Homeschool Essentials

Textbooks vs. ??????

2005-10-04T16:04:00.000-05:00

My mother grew up during the Great Depression. Living on a farm in Kansas, they had difficult times, but they survived without Government assistance. One summer, they grew cantaloupes in the family garden. Whether by chance or design, the had a bumper crop. She described a heap of cantaloupes "higher than the house."

Well, money was tight, and few people bought the cantaloupes. But in such circumstances, no one would let them go to waste. So, for several weeks, my mother and her family ate all the cantaloupe they could hold. Not surprisingly, by the time I was old enough to hear this story, Mom didn't care much for cantaloupe.

Now, that doesn't mean that cantaloupes aren't delicious and nutricious. It jusst meant she had eaten her fill--enough, literally, to last a life time. Some of her brothers and sisters continued to enjoy cantaloupes, but not Mom.

When we present "specific content" lessons--you know, math, spelling, language, geography, science--to children, it's very similar to feeding them a diet of straight cantaloupes. You may say, "No, no, I give them several different courses each day." Sure. But how would you like it if you were served just cream style corn every morning,; followed by just green beans at noon; and just kholrabi for supper. Pretty soon, it would seem repetitious and boring.

In spite of this, we often insist on teaching children just that way. Now, I want to be plain that some children never, ever get tired of cantaloupes. They may decrease the quantity they eat, but they don't come to loathe them. In the same way, there are children who "just love" all sorts of medaevil practices like workbooks. But that's less about enjoyment, and more about the survival instinct of kids.

Real life experiences are more like stew. It may have an overarching flavor, but there are bits and pieces of many other things there. The student takes a spoonful of real life, seeking the dominant taste, but gets every thing else as well. So the kid gets the enjoyment of what he likes, and the nutrition from every element in the stew.

That's why not having a "curriculum" is an advantage. It gets kids in touch with the real world, and they "pick up" most of what they need automatically.

Many different projects through the years of preparation exposes them to many different stew recipes. Some are heavier on meat, some on carrots; some have corn, others don't. But through sampling the many flavors of reality, the end up ingesting a lot of things they wouldn't have eaten straight.

And they don't have the problem of becoming sick of something thet'a very, very good for them.

Phonics Phrenzy II

2005-05-18T19:30:00.000-05:00

Questions or Comments? Just click on the "comments" prompt at the end of this post, and follow the instructions.

Ninety-five percent of all words in English are spelled phonetically, as proponents of phonics love to tell us. Of course, that includes the word “phonics” itself, which, while technically phonetically spelled, you wouldn’t want to teach the “ph” digraph first thing. So phonetically spelled words include a great number of words that are only marginally phonetic. And how do you count such words as “women” and “nation”?

More to the point, however, is that a relatively high proportion of words in primer and pre-primers, the very books beginning readers will be expected to “sound out,” are in fact not phonetic. Note the following list of words:

Word	Phonetic	Actual
was	wass (rhymes with “mass”)	wuhz
said	sayd (rhymes with ”maid”)	sehd
two	???	too (rh. with ”blue”)
some	sowm (rh. with ”home”)	summ (rh. with”hum”)
have	hayve (rhymes with “wave”)	hav (rhymes with “salve”)
one	own(rhymes with moan”)	wuhn
to, do, who	toe, doe, whowe? (rhymes with "owe")	too, doo, hoo (rhymes with ”blue”)
does	doze	duhz
once	ohnss? Or ownss?	wuhnss

None of them are phonetic, and all of them are common first grade words. Whatever the merits of phonics, there are proportionally more exceptions in the early vocabulary. So when phonics are supposedly most important, they are the least useful.

Some systems attempt to teach all the phonetic sounds before teaching any None of them are phonetic, and all of them are common first grade words. Whatever the merits of phonics, there are proportionally more exceptions in the early vocabulary. So when phonics are supposedly most important, they are the least useful.

Some systems attempt to teach all the phonetic sounds before teaching any words. In my opinion, this is the worst possible approach. Confusing children with exceptions, or advanced sounds they are not likely to encounter in their reading, only causes fatigue and discouragement. Just how useful is learning all those combinations? Ask yourself. How many of the so-called phonics rules do you know? Yet you are reading this post. Like so many instructional approaches, these “learn-all-the-possible-sounds-before-you-read” systems ignore the way we actually learn, the way we actually read.

As a mature reader, how often do you use phonics as you read? In truth, we only use it in cases where we encounter a new or unfamiliar word. Chances are you haven’t had to sound out a single word in this post. Indeed, if you had to sound out each word as you went along, you’d soon tire of reading and give up the project. Phonics is not the way we read. Nor is it the way children read.

Phonics is excellent for remediation, for helping older poor readers overcome fear and difficulty. That is not what it is commonly used for. The most common application of phonics today is to artificially accelerate reading. No single task causes parents and teachers such anxiety as learning to read. Reading is the key to the world of learning, and as such, it is a gatekeeping skill. Difficulty or inability to read will make the rest of learning difficult or impossible. So the concern is understandable. Because of this anxiety, parents and teachers do what they usually do in such circumstances: they panic, and try to do too much, too soon.

After many years of observing, I can tell artificially accelerated students almost immediately. They always read phonetically, stilted, one syl-la-ble-at-a-time. Taught to read phonetically before their natural desire and readiness blossomed, they are still frozen in time. Some overcome the damage done by too early instruction through intelligence or sheer desire, but too many do not.

Phonics Phrenzy

2005-05-16T22:51:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know I was missing for more than a month. Burnout happens to everyone sometimes. And yes, I owe you the third layer of Burnout. I promise I'll get to it. Later.

Here's what I have today:

The Phonics Phrenzy

Whether you’re “Hooked” on phonics, playing the phonics game, or simply leaning toward phonics as the best method of teaching reading, you’d have to have lived in a cave for the last ten years not to be aware of the interest in phonics. It seems ironic that in a country where we spend many billions of dollars on schooling, the failure of reading instruction is so widespread that a growth industry has arisen to fill the gap. I’ve had state senators ask me to endorse legislation mandating the teaching of phonics in government run schools, and heard passionate parents hold forth on the almost “righteousness” of phonics.

For years, in the classroom, I used phonics to teach reading, and especially for remediation, to help those who had difficulty with reading recover their enthusiasm increase their proficiency. In our homeschool, my wife began teaching our oldest child phonics at age seven, but we quit when we met serious resistance. Later, working with another homeschooled boy whose mother wanted him to learn to read “now”, verified something which I had begun to suspect for some time. When children are ready to read, they do. If I happen to be at the scene of the accident, then I get credit for having “taught” the child to read. We spent many hours working on vowel and consonant sounds, and he would appear to know them, but often we had to start all over the next time. Yet one day, his eyes would light up, and he knew the sound–then and ever after.

Eventually I actually realized what was happening. I observed his sudden spurts of learning had nothing to do with my instruction, nor with my skills. When he was ready, he remembered the sound associated with a given letter. Because I was interacting with him at the time, it appeared that I had taught him. He liked our sessions, because he enjoyed the positive attention of an adult. I was OK with it, because it made me look competent. But in truth I had little to do with it.

All things being equal, phonics is the best way to teach reading to a group of children. Of course, if all things, in this case children, were equal, then we could find the method for teaching anything. In other words, schools would work. But they don’t . Children differ in development and readiness, interest and learning style, attention and concentration. They learn to read differently. Phonics works very well for some. On average, it works better than any other formal method. But any tool can be abused, and phonics is continually abused today. Before I detail the problems with phonics, lest any enthusiasts miss the point, phonics is the best formal method for teaching groups of children. That is a long way from saying it is the best method for teaching any individual child, much less your child.

Next time we'll see why.

Second Layer of Burnout-2

2005-03-23T22:11:00.000-06:00

As I said the other day, one of the two major reasons for burnout is the failure to nurture. And, sadly, nurture is less common than we would hope. But there is a complementary reason. If we imagine nurture as water, and the child as a cup, there are at least two reasons why the cup is dry, and why the child is not nurtured. We've covered the first one, failure to supply enough water(nurture).

But, a cracked or broken cup can't retain water, no matter how much is poured in. All the nurture in the world can't help a home where parents don't enforce healthy boundaries.

March is burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

Now, back to our irregularly scheduled blog. . .

Yes, I'm essentially an unschooler. But as someone said some time ago, "Unschooling isn't unparenting." Children need strong, clear boundaries to make them feel safe, to give them discipline, and to receive nurture. That's right. Boundaries are the sides of the cup. Without them, nuture is wasted.

A lack of nurture makes children despondent, resentful, frustrated and depressed. A lack of boundaries can add defiance and anger to the mix. These problems can be disguised and easily overlooked when there are other distractions, like the holidays.

But we go through a series of days without distraction, and enforced confinement often aggravated by inclement weather, we find these problems difficult or impossible to ignore. In a basically functional home, they reveal themselves in burnout, frustration, discouragement. In a dysfunctional home, it shows up as abusive behavior. That's why my experience with the two seriously failed homeschools clarified the issues for me.

It was clear and unmistakeable in those homes. And seeing it so clearly there, in its most extreme form, I recognized it in my own home. And then the pattern repeated and revealed itself in other homes.

There's a bonus to understanding burnout. It not only improves our homeschools, it improves our homes. Not a small thing, that.

Next, I'll deal with the innermost layer of the onion we experience as burnout.

Second Layer of Homeschool Burnout

2005-03-21T19:22:00.000-06:00

Big deal, Ed. You've described burnout. That's like going to the Doctor, who, after a thorough examination says, "You're sick." "Thanks a lot. I knew that when I came in."

What do I do about it!! Well, like a lot of other chronic diseases, there is no quick fix. It will require a lifestyle change. But then, who wants to keep burning out? Before we can make those significant changes, we need to understand what causes burnout.

Burnout is like an onion with three layers. The first one is the burnout itself, the descent into chaos. Under that layer, we find two complementary causes.

Now, this isn't easy for me to say, and it won't be easy to hear. But I have to tell you the truth. And part of that truth is that these things exist in every homeschool--yes, in mine, too. Even worse, I came to see these hard truths through exposure to two seriously failed--and borderline abusive--homeschools. Yes, I know we're never supposed to mention such things. It confirms a distorted stereotype some have of us. But we're a mature movement by now. And, the larger the movement becomes, the more closely it mirrors the larger society. Besides, these two homes out of more than 600 I have met with on a regular basis, comprise less than 1/2 of one percent.

