The reluctant pied piper of homeschooling

I’ve had two interactions in the last week that move me to write again about the importance of addressing gifted education in our public schools. The first was at a meeting where a mom passionately explained why her district had to have a program in place to try to draw in more students. She pointed out that although only three kids in her neighborhood of many kids were attending their local public schools, parents could be drawn back in now what with the economy and the difficulty of keeping up private school tuitions. But, she said, many of those parents weren’t going to come back if there wasn’t clear support by the administration for accelerated learners.

The second encounter happened when I was walking on the street and heard a car idling behind me. I looked back and saw a mom I’d known when my son was a preschooler — we haven’t seen much of each other in years. Without any unnecessary chitchat, she got right to the subject at hand. “So tell me about homeschooling,” she said. “My son is doing very well at school, and he’s miserable. The school is giving him nothing. All he’s learning is what’s on the test, and he already knows that. We can’t afford private school, but I have to get him out of there. He’s bored to tears.”

The phrase “bored to tears” brought back the memory of my son in his third-grade classroom. I was across the room helping another child and I glanced at him. He was literally fighting back tears. At home, he was never idle, never unengaged. But at school, he was practicing patience and waiting, all for no benefit to his own education. That was his last week of public school.

So I got to thinking: I read all these well-reasoned articles about how parents pulling the highest achieving students to homeschool them or put them into private schools is hurting our public schools. The theory is, we should sacrifice our children to the greater good and leave them there. We should work with the system rather than opting out.

But ask any parent who has opted out, and they will say the same thing: Yes, the system needs to be changed, but not on my kid’s back. Until they see clear support from administration and teachers, they’re going to do what’s best for their children.

Here’s what we know about gifted learners:

First of all, you don’t have to use the g-word, but the fact is that just as there are learners who need a longer time to process information and understand concepts, there are learners who do this in a shorter timeframe. Whatever you want to call it, and however it happens, these kids do exist and the public schools do need to serve their needs.

Second, a child who learns at a faster pace needs to use her brain just as a child who needs extra physical activity needs that physical activity. Teachers readily admit that they have students who really need to run around and move, but so many teachers refuse to admit that their “smart” kids need to be stretching their brain in the same way.

Third, the traditional ways of “dealing with” having an accelerated learner in a classroom are detrimental to that student. Those ways are:

  • Give the accelerated learner more and more of the same thing that she has already mastered (busy work).
  • Have the accelerated learner do the same work as everyone else, faster, and then have him help other students (unpaid teacher’s aide).
  • Let the accelerated learner do the same work, then let her go into a corner and read or entertain herself while she waits for the others (practicing patience).
  • Have a pull-out program that doesn’t interface with what’s happening in the classroom, so that the accelerated learner misses what’s happening in the classroom and then gets extra work loaded on top of what he’s already doing in the classroom.

Obviously, none of these approaches addresses the accelerated learner’s need to learn more and learn more deeply.

A fourth thing that we know about gifted students is that they do not always do well in school. Bored, frustrated, angry, and becoming more self-loathing as their differences are either denied or misunderstood, gifted students have a higher high school drop-out rate than the general population, are often not appropriately prepared for college, and end up seeing other students who develop healthy study skills and personal drive surpass them. They don’t know why this happens because their needs were not properly met in their earlier education.

So how can an under-funded, stressed-out public school system serve accelerated learners?

First of all, schools have to admit that accelerated learners exist and that they have legitimate needs. Denying their needs now is just like the old days when schools labeled dyslexic kids “stupid,” even though their disability had nothing to do with their ability to think.

Second, school administrators have to make it clear to teachers and parents that accelerated learners are part of the school community and have needs that the school can and wants to address.

Third, all teachers must be taught how to differentiate their teaching, not just for kids who are struggling to learn what’s on the test, but also for kids who can do the test without any apparent effort. As an example: my daughter wanted to take the STAR test this year, so we downloaded some sample questions to make sure she understood how to take such a test. One page of questions involved separating words into their syllables properly. She has never studied this. In fact, I have never knowingly explained what a “syllable” is. Yet she had no problem answering all the questions correctly.

Gifted students often enter the school year already knowing the material on the test. They will literally be bored to tears, or to gross misbehavior, if they are forced to “study” something they mastered without any visible effort.

