I.
I have much stronger opinions about the best way to educate the children I am likely to have than I do about the best way to educate children in general. However, I understand that an educational reform proposal is an important part of being a prospective homeschooling parent who also blogs, and luckily there do seem to be some obvious pieces of low-hanging fruit. Picking these can justify the effort of homeschooling in and of itself.
For instance, high schools, and to a lesser extent middle schools, should run on Silicon Valley time. There is absolutely no reason to start classes before 10, much less at 7am (!!!), as the public high school near where I grew up did. Teenagers like to go to sleep at 11am or midnight, this is an extremely predictable fact about teenagers, and you do not get millions of people to change their preferences by yelling at them to be more virtuous and have more willpower. Chronic sleep deprivation causes depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, poor memory, and poor concentration (interestingly, these are all common complaints about teenagers). And I shudder to think of the consequences of causing chronic sleep deprivation in such a crucial time for brain development. Please, for the love of god, homeschooling parents, let your teenagers sleep in.
Similarly, many schools have cut recess and physical education to create more time for academics, in spite of the evidence that exercise improves children’s academic outcomes (as well as, obviously, their physical health). Again, this is another easy fix: homeschooling parents can and should ensure that their children have sufficient time for physical activity, including plenty of time for unstructured free play. On a related note, play-based kindergartens appear to outperform academically oriented kindergartens.
The homeschooling parent may also be able to adopt some evidence-based learning techniques which are not necessarily common in the classroom. The two techniques with the most evidence are practice testing and distributed practice (also called spaced repetition). People seem to learn better if they regularly have to recall the information they’re supposed to be learning, such as by using flashcards, doing practice problems, or having to write a short essay without referencing your notes. Distributed practice/spaced repetition is spreading out what you’re learning over time: for instance, instead of teaching about the theory of evolution all in one week, spread out the lessons over several weeks, and regularly return to the concepts to review them. Promising techniques with less evidence include interleaved practice (mixing up problems of different kinds, such as having addition and subtraction problems on the same worksheet), elaborative interrogation (trying to explain to yourself why facts are true), and self-explanation (explaining to yourself why you solved a problem in a particular way or how a fact relates to other facts you already know).
While there’s not much the non-homeschooling parent can do about their teenager’s chronic sleep deprivation, non-homeschooling parents can also pick these low-hanging fruit, although with somewhat more difficulty. Prioritize physical activity and unstructured play in choosing your child’s after-school activities, flee any kindergarten which involves a worksheet, and teach your child to test themselves and spread out their studying over time. Also, if you find yourself interested in activism, please consider campaigning for your child’s high school to start at a reasonable hour.
II.
An interesting question is whether homeschooling tends to outperform non-homeschooling. Unfortunately, most of the data that purports to show that it does is selection bias hell, overrepresenting wealthy and college-educated homeschooling parents and underrepresenting educationally neglectful or just generally shitty homeschooling parents.
However, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education has done some very important– albeit preliminary– research with fewer selection bias issues. (Interested readers may fund less preliminary research here.) Poor homeschoolers tend to outperform poor publicly schooled children in reading and writing and slightly underperform them in math. Non-poor homeschoolers tend to slightly underperform in reading and writing and massively underperform in math.
We don’t have enough information to know for certain why homeschoolers and non-homeschoolers differ. However, my speculation is that poor homeschoolers tend to do better because poor homeschoolers are different from poor non-homeschoolers: for instance, they may be more likely to be culturally and educationally middle-class people who are poor because one parent quit their job to homeschool. The lower performance of children in math seems to me to be a result of the average American’s attitude towards math, namely, hatred, fear, and distrust. Many Americans can barely perform elementary-school-level math, such as simplifying fractions. No doubt this is due to American schools’ appalling math education, but one would not expect high-quality reading education from a parent who struggles reading Goosebumps, and one should not expect high-quality math education from a parent who does not know algebra.
For this reason, I would advise the homeschooling parent to put serious thought into how they’ll teach mathematics. In my case, I’m not particularly worried, because my local homeschooling coop is going to include an absurd number of physics majors, a former math tutor, and an Ivy League mathematics PhD. However, people who are less lucky should consider budgeting some money for math tutoring, perhaps from a local grad student, or a high-quality after-school math program.
III.
I currently favor unschooling as a method of homeschooling, but this is pretty much about traits of my child, rather than traits of children in general. It is pretty much inevitable– given genetics– that any children I have will have their own particular, passionate interests which they are extremely enthusiastic about learning about, and that they will respond to attempts to get them to learn about other topics with something between dutifulness and rebellion. This seems to me to imply that unschooling, which involves following the child’s interests, is an ideal choice: the children will be much happier and I won’t have to spend a bunch of time coercing them into doing well on tests on subjects they are uninterested in.
No doubt this will lead the child to have a remarkably unbalanced education: they may understand everything there is to know about sailing, or Broadway musicals, or ancient Greece, while remaining unclear on things like how molecules work or the Civil War. However, conventionally educated people are also generally unclear on these things: for instance, 19% of college students know what the Manhattan Project is, 16% know that the Raven in the poem of the same name says “Nevermore,” and 14% know that Mendel is the man who first studied genetic inheritance in plants. (In the interests of not presenting an unfairly biased list, I will add that college students are generally extremely accurate about the definitions of the words “zebra,” “hibernation,” “hockey puck,” “fossil,” and “ruby.” So science education at least is not a total failure.) It is a commonplace observation that most people go through twelve years of mathematical and scientific education, and graduate with no ability to do anything beyond arithmetic and only the vaguest understanding of Newton’s laws or the theory of evolution. If my children are ignorant about Edgar Allen Poe, at least they will have a firm understanding of ancient Greece, which is more than can be said for the general public.
In addition, one does not have unlimited time to educate children: you can either give them a broad overview of many topics or a deep understanding of a few topics. You can have a world history class which gives two days to Sumeria and one day to the Vietnam War, or you can have a Sumerian history class that doesn’t talk about anything else. It’s not obvious to me that the former is obviously better than the latter, and the difficulty of coercing children whose brains work the way mine does leads one inevitably to the latter.
Perhaps the most important part of unschooling is not what it does but what it doesn’t do: that is, unschooling does not crush the love of learning out of children. Peter Gray writes in Free to Learn that adults who attended Sudbury schools as children are often behind in academic knowledge, but they catch up quite quickly once they go to college. And they are routinely baffled by other college students: these college students are paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn from experts in the field, and yet their primary interest is doing the minimum they can to get an A. It was simply incomprehensible to them.
It seems to me that mandatory schooling is likely to reduce the love of learning, because you will regularly have to learn about things you don’t care about and aren’t interested in, and if you are interested in a subject you cannot explore it in as much depth as you would prefer. Extrinsic rewards tend to decrease intrinsic motivation: the more you’re working to get an A in the class, the less you’re working because you actually care about the subject. I’ve personally experienced this– there’s nothing that kills my motivation to write five-thousand word essays about feminism than getting a grade on it.
