Home School

I may have mentioned this before, but we plan on homeschooling our children.  I have some experience with this, because I was homeschooled from 6th grade on.  My mom chose to take me out of public school because I was failing 6th grade.  Now, you might think this was because I was stupid or lazy.  I was in the Talented and Gifted program, so I was definitely not stupid.  I was not really lazy either (ok, maybe a little).  The problem was the system.  I learn very fast.  In a normal classroom, the teacher repeats a lot of stuff and then assigns homework intended partially to test knowledge, but mostly to reiterate everything taught.  The result is a teaching method that relies on repeatedly telling the students the same things until it sticks.  Well, for me it stuck the first time, and then I got bored.  I found that if I finished assignments early, I was given more work to do, because the teacher didn't know what else to do with me.  This made the boredom even worse.  Consequently, I just quit doing the work.  Halfway through 6th grade, I was in the Talented and Gifted program, but I was failing all of my classes miserably.  So, my mom pulled me out of public school, bought a 2 inch thick workbook that covered all of the material for 6th grade, and made me do it in less than half a school year.  It was hard.  I was doing 10 pages a day in that book that was designed for 3 to 5 pages a day.  I also really enjoyed it, because I could often get all of my 10 pages done by lunch time, and no one gave me more work to do.

We are not homeschooling our children so they will enjoy it, though I do hope that they will.  We are homeschooling our children because we believe that we can give them a superior education to what the public school system offers.  I recognize that this is not a claim that all parents can make.  Some are not educated enough themselves to teach others (or have forgotten too much and do not have an easy time remembering or relearning it).  Others just are not good teachers, regardless of education.  My wife and I are fairly well educated and experience with our three children indicates that we are fairly good at teaching as well.  Given this, I think that we will be successful at homeschooling our children.

Now, what I want to discuss is my goals for homeschooling our children, as well as some of the methods we intend to use to accomplish this.

First, I am working on teaching our 3 year old daughter to read.  If you have read studies on learning to read, you probably know that the absolute minimum recommended age for starting is 4 years old.  Potential consequences of starting too early include the child believing that reading is just too hard for them, which can make it very difficult to teach them to read when they are ready.  I have a decent solution to this problem though.  We are using the Distar method as presented in the book, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons."  The first lesson teaches the child to associate the letters "m" and "s" with their sounds (among a few other things).  Once a week, for maybe 15 minutes, I sit my daughter down, and we work on this.  We have not even made it past the first page, because she still has trouble remembering which sound goes with which letter.  We will continue to do this until she can consistently remember the sounds, then we will move ahead a little bit more.  Because the lessons are short, she does not get frustrated or bored.  Typically a lesson ends when she is no longer interested.  At 3 years old, a short attention span for this sort of learning is normal, and trying to overcome it is likely to harm the child's ability to learn (by making them hate learning).  The nice thing about this method is that now I don't have to try to judge when she is ready to learn to read.  As she becomes ready, she will start to catch on better and will be able to sit still and learn for longer.  These early short lessons are probably helping prepare her brain to read.  She has also become much better at pronouncing words correctly since we started this, so there are additional benefits.  (Note that this may not work for all children.  Different children do learn better with different learning techniques.  This is another reason we are homeschooling.  Public schools cannot tailor learning models to each individual student.  Parents can.)

