Tag: education

Elsa and Renee are two parents who use no curriculum at all and both of them have always homeschooled their girls. Their backgrounds and educational credentials differ, as do the lenses through which they view learning. But they both have chosen a learning style without a structured curriculum.

Elsa’s girls have attended a number of classes like theatre and homeschooling co-ops, but they have had no curriculum to speak of, not even textbooks. Elsa’s philosophy of learning for her girls pretty much explains why there is no curriculum.

I’ve become even more comfortable and trusting in the process of them exploring what is meaningful and interesting to them. At this time of year, when kiddos are going off to school, I’m really happy that Annette and Caden have the opportunity to have more of a free childhood and life to develop their potential because they’re not having to do things that are being set for them to do, that they don’t have any interest in.

This family provides a view of a context where the learning is almost entirely child-led.

 Renee is a teacher. She has a carefully thought-out approach to learning that appears to discredit ‘learning from a book’; even more, learning from a highly structure curriculum that describes how and what to learn. She wants her girls to immerse themselves in their world and figure things out within that context.

When we’re walking down the street and I see a word on a van, I say Let’s try to figure out this word. It’s right there. I want them to realize that you can learn anywhere, you can learn while you’re sitting in the backseat of the car, whether you look at billboards or license plates. You can be at home and find anything on the dining room table and learn about it. My philosophy is I want my kids to not just open up this one book to page 17 and be able to read it and answer the question…I want them to look at someone’s shirt and know that man traveled to Hawaii based on what was on his shirt.

Anything in their life becomes their “curriculum.” Renee’s kids have done post card exchanges. She encourages her children to read newspapers. They have learned about writing letters to the editor of newspapers and even composed a few. They also take field trips to the local theatre, shows and dance. The dance company provides packets of information and Renee might use that as a word search for her younger children or have her older girls write up a summary. She may provide an interesting picture and have them write a story about it. Their family writes collaborative stories. Renee plays a crucial role in structuring the learning environment for her children.

While both families avoid curriculums, their approaches differ, Elsa’s being child-led learning and Renee’s being parent-led learning. I’m interested in examining the progress of Elsa’s children, leading their own search for knowledge. Infants and toddlers are so successful at learning, and they are primarily self-led. At some point parents and teachers take over and guide them along. As a culture we have come to rely on that approach, the well-established trail that educators have created. I am also interested how Renee’s children’s progress, with Renee doing much more of the guiding, but along such a different track than traditional schools.

 

As I finish up my first round of analyzing the data from five years of research I am profoundly struck by how different each homeschooling story is. For those novices to homeschooling, I beg you not to think you know what is going on when you hear someone say homeschooling. These stories I present about how curriculum is or isn’t used in these fourteen homeschools have required me to describe something entirely different every time!

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I sat down today to report on Elizabeth’s data, thinking here’s a family who used lots of curriculum. I realize I am right, they did, but oh my goodness, Elizabeth never bought any curriculum, the ones her girls used were all different and often child-managed. Elizabeth was a parent who delighted in homeschooling and came up with lots of non-curriculum fun ideas helping her daughters select books, engaging in literary discussions, organizing writing projects and they would have regular tea parties where they shared poetry they loved.

Adjusting the learning environment to meet children’s needs is much easier when homeschooling, and Elizabeth took great advantage of this benefit. Her youngest daughter, Ella, loved the outdoors, nature and animals. Ella put a tent in the backyard and slept in it for almost a full year, including the winter,

She slept outside. Periodically she will do about a four- or five-day stint where she doesn’t eat anything except for what she can forage for or catch herself. So, she knows what bark you can eat, what leaves you can eat. She knows what kind of weed makes a seed which she found in our yard and she mashed it up and fried it and it turned into a salt substitute, and then this other plant she got that you can make a paste with for pancakes. So, she made pancakes with stuff she found. She fried up earth worms and ate them one day. I mean this is her. 

Ella also loves animals. She earned money babysitting, so she could buy and fill three huge fish tanks. She also has a ball python, a bearded dragon, two fire-bellied toads, and a rabbit. My mother got her a turtle. Ella was very upset because the turtle’s tank was too small, so she nagged my mother until she got her a bigger tank from Craig’s list.

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The question remains, is following a curriculum necessary for success in school? Elizabeth’s girls are older. My dissertation, the first year of this study, had focused on Ella, her youngest daughter, but all her girls had all been homeschooled and throughout these five years the older girls provide early measures of ‘success’, particularly using a more traditional heuristic*.