Administrators may say that they can’t afford to train all their teachers in acceleration, but really, any decent teacher can train him or herself in the basics. Pick up a copy of Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom, which answers such questions as How can I manage my classroom when students are doing different things at the same time? and How can I make changes in the way I teach when we have no budget for training, materials, or resources? For $35, a district can start the education process and take it from there as they have funding and willpower.

Fourth, school districts must ditch the outmoded and discredited idea that gifted learners do best by staying with their age-based peer group. If a student has one area where he is far accelerated past his classmates and doesn’t have a “cluster” to work with in his own grade, he must be given the opportunity to work with students at a similar level in another grade.

Furthermore, if a student is advanced in all subject areas, acceleration has been proven to be the most effective and least harmful way to provide an appropriate learning environment for that student. Teachers and administrators are the only people left who argue that acceleration is harmful to kids for whom it’s appropriate. At the California Association for the Gifted Conference that I attended recently, a teacher who is also a parent related sitting in on meetings where administrators shamelessly admitted that they were against acceleration not because there is research to show its harmful affects (because that research doesn’t exist), but rather because when a child enters the school system in kindergarten, the district budgets for getting that child’s tax money for 13 years. And darn it, they’re going to get that money if it’s budgeted for!

Fifth, districts need to embrace all the ways to provide a better learning environment for gifted students, from bringing back all the “non-essential” subjects that help gifted children have outlets at school (art, music, drama, clubs, athletics) to keeping up on the latest methods for accommodating students that are basically “free,” such as cluster grouping by grade.

In reality, the needs of many gifted kids are not necessarily met when the parents pull them from public schools. Private schools are not necessarily better equipped, or even more willing, to accommodate unusual learners. Homeschooling is not the best option for a family that won’t or can’t fully embrace it as a lifestyle and not just a last-ditch attempt to save their kids from deadening boredom.

If our public schools’ mission is to provide appropriate education for all students, then all public schools have the absolute obligation to admit the existence of accelerated learners, confirm that they have needs that can be met within the public school system, and then work to provide the resources to support those children as part of our diverse community.

Until that happens, I expect that I’m going to keep playing the uncomfortable role of the reluctant pied piper, walking down the street and doling out advice to frustrated moms who aren’t finding receptive ears at their public schools.

What inspiration looks like

We took our yearly pilgrimage to the Maker Faire on Sunday. Ever since we discovered this event’s magical properties, it’s been a regular on our calendar. Yes, there were disappointments. We searched in vain for our favorite place — the room full of overstocks, rejects, and just plain junk where you could put together whatever your imagination could come up with. That didn’t happen this year. We noticed that for the kids, there were a lot more booths with very closed-end, focused projects that didn’t seem as inspiring as the open play we remembered from previous years.

But despite the disappointments, I think we got what we were looking for: yet another example of children inspired… in two very different ways.

We pretty much immediately had to split up. Our children go at different paces, and are interested in completely different things. Our son, 11, likes to survey things from a distance. He was the kid marked “slow to warm” in preschool. He needs time to adjust and consider. Our daughter, 7, flits around a room and then dives in. She was the preschooler who couldn’t be torn from an activity once she found it.

Listening to music in the alternative music room.
Listening to music in the alternative music room.

At one point when I was with our son, we spent a long, slow time in the experimental music room, playing the instruments and talking to the creators. I got a text from my husband: “She is in needle arts heaven.” He had been stuck at a booth where they handed her beautiful yarn and free knitting needles and worked with her on her knitting skills.

Later, our son went off with a friend and I relieved my husband in the inspiration-watching job. Trying to shepherd her through the Expo Hall to see what I’d missed, she was attracted by a fabulous mess of materials on the table for U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. She immediately grasped the concept of the activity — design a spaceship or satellite that can withstand the heat of the sun — and started to go. She took one of the plastic cups they provided as a base and started alternating electrical tape and foam. At one point I thought perhaps we were nearing the home stretch when she started to decorate the outside with gold foil. But she turned to me and said, “I bet you think that gold is decoration. It’s actually a special sort of insulation. You won’t be able to see it when I’m done.” And sure enough, she added two more layers on top of it. In the end, she did decorate her capsule with red diamond-shaped bits of electrical tape over the silver of the outside of the capsule, and it was time to test.

