Category Archives: Homeschooling

June 27, 2013 · 9:44 am

June heats up

Our schedule was really getting smooth and predictable there for a few days. Then summer started happening for real. Visitors from out of town — two sets at once! — summer camp, a trip to the Davidson Young Scholar summit (we’re an out Davidson family, so ask us anything), a 48+ hour power outage, crushing heat and humidity, a writing class at the Loft, and summer colds. All this in the last 2 weeks.

Where was that math book again?

I haven’t quite figured out how to adjust, knowing that July and August probably won’t be that much different. Once Violet bounces back a little more we’ll work it out. In the meantime we’ve been taking advantage of Victoria being away to watch some classic PG-13 movies, including Spinal Tap (which was rated R! who knew?) and Dumb and Dumber.

I still harbor a hope that my unsocialized girls will be the next Farrelly brothers.

Teen Reading List for Spring

I had been worrying throughout the fall that my 13yo wasn’t reading enough. She was doing a lot of rereading old books, leafing through comics, and checking tumblr, but not poring over new novels like years past.

This semester will be different thanks to her co-op activities. A few teens have organized their own weekly book club, and these are their choices:

Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
The Fault in Our Stars, John Green
Maze Runner, James Dashner
Chosen, Ted Dekker
The Card Turner, Louis Sachar
The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
The Last Dragonslayer, Jasper Fforde
The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak

What a great list, right? All the books were proposed by the kids – they have excellent taste. So far they have organized their discussions themselves: the first meeting they mapped Maze Runner and for the second one of the kids made a Jeopardy-style game about the book.

For the class I am teaching – and it is kind of interesting having your own kid sitting next to you in class, alternately being a teen among teens and being your kid – the reading list is crazy, but awesome:

Jonathan Swift, “The Ladies Dressing Room” and “A Modest Proposal”; Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”; P. G. Wodehouse, Code of the Woosters; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Flannery O’ Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”; Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale”; Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan; and short works Joseph Addison, Dorothy Parker, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, Mark Twain, David Sedaris, Edward Gorey, and Garrison Keillor.

I am feeling torn about “The Miller’s Tale.” I did promise flatulence in the class description, but I didn’t count on how hard it would be for a few of the kids to talk about body stuff in front of each other. Looking for substitutes, I Googled “great farts in literary history.” Do not do this unless you have a strong stomach.

On reflection this seems a little light in mood/substance compared to previous reading lists, but after a fall of dystopian literature, that’s probably a good balance.

4 Comments

Filed under Books, Homeschooling, homeschooling high school, writing life

February 5, 2013 · 11:12 pm

World Nutella Day, and some projects

Oh my gosh, has it really been more than 2 weeks since my last post? Too many things happening.

Want proof?

Since last posting about Project Based Homeschooling I took some time to make some space for creative activity around the house. I confess, I did not do as much as I’d hoped. I moved some furniture around in the breakfast nook to make the shelves more accessible, and I labeled all the cups holding the pens and pencils and sorted them by type.

These are two of my favorite projects that have appeared since then:

I came into the kitchen to find Victoria, my youngest, painstakingly painting old seashells with paints she found in the shelves somewhere. To be honest, I don’t know how she found either of them or what made her think of putting the two together, but there it is.

This is Violet, my older, preparing to sew. She loves the webcomic Homestuck, because she is 1) an aspiring comic artist and 2) a teen. She found the hat-making tutorial, made a list of what she needed, and then dove in. She even made the horns (see below) twice, because she didn’t like the first set. And she did it cheerfully. And all I did was drive to the fabric store because I still don’t really know how to run the sewing machine. I’d venture to say this is the first time she’s used the sewing machine in 2 years, and that was for a pillowcase.

Every time I say to myself “why is she unmotivated?” I need to look at this picture. (And every time the kids give me crap about taking their pictures, I’m going to say that Lori Pickert said I should — though they won’t believe it because I’ve always taken too many pictures.)

