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The Imperfect Homeschooler

Cardamom Publishers

P.O. Box 743

Janesville, WI 53547

You Could Handle It, Mr. Stossel

By Barbara Frank

A while back, television reporter John Stossel wrote yet another of his columns criticizing America’s public school monopoly, where he also explained why we need school choice. I’m with him on that. But after bringing up homeschooling and how successful it is, he made a comment that bothered me. He said,

I don't know how these homeschooling parents do it. I couldn't do it. I'd get impatient and fight with my kids too much. But it works for lots of kids and parents….

I’ve heard this one many times. Sometimes people have called me a saint for homeschooling my kids all these years, adding that they could never do it. Often, that’s a cop-out. They have other things they’d rather do than homeschool, but they don’t want to admit it.

I don’t know if that’s where Stossel is coming from, but there is another possibility. He (and those other parents) may be thinking about who their kids are right now and what kind of relationship they have with them. Their kids come home from school sullen after being locked up in a classroom all day, hardly interested in tackling their homework, and willing to fight about it. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are beat from a long day of work preceded and followed by a harrowing commute. They feel like supervising the kids’ homework about as much as having a root canal, but it must be done. So the exhausted parents fight with the cranky kids about doing their homework, and that’s the picture homeschooling brings to mind when these parents consider the concept.

People only know what they know. How can we get across to Stossel and the rest of them that homeschooled kids aren’t kids who come home every afternoon irritable and tired? Kids who haven’t gone to school have ownership of their time. They don’t have to ask for permission in front of 30 kids when they have to go to the bathroom. They eat when they’re hungry, not from 11:15 to noon because it said so on their schedule. They don’t have to worry whether their clothes are in style; it may be pajamas, anyway. The freedom homeschooled kids have makes them different people than they would have been if they’d been going to school every year.

We homeschooling parents are different, too. We spend more time with our kids than most parents do, so we get them when they’re rested and ready to learn. We get to know them so well that we can handle the times when they’re tired and cranky because we also get to see them when they’re happy and fun to be around. And if they’ve been homeschooled all their lives, they’re even easier to deal with because they’ve missed out on picking up a lot of the obnoxious habits that schoolkids tend to pass around like viruses.

Does this mean we never get impatient with our kids or fight with them? Unfortunately not. We are human, after all. We all have our bad moments and bad days. But because they're just one part of the whole, it’s no big deal. Families who live and learn together on a daily basis are much more accustomed to every facet of family life, the joy and the troubles.

So Mr. Stossel, don’t write off homeschooling as something you could never do. If you gave it a chance, you might find your relationship with your kids rising to a whole new level. But whatever you decide, don’t stop fighting for school choice. It’s needed…desperately.

Excerpted from Stages of Homeschooling, an upcoming eBook series from Cardamom Publishers. Learn more at www.cardamompublishers.com. Barbara Frank homeschooled her four children for 25 years. You’ll find her on the web at www.barbarafrankonline.com and www.thrivinginthe21stcentury.com

Has Something Come Between You and Your Children?

By Barbara Frank

Where I live, at certain times of day the roads are packed with moms taking their kids places. There are young moms with one or two little ones locked into car seats, and older moms ferrying their young teens to soccer practice or the mall.

This is nothing new. Moms have been driving their kids about town ever since the two-car family became prevalent in the 1960s. The difference is that now, many of those moms are talking on their cell phones while they drive.

It’s easy to understand why. If you must be stuck in traffic, why not make some phone calls so you feel like your time in line isn’t a total waste? A nice long chat with a friend seems like a good way to pass the time.

Meanwhile, the children in the back play with toys or video games, or watch a DVD. On good days, they entertain each other. On difficult days, they fight. The one thing they can’t do, however, is talk with Mom, because she’s on the phone.

The car is one place where cell phones have come between parents and their kids. Carrying on a phone conversation while driving with your kids is a lost opportunity, because the family car is a wonderful place for direct communication between parent and child (of any age). Some of the best conversations I had with my children over the years took place while we were driving somewhere.

Of course, when they were little, we sang in the car more than we talked. As my children grew, our repertoire morphed from simple nursery rhymes to songs from their favorite tapes and from Sunday school.

As they developed an awareness of the world around them, they began asking questions about places we drove past, and places they recognized. We still sang occasionally, but most of our car time was spent with me answering their questions.

When they reached the preteen years, like most kids, they began to crave privacy. Asking them direct questions often made them clam up. But in the car, my need to keep my eyes on the road seemed to make them feel more comfortable talking without me looking right at them.

This carried into the teenage years. At times, my teens said things that would normally startle me. But the need to pay constant attention to the road kept me from reacting too strongly, and so they’d continue to talk. I learned many things from them during our drive-time talks, things that I probably would never have gotten out of them any other way. They expressed feelings that helped me understand them, and my responses helped them understand me a little more, too.

When their friends came with us somewhere, I got to know them better by chatting with them in the car. Of course, I learned even more when the conversation between the kids didn’t include me. They seemed to forget I was there, and sometimes I heard things that made me far more well-informed than my kids realized.

A cell phone would have kept me from having those times with my children. It also would have been rude of me to have long phone conversations while my children were in the car. If you’ve ever traveled with a person who’s addicted to their phone, you know what I mean.