However, I do think there is a certain amount of wisdom in the three R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, one that overcomes my objections to coercion. Reading, writing, and arithmetic (plus statistics) are unique among subjects in that they make it easier to learn everything else. While there are other subjects that make everything else easier to learn, they generally only require a few days’ worth of explicit education (the scientific method) or are related to so many different interests that there’s not much reason to explicitly teach it as its own thing (the ability to smell bullshit).
You could also add “a foreign language” to the list of things that make it easier to learn other things, and I certainly would if my children were not native English speakers. However, teaching a foreign language such that the child actually learns it is an enormous pain unless you happen to already have lots of friends who are fluent speakers, and there doesn’t seem to me to be much point in replicating the standard American four-years-of-high-school-Spanish-and-can’t-ask-where-the-bathroom-is. However, if you happen to know lots of people who fluently speak Spanish, Chinese, or a similarly useful language, it seems well-advised to ask them to babysit regularly and refuse to speak any language other than the one you want your child to learn.
Of reading, writing, arithmetic, and a useful foreign language, reading is the most important: while writing is primarily useful if you want to communicate something, and math is useful for the natural and social sciences but generally unnecessary for the humanities, literally everything you want to know– from cooking to woodworking to economics to the history of the Indus valley civilization– is easier to learn if you are capable of reading a reference text.
The good news is that all pretty much all unschooled children learn to read eventually, on average at the age of 8, which is only one year behind most children. (Note, however, the caveats above about self-reported data: this evidence is likely to massively overstate how early unschoolers are reading.) The bad news is that nearly a fifth of unschooling children learn to read after the age of 10, which means that they have at best three to four years of fundamentally impaired ability to learn, and perhaps almost a decade. Imagine what they could have accomplished in those three to four years with appropriate reading education!
Some unschooling advocates point to hunter-gatherer societies, in which children often learn solely through play. However, the games hunter-gatherer children play have undergone literal millennia of cultural evolution to make sure they teach the skills hunter-gatherer children need to learn. This is not true for modern children; our games are not generally optimized for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. For that reason, I suggest using Montessori methods in the early grades, which are play-based.
IV.
Both my family and my husband’s family have a disproportionate number of weird, awkward nerds. Having no social skills is deeply unpleasant: it feels like you are surrounded by incomprehensible monsters who hate you for no reason, perhaps because they are evil, perhaps because you are an inherently terrible person. For this reason, it makes sense to prioritize teaching social skills.
However, explicitly teaching social skills often goes poorly. For one thing, social skills classes are often based more on what parents and teachers want to be true than on what is actually true: for instance, students will be told to tell bullies firmly that they don’t like that, but will not be told to punch the bully or, failing that, befriend someone tough who can punch the bully for you, even though the latter are far more effective techniques. Sometimes students are even told that sitting quietly in class and doing your homework will make you friends. For this reason, I suggest avoiding social skills classes.
I am currently moderately socially competent. When I think about how I became moderately socially competent, two things stand out. One is that I began communicating online, which stripped away the incomprehensible tone and body language and allowed me to quietly observe interactions for months before I participated myself. For this reason, I plan to encourage my children to engage in online interaction.
The second is that online I could talk to people whose neurotypes (for lack of a better word) were similar to mine. (This is not about diagnoses: there are many autistic people I can’t relate to with anything other than polite incomprehension; weird awkward nerds can have a wide variety of different diagnoses and often do not qualify for any diagnosis at all, except perhaps recurring depression.) I don’t think people often think about how important the typical mind fallacy is in developing cognitive empathy, particularly when you are first learning. The first step to cognitive empathy is going “I would be sad if I lost my doll, she lost her doll, so she is probably sad.” Only once you have a firm grasp of that can you move onto “I would be sad if I lost something important to me, I don’t care about tea sets, she cares about her tea set, she lost her tea set, so she is probably sad.”
Interacting with people who are very different from you is interaction on hard mode. We normally place children with social-skills impairments in environments where reasoning based on their own minds is utterly useless. If you like listening to other people’s infodumps, you might infodump about your own interests and then be puzzled about why no one likes you. If you misunderstand subtext, you might politely decide to be blunt about whether you like another child’s haircut. If you don’t care about hygiene, you might be confused about why the other children make fun of you for wearing the same pants three days in a row. Weird awkward nerds are probably different from other children in other ways: for instance, they tend to have different interests, which makes it hard to bond over shared passions or hobbies. The situation is even worse for autistic children, who not only have all these difficulties but also have a characteristic affect (stimming, lack of eye contact) which is unpleasant for most neurotypicals. So you put children who are already bad at social interaction in a situation where they have to do very complicated social reasoning and they don’t share many interests with the children they’re talking to and the other children are already biased towards disliking them. This is a recipe for disaster.
It seems to me a better way would be to put weird awkward nerdy children in an environment of solely weird awkward nerdy children. As young children, they can learn empathy, confidence, and how to make friends around people like them. Once they’re a bit older, they can interact with ordinary children and children who are differently socially impaired, and learn how to expand their empathy to people who are more different from them: since they already have friends, their failures won’t make them feel like they are inherently unlikeable and alien, and perhaps they can compare notes with their friends and together learn to understand more normal people. Autistic children can learn to fake eye contact and to stim subtly in adolescence, after several years of being allowed to stim freely, and when they aren’t trying to learn all the other rules at the same time. (I do believe that being able to pass is, sadly, a useful skill.)
I guess this is partially an argument against inclusion, even though inclusion has been a big disability rights push for decades. I want to defend myself against this a little bit. A disabled-children-only classroom seems very silly: most disabled children don’t have any sort of social impairment, so this argument doesn’t apply to them. Not all socially impaired children should be put in the same classroom: there are lots of different ways children can be socially impaired, and a socially impaired child may have even more difficulties understanding a differently socially impaired child than they do understanding a child with ordinary social skills. And certainly there is no reason to separate disabled and nondisabled weird awkward nerds.
Like I said, I am not really capable of suggesting strategies for educational reform: I shudder at the idea of turning “weird awkward nerd” into a set of criteria that decides which classroom you get to go into. And I have zero evidence (other than my own personal experience) that suggests this is actually a better way to raise socially impaired children. That said, personally I plan on setting up my homeschooling so that my children mostly interact with similarly weird and awkward children in the elementary-school years, and to me this is the major advantage of being able to homeschool.
Thing of Things 
“teaching a foreign language such that the child actually learns it is an enormous pain unless you happen to already have lots of friends who are fluent speakers” you are specifically talking about doing this with unschooling right?
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I mean it is not impossible to learn a foreign language when you are an adult or adolesent. I am doing that right now. so not including it might not really be that much of a big deal. However picking up a second foreign language probably was made easier by the fact that I already learned another one as a child. I had play centered “Egnlsih sesions” as a six year old, i do not know how much of an effect it had on me, or if it helped make English easier at all. I hope I don’t come off as mean, or rude, but gosh I wish language learning was a thing that could be only a hobby for me, not a thing that has a great effect on what job I can have. But I hope you figure it out!