I’ve also cleared the decks to do Journey North with Victoria, which we’ve never done before. I’m being sensible and letting someone experienced show me the way, following along with Melissa Wiley. This is the kind of project-y stuff that always screams “homeschooling” to me — working together, combining disciplines, posting up cool graphs on the fridge. I have no real educational aim in doing it except increasing my joy in homeschooling by participating rather than directing.

With joy as our goal, how could we resist World Nutella Day, which is apparently a real thing. (There is Nutella inside those whipped-cream covered crepes.) Appropriately, a friend sent me a message today with this quotation attached:

Life is meant to be a celebration! It shouldn’t be necessary to set aside special times to remind us of this fact. Wise is the person who finds a reason to make every day a special one.

So we make crepes, or hats, or painted shells, and I try to get comfortable with nudging that towards the center of our day instead making it stay on the margins. I’m still adjusting, leaving more of my own work until late at night now, which means it doesn’t get done or it gets done very slowly. Still, I make myself sleep in and whenever possible try not to push us very quickly in there mornings. There are only so many days to take fuzzy good-morning pictures like this:

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Filed under art, Homeschooling, homeschooling high school, raising girls, Unschoolish

Tagged as homestuck, journey north, project-based homeschooling, project-based learning

January 20, 2013 · 3:31 pm

I’m Reading a Book!

When I was pregnant with my first baby, I read tons and tons of books about childbirth, child rearing, child development. Like many young women, I knew I was ready when I was sick of all the expert advice and couldn’t stand to read any more.

Something similar happened with homeschooling. I read books and discussed curriculum and scoured the internet, and then — I didn’t. I just did it the way I wanted to do it, and the umpteenth time someone wanted to talk about math curriculum I would try very very hard not to slide under the table.

But there has been a buzz around a new book, so I did something I haven’t done in a long time: I got a new book about homeschooling.

It’s Project-Based Homeschooling by Lori Pickert, formerly of the Camp Creek Blog, and now blogging at Project-Based Homeschooling. I’ve read most of it but am looking forward to going through it a bit more slowly and also talking it over with friends.

My one disappointment with the book thus far is that it is mostly oriented towards younger children. She does speak about adapting ideas to older children and teens, however, and I will be spending some time thinking about how to do just that.

Regardless, I like the book for the same reason I assume people often like certain books: it says things I already think, but in much better ways, in more affirming ways — in this case in gentler ways — and it brings that vision of what I wish I were doing that much closer to reality.

Here are a few tidbits from the introduction that made me so happy I bought my first homeschooling book in years:

Surprisingly often, people will champion self-directed learning for children but not allow those children’s parents the same freedom and respect. . . . Your kids should learn at their own pace, follow their interests, and you should trust that they’ll eventually learn everything they need to know. You, on the other hand, should get with the program, right now, 100%, or else.

So true! How easy it is for any of us to slip from advocate to browbeating zealot. I loved this more solicitous approach, inviting you to give some of these ideas a try from a sense of generosity and helpfulness. So much easier to listen to than hearing that your children are in danger of failing academically or having their tender creative souls squashed like helpless bugs unless you shape up.

And then, this:

The freedom that we have to create a life that works for us, our children, and our families is priceless. We should never trade it in for a handful of magic beans — a purist approach that comes with a set of pregummed labels, a rule book an inch thick, and threat of eviction from the tribe if you deviate from the center of the path. As you explore new ideas — in this book and elsewhere — about how children learn and how we can help them learn, I hope you keep a firm grip on your own opinions and values. You can build a life customized to your beliefs and prioritizes. Don’t settle for off-the-rack.

So true again! It can be disillusioning that the most countercultural groups can demand the most conformity, and anything “alternative” is co-opted so quickly as a product sold back to you: everything you need for a brave new lifestyle, all in this convenient package.

I’ve written before that homeschooling our kids made us aware, as adults, of how wide-open our choices really are. That doesn’t mean radical change is always in order: one happy result of our sense of freedom was realizing that we love living right where we do. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I would choose the feeling of “doing it the right way” over waiting to see where an uncharted course takes us.