Bethany, the oldest, homeschooled from 3^rd to 8^th grade. She attended a local private high school and then received a Psychology degree from a local college with a merit scholarship. She works at a day care and is considering graduate school or a fuller job at the daycare.

Patrice, the next oldest, homeschooled for 2^nd through 12^th grade. She worked her way through high school, pretty much self-managing her own learning, using the same textbooks the local school was using. She received a full scholarship to Jacob’s School of Music in Indiana, and now is attending graduate school in music with a full scholarship plus stipend for living expenses at Notre Dame.

Kendra was homeschooled 3^rd through 8^th, skipped 9^th grade and attended 10th – 12^th grades at the local private high school. She attended the local college with a merit scholarship for two years and has transferred to Temple University.

Ella has homeschooled from 3^rd through 10^th grade.  She did try the first semester of her freshman year at high school, and that didn’t work out well, so she returned home to finish out the year,

Ella has been very much on her own this year. I would say she’s unschooling except that she is doing work that I think she feels I’m requiring her to do, so maybe that wouldn’t be called unschooling, technically, because she’s not just doing whatever she wants. But she’s largely doing whatever she wants with the pressure with knowing that we have to see an evaluator, so she better have something.

Ella is very into her music. Mostly she does research. She researches various pieces of music, of classical music, and she also does a lot of composing. She’s participating in Bryn Athyn Orchestra, Bucks County Youth Orchestra, the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, an ensemble group and her cello lessons. So, she has all these five things that she goes to rehearsals for every week and does performances for. Ella has been searching for music colleges since she was in eighth grade. College is a goal for Ella, one she will undoubtedly meet.

The success of this family is obvious, at least measured by traditional educational standards. Many parents, including Elizabeth, have detailed different ideas about what is success. In many cases what is standard in traditional schooling is what nudged these families towards homeschooling, so it isn’t surprising that they might hold different ideas of what a successful outcome is. I will address these different heuristics in a separate post.

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Susan was driven to make learning interesting and sometimes strayed from the traditional path. She started homeschooling because her oldest was bored in school. He was bright and quickly finished up assignments and sat around waiting for more. Susan knew she could offer him more at home.

I used a math textbook when I homeschooled my kids, and I found a workbook with science experiments. But I always was looking for creative ways to jazz up learning. Susan seems like a woman after my own heart, but she may easily top my creative efforts. Once, I decided we were going to only study pirates for a week! And that’s what we did. It was amazing. We read Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates and visited the museum that displays the originals he painted for his book. We studied the Caribbean and the history of pirates. I’m sure we must have calculated the value of plunder on Black Beard’s ship and other such mind-bending activities. However, Susan picked a topic each month, for practically all the years she has homeschooled, and molded their studies around it. They studied the moon landing, the Erie Canal, Native American mythology, the Great Lakes, Aesop’s Fables, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, physics and many other topics. Some favorite activities included Performance of the Week, where they studied a different genre of music each month and look at an example each week, electronics using Snap Circuits, mapping the journey described in Around the World in 80 Days, something with the Olympics every time they’re on, and a study of the states like when they were founded, their motto, and state birds, etc.

Susan thought a blog might be an opportunity for Ozzie to write creatively. Ozzie was all over the idea, “What would it be about? Oh Minecraft!!” Susan may suggest that today might be a write a post on your blog day,  but she doesn’t tell him what to write. She doesn’t proof read anything before he posts it. They talk a little about it, but it’s his thing. However, she likes to keep an eye on this activity because once Ozzie’s on the computer, he slips easily into watching YouTube videos of kids playing Minecraft instead of blogging about Minecraft.

In 2014 they used the book Hello World to learn Python. Susan thinks it’s important for her kids to learn computer programming,

I want them to be able to program. I think that’s important, to understand the basis of the Internet…I’d love for them to be able to make an app.

Last year Ozzie used Python to analyze wave data from the Great Lakes. Monitoring stations in the Great Lakes gather data. Ozzie learned to pull that data from buoys, organize the data, graph the data, even graph multiple lakes onto the same graph. But her daughter, Melanie, wasn’t nearly as interested in programming, so Susan took a different approach with her,

Melanie is not quite as interested in coding. I’m still looking for the right hook for her. This year we ended up reading a book called Computational Fairytales, which introduces coding concepts in a general, fairytale type story, which was the right way to do it for her.

