This is something I wrote at the end of the 2019-20 school year. I don't remember if I merely began it here in the drafts of this blog, or if I had been telling it to someone somewhere else and decided to save it for inspiration/decided this topic needed a whole post someday.
Sometimes I feel obsolete. My 5th grader is doing Theoretical Probability for math and my 7th grader has to help him with it because I can't. 😕 I don't think Theoretical Probability was in my junior and high school math books. If it were, hating math as I did, I might have run away with the circus as soon as I saw it coming.
And said 7th grader just pointed out that her research paper on some astronomer dude with a name I can't pronounce is scoring above college level for reading level in a word counting thing she's using. When I said that's probably because it uses words like "heliocentric," which I don't think is in most kids' vocabularies, she replied, "But we learned about heliocentricism in 7th grade science!"
Well then. If I learned that word in 7th grade then I promptly forgot it I guess. The concept, sure; the word, no. And people get worried they can't teach their kids if they didn't go to college... That's not how it works. They don't get "stuck" behind your highest level of education, they instead outpace you and leave you to feel dumb all by yourself in their dust.
The "7th grader" mentioned is starting high school in a week or so. 😮 How time doth fly.
My mom didn't go to college. She worked in the Library at Princeton University before she married my dad, but she was never a student there... her highest education was high school. When she decided to pull me out of public school and homeschool me and my younger siblings, I don't know to what degree her parents or friends questioned her ability to educate us properly, but I picked up on enough to know that the idea certainly wasn't universally accepted.
This was circa the late 1980's/early 1990's... We managed to miss out on the majority of the time when homeschoolers were being harassed and legally persecuted but even by the time we began, the idea was still far from "okay" with the general public. Every time we were at the grocery store someone would ask, "What grade are you in?" and we would look at mom in confusion. I knew eggs and meat were graded, but children?! Then, upon finding out we were homeschooled (which to their minds translated as being neglected/abused/in a cult), they proceeded to give us an entire multi-subject oral mini-quiz as we stood in line to check out, to reassure themselves that they should let us walk out of the store free without a call to CPS.
I know some of you reading have totally been quizzed (or your kids have) in the store by a nosy stranger... or by a disapproving relative at a family event. Some things never change, eh?
The folks who questioned myself and my siblings upon finding out we were homeschooled were certain that the person who loved us most in all the world, who would do anything or give up anything for us, who lived with us 24/7 and saw all our strengths and weaknesses, couldn't possibly teach us anything of use past the age of learning the ABC song and how to tie our shoes. BUT they were also (ironically) convinced that their equally non-teacher-certified selves could ascertain how well educated and cared for a stranger's kids were in the span of 5 minutes in the checkout lane of the grocery store by asking us questions like how to spell "hopeful" and what's 4x12 and what year Columbus discovered the New World. When I was in public school nobody cared if I learned anything at all, but 2 months into homeschooling and I was suddenly supposed to know these things? All they taught me in public school was how to stand in line, raise my hand to be allowed to use the bathroom, accept that nobody would defend me when I was bullied by teachers and lunch ladies, and that I wasn't allowed to be friends with kids outside my grade. And nobody cared. Nobody cared if I was abused or neglected or uneducated while in the care of the public school system! But how dare my mom believe that she could raise and teach me herself. The audacity!
My high school grad mom, thankfully, didn't allow the opinions of others to derail her. She raised and homeschooled 3 kids, the 2 of whom never set foot in a public school both went on to "higher education" after high school. I personally had wanted to become a lawyer to help homeschoolers who were being sued and harassed for their decision to home educate. I was accepted into the colleges I applied to but a career was never my most cherished dream. You see, I had wide open eyes to the beauty and value of marriage and parenthood. Not to say my siblings did not, but for me it eclipsed my desire to have a career so drastically that when things finally began to move forward with the guy I'd liked for 3 years, all my desire to go to college to study law went right down the drain. I was married at 19 years old - half my life ago. I can tell you I have no regrets. For a while I allowed social pressure to make me feel guilty for 'abandoning my chance to make a real difference in the world and help homeschoolers,' but when it comes right down to it, in the end, I made a difference in another way. Just like my mom never went to college but her love and sacrifices made all the difference for me, a kid who would have been labeled ADD and cared too much about peer approval to have stayed out of trouble my whole childhood if I'd been in public school. I will ALWAYS always be grateful to my parents for homeschooling me.
So you're saying a person who didn't go to college could do a good job homeschooling their kids?