What I observed in these seriously failed homeschools, writ large, I began to
recognize in my own home, and in every home I visited.

March is burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

Now, back to our irregularly scheduled blog. . .

First, is an inability to nurture. This led me to develop of a workshop on Nurture. I don't have time to go into all of that here, but it comes down to this: Children who perceive that they are loved, no matter what they do, will learn, and learn readily. It is too easy for us to "Manage by Exception," to only mention things that go wrong.

Children who only receive correction, and there are more than I once imagined, soon feel that everything they do, and everything they are is wrong. This leads to resentment, or worse, despair. It is a frightening thing to see a child depressed, and in despair. But I see more and more of this. Conscientious parents, wishing only the best for their children, but offering abundant correction and scant praise. And children depressed, despairing that they will ever please anyone.

The resentment or despondency generated in the children turns to resistance, apathy, and rebellion. The simplest tasks become the occasion for dramatic struggles. By March, even the most determined mother has had enough. Thus the burnout.

Tomorrow (or the next day?), I'll talk about the complementary cause, the reason that even some nurturing homes experience burnout time and again.

Who? Me? Homeschool Burnout?

2005-03-16T10:50:00.000-06:00

A thousand apologies. As I said in the previous post, this just proves I'm still a real homeschooler. Even now that my youngest is 21! Only now, instead of running her to swimming lessons, I'm picking up her fiance at the airport.

You think as your children grow older and learn to drive, that you'll once again have time to pursue your own interets once more. But through some inexplicable process, you end up driving more, not less, as you children have their own wheels. It is a total mystery to me.

But Homeschool Burnout I know too well. Mom reaches her wits end, which journey takes less and less time each winter morning. The kids are restless, resentful, bored, and quarrelsome. You come to wonder if the whole enterprise is worthwhile at all.

One source of frustration for parents can be remedied by recognizing it for what it is. Parental Expectations.

In the fall, the new "school year" stretches out like a golden landscape. This year, Mom thinks, finally this year we'll get all those marvelous things done. For a while, Mom's full of energy and enthusiasm.

Before long, the Holiday season comes along, with all of the interruptions that brings. Not nearly as much "schooling" gets done as had been hoped, but the year's young and optimism reigns

After New Year's Day, a vast stretch of time extends well into spring, without interruption of major holidays.

By the time March arrives, all illusions of grand achievements have to be abandoned. Mom either cracks down on the kids or gives up in despair. But the end is not yet. Languishing in the debris of lost hopes and lost opportunities, everybody burns out, and people become so contentious they can't stand one another. So I get the desparate phone call.

March is burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

Proof that I'm still a Homeschooler

2005-03-06T21:35:00.000-06:00

March is Homeschool burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

O.K., O.K. Several days ago I said something about coming back "tomorrow," and I didn't make it. Well, I'm still homeschooling, even though my youngest is 21 years old and a junior in college.

My youngest is majoring in Political Science and Public Relations, but is attending on multiple scholarships in music. While that's unusual for schooled kids, it's not all that strange for homeschooled kids. It always amuses me that school proponents --and too many homeschool parents--worry about homeschooling producing children who are not fully prepared. What a laugh. Unschooling, natural learning at home as I prefer to call it, engages the learner in all the richness of reality. Far from being narrow, lacking exposure to some things, they get experience-- e-x-p-e-r-i-e-n-c-e -- real-life experience in a broad range of things. Expose them to learning opportunities, and they latch on and go far beyond anything a teacher could imagine to assign for them.

So when they show up for college, they have multiple skills and opportunities. And with real-life experience, they have a better idea of what they want to do than the average kid, kept in the artificial school environment.

She left on a choir tour last Thursday for Chicago and New York City. Well, as homeschool parents get used to, there were some last minute complications, some help only we could provide, and the first domino of what turned out to be a hectic weekend. It's almost enough to cause burnout-- well, no, not really. The frustration that builds into burnout has deeper roots and lasts longer.

So, I didn't make it in time to start talking about homeschool burnout. And it's all I can do to check in late today. But tomorrow--really, I think I can make it tomorrow. we'll get a real good start.

In the meantime, I'll finish my recovery and get back to you. You know how homeschooling can be. Oh, yeah, and then there's the grandkids. Whew!

Homeschool Essentials --Understanding Burnout

2005-03-02T21:47:00.000-06:00

March is burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

Several years ago, I got this message dated March 1!

I am ready to quit homeschooling and stick my kids in school!!

They seem to think that life is made up of playing all day, and really grumble when we try to get them to do chores of any kind. . .

I just don't seem to be able to make [homeschooling] work in our family. So, I am ready to either put them in school, or switch to workbooks and textbooks!! Help! Help! Help!!

I had been working with homeschool families for more than twenty years, and had heard this sort of thing nearly every March during that time. Some years are worse than others, but rare is the late winter/early spring when I don't talk to tearful, frustrated, angry, or simply desperate mothers.

Why does this happen so often? And why always in March? Does it have anything to do with a lack of sunlight? Well, the causes are several. The occurrences in March relate to the amount of time elapsed since the start of school. In the Southern Hemisphere, it takes place at a different time. The lack of sunlight in winter contributes in some cases, but it's not a major cause.

For today, let's just say a couple of simple things. 1) It has a lot to do with the failure to detox fully, and 2) It has a lot to do with failed expectations. Frustrating as it is, it is only the surface symptom of some deeper issues which will continue to arise in your home until they are fully remedied.

And don't think this has only to do with homeschools. Why do you think spring break comes in March? Teachers and children in school go through this, too.

So, if you've ever felt like the mother in the e-mail above, come back tomorrow and let me start explaining just what's going on.

What A Boy Needs to Know

2005-03-01T22:28:00.000-06:00

But first. . .

March is burnout month.
Lots of Homeschoolers experience burnout this time of year.

You'll find some of the symptons (and their cures) on my Homeschool Essentials Website

What a boy needs to know to become a man. That's the informal title of a talk that Hub McCann gives to teenage and young adult boys.

If you've seen the film "Secondhand Lions," you know what I'm talking about. This is another DVD that demonstrates important values for homeschoolers. Walter, an adolescent boy, is dumped by his irresponsible mother on her two uncles, Hub and Garth McCann for the summer. On the way she tells Walter that the old men have been gone for forty years, and have mysteriously returned, rumored to have great wealth. She hints rather broadly that Walter might want to find out where they hid it.

The old men, played in cantankerous deadpan by Oscar winners Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, don't care much for relatives, and know little or nothing about children. They make few accommodations for Walter.

The two uncles are stranger than garlic ice cream, scaring away traveling salesmen (except for one notable one) by firing their shotguns, importing a giraffe and a geriatric lion, planting a complete garden of all corn, and telling Walter tales of adventure which include Africa and the Foreign Legion. Hub sleepwalks and fights past battles in his sleep.

Other people claim the men are either bank robbers, or paid assassins, and even try to get Walter to reveal the whereabouts of their supposed stache. In the process, Walter learns what it means to be a man, and what it means to really live. We only hear a part of Hub's "What a boy needs to know to be a man" speech, but it's worth the price of admission. Oh, and all the loose ends are neatly tied up. A real winner for families.

Essential Quality II

2005-02-28T16:38:00.000-06:00

If placing the learner at the center of the learning process is commonly overlooked, many at least pay lip service to it. Essential Quality II isn't even ignored-- it's almost not thought to exist.

But, true to its second place ranking, only putting the learner at the center is more important. And that truly is more important. However, that's somewhat like saying the most important component of water is hydrogen. It is, in that it takes twice as many hydrogen atoms to make a single water molecule. Nevertheless, without oxygen as well, you have no water at all.

Quality II is like oxygen in water. It comes second, but without it, success in your homeschool will elude you. Oh, yes, Quality II is-- "An Environment of Trust." Yes, trust.

Textbooks, methods classes, teacher training, the myriad of homeschooling books with the "Best Way" or even "God's Way" to homeschool never mention this simple fact. Learning involves trust. In my free e-book, "25 Essential Homeschool Quotations", I cite historian Will Durant's statement that "Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance."

That's certainly true, but the discovery of our ignorance is seldom comfortable. None of us wants to feel the fool. And this delicate business of learning always sits on a knife's edge between the joy of discovery, and the humiliation of ignorance.

Schools fail miserably on this point. And the more closely we emulate them at home, the worse our situation becomes. Why do schools fail so badly?

First, because of the simple rule of the peer group. The peer group, so treasured by the ignorant as a "socializing" force, is quite the opposite. Not only do they sneer at the ignorant and make fun of any child who gets a conspicuosly wrong answer, they also tear down anyone who does well. If every time you make a mistake, everyone else in the room starts ridiculing you, you'll get quiet in a hurry. And you won't trust anyone to help you learn.

Next, schools, and all too many homeschools, expend much of their energy identifying mistakes, as if that was the chief aim of learning. If we spanked babies for falling down, it would be hard for them to learn to walk. It also breaks the bond of trust.

In addition, schools for the most part simply act as if there is no functioning relationship between the teacher and the child, except for the amorphous one described as "discipline." But a martinet with children sitting rigidly in their seats, terrified of making a mistake, is often seen as a better disciplinarian than the teacher with a "busy-noisy" classroom, filled with the happy sounds of children exploring.

The ability to learn depends much more on the environment of trust than on having up-to-date texts and materials. Indeed, without trust, those texts and materials lose almost every bit of their value. In the next post we'll look more at this crucial quality of successful homeschools

Essential quality 1 summary

2005-02-22T15:33:00.000-06:00

Successful teaching of any kind, at home, in the school, or in church, or in industry, always must center, must focus, on the learner.

We've touched on why it doesn't work to put the teacher or the curriculum in the center. The knowing, learning student must be at the center of our process.

No matter how thorough the lesson plan, how brilliant the presentation, or even how appropriate the lesson to the learner, if the learner decides not to learn, he will not. The successful homeschool recognizes this and concentrates on the learner.

For this reason we tailor the curriculum to fit the learner, rather than the other way around (quality III). Because every learner is different, we will set appropriate goals (quality IV). And because everyone else will try to move the learner out of the process, we remain consistent (quality V). And yet, all of this will fail without the next quality, which we will take up in the next post.