Second, a major goal for our children's learning is problem solving.  I am a computer programmer, and problem solving is my job.  As a college student, I see a lot of other students have difficulty learning to program computers.  The main reason is that they have poor problem solving skills.  Instead of trying to find information on their own, they ask professors or other students, or they just struggle.  o Often the answers are obvious to me, even for questions that I have no experience with, but they don't have the self confidence to trust what they know, and they don't even consider that they can find it themselves without help.  Problem solving may seem like something that is only really useful for engineering fields.  In reality, problem solving is a skill that can be used everyday in normal life.  What happens when you realize that you don't have enough money to pay the bills this month?  Many people just default on some payment or other.  A lot of vehicles get repossessed because of this.  Try searching "can't afford my loan payments" on Google.  The first hit (that is not an advertisement) gives a long list of ways to handle student loans when you cannot afford them, including deferment and negotiating a better payment schedule.  If you replaced "loan" with "car" you would find information dealing specifically with car loans.  What you would learn is that no one wants to repossess your car or house.  They would much rather the money you owe them, and typically they are willing to work with you if you are having trouble with finances.  The most basic problem solving skill is admitting you have a problem and asking for help, and many people do not have this skill.  Better though, decent problem solving skills would enable people to make good budgeting decisions and come up with a financial plan to avoid this problem all together.  Truly good problem solving skills can help people to avoid unnecessary debt entirely and devise a financial plan to minimize the length and interest of necessary debt.  This kind of problem solving will make any employee a better employee, even in unskilled labor like fast food.  Of course, it is fairly obvious (given the massive failure of many large businesses in the last decade) that even CEOs and other business leaders could do with better problem solving skills.  I think that the two most important skills I can teach my children are reading and problem solving.  With these skills and decent internet access, they can learn anything else they will ever need.

That brings me to everything else.  First, for the problem solving skills, learning basic computer programming should really help with the basic problem solving.  If any of them are interested in more advanced programming, I will teach them, but I won't force them to learn beyond the basics.  This will probably be their first big problem solving training.  Their writing/English training will also involve problem solving, once they get to learning grammar.  My plan for this is to give them either a weekly or biweekly (once every two weeks) subject (typically of their choice, but I might sneak subjects like history into this if they don't choose them on their own) that they have to write a short paper on.  I will expect them to do the research on their own with minimal help (after some tutoring in using various resources, like the internet and the library).  Really, this will work with pretty much any research subject, including history, geography, sociology, and such.

For math, I plan to use Khan Academy.  I may use Khan Academy for some other subjects as well (it does have a little bit of history and will probably have much more by the time my children are old enough to need it).  Khan Academy has a fairly complete set of mathematics learning tools for all math through high school and a bunch more college level math.  The videos make great lectures (that can be watched multiple times as needed; better than public school, where if you miss it the first time, you are out of luck), the exercises are very good, the coaching system will allow us to keep track of our children's progress and give individual tutoring where needed, and the reward system helps keep it fun for the students (and has encouraged certain 5th graders to become proficient at some of the college level math).

In addition to these, I think Freerice.com would be a good supplement for a number of subjects (not to mention that for each correctly answered question, they donate 10 grains of rice to feeding people in 3rd world countries, which may help teach charity to some degree).  Freerice.com covers some subjects that Khan Academy does not and that are not best taught in a classroom setting (vocabulary, for instance).

My ultimate hope is that we can teach our children to be capable of learning anything they need to, without needing the babysitting often found in public school classrooms.  I also hope that easy access to information will help them to be interested in (and study) a broad range of subjects, so they will have a well rounded education.  If my goals are met, they will have a better, more rounded education, than the average high school graduate and may even be more educated in a number of subjects than the average college graduate.

I have a good learning model and curriculum in mind.  I need to do a little bit more research on what subjects are good to start teaching when, before I document it.  I'll write an article outlining these once I have documented it.  One major part of it will be giving the student a lot of choice in what to learn and when.  What I am thinking is that I need to come up with a list of subjects for each grade, along with a number of "credits" needed in each subject to finish that grade.  The student then will submit a proposal for each credit, on what to learn to earn the credit.  So, for American History, one credit might be earned by studying and writing a report on the Civil War, and another might be earned by doing the same for the design and creation of the U.S. Constitution.  Of course, there will probably be a few specifics that are mandatory, but instead of scheduling them for a specific unit, we will leave it up to the student, so long as it gets done by whatever deadline it has (probably end of school year, or graduation).  Anyhow, more information on this when I have it documented.

Lord Rybec