What I like about Project-Based Homeschooling is that it is more like a companion on the journey than a map. Lori Pickert writes in a way that accomplishes just what she’s advocating: she’s a resource, an encourager, a hands-off mentor, never forgetting that the project of being a homeschooling parent belongs to you.

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Filed under Books, education, Homeschooling, Unschoolish

Tagged as Lori Pickert, project-based learning, self-directed learning

January 8, 2013 · 11:11 pm

New Year’s Learning Notes

And we are back to school, whatever that means right now. (Longer post required)

For Victoria, who is 9, she likes the reliability of subjects that we do regularly. Math, history, and French. But she also likes to make, and do, and sing. I am in love with the Klutz paper dresses kit she got for Christmas — she cracked that thing open and started making the most adorable little outfits you ever saw. After the first one was a little crooked, she had the concept down and there was no stopping her.

Totes Adorbs

It’s so funny, because she also recently started participating in a little engineering club (BEST — Bridging Engineers Science and Teaching — ps can we agree no word-person was consulted in the formation of that acronym?) and she is so intimidated. How can a child who figured out, after about 2 minutes of advice from a Sewing Idiot (i.e., me), how to draw and cut out her own sewing patterns on paper by measuring a doll form and calculating seam allowances, cut out the fabric pieces, and sew them together feel intimidated by a few wheels and a battery-operated motor? And for that matter, why is attaching a motor to some wheels “engineering” while navigating the complexities of constructed clothing is “crafty girl stuff”? (Longer post required)

will sell for 2 dollars (observe the giant Tardis that has come to Hogwarts)

Violet, 13, is just drawing and drawing, lots of sketches for a webcomic she is plotting. She has memos on her phone and text files on the computer–the planning, I think, is the best part. Apart from the drawing.

Drawn on the computer/tablet

She continues to study Chinese and linguistics in a pretty-much self-guided way. She’s staying with her chemistry course and keeps saying she wants take AP Physics next year. (Apparently physics will be “easy” because studying chemistry is so incredibly painful and physics is fun.)

And — knock me over with a feather — she said to me yesterday, “I think I need to start doing some math. I feel lazy not doing any math.” She has not formally “done math” in quite a while. Last year she was taking both physics and chemistry, and that seemed like enough math for any 12yo who doesn’t really love math. This year she was perfunctorily working through some geometry but we abandoned that — the level of perfunct seemed to guarantee that next to nothing was going to be retained anyway. One thing we are learning is that there is a degree of presence required, not only from her, but from me, to make things happen. Oddly, trying to be more unschooly seems to require more presence — of a certain sort — from me rather than less. (Longer post required)

We haven’t yet figured out what “doing math” will be. She wants to review before starting the Thinkwell Precalculus we bought, and maybe in the end we’ll put that aside for something else anyway. In any case the next two months, for her, will be all about Julius Caesar, her first performance in a Shakespeare play, unless you count the staging of parts of Midsummer Night’s Dream we did during her 9th birthday party. And all about drawing.

Experimenting with the new markers

Throw in some fencing for Victoria and piano for both girls and lots of reading and trying to get some outdoor time in the winter and we are full-on back to something is that not quite vacation, even if it isn’t really school.

A Few Eggnog-Soaked Thoughts on Wieseltier’s TNR Education Article

An article in The New Republic this week kept poking at me, so I decided to jot down a few thoughts about it despite it being the holidays and all, because I just want to enjoy my excessive eating, drinking, sleeping, game playing, and then guilt-ridden gym-going without this nagging at me.

Naturally I found this article through an angry homeschooling parent online, who didn’t like the stupid stereotype of homeschoolers:

The new interest in homeschooling—-the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—-constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy.

And normally, you know, who cares? People think homeschoolers are ignorant creationist isolationists — whaddya gonna do? After seven years homeschooling this stuff is like mosquitos in a Minnesota summer — you can complain about it, but you can’t really do anything about it.