FREE: 25 Essential Homeschool Quotations

2005-02-17T21:53:00.000-06:00

Tired of know-it-all neighbors or in-laws who always have something bad to say about homeschooling?

Want to refute the mistaken common knowledge of administrators and teachers who try to intimidate you?

Would you just like to read something positive about what you're doing?

Have I got a deal for you!

For a limited time, I'm offering the FREE e-book

25 Essential Homeschool Quotations

Find out what Mark Twain, Will Rogers, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Adams, and even John Dewey had to say about education. You will be surprised.

Here's my introduction:

"To hear school administrators, teachers, neighbors, and (sometimes) the in-laws talk, the sort of schools we have today are an eternal fixture. They came into being as soon as civilization was enlightened enough to understand the necessity for taking children forcibly from the home, and forcing them to endure years of boredom – to make them more capable.

How society reached such enlightenment without the blessing of schools is never addressed. Nor do they actually know what intelligent thinkers– teachers, philosophers, authors, preachers, and some downright geniuses– have to say about schooling.

Thus the reason for this little book. When you’re in the middle of a frustrating homeschool day, and some particularly annoying, self-appointed advocate for the schools gets in your face, wash your ears, and detox your mind, with a few of these quotations.

You’ll find that not only are you not crazy for preparing your children for life at home, but a lot of very smart people give good reasons why it’s the best way to go.

There’s no table of contents or index, and only a general sort of organization. The purpose is not to provide a systematic justification, but to provide a bouquet of soothing, reassuring, and inspiring words to help you get through the day. Read from front to back, or open at random."

Here's how to get the FREE e-book:

Send an me an e-mail with the words: "25 Essential Quotations" in the subject line. That's it. I'll send you a copy of the e-book in PDF format. You can send me an e-mail by clicking the link below. Don't forget to put "25 Essential Quotations" in the subject line.

FREE E-BOOK

There is no cost to you. You'll receive your very own, uniquely keyed copy.

Please do not copy or duplicate the book in any form. If you're interested in multiple copies for a support group, or for another purpose, let me know. If you cannot receive attachments to your e-mail, a hard copy will be available for a nominal cost to cover postage. I will not sell, lease, or otherwise reveal your e-mail address to anyone.

Homeschool Essentials--Math

2005-02-16T21:24:00.000-06:00

Before I resume the Five Essential Qualities of Successful Homeschools, I want to spend just a little time on Math.

I hope to write a booklet on Math exercises for unschooling. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts.

Few things are so poorly understood and poorly taught than Mathematics. In fact, few children are actually exposed to Math in any meaningful way. Most of what's taught in Elementary schools is Arithmetic, and drudgery at that.

Music and mathematics have many commonalities, yet we have a culture almost dominated by music, and at the same time virtually unaware of math.

If we taught music the same way we teach math, maybe there'd never be another garage band. It's hard to imagine a garage math group.

Imagine if you never heard music other than in elevators, or at professional gatherings. The first serious exposure to music began with: "This is a quarter note. Draw the note body, then the stem. Two quarter notes equal a half note." and so on. And the goal of music class was to prepare sheet music with all the notes in the right places.

Well, we do something like that with math. Instead of introducing children to the beauty of patterns, which is at the core of math, we start them with the notation. That's what notes are. They aren't music, they're simply the way we write it so that others can experience the melodies and harmonies we have heard or originated.

Well, that's essentially what numerals are: they are the notation, the way we write down the math we have discovered or observed.

So, what kinds of math experiences can we expose our children to, that will be somewhat comparable to listening to music? Well, we start our children out with lullabies, simple, soothing, easy songs that help the relax and go to sleep.

Most games can serve that same function, and most are mathematically based. Even young children enjoy matching the patterns on dominoes, or playing tic-tac-toe. Children with mathematical aptitudes will quickly demonstrate that they see the patterns involved.

I've worked with many children who had developed a phobia concerning arithmetic, and helped them identify and develop their aptitudes.

As they get older, and their games get more sophisticated, the opportunities are more involved. I learned to convert fractions to percentages by computing batting averages for baseball. My children learned most of their basic arithmetic--and very thoroughly, too-- playing monopoly.

As I said, almost all games are math based, and can be used for learning. I include links to purchase several I've found particularly useful in the past.

Being All They Can Be

2005-02-10T20:31:00.000-06:00

Sadly, few young people ever reach this level of needs. With safety in such short supply, and threatened at every turn in most schools, students expend their energy assuring survival. At home, though, we can provide the opportunity for them to scale the heights, to fulfill their destiny, to fully answer their calling. Peer groups compound the injury by punishing differences. By definition, self-actualization must be different for each individual. Neither teachers nor parents can predict the calling for any particular child. Only as they grow and explore their own talents and gifts can they discover their destiny.

Twenty years ago, I thought I had such foresight, but time taught me otherwise. My nephew announced an intention to go into accounting and business. As I perceived his talents and temperament, nothing seemed less likely to offer success and fulfillment for him. I cannot speak to his fulfillment, but he has spent the last two decades working productively as an auditor. It quickly became evident that, my wisdom notwithstanding, he had picked his profession well. Humbled by that experience, I watched my own children grow with intense interest. My oldest, a boy (now a man), tinkered with mechanisms so much it seemed obvious he would choose engineering. Nope. He majored in History, gained experience in business, and now works in information technology. Increasingly chastened, I gave up predicting, even mentally, what paths my two daughters might take. For each it is an ongoing story, but for now, one seems headed toward social work and counseling, the other toward modeling, with a strong interest in signing for the deaf.

Trained as a teacher, experienced in working with developing children, a close observer of talents and gifts, and yet I couldn’t predict the paths my own children would choose! Had I designed their education to produce the outcomes I thought most likely, it would have served them ill. Fortunately, before I could commit that mistake, I had discovered the Five Essential Qualities, and that knowledge prevented me from further damage.

Given the proper conditions, your children will seek out their true calling as certainly as moths attracted to the light. The proper conditions, put simply, consist of assuring their first four levels of needs are met.

Later we will fill in the details of providing a safe, rich learning environment which enables students to discover their gifts. We’ll also examine how to identify their learning styles so that we can help maximize their ability in all areas. Learning styles dictate how they learn best, not what they can learn.

Now I just want assure you that, contrary to popular belief, children are driven to learn from their first moments. At the same time, we see that our best efforts will be in cooperating with this need, rather than frustrating it. To do so will require new thinking for many of us, new willingness to believe in our own children, new ways of looking at learning. If we can make the transition, success we literally cannot imagine can be ours, in our children’s success. They can be and do things we cannot imagine, things far beyond even our greatest hopes. But we will have to be willing to let them be themselves. This will prove one of our greatest challenges.

Children naturally need and desire to learn. One of the questions that recurs frequently is how to restore the love of learning. We must recognize that if they no longer love learning, then we or someone else must have taught them to disllike it. Dislike of learning does not come naturally. Like the children in Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s song, “they have to be carefully taught.” Rekindling their love of learning requires that we remove and counteract tthe influences that have taught them to dislike learning. I call that process de-toxing. We must however continually realize that we are the strongest influences upon our own children. If they dislike learning, we most likely have been instrumental in teaching them that unhappy lesson. So we must begin the search to rekindle learning in our own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors.

Three Books for Parents

2005-02-08T23:39:00.000-06:00

Wherever two or three homeschoolers are gathered together, they will discuss curriculum. If you want to be liberated from curriculm worship forever, read this timeless satire. It's either to good to be true, or to funny to be good--well, you'll see. I first read it in my grad school curriculum class. A classic!

A true story of a young teacher, himself just graduated from highschool, going to teach in a backwoods Kentucky school in the 1920s. He goes to the school where a young adult 6th grader had blacked his sister's eyes and driven her out of the teaching job. If that's not enough drama, find out the secret of "The Thread That Runs So True," the secret to learning he discovered, and shares with his readers. Fascinating!

Once you get over your reverence for curriculum, and learn the secret of learning itself, let Thomas Armstrong show you how to help your children learn "In Their Own Way." Armstrong, a Ph.D. in special education, leaves no sacred cow ungored. His chapter on learning disabilities, "Dysteachia" is worth the price of the book all by itself."

Esteem Needs and Learning

2005-02-07T17:03:00.000-06:00

Learning, knowing, demonstrating competence builds our feelings of worth. That’s why wilderness survival programs help wayward teens. Overcoming hardship, discovering competence and endurance they doubted they had, restores the sense of worth that abuse, peers, and laziness eroded. From this fact, some reason that children need to be driven to learn. That overcoming adversity will put some starch in them. It’s true that whatever does not destroy you only makes you stronger.

Still, it doesn’t toughen infants to leave them out in the snow overnight. It kills them. There’s no virtue in wasting talent or energy on an impossible task. The value from attempting difficult things comes from what we learn in the attempt. Given developmentally inappropriate tasks, children only learn frustration and failure. At every stage, children need challenging but achievable tasks.

We don’t take our bedding plants out in the spring, and plant them before the last frost. A very few of the toughest species might survive, the rest would die. You wouldn’t make a puppy face a full-grown wolf.

“Nothing succeeds like success.” The more we experience real success, the more we build up a reserve of worth and esteem to sustain us through the times of discouragement and mistakes to ultimate success. A trained athlete may run a marathon. But the average weekend warrior might have a heart attack. An infant could not survive a twenty mile walk, much less a run. So, yes, we gain by overcoming difficulty. The emphasis on the overcoming. The difficulty must be guaged to our abilities so that it will challenge but not defeat us. Simply raising standards and test score requirements will not produce superior students. If we produce superior students, their test scores will rise.

At the same time, we all value the memory of triumph over difficulty, of obstacles overcome, of barriers vanquished. Like Olympic divers, we measure our achievements by degree of difficulty as well as how well we execute them.

Every time we exhibit competence, we overcome difficulty, we accomplish something beyond the ordinary, it builds our sense of worth. When others take positive notice of these things, it builds our sense of worth. Learning enhances our competence, and our opportunities for overcoming ever greater obstacles, so learning naturally feeds this need for esteem.

This powerful need cuts both ways, however. Repeated failure chips away at our sense of worth. We may be labeled as failures by ourselves or others. If a specific skill, like long division, or specific subject matter, like history, becomes associated with continued failure and frustration, we avoid it in order to maintain our esteem. We don’t want others to see our inability, we fear to expose our incompetence. In order to preserve our limited reservoir of value, we avoid those situations where it may be damaged.