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My understanding is that it is basically impossible to learn a language fluently unless you use it regularly in actual conversations (this is true whether you unschool or conventionally school). Except in relatively unusual situations (such as living in Miami), American native English speakers don’t have opportunities to regularly speak other languages. So even though most Americans take foreign language classes (I myself had a year of French, three years of Spanish, four and a half years of Latin, and one and a half years of classical Greek), very few Americans are capable of speaking more than one language.
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I never used English regularly in (oral) conversations, and my English seems pretty good. On the other hand, I do participate in many written conversations and my written English is better than my spoken English (I have a harsh accent when speaking and sometime fail to recognize rare words from hearing). However you look at it, studying a language without the opportunity of regular oral conversation is not wasted effort.
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Written conversations are also actual conversations! But learning vocabulary and grammar without the opportunity to actually use the language will generally leave people unable to speak the language in question. (I am implicitly making the assumption that most elementary schoolers don’t write to strangers either.)
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Well, you have opportunities to write to strangers on the Internet, in many languages. Failing everything else, when you have a kid who is grown enough, I can try to arrange them to correspond with one of my kids in Russian or Hebrew, if you want 🙂 Since you are pregnant right now, your kid is going to have a rather small age difference with my daughter Riva. Also, reading books can go a long way by itself.
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I studied French in 6th-11th grades and this resulted in me actually speaking French! There is plenty of opportunity to actually talk to people in French class, and listening to French music a lot also helped. This certainly doesn’t work for everyone, but at least for people whose brains are language-friendly, it certainly can work – I know quite a few people who learned a second language much the same way I did and were able to use it usefully, e.g. by living in a place where that language is spoken (which I did too).
If a kid is potentially interested in learning a language, I would recommend regular, frequent, systematic, and at least semi-social language instruction starting in middle school or (preferably) earlier. If it doesn’t work, maybe languages aren’t their thing. But it works for some people.
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(Though possibly my situation was a little unusual in that both I and many of my classmates were already bilingual, which made learning a new language easier.)
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I’m a linguist. Ozy’s basic point more or less fit with the current consensus; it’s basically impossible to learn a language by explicit, conscious instruction, and high-school–style language classes are fundamentally a waste of time. It’s however possible to learn a language without conversation; I’ve learned English by reading books and playing videogames, and my experience is far from unique.
It’s a matter of debate how useful explicit instruction (as in language classes) even can be, but they’re obviously unnecessary for infants, and it’s probably much less necessary for adults than people think (if at all). Explicit instruction is tricky because it feels like you’re progressing, but you can do it for years and be unable to understand things at all, because people ‘acquire’ languages more than ‘learn’ them. My current understanding of the experimental literature is that in some quite limited cases explicit instruction may be useful, especially for adults in a beginning stage, and especially for phonology. You want, however, to move into either conversations (what I think of as ‘the party route’) or books (the ‘nerdy route’) as soon as possible, and do them massively. Crucially, do not wait until you’re “good”; accept partial understanding, read/chat for pleasure, and you’ll be fine. Think of it as exercise. You’re not “studying”, you’re soaking your brain with meaningful linguistic stimuli.
It is perfectly possible for a parent to get their children to acquire a language they aren’t fluent in; you don’t need a native speaker to babysit your kid. All you gotta do is, one of the parents always, always talk with the child in the foreign language (the “one parent / one language principle”); and also provide them with an environment to use it (media, books, playmates). A Brazilian friend of mine got his boy to grow up bilingual in Portuguese/French that way; mom talked in Portuguese and Dad in French. Of course, his French is that of a nonnative, and the boy grew up with a funny accented French; but my friend figured that growing up with a funny, accented French is better than growing up with no extra language at all.
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@ tcheasdfjkl: If your French classes included a lot of talking in French to people and a lot of listening to French songs, then it doesn’t surprise me that they worked for you! (This is in fact what woke language schools are moving towards.) However, the whole paraphernalia of translation exercises, written exams, grades etc. can be done away with—it’s the parts where you use French that matters, and doubly so for kids. What’s more, for most people the schedule of typical language classes (e.g. thrice a week, 1-hour each) provides just way too little stimuli to get acquisition to kick in. So getting your kid hooked into some highly addictive fantasy series turns out to be a whole lot more effective than subjecting them to massively boring Duolingo translation drills!
To put it another way, you could have just been hanging out with French friends this whole time, talking about anything you like, and I’m sure you’d have picked French anyway. Or—this is a homeschooling trick—get your kid to learn about something else, in French. The effective part of French school isn’t that you talked about le passé composé de l’indicatif, but that you’ve talked about it in French. You could have been talking about the history of dragons in mythology, about the sexual customs of different peoples, about the merits of Communism, or anything else really. (Of course, as a linguist, I personally like talking about le passé composé de l’indicatif, but I’m told that most people think it’s boring, and in language learning boringness = death.)
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@leoboiko
That’s really surprising! I learned a lot from explicit instruction in high school, but then, the curriculum was structured so that it was always put to immediate use (basically: learn this list of words, okay, now read this actually fairly interesting passage you couldn’t have understood before) and the classes were structured so there was a lot of time to talk in the target language.
I’ve also actually tried learning a new language by just jumping in and trying to understand, and it’s been my experience that some vocabulary drills really speed up the process and that I’ve almost never learned a new grammatical form just by encountering it. I don’t think I could learn without a lot of practice, but I also tend to make much slower or no progress when I’m not explicitly studying with things like flashcards.
I’ve been told before that I’m Language Georg, who learns 10,000 new words from every worksheet, but.
When you have a complete beginner, no comprehension of anything in the target language, how do you get them to start benefiting from the practice? Because for me the answer is “brute-force memorize the basic structure for a declarative sentence, a question, and five hundred words” and that’s a significant initial investment. So. Say you have someone who speaks only Spanish and wants to learn Chinese. Books are full of symbols they don’t understand. TV dramas have plots that are hard to follow if you don’t speak a single word of Chinese. It’s hard to even find the borders between one word and another. What do you do for a no-explicit-learning approach?
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Add someone else that learned a foreign language via formal instruction. I only had a couple of years in high school and a one-semester class on semantics and literary French in college, but when I go to Montreal or Quebec City, the people do not show difficulty in understanding me. I only have problems understanding a very few extremely fast talkers (like the host at Machin et Patente), and a few Quebecois vocabulary quirks.
I’m much less able in Japanese, but I can still cold-call Tokyo and get the business I need to get done, done.
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@Tacitus:
So. Say you have someone who speaks only Spanish and wants to learn Chinese. Books are full of symbols they don’t understand. TV dramas have plots that are hard to follow if you don’t speak a single word of Chinese. It’s hard to even find the borders between one word and another. What do you do for a no-explicit-learning approach?
I am by no means fluent, but with no formal learning at all, I can now parse out the general gist in some Japanese variety TV or radio segments, albeit after 5+ years of consuming a hell of a lot of Japanese (unscripted!) media. It was through watching a balance of subtitled and un-subtitled stuff, in types of media where they beat running jokes to death (aforementioned variety talk shows, and then I’m in idol fandom, so the glossary of common terms is closer to regular conversation than anime slang), so that you hear the same words over and over again and begin to form audio associations, and then get a meaning for those associations from subs. All while enjoying the laughs. Japanese live media tends to be very helpful in including Japanese captions for the big punchlines, so I form visual associations, as well. (“Oh, that kana corresponds to the m-sound, that one is ‘no’, those kanji are that names and this other name that has some of the same kanji only shares that syllable” etc.)