Busy hands making a space capsule
Busy hands making a space capsule

The whole time, the two people manning to the booth watched her with curiosity. In the time since she’d sat down, three other children had arrived, built, tested and left. She presented her capsule. “I’m ready to test,” she said. The man stuck a probe into the capsule with great difficulty — there was a lot of insulation on that thing! We got a chart where were were to record the temperature as he placed it under two hot lights. The changes were tiny.

“That’s very well-insulated,” he remarked.

This is a girl who was going to keep her astronauts safe!

Meanwhile, our son mostly looked. He enjoyed playing with a math program on one computer, and playing with the old Commodore system in the historical computers section. But it wasn’t until much later, when we were home and his sister was in bed, that his inspiration started to show. He started to talk and talk as we sat together and built a paper star structure from Wolfram Alpha. We didn’t talk about things specific to the Maker Faire, but he was spouting ideas and questions until well after his bedtime. It was one of those nights where time took a backseat to inspiration.

I think one important part of parenting is to watch to see what inspires your child, and then help set up that situation over and over until the child is ready to grab inspiration and make it into something. You never know what the inspiration will be, and whether there will be any obvious product. A child who loves to watch car races might grow up to be a racecar mechanic, but then again, might grow up to be a nuclear physicist who enjoys smashing atoms. The important part of parenting is not to determine the product, but to provide support for the inspiration. Since not all our kids can be TV producers and video game designers, we can help them see the possibilities when we turn off the screens and get them out into the world.

A few more gripes from the Home Engineer

If you’re not in the mood to be annoyed, Go Away.

There, I’ve said it. Consider yourself forewarned.

Do you hate stupid people as much as I do? First, let me define stupid people: They are those people who we need to deal with on a daily basis who see it as their function to keep us from doing simply what we need to do. You know who they are: The employee at that government office who has created all sorts of different-sized hoops for you to jump through, no matter that several of the hoops are not of the size that any normal person can jump through. The software programmer at your health insurance company who wrote an infinite loop into the program that you must use, such that every time you try to inquire about an EOB* you don’t understand, you end up back on the same screen that asks you what information you’re looking for. It’s that darn person at the phone company who programmed their automatic phone service menus such that you have to go through four levels before they tell you that, in fact, there is no human there who is going to help you.

* Did you know what an EOB was before you became a parent? I didn’t. I just shredded all that stuff that came from the health insurance. Didn’t understand it, didn’t need it. Never suspected that one day I would have an EOB file and I would eagerly search each one that came in to find all the mistakes, the ways that they would thwart my attempts at a simple, straightforward existence!

Those stupid people who could help you are all at the tiki bar, sipping mai tais.

This is today’s situation, but really, do the details matter? This will sound very familiar to you, I’m guessing: My husband and I went on a much-needed three-day vacation so that we could actually look at each other. As any parents of a special needs child can tell you, we need a break. Our child is not diagnosably “special needs” — there’s no IEP or insurance code available for her — but I can assure you she has special needs. I’m not saying our lives are as difficult as couples who have a severely autistic child. But just that like them, we need breaks in order to remember why we’re doing this in the first place. We hadn’t really had a real break since she was born, and this one took a lot of planning. I had to schedule it down to the minute: enrolling her sainted babysitter (who has since gone and gotten herself a real job, which I very much encouraged and which I may not survive!), my mother and sister (their fault for being related to me!), her school (may they continue to get funding for generations to come), and a friend (who acts like it’s no big deal to take charge of my wonderful, difficult, energetic, annoying, creative, brilliant being).

In other words, this was no small feat of Home Engineering.

While we went on this much-needed vacation, at some gas station or restaurant or even the fancy resort we stayed at, we willingly handed our credit card to someone who copied down the information and called his friend in Houston. Two days later, the credit card company called us — “Have you been trying to use your card all around the Houston area and getting declined?” — and we had to cancel the card.

OK, add the guy who stole our credit card number to the list of people I hate.

So we had to get a whole new credit card number, and if this has happened to you in this modern economy, you know what’s coming next: Did I have time to remember every single business that had our credit card number and was charging our fees to it? Well,… I thought about it at least. And thought I’d have at least a few weeks, and promptly forgot about it.

Back to the phone company and why I hate people who thwart my simple needs. All I need is to change the darn credit card information on our AT&T account. Do you think I am able to do this? Do you think I can make gold shimmer down from the sky and into our bank account?