But in the course of the short editorial Leon Wieseltier said a few things that were way off base, and something that struck close to home as right.

First, because it’s fun for us homeschool veterans, another choice howler:

The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge.

Should we have contest to see who can come up with 100 counterexamples the fastest?

But in decrying the anti-college, pro-entrepreneur, pro-make-your-first-million-on-an-app attitude of many home/unschoolers, Wieseltier, I had to concede, was describing a phenomenon that has bothered me too.

“Here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor [to have dropped out],” a boy genius who left Princeton and started Undrip (beats me) told The New York Times. After all, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dell dropped out—as if their lack of a college education was the cause of their creativity, and as if there will ever be a generation, or a nation, of Jobses, Gateses, Zuckerbergs, and Dells. Stephens’s book, and the larger Web-inebriated movement to abandon study for wealth, is another document of the unreality of Silicon Valley, of its snobbery (tell the aspiring kids in Oakland to give up on college!), of its confusion of itself with the universe. To be sure, all learning cannot be renounced in the search for success. Technological innovation demands scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it begins in intuition: the technical must follow the visionary. So the movement against college is not a campaign against all study. It is a campaign against allegedly useless study—the latest eruption of the utilitarian temper in the American view of life. And what study is allegedly useless? The study of the humanities, of course.

I see this in lots of ways, especially in the gifted homeschooling world. Parents (and I include myself in this group) will spend big money to get a good science co-op class for a kid because they “can’t do it at home,” yet they feel sure that their vague memories of reading “The Good Earth” in ninth grade are more than enough to do justice to the Western (let alone the non-Western) canon. One homeschooler told me to my face — to my face! — that she would discourage her children from following my educational path or entering my profession.

Much of this, I’m sure, is born of ignorance — you can’t miss what you never had, and many people running around with a Bachelor of Arts degree have never had a real liberal arts education.

But there is something more disturbing at play as well, which I think Wieseltier gets at:

The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit.

You could argue that in saying this Wieseltier does not get the class privilege built into his own argument: seeking enlightenment through Homer and Shakespeare takes a backseat to breaking the cycle of poverty or just staying debt-free for many lower- and middle-income students.

At the same time, it’s sad to think that kids are stepping off the institutionalized education treadmill merely to get on the professionalization treadmill even sooner. I love books like Blake Boles’ “College Without High School” and Cal Newport’s “How to Be a High School Superstar,” but it’s easy to (I hope, misguidedly) take away the message that the secret to many of their case studies’ success is not being precocious learners but precocious income-earners. So yes, Wieseltier is talking about something real, and something it pays to be mindful of when thinking about homeschooling the high school years.

Nevertheless, what Wieseltier is missing is that homeschoolers and unschoolers could truly be his allies here. Classical and humanities-based education is being embraced by homeschoolers in droves: consider the popularity of “The Well-Trained Mind,” “A Thomas Jefferson Education,” or the work of Charlotte Mason, or so many other popular homeschool authors. He needs to read, or re-read, “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.” Homeschoolers *are* the “nonconsumers” whose innovations have the potential to improve education for everyone. Online classes like those from Online G3 are leading tech-obsessed kids who IM in class to fall in love with Shakespeare.

Humanist education in a variety of forms is alive and well on the educational frontiers. No doubt it has its enemies, too, but they aren’t the well-read ladies in the denim jumpers.

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Filed under education, gifted education, grown up life, Homeschooling, homeschooling high school

Tagged as anti-college, Blake Boles, Cal Newport, classical education, humanities, Leon Wieseltier, online education, unschooling

December 10, 2012 · 12:56 pm

Closing Doors

[in mid-November DH and I sent the kids to the grandparents and went on a short European tour of Zurich, Vienna, and the Czech Republic. I took way too many pictures of doors.]

Even the most relaxed homeschooling parents usually still have some bottom line subjects they insist on, or a level of competence they expect no matter what.