I also watch a ton of un-subtitled clips where the content doesn’t need much translation, because the appeal is in slapstick or a relationship dynamic, or there’s exaggerated body language/imagery to get their meaning across. Since the titles and comments on those are in Japanese only, I run those through Google translate, which also very helpfully gives you the romanization as well as the rough estimate translation. Since it’s paired with content where the meaning is obvious, I can figure out correlations between the content and the text. I further reinforce the associations because I attempt to search for more similar content based on the fragments that seem relevant, and so trial-and-error teaches me which search-phrases get me what I want. (Ditto for scanning the “related/recommended” videos)
Watching most narrative/scripted story media seems to be not so good for learning a new language, since “good writing” values diversity of diction and syntax, and usually utilizes unrealistic conversation patterns. Exceptions would be very young children’s media, which is already trying to teach language and concepts to the kiddies and so is appropriately repetitive for that, and more comedic stories, as repetition is a key part of most forms of humor.
If the foreign-language version of Sesame Street is effective for them, why wouldn’t it be effective for us? (And as a lot of nostalgic adults will tell you, even shows like Sesame Street will offer entertaining easter eggs for adult viewers.)
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I agree with most of this, except that I hated physical education as a kid. I think that if you want your kids to exercise it’s better to find them some specific sport they would like.
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Physical education was positively torture for me, so I grew up sedentarian. As an adult, I found out that I actually love hiking.
Sports suck for anyone who isn’t competitive. There are, however, a wealth of interesting noncompetitive ways to exercise, from yoga to modern dance to just cycling to the beach to hang out with your friends. We have to challenge the “exercise = sport” paradigm.
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YES. I like a lot of types of physical activity, but team sports are a terrible way to get physical activity when you’re not into the social aspect of them, and I really wish schools stopped pushing them so much. (Although maybe they’re the best option for the “median” child/person?)
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Sports also suck for people who are competitive and bad at sports. I find them pretty entertaining if I’m not noticeably below average – but that happens super rarely.
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Plenty of sports allow you to be competitive with yourself (basically, all sports where there is a measure of performance that is independent of the competition).
Also, despite not really caring for it, I have to give a shout out to golf, which allows people of disparate ability to compete enjoyably through handicapping (basically, you and your opponent(s) try to beat your/their average performance and the one who does that best, wins).
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Yeah, when I said “specific sport” I just meant “specific type of physical exercise,” not necessarily competitive.
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“Sports suck for anyone who isn’t competitive.”
As a competitive person for who sports suck, I should note there are many reasons sports may suck even with competition. In my case, it was getting hit especially hard with the physical/coordination-destroying symptoms of autism, which impacts my ability to enjoy exercise in general. Given as Ozy is trying to optimize the life of a probably-autistic kid, it’s worth to note that there are a whole lot of ways P.E. can be torture that aren’t ‘not competitive’ and can be more common in the context of the specific NDs we’re referencing here.
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From my perspective, the main problem with physical education in schools is the issue of trying to make everybody do the same thing (some people will be able-bodied but unable to keep up) and the general shame and dreariness of locker rooms and gym uniforms.
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I haaated P.E. in school, for a variety of reasons (I was bad at sports; the only thing we ever did was sports; I was always last picked and the team that got me would groan; I struggle at any fast-paced activity; I was fuzzy on the rules of the games because I hadn’t learned them whenever the other kids had…) but I liked recess. Sometimes I ran around. Sometimes I swung on the monkey bars. And of course after school there were trees to climb. I’ve learned I don’t hate exercise, I specifically hate any sport with a ball or played on a team. This definitely is a good argument for more recess/more outside time for homeschoolers — they can learn *on their own* what kind of physical activity they like best rather than becoming prejudiced against physical activity because the only kind on offer is organized sports.
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I hated PE in school, but PE in school wasn’t about physical activity. My high school PE teacher was an obese old man who, on most days, let everyone who liked basketball play basketball while he sat in a corner and ate his Popeyes. I didn’t like basketball, so usually spent PE crawling under the bleachers looking for dropped quarters.
In college, there were PE requirements, but they had a reasonable variety of classes to choose from, so I took up weightlifting and tennis. This seems like a reasonable model for PE. I don’t see any reason (other than the fact that it would’ve added effort and nobody there cared or was remotely fit to administer a gas station, much less an institution with thousands of students) why my high school couldn’t have done this on a smaller scale — we had plenty of sports teams, so the facilities were there.
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What if your child ends up neurotypical?
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I was thinking the same thing, with the kid begging Ozy for a regular childhood.
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Let us assume I am not a gratuitously terrible person who is going to deny my child reasonable requests if they are begging me for them.
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Ozy,
It was just amusing in my mind to invert the ‘neuroatypical child upset at their neurotypical parent scenario.’
It reminds me of this Monty Python sketch where the blue-collar play-write father is at odds with his elitist coal-mining son. Such surrealism appeals to me and it also speaks to a truth that many parents seem to not want to make the mistake that their parents made with them, but in the process, go overboard in the other direction and thereby swing the pendulum the other way.
Your assumption that the kid is going to be neuroatypical is a little bit of a red flag, in the sense that such assumptions, coupled with confirmation bias, can lead one to see what is not there. Detecting false patterns is one of the most common human failure modes and one that pretty much all humans seem to do a fairly large extent, where some are merely a little better at realizing that they are doing it and questioning it.
So IMO, a parent can honestly try to do the best for their kid and yet make the kid feel like their needs aren’t being met. The parent is then not gratuitously terrible, but…human.
You say that you won’t deny your child ‘reasonable requests,’ but this is an extremely loaded statement. What is reasonable? A conservative Christian is going to answer that very differently from you. They have baggage that makes them see the world one way. You have baggage that makes you see the world another way. The conservative Christian parents who deny their kids something because they believe that is best for them, even though you consider it reasonable, are not gratuitously terrible, but you may believe that they cause harm to their child. Similarly, you may sincerely act in a certain way because of a typical mind fallacy, even though that is not best for your kid.
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I’m really not assuming that my children are going to be neurodivergent! The predictions I’m making about my offspring are “weird awkward nerd” and “strong interests,” neither of which is a DSM diagnosis. My sister and husband, both of whom are neurotypical, have both of those traits. I explicitly stated in the post more than once that “weird awkward nerd” does not imply that you have any sort of particular diagnosis. It is true that I didn’t explicitly state that “strong interests” is not a euphemism for autistic, but I thought it was fairly obvious that neurotypicals can also have strong interests!
To the extent that I will be overcorrecting for my parents’ mistakes, it will be in offering my children too much freedom and autonomy and ability to make decisions that go against my personal beliefs, not too little.
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TL;DR version of the above: I think that you are human 🙂
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Thirded. Though come to think of it, the answer is probably ‘the same thing NT people who expected to have NT kids and didn’t do, except with less needless evil’.
