The dreaded “check-in”

When my kids were in preschool, we went through a routine that I bet is still going on in preschools across our nation.

It’s the dreaded check-in.

When I’d drop them off in the morning, their teacher would greet me with a smile and, “Just checking in to see how things are going this morning?”

I had kids four years apart, so I had a long time to answer this question before I started to question its validity.

At first, I’d be honest, and perhaps offer a warning: “It’s been a terribly difficult morning. I couldn’t get her to eat breakfast!”

Or a reassurance: “Things went so smoothly this morning. We all have smiles on our faces and full bellies!”

And when I picked them up, the check-ins were supposed to foretell my future.

“It’s been a hard day for little Mini-Me,” I might hear with dread.

Or, “What a great day this has been. What a great week, really!”

The thing is, after this happens with the first child for a few years, you start to think perhaps you’re the only one who notices a problem. But upon “checking-in” with the second and noticing the same pattern, you start to form a theory:

The check-in is totally bogus. Yep, you heard it here. If you have a little one just starting preschool, consider this a warning. Your teacher will love the check-in. She will hang on your every prophecy in the morning. She will send you off with odes to joy or threnodies of despair.

But it will mean nothing.

Here’s the truth: Your kid can be a screaming maniac one morning. She can insist that the only thing she will eat is slow-cook Annie’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese, don’t even START with the suggestion of the microwave variety. Then when you finally cave in, all she will want is a bagel. Except you don’t have bagels. And by the time she’s worn you down and you’re about to suggest getting bagels on the way to school, you’ll see that it’s past time to get her to preschool, and you have a doctor’s appointment (or, even more important, a pedicure) scheduled for 15 minutes after drop-off time at the prechool. Why did you do that?

Your daughter senses your frustration. She realizes she has real leverage. You, her mother, have dared to schedule something important to you when she wants Annie’s Mac ‘n’ Cheese, slow cook variety, now, here, before preschool? Your daughter resorts to physical violence. She’s hitting and kicking all the way to the car. You pray your neighbors are driving their kids to school so they don’t call CPS on you. You are not touching your daughter but she’s screaming “Ow! Ow! You’re hurting me! I hate you! When you go to sleep tonight, I am going to kill you with my hairbrush!”

You’d laugh, but you’re crying now. You’re driving to preschool, trying to keep the tears from getting you into an accident. Your daughter calms. You wonder what’s happening back there — it’s so quiet.

You get her out of the car. You’re shaking now, though you’ve stopped crying. You’re sure the mascara you actually took time to put on today because of your appointment — because you were doing things for yourself, darn it — is now raccooned under your eyes. You look at the ground, not meeting other parents’ eyes. They are laughing with each other as they leave the school, relaxed and happy.

You walk into the room.

“Just checkin’ in to see how things went this morning!” says a chirpy voice.

Where is that hairbrush your daughter was threatening you with? You have a better use for it.

Because you know, when you go to pick up your daughter later, she will have had a “super-duper day!” She will have sat still for circle time, and she will have shared her paints with little Rosco even though all the other kids don’t like him because he’s autistic and says things like, “Actually, dragons don’t exist, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to fly due to their excessive weight.” Your daughter was a great helper and a great friend. She was so kind and gentle with the class’s pet rat, who was acting sick.

Just checkin’, indeed.

Then there’s the day from hell at preschool. Remember that evaluation your teacher gave you at the first parent meeting? Your son is doing fine, but we do have some questions about his… whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. Perhaps he has a small roadrage problem out on the playground. Perhaps he likes to get into the teacher’s cabinet and squeeze Elmer’s into the scissors box.

No matter what his problem, there will be a day when, “Just checkin’ in!” will be a humiliating experience. My kid? He did that? Oh, I’m so sorry.

“It’s OK,” she’ll comfort you. “I’m just checkin’ in so you know what to expect.”

But when you get home, oh, such a surprise! That’s the day that little Rosco sits on the darn potty and puts his poopie in, plop, plop.

That’s the day he climbs to the top of the play structure at the playground and doesn’t start screaming for you to come save him.

That’s the day he sits next to you on the couch, looks up at you with his adoring eyes, and says, “Mommy, I loves you mostly of anyone.”

Just checkin’, that’s right.

Let’s admit it: preschool-age children are ciphers. One day we give them a cookie and they turn into wild maniacs and we decide No More Sugar.

Then one day they’re wild maniacs and Grandma, having conveniently forgotten about the No More Sugar rule, gives them a huge piece of cake and they quiet right down and ask to read a book.

We think we can figure them out, but really, we can’t. By the time we figure out that we can’t figure them out, they’ve changed again and they have all new behaviors for us to figure out until we realize we can’t figure them out.

I hereby move that we abolish the “check-in.” From here on forward, I would like to change the check-in to some sort of non-denominational blessing: “Oh, ye Parenthead, may whatever deity or force which you believe in bless you with an afternoon not resembling the hellish morning your child gave me.” Or, “Oh, ye Parenthead, please ask whatever deity or force which you believe to bless my morning with your child in the manner you believe would be most beneficial to all of us.”

Now, wouldn’t that be so much better for you?

…Just checkin’!

Teaching writing in the elementary years

This is a transcript of a talk that I gave at the recent HSC Conference in Sacramento. Thanks to my great audience, I have edited the content so hopefully now it’s even more helpful. This talk was written with homeschoolers in mind. If your children are in school or will be in school, you’ll find that schools have a very different approach to writing. Somewhere along the way, they forgot to observe children who eventually became good writers and analyze what helped them get there. You’re not going to be able to change the way your child’s teachers do things, but perhaps if you have a child who has been deemed unsatisfactory in the writing department, you can follow some of my suggestions at home. You might also even consider making suggestions to the teacher, if you think s/he is receptive.