So if you want lots of quality time with your children, put your phone in your pocket and leave it there. Fight the temptation to call someone on it when you’re stuck in line. Instead, talk to your kids. What better use of your time can there be?

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What I Learned from Fifth Grade

By Barbara Frank

OK, I admit it, I loved fifth grade.

Please, before anyone tries to confiscate my homeschool mom credentials, let me explain. Some time after the initial thrill of “going to school” had worn off, and long before the tedium of high school (where my days were filled with a burning desire to get by and get out), I had a school year that was radically different from any I experienced during all my years of compulsory schooling. Ironically, that year distinctly affected how I would eventually homeschool my children.

Clearmont School was a typical 1960s American suburban school. There was a principal, a secretary, a librarian, a “Learning Center” supervisor, two janitors, and several hundred children from the subdivision surrounding the school. Back then, apparently, a school could be run without having as many administrators and staff in the building as children.

I moved to the neighborhood just in time to begin fourth grade at Clearmont, and there was nothing remarkable about that year. I spent it as I had the previous four, parroting back answers and staring out the window daydreaming.

But something changed in fifth grade. Evidently, over the summer a small group of us had been identified as “gifted.” I recall lots of discussion around the house about my achievement test scores, so perhaps that’s what caused the school to separate us from our classmates. Regardless, a small group of us were given a different schedule of classes than the other kids.

At first I was not happy to be separated from most of my friends and neighbors. But as the year unfolded, I found myself actually enjoying school.

In retrospect, I believe the teaching staff didn’t really know what to do with us at first, which would explain how we ended up in the Learning Center each morning. While the other fifth-graders had reading class, we were sent to a spacious room filled with tables and chairs, and lined with shelves full of educational games and resources. We were told to sit quietly and work on the exercises we would find in a box placed in the middle of our table.

The box contained sheets of paper grouped by color. On each sheet was a story followed by comprehension questions. The exercises became more difficult as we progressed through the colors. After finishing each exercise, we were allowed to check our work with an answer key and record our score. I felt proud knowing that they trusted me to do those things.

At first we sat quietly and worked. But at some point, we began to compete with each other to see who could finish soonest with the highest score. This was great fun, and before long all of us had completed the entire box of exercises. The Learning Center supervisor didn’t know what we should do next, but apparently she’d been told to keep us busy, so she let us choose from the resources in the room. This is how I learned to play Mancala, an ancient game of strategy; we spent many happy hours playing that game as well as others. To be free to have fun in the middle of the school day was exciting!

Lunchtime was also exciting, because the girls in our small group were given the opportunity to answer the telephone in the school office during lunch. At Clearmont, the staff took an hour off for lunch while the children walked home to have their own meal, so there was no one around to answer the phone. But this changed once we were allowed to do that job. Each girl was assigned to a week at a time of daily lunchtime phone duty. It was an honor to be trusted enough to take phone messages while sitting at the secretary’s desk, eating a bag lunch. Of course, becoming the envy of all one’s friends made this an extra-special privilege.

The afternoon was interesting, too, for that was when our little group attended algebra and Spanish classes. Our algebra teacher was a young man who had longish hair and a beard, wore a shirt and tie, and talked loudly. He didn’t expect us to raise our hands when we wanted to speak, but he did expect us to speak! It was a far less structured classroom environment than we were accustomed to (teachers in nearby classrooms sometimes asked us to pipe down), but it was a fun place to learn. Knowing that we were expected to understand algebra in fifth grade made it challenging and satisfying.

Our Spanish class was also very stimulating. We were not allowed to speak English in class, so we quickly picked up a fair amount of Spanish out of necessity. At the end of the school year, we presented the play “Blanca Nieve” (“Snow White”) in Spanish to the entire school. While our audience had no idea of what we were saying, they seemed to enjoy the play just the same.

As they say, time flies when you’re having fun. Before long, our fifth grade year ended, and we left Clearmont to attend the junior high down the road. There I would go back to the mind-numbing routines that had characterized my school days before fifth grade. But the experience remained in my mind, and I now realize that my time as a fifth grader actually taught me a few things that have served me well as I teach my children at home:

· I learned that children can be trusted to learn. While loosely supervised in the Learning Center, my classmates and I devoured the various activities that were there for our enrichment. No one walked us through the motions of each exercise and game; we were left to figure out things out for ourselves, and we did.

· I learned that children can be trusted to help out. As one of the girls allowed to answer the phone in the school office during lunch hour, I took great pride in my work, and I recall that the other girls did, too. Who wanted to risk losing one of the principal’s phone messages? We took our jobs seriously, even at age 11.

· I learned that children should be provided with resources. Whether that means a room full of educational games or a giant mud puddle in the back yard, the child who has open access to learning resources will want to explore them.

· I learned that children learn best when they have freedom. The freedom to speak, to move about, to choose what to work on next; these are all part of the process of learning. Traditional schooling rarely allows these things to happen, and that’s why true learning rarely happens there. The flip side of this is that children have freedom at home, and so they learn quickly and efficiently there.

As a fifth grader, I could not have imagined that my future children would never go to school. Back then, we thought school was inevitable, a certainty you just had to get through somehow. But that year planted ideas in my head that would burst into bloom when I became a homeschooling parent. Maybe that’s the real reason I love my memories of fifth grade.

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Updated

Dec. 21, 2011