When learning experiences become identified with loss of esteem, we shy away. “Once burned, twice shy,” goes the old proverb. Psychologists tell us that it actually takes three positives to erase each negative. We will revisit this issue repeatedly, because this problem occurs more often than any other. Adults continually attempt to accelerate academic achievement. Often adults urge tasks on the learner without regard to readiness. The same task which may be mastered with ease at the proper time, may be literally impossible, or prohibitively difficult, if attempted too early.

Parents naturally feel disappointed when children do not live up to their expectations. Children interpret this as disappointment in them, personally, and lose worth. In their eagerness to please, they may continue to attempt the impossible, but when it becomes clear they cannot succeed, they become dispirited and give up.

As in so many instances, the danger here is that the parents will confuse their children's achievement or lack of it with their--the parents--self-worth, with their own esteem. In their efforts to protect their own bruised egos, they injure their children instead.

Is it Safe to Learn?

2005-02-05T19:59:00.000-06:00

Physiological Needs and Learning

As the hierarchy concept would predict, many of children’s earliest learning concerns meeting their physiological needs. At first the child has only crying as a means to communicate every negative experience, whether hunger, cold, discomfort, pain, or fear. Learning to point to the mouth, pat their mother’s breast, speak the word “eat,” make their first peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or grow a garden all arise from, and service the need for nourishment. You can see, through the progression of tasks mentioned, that just as the need to eat does not disappear with the years, neither does it’s power to motivate ever more complex learning.

Learning to speak and communicate aids the child in meeting his own basic needs. So does learning to walk. As time goes on, ever more complex tasks may be addressed and mastered, with the root purpose of meeting needs at this fundamental level. Lack of ability, even brain damage, do not lessen the need to learn, they only make it more difficult, and more urgent. The less we can do to meet our own needs, and the more we must depend upon others, the greater the likelihood that one or more of our needs will go unnoticed and unmet. Learning, a key to survival, becomes as necessary as oxygen or food or warmth.

Lack of physiological needs can block and/or limit learning. Hungry children will be open to learning anything which can bring them food in the short term. Anything else will fade from view, driven away by the need to eat. Cold children may be interested in learning to build a fire, but lack interest in building ice castles. Thirsty children may show no interest in fire-building.

At this level, we recognize the importance of needs, by providing school lunch programs and the like. Somehow, schools and parents alike lose track of the higher levels of needs, and how they affect learning.

Safety Needs and Learning

Meeting physiological needs today raises the possibility of tomorrow. As soon as we can think as far as tomorrow, we want to assure our continued existence. That raises the issue of safety. Perfectly well-fed and clothed people die in accidents and at the hands of others. Meeting physiological needs makes continued existence possible, and allows us to think about increasing the probability, the likelihood, of continued existence. That requires safety.

A stable emotional and psychological atmosphere contribute to the sense of safety, and facilitate learning. Children need both parents, so a two-parent household, where the parents love their children and one another, builds safety, and liberate the children emotionally and psychologically. Conversely domestic abuse, fighting, and divorce make learning more difficult. Illness, financial difficulties, or anything which results in domestic unrest, will inhibit learning.

As mentioned earlier, schools generally ignore these situations until they reach crisis proportions. But we need to recognized that any lack of safety inhibits learning. Demanding that children assume normal learning loads when under stress is unrealistic. Schools do it because they lack knowledge of home conditions, and the lack the time or interest to inquire. Homeschool parents do it to occupy the child and reduce their own stress. Whatever the reason, it reduces safety and runs the risk of turning kids off to learning.

Consistent, understandable rules and loving discipline likewise contribute to the child’s sense of safety. Regularity in meals, bed and rising times contribute to stability. For children, routine, the familiar, the predictable, feels safe, and safety encourages learning. Normal life provides plenty of variety to keep our interest, if we’re open to it.

As safety increases learning, so learning can increase safety. The ability to identify possible threats, and design counter measures increases safety. Learning not to closely approach, hurtful things; learning to use tools (like scissors and hammers) properly; understanding what behaviors provoke violence from others–all these increase the sense of control over the environment, and ability to preserve oneself from danger.

Do not take safety for granted. Parents, teachers, and peer groups often make learning so dangerous that children fear to attempt it. A child’s apparent lack of interest in learning often stems from a lack of safety in the learning environment.

Learning in the Heirarchy of Needs

2005-02-04T17:18:00.000-06:00

Children need to learn. If they show resistance to learning, then there’s something wrong in the learning environment. It’s almost certainly not learner focused. In spite of our best intentions, we parents take over center stage.

I’m going to talk straight here, at the risk of offending some parents. There’s no gentle way to say this. Children rarely resist learning, but they often resent and resist our efforts to teach them. This remains true, whatever the setting, whether at home or at a formal school. Children learn because they possess an inherent need to understand their world. Adults teach in order to satisfy appetites of their own. Whether it’s to be seen as a competent parent, or to demonstrate our ability at long division, we lecture and instruct for our purposes, not to meet children’s needs. Maybe we do it because we fear our children are “falling behind,” and that reflects poorly on our homeschooling. We rationalize that it’s for their own good, but we’re only fooling ourselves.

"Whatever educates us merely for its own use, without regard to us as living beings, whatever takes us for granted, degrades and impoverishes us. It does not matter that we are told it is for our own good.” Haniel Long

When we buy into the notion that children are mentally lazy by nature, that we have to force them to learn, we have turned learning into a contest with our children, a contest which we cannot win. “Nothing is harder than the human head,” one of my college professors told me. No one can doubt that when attempting to teach an inattentive seven-year-old the sound of “oi,” or the sum of two numbers.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow formulated what we know as “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” This hierarchy of needs can be useful in understanding human nature. For our purposes, they demonstrate the fundamental importance of learning. When we cooperate with these needs, children learn quickly and without need for external motivation. Frustrate these needs, and learning quickly becomes more and more difficult.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

1. Physiological. These include such things as oxygen, food, water, shelter. Things which, should we lack them for long, would kill us. We see the truth of this all over the world. In secure these, people are willing to run terrible risks, because they have to in order to survive.

2. Safety. No sooner do we secure sources of food, water, and other physiological needs, than we begin to contemplate safety. Should our physiological needs be endangered, we would once again forget safety in order to secure survival. But as soon as we know where our next meal is coming from, we want to be around to enjoy it.

3. Love, Affection and Belongingness. In order to escape loneliness and overcome alienation, we all need relationships where we can give and receive love, affection, and experience belonging. Peer groups actually punish achievement. Children may avoid or hide competence in order to belong.

4. Esteem. We all need an abiding sense of personal worth. Without it, we lack the confidence necessary to life a fruitful life.

5. Self-actualization. The U.S. Army tapped into this need with it’s long-running, “Be All That You Can Be,” advertising campaign. This speaks to our “destiny,” or our “calling.” Each of us has something to do, some skill to develop and express, some path to follow, unique to ourselves. If we find and fulfill this calling, it gives us the greatest sense of personal fulfillment. Until we do, we will feel restless and discontent. If, however, the lower levels of needs are threatened, we will have to attend to them in preference to this one.

These five types and levels of needs form a hierarchy, because we seek to meet the most important of these needs before all else. Only when satisfied that the first levels of needs will continue to be provided, do we turn our attention to the next and higher levels. Taking nothing away from Maslow’s insights, which I value greatly, these seem self-evident at each level. Like all great truths, once someone articulates them, we wonder why no one ever saw it before.
When we look at this hierarchy in terms of learning, we discover the need to learn permeates these levels from top to bottom. We can also see how various learning tasks fit into the hierarchy. Finally, we can see how frustrating these needs blocks learning.

Children Need to Learn

2005-02-03T23:53:00.000-06:00

"In the education of children
there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection;
otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books."

Michel de Montaigne

Children need to learn. From the first moments of birth, they seek meaning in their environment. Not a passive blank slate, waiting for others to write whatever they will, children aggressively interact with their environment. This fundamental truth underlies the whole learning process. If, at some point, children choose not to learn something, no power short of torture can force the proper response from them.

I’ll say it again. Children need to learn. As surely as they hunger for food, they hunger for knowledge, for understanding. If a child stops eating, we immediately know something is wrong. Few would attempt to force-feed a child they thought ill. Yet that’s just what we do with children who lose their appetite for learning. Again and again, when asked to help people with their homeschooling challenges, I find this fundamental misunderstanding. Seldom do parents ask, “Why doesn’t my child want to learn?” Instead, they inquire, “How can I get my child to . . .?”

Parents bring me the most odious textbooks, and wonder why the child refuses to partake. Now, I like textbooks, but I’m a little odd. I’ve kept nearly every one of my textbooks for reference. I still have my seventh grade reading workbook, because of two special stories it contains. Rarely, however, do I take those old textbooks off the shelf and just read through them. Wonderful for reference, they make pretty dull reading fare.

Children need to learn, they enjoy learning as much as they enjoy food, sometimes more. I keep saying this because keeping this fact before you simplifies homeschooling. I asked one mother her main goal for her eight-year-old son one year. “I want him to learn to love reading!” she said.

“Excellent!” I replied, then asked, “How do you plan to go about doing that?”

“I’m going to force him to read two hours every afternoon,” she said. That’s an exact quote.

Stunned, I asked, “Do you think that’s likely to help him to love reading?”

“Well,” she shrugged, “at least he’ll do it.” Now, I enjoy reading, but I’m not always ready to devote two full hours to it. And I had my eighth birthday during the Eisenhower administration. Generally speaking, two hours represents far too long a time period for an eight-year-old boy to spend reading at a stretch. Try as I might, I couldn’t get that mother to see that her son’s reluctance to read was the direct result of her approach. Even more strange, he actually read far better than average, and enjoyed reading. After an hour or so, though, he found it taxing and wanted a change.

Years later, I saw her and her son at the "graduation" of another homeschooler we both knew. My wife, knowing the history, talked with the mother a little, asked her how her son was doing. "Oh, pretty good," the mother said. "But he doesn't like to read much."

Who'd a-thought?

Curriculum

2005-02-01T20:43:00.000-06:00

"Wherever two or three homeschoolers are gathered together, they will discuss curriculum."

