dot (Connect the Dots & Color) at the local bookstore.

So, when we first got around to reading Mummies in the Morning, David was already excited and familiar with ancient Egypt. We must have read this one five or six times in a row before he was ready to move on to the next Magic Tree House book. It’s still one of his favorites.

Read the rest of this entry »