No: That programmer who did their phone system? Didn’t bother to program it so that I find out in advance of the many times I have to answer questions and be misunderstood by their voice recognition system that they are actually closed and are actually not planning on answering any question I may have. And while they’re closed, did it occur to them that this is not the best time for them to bring down their online computer system so I can’t check my account from the Web and see if my request to change the credit card to which they charge my phone lines has gone through? Has it occurred to them that there are many, many people who have much, much more complicated lives than I who burst into tears upon receiving, yet again, the information that their quest to change their credit card information has been thwarted?

OK, I will admit to you that I know that these people aren’t stupid, or even mean. It’s the system they work within that makes them act stupid and mean. I don’t think about the evil computer programmer, rubbing his hands together and chuckling as he makes sure that I will get stuck in his infinite loop. I don’t blame the bored woman who finally answers the phone and sighs, slowly, heavily, audibly, when I ask to speak to her manager. I don’t blame the manager who decided that they would save money if they made sure to route callers through six different voice-recognized levels of the program before being told that, in fact, there is no human being available to talk to.

They are all just doing their jobs.

But as a [always working on being a] well-read person, I can’t help but think of our sages: Kafka, Orwell… I’m so annoyed no one else comes to mind but a few more could be inserted here. All these people who told us what was going to happen, and we blithely progressed along the road to Progress.

Heck, it was probably really annoying back in the day when you had to call the Operator to place a call and she knew all your business. But she was there! After she was done connecting you to your sister and listened in on your telling your sister about the awful fight you had with your husband, she took off her headphone and walked down the street to the cafe and you could say, “Hey, Julie. Who do I talk to about paying my bill in a different way?” and she could tell you who the person was.

But here we are.

Back in the day, being a mom didn’t get much respect. But given our present situation, I suggest that we get a title. We are not homemakers or stay-at-home moms, we are Home Engineers. We get capital letters. We get kudos from company management when we take the time to point out their infinite loops. We use our Stanford educations to get really, really pissed off and blog about why being a Home Engineer is a thankless, difficult job. We blog about it, for next to no money at all (because the people who read our blogs are cool people like us, who don’t click on the darn links because really, we don’t care about the big corporations that advertise on our Google ads and we buy pretty much everything from our farmer’s market and our local co-op anyway)…

Oh, darn. I’ve used up all this time to complain and I still have bills to pay and three more companies to tell that some dweeb in a restaurant we went to while we were trying to get away so that we could actually talk to each other stole our credit card number and sold it to his friend in Houston…

Make way for unbridled creativity!

It’s something like non-stop creativity at my house. My daughter has a spot in our breakfast room, on the floor, where she pulls out her wares: bits of cloth, paper of various colors and textures, glue, beads, string, egg cartons, boxes we threw in the recycling and hoped would stay there, needles and thread, a stapler, tape, markers, glitter pens, stickers…

At some point I had to make an agreement with her: you can make this colossal mess on the floor, but once a day it needs to be cleaned up. She readily agreed, but she’s even creative about agreements.

My son has largely moved his creativity to the computer, but when he was her age he was always on the floor in the front hall, which we had gated off so that there was one place where our roving preschooler wouldn’t be able to destroy his stuff. Visitors would have to step over block structures, paper folding projects, and scattered natural objects that he brought in from the outside.

One time I heard one of my son’s friends say to him, “You haven’t seen any movies!” That’s not literally true, but in general watching things is not a big hit around our house. Our daughter will do it as much as we’ll let her, but inspiration doesn’t come from a glowing box. We get inspired by doing things. Right now we have a project in progress for year-end teacher gifts, cannelini beans sprouting in peat cups, and an electronics project my husband is doing to create laser communicators. I am working on making a video of my daughter’s school play, and our son has created a blog of software reviews. In other words, we’re very, very busy and haven’t gotten to half of the things we really want to be doing!

And along comes the Maker Faire. To learn a bit about it, you can visit my last year’s blog entry about it. The Maker Faire is to people like us like Cannes is to movie buffs. It’s the real deal, and it happens in San Mateo. If you’re a watcher, you can go and watch all the amazing things that people have made. If you’re a shopper, you can buy both kits and pre-made items. If you’re a doer, you can go straight to the room where you get to create oddities out of surplus everything.