--your humble servant

After leaving grad school, I served on curriculum committees, even designed several different specific curricula which were then put into service. Yet I never had such sustained discussions of curriculum until I left teaching, and began working with homeschool families.

Homeschool conferences and convocations, magazines and support groups seem obsessed with curriculum. Of the many calls, letters, and e-mails addressed to me, fully 75% concern curriculum.

If you've been following this blog, or have read the last couple of entries, you know what I'm going to say next. This is nothing less than putting the curriculum in the center of the learning system. It's been tried for centuries, and it never works.

I'm always amused by the homeschoolers, some of whom I know well, who think themselves tremendously independent thinkers, but who can't resist the siren song of "curriculum." I'm particularly amused by those claiming the purest Christianity, who have nonetheless adopted the curriculum of ancient Greece. Since my graduate degree is in Religious Education, one of the central contrasts of history is 'Jerusalem vs. Athens.'

Curriculum should be tailored to the student, not the other way around. We'll get to that more in the second essential quality. Putting the curriculum in the center means we'll try to force the student's mind to fit an arbitrary set of information, an approach to that information, a method of learning that information-- all of which were designed by someone who never met your child. More than that, they didn't have your child, or any real child, in mind.

Yet so often, this is the first question parents ask. What curriculum should I use?

Any real teacher, anyone who really understands the learning process, will respond to the curriculum question by asking questions about the one being taught.

Your child, your particular treasure, with his/her own way of seeing the world, expressing thoughts, and with a unique set of abilities. No one, no matter how educated or brilliant, can devise a course of study for your child without knowing your child.

The fact that you know your child better than any teacher can is one of your chief advantages in helping your child learn. Don't throw it away.

Galileo's Heresy

2005-01-26T17:49:00.000-06:00

Galileo Galilei not only had the most redundant name of his generation, he was the greatest scientist of his generation. Still, he got in trouble with Church authorities for teaching that the sun, and not the earth, was the center of the solar system.

In Galileo's day, it was common knowledge that the earth was the center of the solar system, indeed, the center of the universe. And like so much "common knowledge," it was false.

Actually, the idea made a great deal of sense. During the day, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, after apparently sweeping through the sky. During the night the stars appear to rotate through the sky. Except, in those days, for five rogue stars.

These rogue stars had been observed and speculated about since the earliest times. They did not appear to follow any fixed patter, sometimes stalling, even backing up, before moving around again. The greeks called these "wanderers" or "planetoi." Yup, the other five planets eventually proved that old Sol. the sun, was the center.

A similar confusion has taken hold of the world of education and schools. State laws are built on it, even some of the most independent-minded homeschoolers fall for it. They put the teacher at the center of the learning system.

Teacher training, teacher "certification" or licensing, teacher preparation, lesson plans-- all these occupy the minds of legislators, regulators, administrators, and most spectators (You know, like your neighbors, who have no training, but just "know" homeschooling can't work).

Now, teacher licensing has nothing whatsoever to do with teacher competence, or, more importantly, student performance. Yet states and parents spend much effort and concern over the qualifications and training of teachers. Teacher certification deals with the successful completion, by the teacher, of certain courses. The teacher is observed while teaching, but student performance is not part of the mix.

It's a crazy system, really. It's like hiring a chef based on the food he has eaten. Does anyone care to eat what he cooks? Who knows. That's not what we look for.

But let's go back to the Churchill quote, "I am always ready to learn. I am not always willing to be taught." Isn't that the truth! And that's the whole point. Because if the student is not willing to be taught, the greates teacher in the world will fail to teach him. If nothing else, the lives of Socrates and Jesus should assure us of the truth of that assertion.

So, sorry to disillusion you, Mom. Too bad about your shiny new degree, young teacher. YOU are not the center of the learning universe. Deal with it, or be prepared to spend much of your life either irrelevant, frustrated, or both.

Next time, another false Sun.

Essential Qualities -- I

2005-01-25T18:53:00.000-06:00

Today I begin the discussion of the Five Essential Qualities of Successful Homeschools. A full discussion of these qualities wlll last at least until summer, but don't be alarmed. We'll take numerous excursions, breaks to cover targets of opportunity, or answer questions, or deal with comments.

Although I'll be examining them primarily in reference to homeschooling, they apply to all learning situations, and more broadly to all sorts of motivational situations. Indeed, I have one application which examines them as the Five Essential Qualities of Leadership. So they have broad application.

Still, they were derived from observations of the scores of homeschool families. Although these homes had superficial differences, I could see that they had common factors below the surface, and it was these common factors that made them successful.

Over time I confirmed the observations and refined my description. So that's the provenance of the information I'm about to share with you.

Quality I: Learner Focused.

Some years ago, I hear Tom and Ray Magliozzi, hosts of NPR's "Car Talk," discussing a brand of auto parts with a reputation for shoddy workmanship. According to their story, the motto on the side of the box read, "[Brand Name]: There's no substitute for quality." In their inimitable way, the brothers declared, "They [the company] ought to know. They've tried everything else."

This comes to mind because I find that it describes most schools, classrooms, and homeschools, when it comes to this first quality, focusing on the learner: They've tried everything else. And, with each wave of reform--always focused on "everything else," they confirm this once again. I can't even guess at the number of curriculum and regulatory committees--even a Governor's truancy panel-- that continually overlooks the central role of the learner.

For some reason, people forget that learning is volitional, that the learner has to want to. This causes them to make claims about studen behavior that are ludicrous. They continually claim that children/students will behave in outlandish ways, "Because it's good for them." Yeah, that's why kids line up when the spinach truck rolls around. Oops! No, it's the ice cream truck they go for. So that prompts the question, "Why do the kids want to. . ." eat spinach, do the problems, fill in the blanks. Because if they don't want to, it won't happen.

As Elbert Hubbard remarked, "You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think." Yes, you can force a kid to do a workbook, but can you force him to retain anything? Of course not.

Now, does this mean that, when it comes to learning at home, the inmates should run the asylum? Do we let kids call all the shots? No. But it does mean that to be successful, we have to begin our understanding of learning with the learner.

This runs counter to every state law concerning education, and against conventional wisdom. But "conventional wisdom" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

The next post will examine where the state, and nearly everyone else, thinks is the center of the process.

One of My Favorite Children's Authors-- John Ciardi

2005-01-24T23:01:00.000-06:00

I really can't say enough about the late John Ciardi's (che-AHR-dee) poetry for children.

Mr. Rodgers never talked down to children, and John Ciardi never wrote poetry down to them. Yes, he wrote nonsense poetry, but it always has some substance, and sometimes a lot.

His best poetry for children has that timeless quality-- it entertains the children, and evokes a knowing "Ahhh!" from the grandparents. For example, the funny but wise title poem from Ciardi's Fast and Slow ends with a line that will have parents and grandparents smiling at its wisdom. It's one of my favorite poems of all time.

Or one of his poems about the shark (he has several in various books) which contains a line that we love to quote. Speaking of the shark's "one dark thought" -- which is always about eating-- Ciardi writes of the shark: "with his two bright eyes, and his one dark thought/He has only one, but he thinks it a lot."

Even his nonsense poems don't have the sense of triality that I find grating in Dr. Seuss. Even when having fun, Ciardi takes his poetry, and children, very seriously.

Another favorite is Doodle Soup , a collection of poems once again witty and wise. To this day my children (now 28, 24, and 21) love to get out this book when we dine together and read, "When Mummy Slept Late, and Daddy Fixed Breakfast," describing the misadventures of a father's attempts at cooking: "This time I got it right/But what landed on my plate/was between bituminous and anthracite." That poem still gets them howling with laughter, though I don't know why.

There's one about the Ice Cream truck getting stuck at the edge of town, and everyone pitching in to "lighten the load." "It's important to help as much as you can/Especially when it's the ice cream man." And a very wise one about a child's two heads-- one good and one bad. Sounds strange, but expresses a profound understanding of children.

Best of all, for the beginning reader is You Read to Me, I'll Read to You. Every other poem is written in first grade vocabulary. So the parent or grandparent can put the child on his lap, read one poem, and the child can read the next one, and so on through the book. And the poetry is all up to Ciardi's wonderful standard. Indeed, one poem entitled "I Wouldn't," is a tiny masterpiece in my opinion. Written in the most difficult, short lines, but masterfully expressed "The cat sat/on the hall floor/by the mouse house/with the small door--" It goes on that way to a delightful concluding question-- answered by the author in the title.

I really can't recommend these books too highly. They've given my family many hours of delight, as we share these wise, witty, beautiful, funny poems again and again.

You'll want a copy of all three, and they're rarely in stock at the local bookstore. Now that I think about it, it's time I bought them for my grandchildren. Gotta go!

All Learning is Toilet Training

2005-01-17T15:14:00.000-06:00

If we learn nothing else from this exploration of the adventure of toilet training, let's at least understand this. A child's readiness is independent of the parents' needs.

Just because you're tired of changing diapers (who isn't?), just because you're embarrassed by someone's assessment of your parenting deficiencies (when won't that be?), and especially because you've decided you want it to happen NOW! -- doesn't mean your child is ready.

And please understand, this holds true (with the exception of diaper fatigue) for every other learning task your child will face. You may be ready for your child to read, to do calculus, or play the oboe-- so what? Never forget, as soon as these become battles, they become battles you cannot win. Even when you appear to prevail, it will cost you in the end.

Readiness is everything. We can't really accelerate it, we can only hold it back. Indeed, often our efforts to accelerate readiness result in significant tardiness in its development.

Like the mother trying to force her child's readiness for toilet training, but unwilling to cross his will on diet, whenever we find ourselves fighting over readiness, it's really a substitute for another battle we should be fighting, and which we can win.

We need to concentrate on our children's mental, emotional, and physical health, especially character, because character transfers to every other task. If we keep children healthy, they will learn.

One mother who had been homeschooling for a number of years, and whose children were both teenagers, came to me for supervision because her previous teacher moved away. Somewhat surprised by my approach, she tried it anyway, because she had grown so tired of always being the engine of achievement.

After two months, she and her children were so excited they would never go back. By letting go of the attempt to push, she had also let go of the responsibility, putting it on the chlidren, where it belonged. They assumed the responsibility gladly. Why? Because they realized that authority and responsibility go together. The battle had been over authority. So when Mom let go of the authority over their learning, they grabbed it eagerly, and began taking responsibility with it.