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(note for the concerned: I am not implying all abled parents of disabled children are needlessly evil)
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I was homeschooled much like this! And so have Many Thoughts. Apologies for the absurdly long comment.
(Well, my parents would never describe themselves as “unschoolers” in a million years — they’d say “classical/eclectic” if asked — but “classic homeschoolers who pay serious attention to the child’s interests” and “unschoolers who pay serious attention to the three R’s” probably converge at some point.)
I had a very very positive experience with homeschooling overall (and am happy to expound on it at length; my parents are very Into educational theory, and included me in the discussions as I got older).
(Braggy data on success thereof, which I blush to include, but: I ended up graduating at 16, attending a college in the top 20 in my field, and recently getting accepted to a good grad school with tuition waiver, TA position, and fellowship. On the non-math side, I double-majored in honors liberal arts, and was nationally competitive in fencing in high school. My 13-year-old sister is auditing her first college class (discrete math), regularly runs local 5- and 10Ks and places top in her age group, and wants to be a surgeon. The 10-year-old is on Suzuki book 3 for cello, and one of the top students in the local string project. All of us were reading at two, reading chapter books at three, and won various impressive things in lots of math competitions as well as the private-school-equivalent-of-UIL.)
So from that experience, some thoughts:
(1) The sleep thing is so so so true. Easily the #1 thing my non-homeschooled friends were jealous of. (#2 was not having to take the state’s standardized tests.) Possibly this is outdated science, but my understanding is that teenagers are actually just biologically wired to go to bed later and sleep in later than adults.
(2) Exercise, yes! Homeschooling and exercise and free-range kids all fit very nicely together. I did lots of biking and swimming and hiking and roller-blading and just running about wildly; it definitely contributed that by the time I was in double digits I was allowed to ride my bike anywhere within about a ten-block radius (the boundaries were defined by the nearest streets busy enough to be dangerous), so I got lots of exercise just getting around.
(3) Something of a follow-up on that last: if your kids are going to be running around unsupervised outdoors during school hours, you should probably make sure you’re clear on the local homeschooling laws, and then coach them on how to talk to a policeman. My parents did that for me, which was good, because it did in fact happen a few times that a policeman stopped me and asked some very pointed questions about whether I was playing hooky.
My instructions were: be polite; say “yes, officer, no, officer”; explain that I was homeschooled, and it was my recess [we didn’t have anything that formal, but easier to say that than explain your entire homeschooling philosophy]; if they insisted on taking me to the station, comply and then ask for my parents until they were provided.
The last stage of that never in fact came into play; the policemen always went “oh, okay. My sister homeschools! Do you like it?” and let me go (once with instructions to go get a better lock for my bike).
(4) I absolutely approve of homeschooling as “hey, let’s test out our kooky educational theories!” That’s exactly what my parents did. (My dad’s pet theory is that algebra should be introduced alongside arithmetic, and slopes alongside fractions. All three of us turned out super-math-y. Just saying…)
(5) One of the best things about homeschooling is a 1:1 (or close to it, if you have multiple kids) student:teacher ratio. Take full advantage of this.
(6) Yes, the math thing! A depressing number of homeschooled kids end up with poor math skills. It doesn’t help that it’s usually the mom homeschooling, and women seem to have even more of a tendency to go “oh, I can’t do math, it’s scary” than men. (Not claiming that women are inherently worse at math or anything; this seems to be pretty clearly a response to cultural pressure.)
Hiring grad students is a good idea; they’re interested in the subject, have some teaching experience, are usually lonely for their own families/younger siblings, and will work for dirt cheap. My family did a lot of that for me.
Beware of Khan Academy and various other “teach your kid math for you” services; these tend to prey on this phenomenon. Parents will pay ridiculous amounts of money for canned math curricula, because they’re so nervous about their own abilities; and while I know a lot of public-schooled people who used Khan Academy on their own after school and liked it, it really doesn’t substitute for an actual math teacher, especially for kids who aren’t inherently super-math-gifted. If you want a math curriculum, consider looking into Art of Problem Solving.
(7) A common unschooling failure method is: the kid spends twelve hours a day playing minecraft, the parent decides this is Probably Educational He’s Learning About Architecture Or Something, at eighteen he still can’t read or multiply. (My parents tend to refer to this as “nonschooling.”)
Making the three R’s less optional will probably help with that. Also, it seems like there’s something to be said for helping kids do things that they first-level don’t want to do but second-level do want to do. Plenty of adults use things like leechblock, or accountability to a friend, to serve the same function; a kid can’t reasonably be expected to have mastered using those tools, so a parent reminding them to turn off the computer and go work on their exhaustively detailed pyramid replica they love seems like a good thing.
C. S. Lewis actually brings something like this up in the Screwtape Letters (as part of an analogy for spiritual growth, but whatever). He points out that reading children’s versions of Greek myths is fun, and learning the first handful of Greek words is fun; and that being able to read Hesiod in the original is also fun; but in between, there’s a lot of drudgery with memorizing paradigms and struggling through translations. Even a kid who’s really passionate about Greek may need to be nagged a bit on a day-to-day basis to go review their verb tenses; it seems hard on a twelve-year-old to require them to have the intrinsic motivation to do that without any authority figure nudging them.
In my family, what this looked like on the day-to-day level was: my parents would tell me things like “no, go do your translations before you play” or “don’t forget you need to spend 30 minutes working on chemistry at some point this evening.” (Not very unschool-y, I admit.) But they’d be flexible about it, if I’d gotten really into researching the mathematics of swarming behavior or something.
And if some subject was consistently a cause of misery for me — not just “ugh, organic compounds, whyyy” but genuine “I hate this, it’s boring, I don’t want to do it,” every time over a period of days or weeks — they’d discuss with me whether I genuinely wanted to quit the subject. (It was really really clear that this was actually an option, and I wouldn’t be in trouble for choosing it or anything, which was crucial.)
I nearly always, given some space to think about it, decided that I wanted to keep working on the subject. Sometimes we’d decide to put it on the back burner for a while and come back to it next semester, or to skip to a different part of the subject and come back to that one another time, or try a different textbook, or find a tutor. Occasionally I did decide I was done with the subject, and they respected that.
I think this worked out really well. The only two subjects I can think of that I decided to totally quit were piano and Latin, and in retrospect both were absolutely the right call. Piano I quit after a year, and I recall absolutely none of it; I’m profoundly unmusical and was a disaster at it and hated it, and don’t wish in the least that I’d kept trying. Latin I quit after eight years and an audited university class; my parents and I had a serious discussion, and agreed that while I was glad to have studied Latin I wasn’t interested in pursuing it at a higher level, and that “took a class on the Aeneid in Latin” would be a good milestone for having mastered it to a casual-reading-of-Latin-texts level, and so I did that and then quit. I’m a little rusty, now, but given a dictionary and grammar can still read Latin texts fairly comfortably.
(8) I think you’re overestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I had a friend growing up who was German/English bilingual, as was his mother; my mom tutored him in literature in exchange for his mother spending an hour or so a week talking with me in German. Afterwards my friend and I would hang out, and were encouraged to talk in German.