I really can’t recommend a more inspirational day for your little inventors than this one. At $50 for a family entry, it’s gotten a bit more pricey. But it’s hard to put a price on an experience like this. $50 is about what you’d have to pay these days to take your family to a movie, too, and I can assure you, they’ll get a lot more from the Maker Faire. And they’ll probably be able to watch some videos there, too.

The Maker Faire is a mind-boggling assortment of wild, weird, and wonderful. We always come home totally exhausted and recharged for another year of messing, mixing, melting, and fun!

Who are you calling a stay-at-home mom?

One of my contacts sent out this piece on the Forbes website — Who are you calling a stay at home mom? It’s yet another rehash of the tired question, Should women stay home with their kids or go back to work right away? In this case, though, they do mention the middle option, mothers who work part-time or from home.

But the thing that these pieces always miss is all the grey area, the most interesting stuff!

Perhaps they need to talk to some homeschooling moms. Of course, there are many homeschooling moms who are the epitome of the old-fashioned stay-at-home mom in many ways. Most Christian homeschoolers, for example, believe that it is the mother’s place to stay at home with her kids. Of course, the Bible neglected to say anything about how you’ll have to re-learn calculus right ahead of your kids if you’re planning to send them to college!

In the case of most homeschooling moms I know (no matter what religious bent), staying at home with the kids is as rigorous as getting a PhD, as demanding as running a corporation, as creatively fulfilling as being the artistic director of a small theater group. The big difference is that you get to decide what to do, where to work, and whether or not you want to get out of your jammies.

My thinking has come full circle on this. When my husband and I decided to have a baby, we discussed what we had as kids and what we knew of the research regarding those important first few years. We decided that we did want one of us to stay home, and that I would have to be that person given our comparative earnings. It wasn’t a huge change for me in some ways: since I met my future husband at a corporate job in 1986, I’ve made a point of avoiding corporate jobs. I taught at colleges, so most of the work I did was at home. Then I became a graphic designer and publisher, working again mostly from home. So staying at home wasn’t a change of great proportions.

The big change didn’t even come when my son was a baby. I had then some friends I’d made through graphic design and poetry, and babies are portable. I hauled that kid to cafés and restaurants, readings and art shows. Yes, I was a bit more isolated and I didn’t really know any other moms, so I felt frustrated sometimes. But then we decided that what our very sensitive, very attached boy needed was a bit of preschool, so we signed him up for two mornings a week. I started to get back to work, much as the moms mentioned in the Forbes piece who work part-time from home.

Through this time I guess I was what most moms would call a stay-at-home mom. I was primarily doing “childcare” — not education, though I know now that all that I did with them, all the reading, art, and playing in the sand, the singing and the dancing, exploration and conversation, was education in the truest sense.

It wasn’t until I started homeschooling that I started to appreciate what I was really doing: I was changing and growing, just like my kids except the growth was not in height or (mostly!) in pounds. The change and growth was in the way I saw the world and my ability to see past what I’d been able to see as just plain old me. “Staying at home with the kids” changed me in a fundamental way that can’t really be explained to a woman who is satisfied with her choice to go back to work. I know this, because I can hardly explain it to my pre-kid self, who planned to suffer through the early years, then get back to her real life once the kids were in school.

Other homeschooling moms and I chat all the time about what we’re learning. You may think that an adult homeschooling kindergarteners would just be in kindergarten again, but we are learning so much more. In schooling our kids, we’re learning curriculum and pedagogy, but we’re also learning psychology, time management, and crowd management. We get so much more done than many traditional stay-at-home moms I know because we’re motivated by our job.

So yes, I do think the old argument is very tired and really not worth discussing. There are women who want to go right back to work. They make the decision, they’re happy with it, and they make it work. Their kids turn out just fine.

And there are women who choose to stay at home and be the mom they had or wanted. They run the household and bake cookies and hopefully do lots of volunteer work as well. Their kids turn out just fine.

And yes, thanks for noticing that there are lots of women who keep feet in both camps, who do want to continue their careers but also sacrifice in order to be with their kids during the young years. And you know, their kids are just fine.

But those categories are superseded by the legions of moms who use this time to educate themselves and perhaps their children. We aren’t separate from those three categories above; we weave ourselves in so that sometimes you can’t even see us. We’re not stagnating; we’re not even sacrificing. We’re here, we’re growing, we’re happy, and we’re not just sitting around watching soap operas.

Though if we can find some educational value in watching soap operas, you might find us doing that, whether in our pajamas or not.

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