It was a relief to all concerned.

The battle over authority is the battle over toilet training, as well. Who's going to have authority over little one's sphincter muscles? Put that way, it's a no brainer. The child will, of course, no matter what we might wish. So don't fight that battle. Let the child have authority, and you'll be surprised at how quickly responsibility will make itself felt.

Comments are welcome. Just click on the comments link below, and you'll be shown how.

Why it hits the fan

2005-01-14T16:43:00.000-06:00

In the previous blog, I mentioned the mother whose 3-y-o son refused to cooperate in his toilet training. In fact, his resistance reached the point where he was retaining his feces, just simply refusing to go! Since this is not a healthy situation, Doctors considered prescribing drugs for the child in order to "force" the matter. The mother, of course, was extremely reluctant to resort to this radical-- and potentially dangerous-- solution.

So I suggested she simply feed him fruit for a while, and let nature take its course. She replied to this suggestions, "Oh, but he doesn't like fruit."

One of the prime rules of parenting or teaching is choosing which battles to fight. You only have so much influence on your child, and if you squander it on trivial matters, you won't have any left when important issues arise. Here was a classic case.

Mother and son had locked horns in a classic battle of wills over toilet training-- but this was a battle which the mother could never win. Even in an extreme case, and these are not as rare as I would hope, where the parent obliterates the child's will and produces a totally compliant child, the parent loses. Because in making a child totally compliant, totally dependent, the parent has obligated himself or herself to directing that child's life forever-- or until the child encounters a more skilled controller and manipulator. These are the ingredients of tragedy.

Short of this scorched-earth, and ultimately self-defeating tactic, so long as the child's will remains intact, he or she will control their own sphincter muscles-- and there's nothing the parent can do about it.

So long as this remains a contest of wills, no amount of coaxing will get the child to relax those muscles on the toilet. And when the child discovers the discomfort and embarrassment they can cause the parents by releasing at an inopportune moment, the game is really over.

Being the supposed adult in the situation, the parent can avoid this becoming a contest of wills, avoid it becoming a problem, if they think about it. After all, the parent is not without advantages in this situtation.

Chief among these advantages is the simple fact that wearing a diaper is not pleasant. Few adults would choose to. At some point, the child will discover this unpleasantness, and desire to be rid of it. That is the golden moment of "readiness."

Unfortunately, adult readiness seldom synchronizes with child readiness. Tired of changing diapers, weary of insinuations by in-laws or others about one's competence as a parent, fatigued by stories about "cousin Samantha, who was toilet trained at 6 months," parents grow increasingly eager for little Fauntleroy to be a "big boy," and start using the toilet. This almost always anticipates little Fauntleroy's readiness by several months.

When mom, because it is generally she who bears this responsibility, decides "it's time for Fauntleroy to be a big boy" without regard to his readiness, the battle is joined. Chances are, she and dad should be focusing on something else, some other area of behavior where they're losing a battle they should be winning, like the mother I mentioned with the screaming children. Frustrated and worn out by the child's bad behavior in other areas, they decide to have a showdown in an arena they really care about-- but can't possibly prevail.

Why would I say a thing like this? Remember the mom whose child "Didn't like fruit?"

She had surrendered the battle of diet, and sought to regain the ground lost there in toilet training. So she was losing both.

Three-year-olds don't purchase or prepare their own food. It's unbelievable that this child actually disliked the flavor of every type of available fruit, or that he couldn't learn to like it. It just wasn't worth the trouble of his fussing and complaining, and, who knows, maybe throwing flatware or china. Those are all areas where, for the child's long-term good, the parent can and should prevail. But having failed on that battleground, the parents could not win the battle of the potty.

I should have known that I couldn't deal, in a couple of short blogs, with a topic on which many books have been written. So it will have to wait for the next installment--and the final one on this topic, I hope-- to finish up and draw larger lessons from this area of parental/child conflict. I will just finish with this: the key to toilet training is also the key to Math, to reading, and to virtually every other difficult area for parents, teachers, and children.

Essential Skill #3

2005-01-13T16:27:00.000-06:00

We've already looked at two of the most important skills children ever learn, which they learn at home, before the age of five, under the tutelage of amateurs. Walking, a complex psycho-motor skill, and talking, an amazing cognitive achievement.

Today I will take up the third essential skill, and the only one which often causes difficulty: toilet training.

Mention the words "toilet training," and many a young mother's blood begins to run cold. Compared to either walking or talking, this is a simpler skill. Note that I did not say "simple," only that it is less difficult than the other two. Once the child becomes fully aware of the process, and his/her part in it, it should be a relatively easy habit to establish. But often it is not.

Why should this be?

A number of factors go into this messy equation. We understand those that motivate mothers better than the ones that motivate children, but that doesn't mean children are a total mystery on this issue. On the contrary, since they are young and unsophisticated, their motivations tend to be simple and direct. By contrast, parents are more adept at self-deception and rationalization, and often don't realize what's going on in their own heads.

Perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate this is with a true story. After speaking to a group of parents on the topic of these three essential skills, a young mother came to discuss her situation privately. "My three-year-old son," she said, "is resisting so strongly that he's retaining his feces. The doctor is considering giving him drugs." Hoping to deal with this one quickly, I suggested she feed him a diet of fruit for a few days. It wouldn't train him, of course, but it should get things moving. "Oh," she replied, "he doesn't like fruit."

For a host of reasons, this tends to be the first of these skills where we observe a contest of wills. Not that children and parents don't engage in many other contests of wills. It's just that in toilet training, children can assert their wills in a way that their parents cannot ignore.

Many children win the contest of wills when it comes to other obnoxious behaviors. The standards of civil behavior have deteriorated to the point where bratty children seldom elicit notice in society. Parents ignore their failure to get their children to behave in civilized ways, and take extreme umbrage should anyone else take notice.

"My children just scream," one highly offended (and highly incompetent) mother said to me. "It's their nature. It's just the way they are." Yes, (I could have added but did not) it's also their nature to demand their own way all the time, to ignore or subordinate the needs and desires of others, and to rant and rave when anyone opposes their will. All children scream and otherwise throw tantrums when thwarted. That's what parents are for, to help children learn to behave better. But that's for another day.

The point is that this mother, like many parents, had rationalized her children's misbehaviors away. Since it was "their nature," she could not be expected to do anything about it. And so it often is with a multitude of lesser offenses. It's "their nature" to make a mess and let others clean it up, too, and it comes to the child's urine and feces, only the most dysfunctional can still ignore them. So the lazy, rationalizing parent comes to this early day of reckoning. And makes a worse mess, if that's possible.

Even relatively competent parents can become exasperated by a child's reluctance to toilet-train. Even a child who has learned to comply with reasonable results will often have difficulty here.

The reason is quite simple. At first, neither the parent nor the child can control the child's bodily functions. At some point, the balance tilts, and the child can--and does-- control them, but not necessarily to the convenience of the parent. And that's where it all hits the fan.

There's too much here for one day's blog, so I'll continue it tomorrow. Then we'll look at this classic battle of wills, and its lessons for academic and other learning later on. You may be surprised by the solution.

Another Essential DVD

2005-01-10T21:25:00.000-06:00

I'll get to essential skill #3 tomorrow. Today I want to talk about an excellent DVD for anyone serious about working with children.

It's The Horse Whisperer, released in 1998. The story is compelling and deeply moving, but for homeschoolers, it's even better-- it's deeply instructive.

A young girl named Grace, out for a ride with a friend, becomes a victim of a horrific accident. Her friend is killed, Grace loses one leg below the knee, and her horse is deeply traumatized. The mother, who has been a high pressure NY editor, used to having her way, immediately tries to fix everything. A leg can be replaced with a prosthesis, but scarred emotions and fractured relationships are much harder to deal with.

The stable owner recommends that Grace's horse be "put down." The angry, frightened Grace says to go ahead, an while they're at it to put her down, too.

So the mother goes looking for someone who can heal the traumatized horse, tacitly hoping that will bring Grace back, too. When she locates a renowned "horse whisperer" across the country in Montana, he refuses to help, even when she offers to fly him both ways first class, just for one day's time.

Unaccustomed to being denied, she then has the tranquilized horse loaded into a horse trailer, and she and Grace head across country, the beginning of an emotional odysey that eventually brings healing to the whole family.

"Tom Booker," the horse whisperer (played by Robert Redford) quietly assesses the needs, both of Grace and her horse, alternately soothing and challenging them, but always realizing the responsibility lies within each. It's a masterful example of how to mentor.

Time and again, the mother tries to evade her own responsibility, but Booker calmly brings her back to it. "It's not that simple," she says. "It's as simple or as hard a s you make it," Booker replies.

Booker's young nephew, the cutest cowhand in a genuine "aw shucks" way, almost steals every scene he's in. And he and his whole family are a testament to traditional family values, and how they foster integrity.

A treasure.

Essential Skill #2

2005-01-03T20:57:00.000-06:00

Three of the most crucial skills children ever learn, they learn at home, by age five, with amateur teachers. We mentioned one a couple of posts ago: walking.

Today we'll take up another: talking. Walking and talking happen so naturally that we take them for granted. We wouldn't think of calling in "experts" unless some radical problem appears. Just because they happen naturally doesn't mean these are simple or easy skills. Quite the contrary.

How many adults enjoy learning a foreign language? Compared to the task of learning to speak, learning to read is, well, child's play.

Think about it. Children must learn that sounds make up words, and words are symbols which stand for other things, some concrete, like a table or a chair; some abstract. One of the first things a child learns to say is, "Mommy, I love you." Love is not a thing like a table or a chair, it is-- well, poets and philosophers have spent centuries trying to define this abstraction. Yet children quickly learn to associate the sound of the word "love," with that intangible quality.

It's amazing, really. Yet the vast majority of children learn it without significant difficulty. Why then, do so many children in America have difficulty learning to read? After all, in learning to speak they've already mastered the concept of sounds/words as symbols. That's the big conceptual leap. With reading, all they have to do is add one more layer-- recognizing marks (letters) as representing the sounds which make up words.

One of the keys to understanding why this is so will be revealed when we examine the third crucial-- and also quite complex-- skill that children learn early on. It's the only one that parents regularly struggle with-- and for the same reasons they struggle teaching children to read, to do math, and other supposedly "advanced" (but really simpler) academic skills.