Yes! How? That's easy; commitment and curriculum. Here in 2021 we have so many options for curriculum that the question is not how to find it so much as how to choose from the vast buffet of options. We could in theory (and some actually have done) educate our kids from primary through 12th grade using only basic supplies that most homes already have and free resources like the library and the wealth of the internet. How would one figure out what topics are appropriate for what ages/grades? You look up a grade by grade scope and sequence on that great world wide web and use it as a springboard. And yet if you're willing to save up some money you could get a curriculum that will not only give you 180 pre-portioned lessons and an answer key for each subject, but some also give you a script for how to teach it to the child and a list of crafts and supplemental resources to help cement the concepts. If you learned what you were taught in school, you can teach it. And if you didn't learn or retain it, you can (re)learn right along with your child.
Yes! How? That's easy; commitment and curriculum. Here in 2021 we have so many options for curriculum that the question is not how to find it so much as how to choose from the vast buffet of options. We could in theory (and some actually have done) educate our kids from primary through 12th grade using only basic supplies that most homes already have and free resources like the library and the wealth of the internet. How would one figure out what topics are appropriate for what ages/grades? You look up a grade by grade scope and sequence on that great world wide web and use it as a springboard. And yet if you're willing to save up some money you could get a curriculum that will not only give you 180 pre-portioned lessons and an answer key for each subject, but some also give you a script for how to teach it to the child and a list of crafts and supplemental resources to help cement the concepts. If you learned what you were taught in school, you can teach it. And if you didn't learn or retain it, you can (re)learn right along with your child.
But what about... EDUCATIONAL GAPS?!
There it is. The question every new homeschooler has. I'm curious why when we think of homeschooling we worry about gaps as though they were a homeschool-specific problem. EVERY educational model has gaps. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. In fact, I can't think of a more obvious educational gap problem than the startling fact almost everyone coming out of the American Public Education System feels like nobody learned the material well enough to be trusted to teach it to the next generation! Graduation should be the certification that you've learned the material and if you've learned it you can teach it. That's what the long-held concept of apprenticeship is based on. And if public school is certifying all these people as having sufficiently learned their ABCs and 123s through the 12th grade level but these graduates really don't actually know these things, then I'd say that's an educational gap, wouldn't you?
...But is a gap really something to be worried about? I think that depends on the rest of the education. If the educational model is one that values the students learning rote answers like good little copy machines so they can get the exact answer on the next test, then yeah a gap is going to be a big problem. Students who have been primarily taught to regurgitate memorized answers are going to be blindsided when a scenario comes up in which they have to deal with something they don't have an answer on file for. However if the educational model teaches the child how to find information, compare multiple sources, and form conclusions based on logic and evidence, then when that student encounters something they don't have an answer on file for, instead of feeling paralyzed and unprepared, that student will say to themselves, "Hmm. I don't know, but I'll find out!"
Let's say for example you decide you'd like to bake an apple pie, which you have never done before. I bet most kids don't learn that in school, so that's an educational gap. Do you lie on the floor and wail that your life is ruined because an educational gap has denied you the ability to bake a pie? No, you go on allrecipes and YouTube and find out how to make an apple pie. Ta-da! Now you have filled that gap, without ever having stopped to think of it as being an educational gap or panicking about it.
Perhaps you're building a garden shed and you need a mathematical formula to help you cut the corners at the correct angle. Do you stop and have a cow because you were out sick with the flu the week they covered that in school and thus you have a gap? No, you google it and get on with your life.
Educational gaps are inevitable no matter where you go to school, but most humans have figured out that if you don't know something you just... find out. In our modern world where every phone has a calculator and is a portal to dictionaries, encyclopedias, articles, libraries, etc. there's literally no reason to worry about gaps themselves. Rather than worrying about gaps, teach your child how to read and write and then how to find the information they need and form wise conclusions with it. With this power, in the age of information they can be unstoppable.
Perhaps you're building a garden shed and you need a mathematical formula to help you cut the corners at the correct angle. Do you stop and have a cow because you were out sick with the flu the week they covered that in school and thus you have a gap? No, you google it and get on with your life.
Educational gaps are inevitable no matter where you go to school, but most humans have figured out that if you don't know something you just... find out. In our modern world where every phone has a calculator and is a portal to dictionaries, encyclopedias, articles, libraries, etc. there's literally no reason to worry about gaps themselves. Rather than worrying about gaps, teach your child how to read and write and then how to find the information they need and form wise conclusions with it. With this power, in the age of information they can be unstoppable.
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