Jody Cooper

Janna’s curriculum

Curriculum plays a varied and interesting role in Janna’s homeschooling story. When Janna began homeschooling her girls, she immediately purchased a structured online curriculum, Time for Learning.

It’s an online curriculum, but it’s private pay. It’s not through a Cyber School or anything like that. We did that the first year because I was worried about keeping track of everything too…It’s a full curriculum.

 I wanted something we could just use out of box, ‘out of computer’ [laughter]… I wasn’t really sure where Sacha was in terms of, I feel like she maybe wasn’t exactly at second grade, like maybe there were things that she needed to catch up on and also some things that maybe she was above…Their [Time for Learning] bill is that the curriculum adjusts for where you are. So, if you’re doing something on the computer and you’re making a lot of mistakes, then it will just automatically back you up.

Here she comments on the preponderance of religious curriculums.

The thing I liked about it, well it’s secular, which is a big thing for us; we are not homeschooling because of religious reasons, and we’re not a religious family. So that eliminates a bunch of homeschooling curriculum…We weeded out a lot, because I didn’t want to, I mean I know some people will just skip those parts or whatever, but I just didn’t want to be picking and choosing.

While Janna and her daughters loved the program, as the school year progressed their use of the program slowly diminished. They began doing their own writing and reading and math and didn’t need the curriculum. Their learning became more organic.

We loved it (online curriculum). We really did. The kids loved it. I loved it. It keeps track of everything for you and tells you exactly what they have done and haven’t done and so it’s like easy-peasy at the end of the year. And we probably would have continued with it, there wasn’t anything really negative about it. But I just decided that we, I, didn’t really need that anymore. We were using it less and less because we were doing other stuff more. We were doing more writing on our own. We were doing more reading on our own. We were doing more math stuff on our own, and I just decided I didn’t need it any more.

 Actually, we were talking this year about going back to it just for the math component, cause the kids really liked the math component on it, but it’s expensive to pay for the whole thing just to do math.

 So, yeah, it was really more that, that I just decided I wanted to be more interactive with them. And I was more comfortable, like I wasn’t as worried about the rubric anymore, about checking the boxes and I think I settled down and got more comfortable.

 Janna became less reliant on someone else telling her what her kids needed to learn and also, she wanted to be more personally involved in the homeschooling experience. However, she did target certain skills and subjects they were interested in and accessed or purchased certain programs, like Brave Writer for language arts and writing.

Love it (Brave Writer). It can be online, or it can be boxed. I just boxed it. I love it. I’m the kind, you know, I wrote a lot in school. I read a lot. I’m all about the reading and writing. And I just love the whole thing, and I really wanted us to do it because the spine of it is sharing books together and then doing some like copy work and short writing on the books. I just really loved the framework.

 I realized that nobody was going to come and tell me that my kids weren’t learning enough. After I got over kind of all of that, I realized that that’s like the beauty of all of this. And that’s like why we keep homeschooling is that it’s super fun. I mean I get to do all this cool stuff. Like history, I never was a history person really. I never really got a good grasp of it…Read all this stuff, learn all this stuff, all is fitting together in a way it didn’t fit together for me before.

The second year of homeschooling began.

At the beginning of the year… we did kind of what we’ve always done. Which is we do a little bit of everything. We do some book work, umm more math, writing, book work. They both had their classes that they took. Ruby is my science kid, so she took Franklin classes, Wagner institute classes. She does a science nature class at Aubrey down the road. That’s why we come here. And Sacha was doing art and that kind of stuff.

 Then Janna was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had surgery and was often sick from the treatment. What to do with the children? Janna’s father suggested that the girls go back to school because Janna was often unable to help them. Janna wanted to have them close by and they wanted to be with their mother.

In the spring I worried more about them having something. Not because I was worried about them academically. I always feel like you can catch up with that stuff. But I wanted them to have something that they could do in the house when I wasn’t feeling well. So, I signed them both up for Time for Learning (Online curriculum they used when they first started homeschooling.)

We used bits and pieces when they are wanting to do something and I’m not available. But for the spring it was really useful because that’s exactly what it is, especially for Ruby, she really had times when she needed … to have structure, wanting to learn things. I wasn’t as available, and it really was useful for us…so I’d get annoyed with why am I paying thirty bucks?!? But that’s how it changed in the spring. We definitely relied on it more. They used it more, and I think they did get a lot out of it.