If you're in a hurry to get started understanding your child better, I recommend Thomas Armstrong's "In Their Own Way"

It's one of the very best books ever on this topic!

Homeschool Essential DVD

2005-01-02T11:14:00.000-06:00

Today's entry will be short, because of the holidays, but now they're past, you can expect something pretty much every day for a while. I've got a lot to share over the next weeks and months.

I just have to share with you the best homeschool DVD I've seen in a long time. Last night my wife and I watched Fred Rogers, America's favorite neighbor This is three hours of wonderful material about his life, greate moments from his 900+ episodes of children's TV, and other remarkable episodes.

A highlight is the confrontation between Fred Rogers and Senator Pastore in a congressional hearing 30 years ago. It has to be seen to be believed.

Fred Rogers understood children, and ministered to the needs of millions of them for thirty years. And just listening to this caring man, imbibing his spirit, makes me better. As he said at one point in the video, he respected children. For me, that has always marked the difference between the really worthwhile material for children, and the mountains of schlock. The best material never talks down to children, never treats them as foolish or stupid.

Rogers focused on child development, and that's one of the things that made him so effective. It also makes the most effective approach to teaching, whether in school or at home. Spending time with someone who did it so well can only help us do better.

I could go on, but the best thing to do is get the DVD-- you'll be glad you did.

Three Crucial Skills Learned at Home

2004-12-27T11:58:00.000-06:00

Most of us attempt to copy the school model at home because we've been schooled ourselves. Part of that schooling includes the notion that learning takes place, if not in a school building, at least in a schoolish fashion-- doing "assignments," memorization, drill-and- practice.

Robert Fulghum both dented and reinforced the school-as-temple-of-learning idea with his best seller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, recently re-issued in a fifteenth anniversary edition with new comments by the author. It's a good book for homeschoolers if you recognize the basic fallacy of his book--he really learned most of it-- "share," "don' hit," and other useful notions-- at home, not in kindergarten. I've had the misfortune of teaching some of the children who didn't learn them until they came into the school environement.

Schoolish classrooms, in fact, teach just the opposite. Children not allowed to hit or be hit at home quickly learn both at school. Kids who wouldn't think of carving their names in their furniture incise their names in their desks. Words never spoken in their hearing at home became part of their vocabulary at school.

Fulghum, does, however, point to a large truth. All the really important things are learned in places other than school -- at home, at work, at church or synagogue.

Which brings me to three of the most crucial skills anyone learns. These skills are learned at home, before age five, and under the tutelage of amateurs. First, they learn to walk. Yes, walk.

Walking is a complex psycho-motor skill. If you don't think it's difficult, just ask an adult who has been injured so that they have to re-learn how to walk. Elderly people sometimes lose the power of locomotion, because of its physical demands. Walking is extremely difficult. Yet infants under two commonly learn how to do it, without the benefit of professional instruction. Indeed, when children learn to walk, most cannot understand spoken language, and cannot benefit from detailed instruction, examples, or coaching.

Understanding how children learn to walk sheds light on how they learn anything. When we learn how to approach other skills the same way we help our children learn to walk, we will be amazed at the results.

In the next blog, I'll look at the next crucial skill children learn. Compared to that primarily cognitive task, things like reading, calculus, particle physics are simple and easy. No, the next crucial skill isn't rocket science-- it's much more difficult than that.

NOTE: Comments and questions are welcome. Disagreement is fine, but personal attacks, etc. will be removed at the discretion of the blog management.

A Wholistic Approach

2004-12-20T20:45:00.000-06:00

Far too many involved in homeschooling act as though a child's academic performance can be isolated from everything else happening in their life. Think that's an extreme statement?

A school principal called me one day, concerned about a teenage girl who had been withdrawn from school for homeschooling. “I’m very concerned about Robin,” (not her real name) the man said. “She was skipping classes and not completing her assignments last year. You need to make sure she buckles down.” I made grunting noises and put down the phone. Based on his account, you’d conclude that Robin exhibited a stereotypical teenage irresponsibility, that if you could overcome her laziness, deal with her attitude problem, she’d be fine. He broadly hinted that Robin had deceived her mother into pulling her out of school so she could shirk even more.

However, the conscientious Robin and her worried mother had already talked with me. Yes, Robin had missed classes during the previous semester. Her parents were concluding a bitter and messy divorce at that time, and understandably this upset the thirteen year old. Either the school didn’t know or didn’t care about this domestic turmoil. They expected this thirteen year old to keep her emotional balance and continue to perform in school while her home disintegrated around her.

Real life doesn’t work that way. Adults’ work performance suffers during times of stress. Illness in the family, birth of a baby, loss or change of job–all of these things cause stress in the family, and affect learning. Sometimes homeschool families express anxiety that children have “fallen behind” because of family trials. But there’s no way to avoid that. Stress affects children, including their development and learning readiness, every bit as much as it affects adults. Expecting learning to go on as though nothing is happening is unrealistic and unfair. Homeschools can take this into account, can be people friendly.

The wise, and ultimatelyl successful homeschooler understands the need to address learning problems within the whole context of the child's life. Fail to do that only results in frustration and breakdown of that most precious commodity-- trust.

Pushing vs. Encouraging

2004-12-17T18:32:00.000-06:00

First, today's recommended resource.

Several years ago, after I had commented on the damage that "pushing" causes in homeschools, I got this question. "But if you don't encourage children to do better, won't they just slide by?"

"Encouragement" is one thing. "Encouraging forward" is another.

Let me share with you a concept that I learned from observing homeschoolers, and which underlies everything important I do and say.

All real love, real nurture, real acceptance, real approval, all of these are unconditional. The minute they become conditional, they become manipulation. Manipulation is always ugly, because it treats others as objects, rather than as living individuals.

Now, the one thing I know for sure is that all of us manipulate. We take no more notice of our own manipulation than we do of the air, or than fishes do the water. We are immersed in it.

All of us need love and nurture. All of us resent manipulation. Some catch it sooner, some later, some react actively, some passively. But it always costs us dearly.

"You're not going as fast as I want you to," "You're not going as fast as the others," "You're too slow," all these send the message, "You're defective. You don't please me. You disappoint me. You're not living up to my expectations." These cannot redound to the benefit of anyone.

Pushing, telling the child to go faster, sends a couple of damaging messages. First, something's wrong, you're too slow. Second, you don't need to take responsibility for speeding up (if that's really necessary), because I'll see to it you keep moving.

Once the parent accepts the responsibility for pacing, for pushing, for "keeping up with," for "having the child ready" at a certain time, they are in danger of keeping it forever.

When I give the talk on pushing, I always walk up to someone on the front row, and have them hold up their hand, palm toward me. I then place my hand on their hand, and begin to push. I've never had anyone simply let me fall! When I push, they push back. I even step back and say, "I didn't tell you to push back!" And then everyone gets it.

The most natural reaction to being pushed is pushing back. If we start it early enough, and keep it up long enough, most children won't appear to resist. Instead, they exhibit what psychologists call "passive aggression." You may have seen demonstrators, who, when arrested, don't fight back. Instead, they go limp, making the police pick them up and carry them physically to the paddy wagon. Where one well-trained policeman may be able to wrestle a struggling protester to the police van, it may take two orthree to carry the "unresisting" limp protester.

I hope you'll forgive me for sharing a couple of paragraphs from my detox booklet.

"Teacher dependent students mentally “go limp,” requiring the teacher to break down every task into its smallest possible parts, and spoon feed them to the student. Some parents and teachers actually desire this state of affairs. In order to feed emotional needs of their own, they encourage students to be dependent.
"But this requires a great deal more energy from the teacher than the student. Over the long haul, it stunts development and increases friction. Trying to propel the mentally limp, passive aggressive student down the path of learning eventually exhausts everyone involved. "

This situation will not rectify itself. When the teacher-dependent student goes to college, where no one herds the students into class, or forces them into study hall, these students flounder.

Encouragement sends the message, "You can do it." Pushing sends the message, "You're not doing-- not good-- not smart-- enough." How can you tell when you've crossed the line?

Students welcome encouragement, and they resist pushing. Once you encounter resistance, it's time to re-evaluate what you're doing.

Character

2004-12-16T22:48:00.000-06:00

I'm always fascinated by those who think an emphasis on character is somehow "softer," or "less rigorous" than an emphasis on academics. From secular people this doesn't surprise me too much, but I've received the same message from a number of religious families.

It becomes all the more interesting when you observe that government schools* have revived their interest in character after nearly a quarter century experiment with "value-free" classrooms. Since I was studying character education in grad school when the movement to value free classrooms began, I've watched it with interest. My original position, largely vindicated by history, held that it is impossible to have a value-free classroom. The very fact that you require students to be there, and expose them to certain ideas, communicates a set of values. To put it another way, if you didn't value certain ideas and information, you wouldn't bother teaching them.

Having said that, I must confess that they came much closer to establishing a value-free classroom than I expected. We see that in surveys of now young college-age students who say things like, "Yes, I think the Nazis were evil. But who are we to criticize someone else's beliefs?"

Apparently horrified by things like the Columbine High School shootings and other indications of morally and ethically illiteracy among students, and hoping to quell the appearance of increasing violence in schools, we're seeing a new emphasis on character.

Dr. Thomas Lickona is a proponent of what he calls character education. You can see my review of his book "Character Matters," and recommendations for books on this topic, on my main web page, here. I won't duplicate that on this site.

Let me close with two points. Number one: Character Matters.

Diligence, integrity, fortitude-- you name the positive character quality -- and it makes a student a better student. It not only boosts academic achievement, it gives them a foundation for a successful life beyond the classroom. A child who doesn't master an academic skill may need help in that area later in life-- but which of us excels at every academic area? Geniuses in one area often know little about other areas. My mechanic doesn't understanc computers. But many software engineers don't understand cars.

A child with an academic gap may cause us an inconvenience in later life, but a child without character can give us heartbreaks that never go away. Good friends of mine did a good job with academics. But one daughter had several children by different fathers, some out of wedlock. Her continuing difficulties are an unending burden for her parents. Ask them if they'd trade a few points on the SAT for more character.

The second point is this. It really doesn't matter what government schools tackle, you can count on them making a mess of it.