In addition, I did Rosetta Stone (pricey but effective, immersion-based) and later the Foreign Service Insitute’s course (free online if you can find it, or cheap to buy; immersion-based; meant for diplomats who are told ‘okay, you’re going to Germany in a month, be ready.’) (I also did another online course at one point, but it wasn’t very good.)
By the time I graduated high school, I was able to (with reference to a dictionary) read genuine literature in German; Goethe and Rilke were my favorites. My accent was apparently very good; I was asked more than once if my parents were native speakers (e.g. by the instructor in the not-so-good online course). I got a 4 on the German language AP test, which exempted me from all foreign language requirements in college (which I’m very grateful for; college language classes are super-intensive).
And — in some sense, the most important — when I spent a semester abroad, I was comfortably able to get around Vienna for a week or so speaking to people in German. (It helped in Hungary, too; Hungarian is hard and I learned very little, but nearly everyone spoke either English or German.)
I think key elements in that were: I started early (I was seven when I met my friend); I spent a good amount of time with a native speaker; and everything I did was immersion-based. The not-so-good course I took wasn’t mostly immersion-based, and I actually found that very frustrating, because I had to keep switching languages in my head; eventually I convinced the teacher to just talk to me in German all the time, which everyone else found very impressive but made it much easier for me.
(9) What you’ve said about the social issues all sounds right. I think the value of just escaping the social pressures of middle school isn’t to be underestimated; I know a surprising number of people whose parents homeschooled them /just for middle school/.
I got to spend my early teens dressing however I felt like (frequently ridiculously), wearing no makeup, hanging out with boys as friends, and not being at all self-conscious about any of it. My friends in public school were constantly worried about their appearance and their weight — and I don’t mean this as “I was a better person than them” or anything like that, I mean that other girls made nasty remarks to them constantly, and I escaped that. I’m very glad to see my sisters getting the same benefit.
(10) Also: bullying. Or, rather, not. The vast majority of my friends who were in public school were bullied, at least at some point; many of them still deal with ongoing trauma from that.
I encountered bullies — twice, total. The first time was in elementary school, in a homeschool group, and my mom promptly picked up on it and got the bully kicked out — she was able to both notice and do something about it, neither of which parents of kids in school can usually do. The second time was in middle school, in my fencing club; I took it to the instructor promptly, because I had spent my whole life with authority figures who listened to me and trusted me and acted productively on that. She had a very stern talk with the much older teenager in question, and he left me alone from then on.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure the bullying issue alone justifies homeschooling.
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I came here to make a comment about bullying. Only in college did I start becoming socially comfortable, and that was just because I went to a tech school.
It is truly amazing children’s capacity to bully. I was already being picked on in pre-k!
On the other hand, some of my friends who were homeschooled never learned how to “act normal” and have a hard time interacting with their co-workers. Some bully coping strategies are legitimate skills to learn.
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@Moriwen
For the goal setting, I think that goal setting writing exercises can be very useful.
The one in the link makes students write down their desired future and a future that they want to avoid; and articulate subgoals/behaviors that achieve the desired future and those that result in the future they want to avoid.
It seems very useful to do the same in unschooling/homeschooling/parental contexts, because makes the child have a long term plan, but not one that is mandated by parents/teachers and/or enforced by them. Instead, the child is treated as a person who is responsible for their own future well-being.
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I agree with the gist of your post. Minor nitpick: Minecraft classic was released in 2009 and it didn’t get popular until around 2010-2011ish. It’s not possible for someone to have grown to 18 and not know how to read or multiply because of the game, since its only been out for 8 years. Personally, playing around with redstone circuits and reading the related Minecraft wiki pages taught me about logic gates, truth tables, binary, etc. — stuff taught in my college’s logic design and discrete math classes in the first few weeks. (I didn’t learn much about architecture though. I was never creative enough nor patient enough to build anything like, say, an exhaustively detailed pyramid replica in it.)
I can definitely see how an addiction to fun games can be detrimental to one’s education, and a lot of popular games aren’t very educational. Minecraft isn’t one of them though.
P.S. A list of education games: puzzle games like The Witness or Portal, games with deep stories or real moral choices like Undertale, board games + card games (teach probability, game theory, strategy), classic board games like chess and go, and games you program yourself in javascript.
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Yes, I was definitely engaging in some rhetoric by saying “Minecraft” specifically there, and didn’t mean any criticism of Minecraft-as-such.
I definitely agree that Minecraft, and lots of other things, can in fact be educational! I am super into board and card gaming, was as a kid, spent lots of time doing it, designed lots of my own little amateur games, and am now heading off to grad school to do combinatorics. Which seems, uh, not entirely uncorrelated. So there are definitely benefits to be had there.
The failure mode I see and worry about happens when the parent assumes that the child is (like you) self-teaching logic gates &c, because they’ve heard about how Minecraft can do that, when in fact the child is just doing something mindless but very in-the-moment rewarding. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I play mindless Flash games from time to time too; but it’s not what you want to spend your school years doing.)
I think it can be hard for parents to figure out which is actually happening. Especially because technology develops so quickly; I’ve heard parents who were quite certain that their kids were in fact learning /chemistry/ from Minecraft, which (while I’ve only played a very small amount) I’m fairly sure is not a thing. But they hear “combining blocks of different substances to make other substances,” and make assumptions. Which sound ridiculous to us, but I suspect that I’ll be equally out of touch with some things by the time I have school-aged children.
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Moriwen, some Minecraft mods introduce actual (or semi realistic) chemistry to the game:
http://minechem2.wikia.com/wiki/Mine_Chem_2_Wiki
Could those parents have been referring to something like that?
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hahaha WHAT, my German class was 90% “memorize these twenty words before the test” and 10% prepositions
it was also taught by a very strange fellow by the name of Mohammed who disappeared unannounced, leaving the class to be taught by the TA (who had a thick Bavarian accent), and turned up a month later in Israel, so
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One caveat about the sleep thing—while totally 100% correct, it’s also a fact that glaring, backlit screens screw up one’s natural circadian rhythms, which are calibrated by light stimuli. You can artificially not feel sleepy the entire night if you’re staring at a bright screen, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced. For the same reasons we should let people sleep as much as they want (sleep deprivation is bad), I think it also makes a lot of sense to establish house rules against bright screens late at night. Say, no one’s allowed to use computers or smartphones after 12am. Your teen can talk to people or play D&D or read books or a Kindle, but nothing that shines light directly into your face. I’d also replace all light fixtures with subdued lightning—we negate the night way too much, in my estimation at least.
I think it’s unfair to subject my kids to any rule to which I don’t subject myself, so if I establish a house rule of no bright screens after 12am, then it’s no screens for everyone, most especially myself.
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Do color filters on screens help any with this, in your experience’
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I’m no sleep scientist, so my experience with this is as good as yours! All I can say is that a red-shifted smartphone feels subjectively less harsh to me, but will still easily keep me up the whole night; while a book or e-ink reader has no such effect at all (I go to bed thinking I’m not sleepy, and before half a chapter I’ve crashed). However, this effect may be confounded by the fact that smartphone apps and modern websites are designed to be addictive Skinner boxes. I still think the screen glare itself is to blame for a large part of the effect, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps we could experiment on ourselves with some sort of lockdown app to restrict our phones to an ebook reader, but even then we risk placebo interference.