While Susan is a teacher, she doesn’t write or use lesson plans. Each Sunday she plans out the week, writing out a schedule on paper and giving each child a daily list. Like many other parents, as her oldest approached high school, she began to feel nervous about their past endeavors,

Oh, I can’t put it into words…you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some of this and some of that and we’d have big gaping holes, and I’d be like, “Oh, why didn’t I cover that?

She embedded some structured learning into their projects. Early on she used a book teaching writing called Rip the Page. Next, she tried a writing curriculum called Think Write that introduced the essay. And finally, as her fears rattled her nerves more regularly, she purchased a classical curriculum called The Well-Trained Mind that takes a more systematic approach to history and the classics. It encompasses logic and Latin and rhetoric.

We all worry about our children’s success. No matter how much we love homeschooling, and how excited we are watching our children learn, higher education casts a deep shadow over our joy. A belief that a standardized curriculum will best serve students in treading the path of learning often calms one’s nerves. It takes courage to wander off the path.

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Many of my parents love homeschooling. However, Kimberly exhibits a tremendous love of curricular content. She displays a deep interest in exactly what and how their curriculum should be built and seems to find joy doing it. She continually works at refining strategies for how certain subjects should be taught and why. For example, she has ideas about teaching cursive, and spelling;

I have discovered that it is important to teach cursive, so children can read it. Once my children were proficient at reading cursive, I stopped requiring them to write it, so they forgotten most of it now.

Even though spell check is available to them, I don’t think this can “teach” spelling nor be used as an excuse not to learn to spell. I still think spelling is an important subject to learn, so we do a traditional spelling program.

 Kimberly uses some technology in her planning and she struggles with how much “teaching of technology” she should do with her kids;

 When I’m researching a new subject to teach, primarily history/science, I use Internet searches extensively to plan the curriculum I will teach. For these subjects, I use a combination of traditional textbooks, regular ‘reading’ books, worksheets printed off the Internet, videos, field trips, etc.

 If that’s where technology is headed, you don’t type like this and you text like this (demonstrates texting in the air). So, is it worth teaching something that is probably going to be an outdated skill? And so, I struggle with this, and I have run out of time. If I had excess time it would probably get taught. I don’t have excess time, I’m cutting things out that I really want to teach, so I have a feeling that typing is going to end up not being taught.

Kimberly believes reading is “number one the most important thing of any skill that if I could only teach one thing ever, I’d teach reading, and I honestly think that they would end up being fine, because once you read, you can do anything.” Writing is the second most important thing to teach. Kimberly has worked very hard at writing with her children. She didn’t know how to teach writing, especially to children who didn’t want to write. I experienced this same challenge when I tried to teach writing to fourth graders who really didn’t have anything to say. She attempted to teach it and sometimes just gave up on it for a time, while her children developed other skills, and went back to it later, a strategy more easy for homeschooling moms to use that classroom teachers would find more difficult.

Kimberly talks a lot about loving the work she does to prepare for homeschooling. She has used a formal math curriculum for years and a spelling curriculum that she plans to continue using, and explains how she approaches building her own;

I usually take bits and pieces of a lot of things. I love creating my own curriculums. I find something that I could base it on. I spend a lot of time…I like my spelling program, it works, so I stick with that, but I think that in literature and vocabulary, I love being able to tie things in together. That’s one of the things I love most about homeschooling…we tied science and literature and history and all of those things in together. And there isn’t a curriculum I found that does it in a way I like, so I just make up my own. 

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When Sara’s phone rang, she was surprised to see it was Ryan. He was at the local community college taking his first math test of the semester. What was he doing calling her? “Mom, I don’t know what’s going on in this test,” Ryan whispers, “I don’t know anything.” Sara explains further,

 He was almost in tears. Where are you? she asked. I’m in the bathroom. For whatever reasons the teacher let him get up in the middle of the test to go to the bathroom, which was kind of surprising to Sara. He was in a complete panic, because he didn’t recognize almost anything on the test.  

 Sara was thinking that she should have coached him better. She should have prepared him for a ‘test’. His experience learning at home included no test-taking and very little formal math instruction. So, she just gave him the best advice she could think of,

So, Sweetie, just take a breath, do what you can. Do not get caught up on any problem you don’t know, just go on to the next one.  Just let go of this one. This is going to be a bad test, that’s fine. Yeah, you can fail or whatever.