In 1848, when the government school program got its start, America had a high rate of literacy. After more than 50 years of reading instruction in government schools, literacy rates continue to drop.

Or take "sex education." When this movement took off in government schools, relatively few children were born out of wedlock. Now the rates are nearly 70% in black families, and approaching 30% among whites.

So look out, now they want to take on "character."

* I know that many in the government school system resent calling them "government schools." "Public" schools are schools which accept the public, just as restaurants and stadiums, which accept the public, are regulated as "public places." The court house, federal office buildings, and so forth, are "government buildgings," because they're paid for with tax monies and staffed with employees paid from tax revenues. That describes the so-called "public school" system perfectly-- buildings and employees paid from tax revenues. Not only that, they are run by elected boards who serve as government officials, and their curriculum is determined by elected bodies as well.

Homeschool Success? or ?

2004-12-15T00:01:00.000-06:00

What constitutes success for homeschoolers?

Take Daisy(not her real name), for example. At eighteen, she finished a formal homeschool career with high test scores, and played the violin beautifully.

Attractive, healthy, and bright, she entered college, and quickly became totally lost. Although academically well-prepared, she had no sense of personal identity or purpose. Offered a job in her preferred field, she couldn’t convert that opportunity into a career, because, although she had worked hard growing up under her parents supervision, she lacked the motivation to work diligently on her own. As her work performance flagged, she lost self-esteem. Her appearance suffered, and then she missed work. What might have been a leg up in her chosen field now became a disaster.

She’s a productive member of society, but instead of a fulfilling career in a field that matched her talents, she moves from one job to another at the lower rungs of employment. Several years later, she still doesn’t know what her life is about. In terms of strictly academic performance, Daisy is a star. Give her information to remember and reproduce on a test, and she shines. But so far, the sterner course of Life 101, gives her no better than a C+. She’s not pregnant, and not on drugs. Nor is she happy, or living up to her potential. If she were my child, I would not consider her education truly successful.

On the other hand, compared to many other young women in her generation, she is doing well. The parents worked hard, and were successful, at duplicating the school environment. She even scored well on standardized tests, often the state's preferred mode of measurement. But the really important things were missing.

One mother, highly competitive and quite certain of herself, though she had neither experience nor training as a teacher, discounted my approach. "We're not people who feel that as long as you get character right, academics don't matter." As though that were the choice. But experience repeatedly demonstrates that if you get character wrong, academics truly don't matter. Get character right, and you get all the academic achievement that child can produce.

Homeschool "Essentials?"

2004-12-13T09:44:00.000-06:00

A colleague of mine, describing a presenter at a homeschool conference said, "She did O.K. for someone who homeschooled two kids for two years."

I often wondered, when I first got started homeschooling, how people with children no older than my own, and no in-depth exposure to others homeschool families, could speak with such certainty about matters that my training and experience told me were wrong. Now I know.

They spoke with certainty, but without knowledge, like mapamakers in the sixteenth century, coloring in the blank spaces with their own fancies, whether romantic or frightening.

You'll find a lot of that today. Many books, some contradicting each other, all telling you how to homeschool. Some seem to indicate that any method you use will work just fine, populating the blank parchment with cities of golden opportunity. Others indicate only their approach has any hope of success, guiding you past the dragons and sea monsters of their imaginations. Most people make the journey only once, and, as the Donner party could testify, conditions can vary greatly from one trip to another.

Since this blog sports a title that includes the word "essential," you probably expect that I intend to map out your journey in some detail. And you have every right to wonder how I fill in the disputed areas, whether with dragons or treasure.

First of all, I can point to the success of own three children, all educated exclusively at home, in accordance with the principles in this book, until college entry. More to the point, scores of other young adults and their families have demonstrated the value of what I'm sharing. The qualities I share here arise out of experience with hundreds of homeschool families.

I'm not talking here about people who've written me letters or talked to me at conferences. No, I'm talking about families who invited me into their homes, week by week, month by month. Some families I have worked with for nearly twenty years, watching one child after another go from reading their first word, to getting their first job after college. Like an experienced frontier guide, I have made the journey many times, with many families. I can tell you where the water may be found, and whether rain clouds herald salvation or calamity.

Of even more value are the two seriously failed homeschools I was privileged to observe. Their failures threw the essential qualitites of success into sharp relief, just as the dark shadows on a sunlit landscape reveal both the depths and the heights. As in the case of all learning, we often benefit more from our mistakes than from our successes. Autopsies reveal disease mechanisms that weaken and kill, making it possible to identify symptoms of the illness in its early stages. Doing a post mortem on those sad failed homeschools permits me to recognize problems long before they become fatal. It also enables me to prescribe remedies that prevent or alleviate problems. Had any doubt remained about the essential qualities of success, these failures eliminated it.

But enough of failure. What about success? Like one of my longtime homeschool friends, your initial definition of success may be "Better than public school." But if you didn't think you could do that, you wouldn't start in the first place. No, my definition of success requires more than that. Here’s my definition of success, a success which is within the reach of every child. A truly successful homeschool produces individuals who possess:
● Clear and positive identity
● Clear goals
● Positive Outlook on Life
● Initiative
● Responsibility
● Enthusiasm
● Creativity
● Ability to think clearly
● Academic tools to reach their goals

I want for your child, for every child, the very best. I set such a high goal, not so that I can label those who fall short as failures, but so that we can attain as much as possible. Browning wrote the famous lines:

A man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

But what I'm advocating is within your grasp. I've seen many families reach it. You can, too.

By ordinary standards, almost every homeschool succeeds. The failed homeschools I mention make up a tiny percentage. Out of the more than 600 homeschools I've closely worked with (I quit counting after that) only two could be considered significantly failed. Even they produced results similar to many schooled children. But, limiting the total sample to 600, and counting those two as seriously failed, they still make up one third of one percent. So, in one sense, the books that say any method will produce success have a point.

In the next post I'll examine one of the failures, and one of the successes.

Homeschooling in Poland

2004-12-10T17:59:00.000-06:00

Ordinarily, it will be at least a couple of days between posts here. But I just had to share this fascinating article about homeschooling in Poland.

As one who has experience with legislators, educators, and regulators (see here), I find this tale particularly interesting.

Essentials for Homeschoolers in a Hurry to Start

2004-12-10T16:42:00.000-06:00

Although probably a majority of families who decide to opt out of schools and help their children learn at home, sometimes called "homeschooling" (see my first post on why I hate that term), in my 25 years of helping homeschool families, I've seen that some choose it every month. And the New Year, just after the holidays, and around the beginning of the second half of the year, is a very popular time.

Over time, I'll be getting into almost every issue right here. But if you're in a hurry to get underway, I can direct you to other resources of mine on the web.

My home page for homeschooling is can be foune here. From there you can find a great deal of information. But if you're really in a hurry, go to my beginner's page first thing. If you already know about your state law, the next thing you need to know is about the transition phase, of shifting from schoolish thinking to and understanding of learning at home. A quick diagnosis of your children's attitudes (and your own), here, can tell you how much needs to be changed. This page will help you make a start on that. Further posts on this blog will elaborate, especially as questions come in.

For those concerned, the Ten Worst Mistakes homeschoolers make can be found here. For those interested in more information about your humble author, it can be found on this page.

If you're interested in homeschooling in my state of Iowa, there's a good deal of information on compliance with our law here. There's a handy glossary of terms, to make the sometimes opaque legal language easier to understand. I have been intimately involved with every stage of development of our law, and have several pages on the various types of complicance: supervising teacher, testing, or portfolio evaluation.

Yes, I have a homeschool book, or more accurately a workbook for parents, to help them put together a homeschool curriculum tailored to each family's, and each child's needs. It was piloted with scores of real homeschool families, to make sure it actually worked in real homes. And it's in continuous use by hundreds of families right now.

But this post is not about selling my book, or anything, right now, but to help new families get a quick feel for what may be facing them in the weeks and months immediately ahead.

That's it for now.

Ed

I Hate "Homeschooling"

2004-12-09T20:51:00.000-06:00

No, the title doesn't refer to those days when Mom is ready pack the children off to military school and take herself to a convent (even if she's not Catholic). It doesn't refer to the times when the in-laws spend the weekend regaling you with the achievements of their other grandchildren, you know, the normal ones that go to school. It doesn't even refer to the times when you've just bought the perfect curriculum, or designed the killer unit study, only to have the little darlings turn up their noses.

No, it's actually the term itself. "Homeschooling" misleads a lot of people into thinking that the major difference between learning at home and learning at a formal school is a matter of location. As a matter of simple logistics, that's not possible. As an experienced teacher and school principal before my own children reached school age, I wasn't looking to duplicate the classroom experience at home-- simply reduce class size and shorten my commute.

On the contrary, what I sought was a different quality of experience. I wanted my children to love learning, to develop initiative, to be self-starting, self-motivated, self-disciplined learners. I wanted them to develop the character that would enable their talent-- after all, few things are more common than unrealized potential.

Not only that, but in observing more than 600 families close up over the last twenty years, those who work hardest at duplicating the classroom at home suffer the most. They often suffer chronic burnout.

One mother who ran her homeschool with near military precision strenuously denied my last sentence. She did the very best to duplicate the classroom, she said, and she had never burned out. Some weeks later I saw her again, looking even more austere than usual. She had just returned from the Mayo Clinic, she told me, where the doctors had spent two months trying to understand the origin of, and treat her mysterious case of pneumonia. I nodded sympathetically, thinking to myself, "Well, at least she didn't burn out."

Anyway, I prefer the term "learning at home" to "homeschooling." I think the former phrase describes, without misleading, the actual process much more accurately. but I continue to use the term "homeschooling" for one reason: it is a term everyone knows and accepts. If I titled this blog "Essentials for Learning at Home," most people would simply shake their heads. Google the term "learning at home" and you'll get a very different result than that for "homeschooling."

As I will explore in the future, the misunderstanding engendered by the term "homeschooling" causes almost endless grief for families who want their children to learn at home. But we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to have been, so this blog is homeschoolessentials, and homeschooling we will discuss.

Just as an aside. I'm not interested in debating the opponents of homeschooling here, nor will I waste energy with gadflies. For those who want to have active learning children at home, I have all the time in the world. Whether you're homeschooling one child or twenty, those under 5 or over 15, I've pretty much seen it all. It can work for you, as it has for so many others.