Janna also used Khan Academy; it was a good fit for Ruby and it was free. Ruby was particularly interested in computer science and coding. She taught herself JavaScript through Khan Academy. Janna explained, “I mean I’m involved. I know that she’s doing it, but she knows more than I do at this point.”

Having her kids learn at home captured Janna’s imagination and pull her into a new way of life. She thrived on new ideas and wanted to be involved in family learning.

One of my homeschooling friends talks about strewing materials, and strewing ideas, and I just love it, like it gives me this little mental image, and I just love that idea…throw a bunch of stuff around, see what we love, what we don’t like, what’s interesting. What works? What doesn’t work? Oh, we tried to learn some math this way. That didn’t really work. Let’s try to learn something this way. I don’t know? But I just love that idea, like this whole different curriculum.

Once Janna was recovered from her cancer and life seemed to settle a little, Sacha learned about a new opportunity – a brick and mortar fine arts academy that combined with doing regular schooling through Cyber School. She quickly prepared an audition at the end of the summer and was accepted. Now life involved taking Sacha ‘to school’ two days a week, and then Sacha labored through Cyber School three days a week while Janna and Ruby carried on with their own particular brand of homeschooling. Sacha loved the fine arts brick and mortar classes.

There’s a theme for the year, they do all things art around that theme. Last year it was Women and Arts. So, they did dance, they did music, they did history, they did live performances, they did all kinds of stuff, awesome.

The Cyber School was very trying. Sacha found it to be very challenging and time-consuming. Even though they only did it for three days they were expected to complete five-days-worth of classes. The question of whether Sacha would continue in the program became moot because the family decided to move to New York because of dad’s job.

The family was challenged to build up their knowledge of a whole new state and environment in which to homeschool. The only curriculum reported to me after the move was that they use something called Build Your Library.

We’re using that as a kind of the frame, so I am changing some things. It purports itself to be an everything but math curriculum. It integrates history, literature, reading, writing, and history, and science. It integrates them together… It’s a five day a week curriculum to get through a year. And we don’t do curriculum five days a week, so I cut and paste.

I look forward to hearing from Janna each year. What new approach will they be trying this year?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Jody Cooper

How Important is Curriculum?

Morgan talks about curriculum, history curriculum in particular;

“You know when we grew up we learned white people history, mostly wars…”

“…out of a text book, and it was very Western culture-centered, and history was mostly about who fought, who won, and…

When Morgan said this I thought… The Trojan War, the Wars in the Bible, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War 1, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. She’s right, at least that’s what I studied in school, at least in middle school and high school. It never occurred to me that the history of the world didn’t have to be followed in threads of fighting.

Morgan suggests other ways history could be organized,

Why do we learn history by wars? How about we learn history based on science and invention, or from a women’s point of view or from you know indigenous people’s point of view or there are so many more things which in some ways makes, like I don’t feel like I had a well-rounded education because it was from such a narrow point of view.

And outside of history,  curriculum-guided content still dominates what a child learns in school. When I chose to homeschool my children, I searched out the local public schools for their grade-level curricula to make sure my children learned the “important stuff”; I so bought into the absolute sovereignty of the curriculum the public schools had created. Morgan had the courage to imagine something different.

“Like it doesn’t seem to me, in this day and age, that there is a particular curriculum that you need to know.”

Morgan unschools her children. She doesn’t follow a curriculum. When asked what goals she has for her children she responded,

I think my goals are for them to be confident that they can figure out stuff. Like I don’t think you need to know this or you need to know that so much as more the confidence that they know how to figure things out or know people to go ask or can go online and figure stuff out. Like it doesn’t seem to me, in this day and age, that there is a particular curriculum that you need to know as much as the ability to learn what you need to know.

Morgan’s personal school experience made a strong impression on her and the direction she steers her children.

I feel like when I grew up you had to know Western Civilization and bloddy blah, and that a lot of the rest of the world history was just kind of ignored. And it’s like well there’s more if you tried to learn all the world history from forever, you could never know it all, and it would take up all your time. So I think everyone’s view of everything is so much broader, that you can’t say you have to know this.

I’ve read some of the classics when I was in school, and there is other stuff that I haven’t read. and I don’t feel my life is ruined by the classics I missed and history I don’t know.

Morgan reports feeling bored or angry when she went to school. She felt unable to do the things she was interested in.