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On the point about sleep schedules I agree in large part (it’s pretty clear that teenagers prefer later schedules; there’s no good reason not to let them keep later schedules within reason; and sleep deprivation is a huge problem that should be given high priority). But I have some long-held quibbles on this so I’m going to be a little annoying and pedantic here.
Well, when you put it that way, no, yelling at people does not get them to change their preferences. And in general there are kinder and more effective ways to inspire someone than actual yelling. But sometimes yelling at people can result in them finding the willpower to shift to healthier habits in spite of their preferences, which is what I think what a lot of parents are intending to do when they’re scolding their teenagers for sleeping in. To imply otherwise seems like an uncharitable way to interpret the rationale behind yelling at teenagers about sleep, and proves too much (is it wrong to push someone to find the willpower to quit smoking because yelling at them will not change their preference to smoke?)
I guess I’m just stubbornly clinging to an isolated demand for rigor, but I’ve been raising my eyebrows for a very long time at how (at least among younger, fairly-liberal-ish people) the assumption that most teenagers and all adults of a certain type need to keep a late schedule (not just a psychological preference) seems to go completely without question. It’s certainly been implied in this blog post and has been unreservedly agreed upon in the comments so far. And to be fair, I fairly often see news articles being posted online which cite scientific studies to back up the “some people are innately night owls” theory. But among these assertions and arguments and articles, there’s been a dearth of explanations of the actual mechanics behind why certain people would have a physical need for staying up through the wee hours. I suppose it’s not impossible that some people’s bodies are very sensitive to whether it’s been 4 or 6 hours since there was natural light outside the window, but that seems like something pretty elaborate that would only affect a few people. Half the time, the explanation people (including very smart critical thinkers) pull out is “longer circadian rhythm”, which makes absolutely no sense to me as an explanation since it would make it equally hard to stick to any schedule.
Then again, if most occurrences of this preference among teenagers and many adults (especially intelligent ones, I’m often reminded) originates in a psychological preference (some people innately enjoy being awake late into the night, for a variety of reasons), then my determinist/compatibilist ideology compels me to admit that it is still on some level a “need”. So to some degree I’m picking a fight over a possibly inconsequential point here. I apologize for such a long and rather tangential comment.
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If you have some strategy for causing the majority of teenagers to go to bed at 9pm, I am all ears.
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“Half the time, the explanation people (including very smart critical thinkers) pull out is “longer circadian rhythm”, which makes absolutely no sense to me as an explanation since it would make it equally hard to stick to any schedule.”
Significant information: All or almost all cases of non-24 (the aforementioned inability to keep to any schedule due to constantly shifting sleep window) in sighted people progressed from delayed sleep phase disorder, implying that hypothesis is at least not-completely-wrong.
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Interesting. What I hear about the >24-hour circadian rhythms, it is usually spoken of as if many if not most humans have them. After all, the usual context is people giving deterministic explanations for being night owls. I have eventually become semi-convinced that I have this condition as well. Whereas I thought Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder was said to be quite rare (it would be interesting to know more about the actual mechanics behind it). But I might be misinformed and should probably research it properly.
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My history on social skills is that mine were fairly poor when I was in school, though maybe not as bad as I think. The problem was being bullied, but I did tend to have a friend– and I think I spent time with them out of school. I didn’t realize that being my friend publically would have been socially costly. What helped was going to college. I wasn’t being bullied, I was away from my mother who was convinced I was socially incompetent (I think she just didn’t like me), and not only did I have people who I got along with, I found sf fansom, which is where I fit easily.
In re languages: I was studying French, which is a bad idea for someone who doesn’t have sharp ears. (I think of myself as mediocre of hearing– probably mostly processing problems.)
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Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
The explanation for the traditional absurdly early start time for high schools is perfectly straightforward: bus schedules. The school schedules are staggered so that the school buses can make multiple rounds. The only question is whether they make two circuits or three. My kids’ (elementary) school starts at 7:30 because of this. It was a bit later a few years ago, when the buses did only two circuits, but they switched to three circuits as a budget cut.
This is unusual in that normally the older kids get the earlier schedules. The way it worked out, a couple of the elementary schools had to have the early schedule as well. We won the luck of the draw.
High schools normally get the early schedule to allow time for after-school activities or jobs. I suspect that were there no bus schedule issues they would run a bit later than they do, but given the scheduling restrictions it is either early or late. If it were late, people would complain.
None of this is intended to say that the status quo is a good idea–merely that there are rational explanations for it.
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I don’t totally get this – why can’t you time the bus schedules to all run later?
Anyway, in my school districts there were no school buses anyway, and yet school start times were terribly early.
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Regarding languages, I had German and English spoken to me in equal amounts from when I was born to when I was about five. At that point, I went to school, was surrounded by English-speaking friends, and decided I didn’t want to speak German half the time any more.
But a consequence of that very early-years language acquisition is that no matter how much I neglect my German, my ability to speak it never drops below a certain standard – unlike my French, which I learned at school to nearly the same standard as German, and which I’ve forgotten most of.
I think this is reasonably typical of children raised bilingual, so if there is a native speaker of another language who will be around your children a lot, getting them to speak that language to them exclusively is a cheat’s way to teach them languages without formal schooling.
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Free advice from a person that was homeschooled, make sure the kid learns the times tables. Like, I agree that reading and writing will be picked up by a smart kid, but it’s super easy to miss out on rithmetic.
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Here’s what I’d say about parenting:
Be ready to have your presuppositions challenged.
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SO TRUE.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed major parenting opinions because my kids weren’t acting like I expected. No parenting theory survives five minutes with an actual child! Except “listen to your child.” 😉 Which it looks like Ozy is prepared to do, so they’re well ahead of the game.
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Ooh, I love parenting/education posts. I myself was homeschooled up to third grade, went to public school in 4th grade, private school for 5th and 6th, homeschooled again for 7th and 8th, went to boarding school for 9th and 10th, homeschooled for 11th, and started college early for 12th. Then I taught at private schools for three years and am now a homeschooling parent of an autistic kid. This is just to tell you — I have some experience with varying kinds of education!
Generally speaking I think homeschooling is best IF you are able to manage it well. Reasons you can’t might include having been poorly educated yourself, having few resources outside the family, having too many kids to easily teach them all, not being able to afford textbooks/curricula, or being a controlling personality who’s not able to be flexible with kids. I lean toward mostly-unschooling as described above — NOT “just let the kids do whatever,” but “teach reading, writing, math, encourage kids to spend a lot of their time on educational stuff based on their interests.” Yet I don’t think schools are necessarily bad. There are wildly divergent ways schools can be run as well as homeschools, and some are better than others.
