Getting involved in the Community

A couple of weeks ago our local news channel did a two-part bit on homeschooling. Overall I was quite disappointed; the editors made sure to reinforce every stereotype out there for homeschoolers while paying lip service to research that dispels these myths.

They also had a school principal (or head of the teacher’s union, can’t remember now) to give “the other side” (like it isn’t represented in every facet of daily life)…and one comment she said just made me want to tear my hair out. She noted that schools have diverse backgrounds of kids, from poor to wealthy, of all abilities and races, etc…she suggested that, in this way, school provides kids with a taste of what society is like. She implied that, because of this, schooled children are somehow “involved” with society.

Besides the obvious criticisms one can level at this claim, such as where in society one finds adults segregated by age, there is also the fact that school kids simply don’t have the time to truly involve themselves in the real world. Oh sure, they’ll take a field trip to an old folks’ home. But such involvements really seem artificial to me. Going on a field trip, with a group of 30 kids all your age and only a handful of adults, is nothing like being involved as an individual.

Then Miranda over at Nurtured By Love posted this story about her family’s involvement at the local community garden. She points out that all the kids attending were homeschoolers, and that this was the case for many community events they attended.

My kids haven’t yet reached a level of maturity where they can be taken to such places, but you can bet that when they can we’ll be getting involved with our community. Volunteering in park cleanups, invasive plant removal programs, food banks, etc are all open to us. I think Miranda was right that the school kids really don’t have the time. But I also think that school kids are removed and isolated from the real world, and so perhaps can’t feel their place within it as homeschooled kids do. It’s hard to participate in something when you don’t feel any ownership of it.

It just seems strange to me that we consider school kids part of society, and yet we remove them from it for most of their lives. Add in homework and busy commuting parents and it’s no wonder that few of us have a true sense of community involvement. As a homeschooling family, we look forward to building a connection to our community as part of our daily life experiences.

Reading Level Tools

DD’s learning consultant told me about some neat links you can go to in order to determine at what level your child is reading. DD has been reading with increasing confidence lately; some of the things she can read surprises me. I was curious to know how her reading skills compared with grade level expectations.

Last week she read several pages of The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit (I can’t stand this book, but that’s another story). The LC showed me that Amazon now has a new feature whereby you can find out the reading level of a particular book. If you click on the link for the book, scroll down the page to the “Inside this Book” section and look for “Concordance”. Click on that, scroll down to “text stats” and under “readability” you’ll see the Flesch-Kincaid Index Score. This tries to relate the book to US Grade Levels. Apparently, this book reads at about a Grade 4 – 5 level. I dunno, seems a bit high to me.

There’s another cool feature over at the Literacy Trust called the SMOG test (Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook). It allows you to type in a minimum of 30 words from any text and it will calculate the reading level. The scores are a bit confusing to me, however. I think they are based on adult literacy. Everything from 0-6 is considered “low literate” and apparently an example of this level is Soap Opera Weekly (!). Level 7 is “junior high” and 9 is “some high school”.

Neat idea, but I’m not sure how useful it is. For example, I typed in this back page synopsis from one of DD’s books called A Sticker Book of Dinosaurs. She read it to me the other day, for the first time (we picked it up at a swap recently):

“Do you like Dinosaurs? Then get set for ages of fun as you answer the riddles, find the stickers, and complete the colourful scenes in this sticker book all about dinosaurs.”

I even left out the words “complete” and “scenes” because DD stumbled over them. Still it came back as Level 9.7, somewhere between Readers Digest and Newsweek.

Whatever grade level DD is reading I honestly don’t care. She’s enjoying herself, all her reading is spontaneous and self-driven, and she’s improving every week. To me, that is all the progress I need to hear. But I confess, I’m only human. I tend to get defensive about homeschooling with some members of my family and it’s nice to have that little tidbit in my back pocket “Oh well, DD is already reading at a grade school level”. It keeps them happy and off my back.

In a related note: DS will be 3.5 next month and he just read his first two words to me “Yes” and “No”. They were printed on the side of our recycling box and he read them while waiting to get into the car in our garage. I know how it is he came to know these words: he plays a lot of Wii games (specifically Super Mario Galaxy) and you often have to select between Yes and No. Who says video games can’t be educational?

Teens skipping school

I heard a report on the radio today about teens in Cape Breton skipping school. The focus of the story, and this article on the same subject, seems to be finding ways to force kids back into their seats.

Articles like this truly leave me stunned at how brainwashed our society is when it comes to schooling. First of all, not a single person has suggested that the reason kids don’t want to go to school is because they hate it. Survey any class of grade-schoolers and ask them if they had a choice would they go to school and you’ll find most say “no”. Ever notice the collective joy on 1) the last day of school, 2) a snow day, and 3) a teachers’ strike?

But no, instead of trying to fix our education system so that all kids can feel challenged, stimulated, included, and in some control over their own learning we’d rather come up with punishments and consequences. Have these people never heard the expression “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink.”? Apparently forcing somebody’s ass into a desk chair = educating them. Are they actually learning if they don’t want to be there but are being forced to? I think not.

But nobody asks that. Nobody asks whether counting the number of bums in seats is an accurate indicator of how many are being “educated”. The principle of one Cape Breton school calls this “the biggest thorn in his side”. Huh, I don’t suppose that has to do with the fact that your Ministry of Education funds students (i.e. gives money to the school) based on attendance…?

I feel truly sorry for these teens. They are in the prime of their lives and they are forced to live the sort of 9-5 hell that many working adults get stuck in without realizing it until it’s too late. Life is too short to be doing that from cradle to grave.

The rhetoric coming out in this story is just tragic. It’s all “this is for your own good, like it or not” and “life is hard and you can’t just not show up for work” etc. Nobody cares that the kids hate school. What are we doing to our youth? How many of us, in our middle years, look back on wasted time and regrets. These poor kids are pissing half their lives away in a classroom that provides nothing for them. And our society is forcing them back in there rather than listening to anything they might have to say about why they don’t want to go. We don’t care. We’ve already decided it’s for their own good and we assume they are too immature and unmotivated to have an opinion.

Thank God my teens will not have to deal with that.