Often we talk about this in terms of keeping doors open. A kid who says “but when will I ever really use algebra?” is likely to grow up and a) want to go to college and quite possibly b) go into a field in which solid math skills are necessary.

[These were in the back of the Spilberk Castle in Brno. I especially liked the hinges.]

Sounds reasonable so far.

But then the questions come: How long do you hold the doors open for your kids before you let them close? How many doors can you keep open at once? For parents of kids with multiple interests and multiple talents, stretching far enough to keep all the doors open starts to feel like spinning too many plates. So which doors do you keep open?

[The door on the left is from the Einsiedeln Abbey in Switzerland; the door on the right is from the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Brno.]

Math is a big one for most families. “Math is cumulative,” people say. Slack off for a bit and that lost time will come back to bite you later. For some “English” is big: spelling, grammar, vocabulary building.

As we move further along the relaxed spectrum, and as my 13yo reaches high school transcript age, this is a big question for me: Am I keeping the doors open? What doors am I closing?

[More castle doors in Brno. There must have been quite an artisan in the area at some point in the castle’s long history.]

So far I’ve figured out two things:

1. At a certain point, it’s no longer my job to keep the door open. That feeling that I am stretching too far probably means that I am stretching too far. I’ve shown the kid the door, I’ve made my best argument for why we should leave it open, but I just can’t make someone walk through. Anyway, most doors that have closed can be opened again by a motivated young adult.

2. There are more doors than you think. I have to say, I have never heard anyone argue, “I insist on my child continuing music lessons because I want to keep the door to a musical career open.” No parent has ever told me, “I told my child to spend lots of time role playing, because I want to keep the door open for a career as a novelist, playwright, or actor.” Aren’t drawing skills cumulative too?

[I want this for my garage.]

I suppose it’s easy to argue that if a kid is “really passionate” or if it’s “meant to be” she will find a way. One could argue that math is a door you have to keep pushing open for them; art is a door they will run through at every opportunity.

But hogwash, to put it mildly. A kid who’s keeping every door open doesn’t have that many opportunities. She’s too busy scraping herself like butter over too much bread. And some kids know very clearly that some doors lead to parental (or social) admiration and support, while others are for lesser minds and also-rans. In other words, there is a point at which insisting that some doors stay open means that others close.

[The Grossmünster in Zurich; Spillberk in Brno. The Grossmünster door at least is relatively recent: no doubt Zwingli and Bollinger would not have approved.]

Careers in the arts are incredibly competitive — that’s what makes them so scary to parents who want their children to grow up and support themselves. All the time that goes into building a robust Plan B, however, is time that is not going into developing a craft. And whether either or both of our kids have careers in the arts, they’ll likely find that having some fluency in a creative medium makes life a lot better.

I can’t say that I feel totally confident about moving in a more unschooly direction: blog posts like this are about convincing myself, not necessarily sharing my brilliant insights with the world. But I can’t say that I felt totally confident about the path we seemed in danger of starting down: relegating genuine talents and passions to the back burner in order to be sure our homeschooling met some made-up definition of “college prep” — to say nothing of what happens to our relationships and quality of life along the way.

[Doors to one of the many art museums in Vienna, nearly three stories high; a yarn-bombed door on an office building in Brno.]

I am curious, though, whether we’ll eventually find out that “keeping the door open” has been an insufficient metaphor all along.

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Filed under art, education, Homeschooling, homeschooling high school

November 25, 2012 · 11:17 pm

Homeschool Dropouts

It’s not been all lapbooks and readalouds in the old home-schoolhouse these last few months. Well, really, it’s never been lapbooks, because although the pictures I’ve seen look cool I’ve never quite understood what they are or why you do them.

In any case, the road to homeschooling high school has been bumpy, and we need to get out of some bad habits now. As of tomorrow, Violet, the 13yo, is cutting back her formal learning activities (classes or curriculum) to just a few: chemistry, an online current events class, and a literature class at co-op. I guess officially we should also count Shakespeare Youth Theater and maybe piano in the “formal” realm. And that’s it for a while.