Well, I was super bored through all of school. and I was angry a lot of the time…I joked about Cuisenaire rods, because I loved to play with Cuisenaire rods, and I remember they were really something that got brought out for like two or three days in the school year. And I REALLY loved them. I really wanted to play with them and make patterns and do stuff, and we weren’t allowed to. Like they only came out at that one time. That’s just one example, but there were a lot of things that just made me angry…having to do what they thought was important, the way they wanted to do, and being bored just a lot of the time. I was smart. I got my work done really fast…and I wasn’t allowed to do what I was interested in.

These experiences in traditional classrooms led Morgan to try something different. When asked about how she plans school, without a curriculum, she laughs and says,

I would say we have a lot of books in our house. and we have the computer. And I do go through and sort of look at, like Ricky will be in third grade this year, and I do go through and look at what’s expected of a third grader, and I will get books out of the library…The other thing that I do, was like we went to the mountains and there were like 50 million garter snakes everywhere. Ricky was capturing them. We were there when they came out of their den this spring and had the mating ball…when we came home from the mountains, we went to the library and got all these books out about garter snakes, and Ricky looks at the pictures and we talk about it, and I read them and tell them about it. Like sometimes they’ll read them and get interested, and we watch videos, but that’s sort of my planning is sort of when something gets interesting, we get a whole bunch of books.

Going against the tide has not been worry free. Math is one example; her boys haven’t studied math in a structured way. Some of this causes her worry. She’s not sure that her choices are always the right ones, but she does the best she can. She talks about the math she learned in school,

M: Like the times tables, Any times tables (Morgan snaps her fingers a few times) pops out of my head, you know?

J: you mean you can’t remember the?

M: No, I know them all. Oh, they were drilled into my head. 6×7=42, you know like, it’s just there. And they will never (pause)

J; have that?

M: have that. That immediate knowledge of 8×5=40. and I can’t tell whether that’s a problem or not.

I spent a lot of math time teaching math facts to fourth graders. When they didn’t learn them I heard about it from the teachers in the upper grades; it caused problems in higher level math. It remains to be see how difficult this will be for Morgan’s children. Maybe they won’t ever use higher level math, or else use calculators. Maybe one day they’ll decide they need to know this and learn it.

Curriculum holds a place in our culture that few people question. I’ll share how some other parents in my study approached curriculum.

 

photo credit: Bundesheer.Fotos via photopin (license)

Jody Cooper

The Culture of Schooling

You, yes you, when you graduated from high school, were more prepared to major in education than most other majors. This is because you already have 12 years of experience with education under your belt. You’ve been immersed in the culture of schooling for your whole life.

Smagorinsky (2011) presents an elegant explanation as to why teachers continue to employ traditional, teacher-centered, lecture-driven instruction when research recommends more progressive, constructivist, student-centered, experiential pedagogies. He argues, “that the issue of the persistence of authoritarian patterns of teaching and learning is a function of the culture of schooling, a culture embedded in 4000 years of stone and seemingly impervious to real, systemic change” (Smagorinsky, 2011, p. 78).

Here is a brief accounting of Smagorinksy’s thinking about why education is slow to change. (For the full argument read the chapter on The Culture of Schooling in his book.)

…the deep processing of students’ conception of schooling is established early and thus powerfully (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) 83

 A teacher starts learning to be one when they first enter school as a child.

 I approach this problem by going through the process through which people, particularly teachers, become acculturated to authoritarian schooling and questioning the degree to which even the most passionately progressive teacher education program can produce fundamental changes in teacher candidates’ thinking as they transition from their generally authoritarian school and university experiences as students to their brief exposure to alternatives in teacher education courses. From this course work they immediately cycle back, often concurrent with their university preparation in progressive teaching into the very settings that for so long socialized them to authoritarian conceptions of teaching and learning. 80

 It can be very hard to impose newer, progressive ideas of teaching over well-known, often loved ways of teaching.

 Faculties, then, tend to reproduce themselves by hiring people who will perpetuate their values; and the pool from which they draw their candidates is filled with people who are inclined to oblige. 94

 The result for the workforce is a profession more likely to be filled by those who embrace authoritarian traditions than those who seek alternatives. 95

It is hard for new ideas to displace cultural norms. A person has a hard time even waking up to understanding the culture they were raised in; it is so powerful in molding who they’ve become. There’s a very strong desire to hold on to what you know, to stay on the path. This is one reason I’m drawn to alternative ways of educating, rather than trying to change the traditional school.

photo credit: acase1968 Graduate via photopin (license)