So, Ryan gets the test back, his grade is 30. He went and asked the teacher if he could take a retest or do extra credit. Sara said, “To his teacher’s credit I like that he said, ‘No, actually, I’m not going to coddle students. If you bomb something, learn something from it.’”

To some, this approach to learning math might seem faulty or inadequate. However, this was exactly the plan Ryan’s mother had for him. Ryan and his siblings were not just homeschooled, they were unschooled. Sara, believed all along that when Ryan needed to learn math, that would be the best time for him to study math. He would then use it for something that mattered to him.  After badly flunking his first test, he moved on, taking the accounting test and getting an 82, but because so many people did badly, the teacher rounded up, and Ryan ended up with a 92. And then on the probability test he got a 90, and finally on the statistics test he got 102. And this is a kid who literally had almost no math background.

Unschooling philosophy discards the whole idea of curriculum. Sara believes that kids are wired to learn what they need to know when they need to know it. Therefore, no set of skills or knowledge is predetermined for unschoolers. A traditional curriculum sets forth exactly what needs to be learned and when a child should learn it. In a school setting one might argue that the knowledge and skills sets defined in a curriculum are necessary for a child to learn because they are needed to accomplish the next step in the curriculum, not because the children need to use them in their lives.

Ryan has been unschooled from second grade through twelfth. But he has set his sights on college. As Sara contemplates the collegiate journey for Ryan she admits that he has, “holes in his learning.” It is an interesting term. There is no way anyone knows everything there is to know. There are always holes in one’s learning. But the term holds meaning for many because they are referring to the learning described by a standardized curriculum and an unschooler who isn’t following any curriculum will most likely have those kinds of holes in their learning.

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Money is often a concern in schooling. Public schooling is probably the cheapest. Private school is expensive. Homeschooling costs vary widely. One can spend money on a curriculum, textbooks, books, technological devices, classes, projects, field trips, and much more. Isabel believes that public schools should be excellent, and that they aren’t. She admired Waldorf educational approaches. In the beginning she would probably have chosen a private school over homeschooling if she could have afforded it. However, after homeschooling for a while she may have changed her mind.

Isabel doesn’t buy a curriculum and has used very few textbooks or structured materials. However, she does take advantage of some curricular frameworks.

 J: Do you have a curriculum you buy?

I: Nope

 I: …I do objectives that have a lot to do with what Waldorf proposes, because I do believe they have a very good understanding of development and interest of the children. So, I do need a base…I do need something structured.

When she began homeschooling Isabel used Waldorf as a frame for their curriculum, but she didn’t stick closely to it because she believes it was “very strict” and she doesn’t like that.

It was really hard to keep the kids interested in the themes and activities of that curriculum. And it was really hard for me to keep up with my own skills and professional-development necessary to be true to that curriculum.

Their schooling is very informal. She is a mom who includes what she thinks is important, but then modifies things according to her children’s interests. She describes their curriculum as,

Very, very informal. I still kind of keep the direction of it. They work on things they really enjoy, and we do kind of projects on topics of interest.

 Isabel doesn’t have money to do all the things she would like to do with her children. So, she encourages them to be independent and creative and participate in making and saving money for field trips they want to take.

So, they do everything around that. For example, it could be an animal they want to study…or it could be like the lanyard, they wanted to make money to go to the museum and we have not money…and I say well, if you wanna go to the museum you have to find a way to make money. And that’s when we work on brainstorming how we can do that.

Isabel doesn’t buy structured curricula. However, her children have used Khan Academy for math for the last three years, Matias started introduction to chemistry at Khan Academy, and Isabel always has her eye out for materials that might be interesting and useful.

J: Where do you get your materials and stuff?
I: We don’t. I mean I’m going to get a book for Luciana for math because I saw it and I really liked it. I mean it’s the life of Fred.

J: That’s a math book?

I: That’s a math book and I looked through it and I went ummm, because she needs more than I can, like she needs structure. Now for me this is a time when she needs to start learning specific things, even if they don’t come her way.

J: But you don’t want to get a math textbook?

I: No

 As Isabel’s daughter, Luciana, approaches high school, Isabel wants her to have a more structured approach to learning so that she can be successful in high school.

We are looking for a school for Luciana for next year (10th grade) because we feel that she needs a more structured schooling to be prepared to apply and attend college.

 Families that don’t use structured curriculum often become concerned as their children approach high school age and contemplate attending a brick and mortar high school.

 

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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.

 

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