Victoria, the 9yo, also has the option to cut back, but for now she is really happy with the progress she has been making in math and French and she wants to keep with what we’ve been doing. And history is reading, and who doesn’t love reading?

It should be noted that Violet has big plans for writing, and for reading more and more about linguistics, and doing lots of art, and opening an etsy shop for selling art, and getting her Chinese writing and reading caught up with her conversation skills. I’m forgetting a bunch of other stuff she has written in a notebook. Tomorrow she’ll be catching up on chemistry after a vacation with Mimi and Papa while her dad and I were abroad and after a leisurely Thanksgiving weekend. She’s decided to extend her upcoming current events presentation to include something called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. She already had some kind of mind-reading story lined up, so now she’ll have a broader theme of “Ethics of Brain Science,” or something like that. Or that’s the plan for now.

Also, she’d like to do more baking.

It makes me a little nervous, nudging our family further along the “relaxed” spectrum of relaxed homeschoolers. I have many good qualities, I like to think, but “relaxed” is not one of them. But it also makes me nervous to wonder what the consequences of the insane schedule and the frequent arguments over things neither of us really care about might be.

Violet baked two pies this week, and I think the consequences of that were excellent.

Rethinking Talent Development

I did mean to write about my 9yo’s schedule, but all I really have to say is that I can’t wait til she can have the routine she craves. It’s been lacking since mid-August, as she’s been sick with whooping cough (and this past week a cold on top of it). Ever heard whooping cough called the 100-Day Cough? Well, there’s a reason for it.

Anyway.

If you aren’t part of the GT education community, you might wonder why a totally benign, focus-grouped phrase like “talent development” has come to be a flashpoint.

My friend Stacia, who has been an advocate for gifted children for many years, put her finger on one part of the “talent development” movement that has always irked me. Talent development tends to mean STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) development, but not all students who have talents to develop want to develop in that direction.

Our society has also begun to send a second message,”Artists and philosophers are not as important to society as scientists and mathematicians.” I beg to differ. There is balance in all things. The great minds of science and mathematics were often also philosophers and artists. We can’t separate out talents like we are separating the wheat from the chaff because art and philosophy are not chaff. They are wheat just like science and mathematics.

It’s not hard to observe this in any circle: the “geniuses” are the ones who go far and fast in math and science. Sometimes I wonder if this is just because so many adults have mediocre math and science educations that they are impressed by what seems impossible to understand — and sometimes I wonder if it’s because they’ve had even worse educations in language and the arts, to the extent that they don’t even know the difference between adequate and excellent.

Anyway.

As homeschoolers we try to have a balance: keeping open as many doors as we can by having a broad-based education, not completely ignoring the necessity of earning a living, and making note of every person we know who earns a living being creative or finds a way to maintain creative pursuits in a busy life. What I’ve observed so far is that telling the wheat from the chaff is a lot harder than you’d think.

And on the other hand, sometimes we watch way too many episodes of My Little Pony while we wait for good health to return.

Truly, Friendship is Magic

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Filed under education, gifted education, Homeschooling

September 19, 2012 · 10:17 pm

A Misleading Guide to This Year’s Resources, Part One

It’s mid-September, and I’d like to do what some other homeschool bloggers have done and post my kids’ rough schedules. I’d like to, but that could be hard. I haven’t even ordered the books for all of them yet. I figure summer isn’t officially over for a few more days yet anyway, so how behind am I really?

How can anyone concentrate on ordering books when there are hummingbirds everywhere just begging to be photographed?

Still, in the interest of sharing information, here’s what my 13yo is doing as of now:

AP American Government via Thinkwell
DD13 is really enjoying this. She took a great American Government class with Online G3 this year and enjoyed it so much that I thought she might as well continue with the subject. The Thinkwell class has some review, but it’s enough material for a whole year – and supposedly the AP exam – so I believe she’ll still get a lot of new stuff out of it. So far, she likes the format and the lecturers, and I think she’s getting some good note-taking practice. Besides, this is a great year to be studying American Government. Speaking of which . . .