I admit I had some expectations for my kids … I thought they would teach themselves to read if I just read to them a lot (which is how I learned, at four), and they haven’t. At six I started actively teaching my oldest to read, and it took a lot more work than I thought it would. This might be because he’s autistic or it could just be that reading instruction is harder than I expected. I thought math would be easier than it is, and I didn’t expect to have to cajole my child into learning math facts if only I made it FUN! (Though he did make great progress after we started using a math game app.) I was going to teach without any threats or rewards because learning itself is supposed to be rewarding, but after about six months of him being totally unwilling to do any kind of school other than watching documentaries, I started rewarding him with Minecraft time after he’d done some reading and math work.
The thing about him (which may or may not be generally true of autistic kids) is that he is intimidated by new things and doesn’t want to try stuff that is not exactly like stuff he’s already done. That’s a huge barrier to his education — but I feel we’ve been able to overcome it to some degree by using his interests. For instance, when he wouldn’t read any of the beginner books I brought home, I wrote my own series of Minecraft beginner books (“Good Wood,” “The Safe Base,” etc.) and managed with lots of effort to teach him to read. His interest in fantasy has been useful in introducing him to mythology, which leads a bit into history. And he loves to play the immune system game he made up. So it’s always been this careful balance between “let him keep doing exactly what he’s already doing and hope like heck he eventually wants to learn something” and “push him too hard and turning school into a daily battle.” I can’t say we’ve always kept that balance perfectly, but we’ve managed okay.
Which makes it very weird that we are planning to send him to school next year, along with his kindergarten-age brother. The reasons are many. First, that I can’t seem to teach the younger one at all, given how much attention the older one needs, and the fact that I have two even younger kids too. Second, social skills — while I don’t think that being bullied does anybody any good, I think it would be good if they had a chance to meet more kids (and adults!) and interact with them. Providing social opportunities for homeschooled kids isn’t always easy, especially when you don’t want to join the fundy co-op. My parents just didn’t bother at all, which was not helpful (though it’s impossible to say how much of my social struggles were the homeschooling, and how much were “broader autism phenotype” or whatever). I just want my kids to become comfortable with a few basic skills like being outside of the house every day, asking adults not their parents for help as needed, meeting other children, following directions, navigating a school building without getting lost. And I’d rather they learn this sooner rather than later, because school gets brutal by middle school and I definitely want them at home for that part.
So, forgive the novel. Just wanted to share my experience and encourage you that you seem to be on the right track, and that having an educational philosophy doesn’t mean you won’t be able to respond to your kids’ needs as they make themselves known.
(And if they wind up being into Minecraft, let me know, I have a whole bunch of books. 😉 )
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It might make sense for you to publish your Minecraft books.
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I’m thinking about it. First I’d need to get permission from Mojang, of course. But I can’t imagine they’d say no, so long as they got paid.
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There has been research that found that children are more likely to respond like this when they are praised for their achievements, rather than the effort they put in, as the judgment for success implies disapproval for failure; so they become reticent to try things at which they may fail, even though these are obviously the things they tend to learn most from.
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I know that and do avoid the whole “praising achievement” thing. In fact I don’t grade or call anything a success or failure, I just say “let’s try reading this thing!” or “hey, here’s how you write small letters!” and he screeches at me because it’s not what he’s used to.
This is the kid who cried for an hour when his dad insisted on reading a new book at bedtime instead of flipping back to the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, and who puts his fingers in his ears and shrieks when his brother wants to watch a new cartoon. It’s just … the way he is, I guess. The good news is that after the screaming and the crying he winds up loving Harry Potter EVEN MORE than LoTR. (But what we’ll do when that’s over, I have no idea!)
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Preferring the familiar is a known autistic trait and I wouldn’t necessarily classify that fearing failure though.
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If you’re keen on evidence-based education practices, be sure to keep your eye on the work of the Education Endowment Foundation. They have some great summaries and lots of rigorous trials underway.
Although WRT the “toolkits”, I found I had to dig into some of the individual studies making up the meta-analyses to really get an idea of what was being tested.
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/
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I’m an autistic adult who was unschooled through high school, apart from Montessori preschool and 2 community college courses/semester my senior year. I then went to college full-time. I wanted to add some comments:
1) Colleges and workplaces expect adults to know how to jump through hoops / conform / put up with bullshit. If I could do my education over again, the #1 thing I would do is ensure I was taught how to tell when it’s necessary to do this, and how to do it when it’s necessary, in very concrete terms. (Since people sometimes misunderstand me when I say this: I’m not endorsing forced conformity. I’m endorsing new adults having the option to pick their battles, instead of having to stand and fight every single time because they don’t have the skills to do otherwise.)
2) Homeschooled educations can draw on different skills and abilities than public or private school educations do. Sometimes this results in automatically compensating for a kid’s learning disabilities without anyone realizing they have learning disabilities. It’s a really good idea to check whether a kid *can* learn under the same conditions they’ll be expected to learn under after graduating, because if they can’t, a diagnosis and accommodations may make a huge difference, and it’s much better to get those in place before college/work than after/during, and it can get much harder to get some diagnoses for the first time as an adult.
(Public and private schools miss learning disabilities too, of course—but the topic here is homeschooling, so I’m focusing on a specific thing that can happen with homeschooling, and that is best addressed by parents who are homeschooling. I’m not trying to start a “public school vs homeschool” debate; I’m trying to reduce the chances of a specific very bad thing happening that doesn’t have to happen.)
3) One of the most difficult things about college for me was interpreting what was being asked for in homework assignments. Teachers made assumptions about what students would understand that were accurate for most of my classmates, but not for me. When I asked for clarification on things no one else had to ask for clarification on, teachers treated me like I was trying to cheat them somehow. It was a very bad experience, and I don’t think it was necessary. Practice and feedback on a variety of types of assignments—including having someone other than me grade them—would have made my first semester at college much easier and possibly prevented a major depressive episode my freshman year. (Public/private schooled kids don’t always get this either, of course, but I’m commenting on this with respect to homeschooling because it’s the topic under discussion, and because there are ways to homeschool that are particularly likely to run into that problem, and it’s relatively easy to address.)
Often when I say “there were some problems with my homeschooling experience that could have been avoided and here’s how,” at least one person will think I’m saying “public schools never have any problems ever.” To be very clear, public schools have a ton of problems, and there are many kids for whom homeschooling is a better choice. These are specific pitfalls that are often not obvious to people whose education didn’t fall into them, and they’re avoidable.
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As an unschooled weird awkward nerd with strong interests, 10/10 would recommend. My special interests were and are books and animals. I taught myself how to read with a cutesy little Disney game my parents got me when I was 3, which my parents discovered when I read a roadside sign out loud in my tiny 3 year old voice. I read Charlotte’s Web at 5, and Lord of the Rings at 7, and chewed through entire sets of used encyclopedias my mom got at yard sales. I’m now in community college, getting credits to transfer to a university, and I am ACING it because it turns out that ravenously consuming 10 library books, or, like, a million words a week, means your reading comprehension is through the roof and you can write incredibly fluently. The math thing IS a problem, because ugh numbers are so boring, but I’ve got algebra and all that down, and I have a 4.0 college GPA.
So, yeah, unschooling is excellent for weird awkward nerds and I highly recommend it. Especially the way you’re doing it!
(Sorry about the formatting, the mobile app sucks for commenting.)
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