I’m already tired of having this discussion

Last night DH and I were on a company dinner cruise. We sat at a table with his two good workmates and their wives. We were talking about our plans to buy an acreage outside of town and spend half the week there and half the week in town. One couple, N and H, have school-aged kids and live in the suburbs. H remembered that we are homeschooling and said this to me: “Oh yes, you say you aren’t going to send the kids to school, but when they do go to school you won’t be able to go back and forth like that”.

Excuse me? You are so sure that, despite our best intentions, we will “see the light” and put our kids in school eventually?

Okay, so maybe she didn’t mean it that way. But the comments just kept coming. The socialization stuff. Puh-LEASE. I am so sick of that. Then N says he coaches soccer and there are two homeschooled kids on his team and its so obvious that they just don’t socialize well with the other kids at all…

Oh, so you mean they aren’t sucky little conformists who’ve had all the uniqueness bullied out of them? You mean their lives don’t revolve around discussions of video games and the latest TV series and how much school SUCKS?

I mean, even if you take what this guy is saying at face value, it’s pretty damned rude. I sure wouldn’t say “yeah, we go to the playground at our local public school and those school kids are little hooligans!” to somebody whose kids I know go to school.

There were other comments, like if one kid wanted to go to school but a sibling didn’t how “awful” that would be. As if the homeschooled kid is being totally deprived of a life by being homeschooled while the other child enjoys everything childhood has to offer. Yeah, right.

I guess what pisses me off the most is that most people you run across have NO CLUE what homeschooling is. And yet they are so certain it’s substandard, or not for them, or whatever, and they are so ready to hand you their opinions of homeschooling. H and N’s boys are 8 and 5. Give the older one another year or two and I’m betting his enthusiasm for school will be all but annihilated. Then again, it was obvious from the conversation that these parents have the usual mainstream ideas about kids. How the older one is “self motivated” but wouldn’t do anything with mama around; how the younger one is clingy and insecure and needed school to show him that he could “do it on his own”, etc.

The whole conversation left me with a really bad taste in my mouth. And I know that this is just one of many, many such conversations I’m going to have to endure for the next decade or so. I’m starting to think about the typical comments I get and formulate some responses. It seems I’m going to have to have a repertoire of answers ready, lest I shoot off at the mouth and have to shove my foot in it. I know some people can just shrug their shoulders and say nothing, and they are probably right that there is no point: I’m not trying to convince schoolers that they should homeschool and what do I care what strangers think of me? But I do feel like I want to defend myself. It pisses me off to no end that people hear I am homeschooling and imagine me sitting in my living room making my kids do worksheets and depriving them of the company of their peers.

And I guess there’s also a part of me that wants to let people know that homeschooling is not just for fringe lunatics, but for educated parents who want the best for their children. Last week at the school playground I ran into a lady I know whose son went to school with my neice. He started at the middle school this year and when I asked her if he was liking it she paused and said “Well, he has no choice”.

Nice.

Learning as a separate activity

Many of the mamas in our homelearning group have enrolled their children in the Silverdale program, which DD will be starting this fall. Portfolios are submitted three times a year and evaluated by a teacher. Most of us are unschoolers and readily admit to “pimping” ourselves out for the cash incentives (you get cash and internet connection paid for, as well as some free software like Rosetta Stone). For me it’s more about needing a personal kick in the pants to keep up a portfolio, as well as access to lots of homeschooling-oriented programs (from arts to sciences to sports). Most of the moms I know who are doing Silverdale take the teacher comments with a big grain of salt and don’t share them with their kids. All agree, however, that doing the portfolios is actually fun and provides a nice record of progress and what’s been done.

So this one mama, J, was telling me that her evaluator is pressing for more writing from her 7 year old son. She had included a letter he’d worked painstakingly at writing, as thanks to the coordinator of the theatre program he’d completed: he loved every minute of it and asked his mother to help him write and mail the letter. But the teacher didn’t pay much mind to it and instead suggested he write about the things he learned and discuss what was most interesting to him, etc. (we all suspect that this is an attempt to show “proof” that are kids are actually learning something; the teachers don’t seem to have much faith that learning can take place without some Busywork being required at the end of it).

J pointed out to me that it seemed so contrived to ask her son to write about “what he learned” and that, if she asked her son, he probably wouldn’t really get the question at first. Unschoolers learn by Living Life. The kids ask the questions, follow their interests, but they don’t really think of these moments as “learning”. Learning in school is a distinct activity. You go to school to Learn. Learning occurs during the hours of classroom time, and takes a break for recess and lunch. School kids understand that they are there to Learn and nothing else (no chit-chatting, no game playing, etc). But for unschoolers there is no distinct activity that is Learning. It happens all the time, throughout the day, in bits and peices. The child perceives no difference between watching a movie, colouring pictures, and reading a book about Natural History. These are all just fun things that they do. They are just how the day goes.

J didn’t want her son to start considering Learning as a distinct activity, to start separating parts of the day into “learning” and “not learning”. I agree.

It’s all Fun and Games

Last night DS went to bed early (he hadn’t napped) and DH joined him (had an early morning flight to San Fran today), which left me and DD the chance to play a board game together. She chose her favorite, “Vancouveropoly”, which is a variation on Monopoly using local places.

We had an excellent game, and this time she seemed open to the idea of losing money as well as gaining it. I charged her for properties and then showed her how to use the different denominations of money to pay for things. She grasped the concept immediately. I could tell her “this costs two hundred dollars” and she would hand me two $100 bills. She also learned what “change” is, and how you can use bigger bills to pay for things and then get money back (not getting that the net transaction results in a loss of money, she was quite excited with this). We actually got to the point where we were each able to buy houses for our properties, and she got that the house price had to be distributed among three properties (eg. three houses at $100 each cost $300 and that gives you one house for each of the three spots).

Rolling the dice was also instructive. She used to ask me to tell her what the two numbers added up to, but now insists on counting them herself. And while I know she’s far and away from understanding probability, she did seem to get that rolling doubles was something special, and the more often she rolled them the more special it was (the kid was on a serious doubles streak last night; I should take her to Vegas).

We made it fairly far into the game before things started to deteriorate (and it was bedtime), and I enjoyed myself and enjoyed watching her learning while not realizing she was learning. Seeing how easy it is to incorporate mathematical concepts into play makes me marvel at how efficiently schools manage to suck the joy out of math and reduce it to a mind-numbing chore.