Current Events via Online G3
I admit that this class was initially an afterthought. I wanted DD to keep in contact with Headmistress Guinevere and her longtime G3 classmates, but this was the only class that fit our needs at all. Wow, has it been great! I love turning on NPR and having her say “Yeah! We talked about that in class!” and then share more about what she knows. I’m so happy that she is part of the class.

Geometry via Life of Fred
DD did took a chemistry class and a physics class last year, so at some point we completely abandoned math as a formal subject. There was plenty of applied math—and brain overload—happening as it was. We also skipped ahead to trigonometry for a while so she’d be ready for vectors in physics. So there’s some geometry still to do before moving on to what we had actually planned for this year, which is:

Precalculus via Thinkwell
We’ve really liked Life of Fred. DD seems to have a math talent without having a strong math interested, and this has suited her well. But I think we need to move beyond the totally self-taught approach at this point. Once geometry is done she’ll start this up.

Dystopian Literature via co-op
This is a co-op class I proposed to the retired teacher who’s taught several literature classes for our group. It’s kind of a “What to read after The Hunger Games and City of Ember,” including 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, and Gulliver’s Travels, among other things.

Japanese via VHSG
This is DD’s first time take a class through this group. So far so good! Community college was just not in the budget this fall, but this still allows some exposure.

Chinese via Chinese Pod
DD has been working through Chinese Pod for some time. While it doesn’t really force her to develop her reading skills as much as she’ll need to eventually, she has a great ear and is pretty fluent in conversation with her teacher, so I’m satisfied with the time and money spent here.

Chemistry via SSE
This is a 2-year chemistry class billed as Honors Chemistry. Several of the students will be studying for AP Chemistry, DD among them, though she may do the SAT Chem test instead/also. I can’t say enough about the great instructor for this class. He does not know how to worry and takes each student as he (or she, but really almost entirely he) comes. He does offer online classes, but we’re lucky to have access to the in-person version.

Fire Good!

Still to come:

Korean via Rosetta Stone
DD was doing this over the summer but has dropped it over the last few weeks to start Japanese. She would like to pick it up again, but we’ll see.

Linguistics via MITOpenCourse
I really need to get the darn book so she can start this!

Writing via Mom
It could be that I am putting this off.

Oil Painting via art teacher
I have been talking to one of Violet’s former art teachers for almost 6 months about getting this on the calendar. Ugh! But since one of her co-op classes was cancelled at least I have the money set aside to get her started. I will do it — I will!

Of course typing it out like this makes it all look so formal and organized. Don’t be fooled! No, we will never be mistaken for radical unschoolers, but we do aim for as much self-direction and freedom as possible.

It’s just that the self-direction and freedom can’t be typed up as neatly as the official-sounding resources we use. There is no official “tumblr creation” time or songwriting time or obsessive drawing time, and yet these take up at least as much of the day. Not to mention bike-riding time and skyping time and novel-writing time and lying-on-the-sofa-reading time. Oh, and piano. Always lots of piano.

Staring-at-stream time is also very important.

Typing it all out may also make it seem like we are more test-oriented than I think we are. We are, to some extent, following the advice of Blake Boles, who suggests in College Without High School that a few College Board-y test scores will make it easier to have an unconventional adolescence and still go to college, if that’s the desire. I’ve also seen plenty PG kids at this point who reach mid-teens and say, “forget it, I’m ready for college NOW.” That’s not the road we’re on today, but it’s happened enough that I think we’ll just take a few precautions. Besides, this particular child doesn’t mind taking tests. When the other daughter reaches this age, I feel pretty sure a different path will be laid out before us.

Speaking of which, I’ll lay out the 9yo’s current resources in an upcoming post.

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