*

I graduated from University of Michigan with a Master’s in Creative Writing. Somehow, this made me eligible to teach expository writing at the college level. I remember when I got my first job, my elation and then my dismay: How do you teach expository writing? Nobody had ever taught me much of anything. I read the textbook before walking in the first day. And I got one valuable piece of advice: Another teacher told me that the best way to get to know my students was to have them write their first essay on the topic, “How my family eats dinner.”

I followed his advice. The results were fascinating. The worst-written essays came from 18-year-olds who wrote things like, “I grab a TV dinner and eat in front of the TV.” One of the best essays, however, was from a young man who happened to be a preacher’s son. His essay revealed how every evening of his childhood, his father had sat the family at the table and grilled them on topics of his choice. At any given moment, they were supposed to be able to expound on questions concerning morality or rights.

This young man also revealed to me that he’d gone to an abysmal California high school that seemed bent on preparing its low-income students for prison. He’d never written an essay before, but because of his father’s training, he intrinsically knew what it was.

He got an A.

In order to get you into the mind and body of an elementary-age kid who has assigned writing, I’d like you to do the following exercise: Choose a profession you are not interested in pursuing. Write three paragraphs about the best things about practicing this profession. Do it with your non-dominant hand. Consider how that feels, and how your eight-year-old might feel when given an assigned writing topic.

I want to go back to my own writing training. My school system was pretty old-fashioned. None of this new-fangled “writing across the curriculum.” We studied grammar, we studied spelling, we had to write reports in middle school, and papers in high school. Also in high school we were given the opportunity, occasionally, to write creatively. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach: It’s uninspired and ignores creativity and the joy of writing.

But the good thing about this approach was that I was never, as a young child, expected to want to write or to have opinions on things adults thought were important. By contrast, when my son was in public school, his math book had problems where he was supposed to write narrative answers. I’m sure the committee that thought this up had good intentions, but really, who wants to write about math? Even the people I know who are good at it have little interest in writing about it. And if a kid isn’t good at it, forcing him/her to write about it instills more resentment…against both math and writing!

So I actually don’t know that our school-y approach to writing has improved all that much. It’s replaced a system that expected little from kids and did little to inspire them with a system that expects way too much from kids and turns inspiration into force-feeding.

Let’s talk about what writing is:

  • Expression
  • Ideas
  • Argument
  • Self-awareness
  • Flow
  • Creativity
  • Communication
  • Being part of a community of readers/writers
  • Permanence

Writing is more than just learning a skill. It’s about expressing yourself and your ideas, being able to bring your ideas out of your head and give them a form where you can consider them, edit them, change them, and refine them. It is the process of revealing what’s in your brain in a sort of real-world, permanent way. It’s a really BIG thing, especially to a kid. Writing is power.

So what stifles writing?

  • The wrong tool (scratchy pen, dull pencil, broken keyboard)
  • The wrong environment (too noisy, too quiet, wrong kind of music, bad smell)
  • Too high expectations from someone else or yourself
  • Having to write about something you don’t care about
  • A physical problem (carpal tunnel syndrome, young hands with very little fine motor control)
  • The editor on your shoulder (that voice in your head that keeps criticizing what you’re writing, often even before it makes it to the page)

Taking all of this into account, I believe that enforcing a general rule that all kids must “work on” writing before they are, at minimum, in late elementary school is unwise. Now, notice that I said “a general rule.” As a child, I was a clear exception to this. In the third grade, I wrote an entire post-apocalyptic novel on purple notebook paper. It was, if I remember correctly, about a girl who has lived through a nuclear disaster and is left to fend for herself in a poisoned world. (Unfortunately, it was lost in a flood at my parents’ house. I’d love to read it now for a good chuckle!) So there I was, an 8-year-old, definitely not a kid who was afraid of writing or unable to express myself. But there were two other extenuating circumstances: First, no one had ever told me I had to write or had edited my writing. They had edited my spelling, punctuation, and grammar on exercises, but no one had ever asked me to produce writing I cared about and then proceeded to tell me what was wrong with it. Second, I was unusually drawn to writing at a young age, and no one was expecting me to write novels, or even essays.

Parents homeschooling their kids need to have a stern talk with themselves about interfering in their young children’s writing. Here are some rules I suggest you follow:

  1. Never, ever correct your child’s spelling on a piece of spontaneous writing unless you are asked to
  2. Never, ever correct your child’s grammar on a piece of spontaneous writing unless you are asked to
  3. Do notice the errors your child is making and gently point them out in circumstances completely separated from creative writing, if you feel you need to
  4. Do nothing but praise what your child produces, and make your praise “functional,” e.g. “Wow,  you worked hard on that!” or “It is fun that your story has a surprise ending!” (Not, “That’s brilliant and should be published!” because that’s a lie.)

So now you’re thinking, Wait, are you telling me that I shouldn’t have my younger elementary child work on writing at all? Yes, indeed, that is what I’m saying. However, I’m not saying you shouldn’t interfere, but rather, I’m suggesting that you should do it in a stealthy way that looks nothing like a “writing exercise.”

Here is what you should do to stimulate your child’s writing:

  • Read. Then read. Oh, and also read. Read some more. Read all the time. Enjoy reading. If your child enjoys reading aloud, ask him/her to read to you.
    Reading constantly and enjoyably is the number one way for your child to learn how to write. When I teach writing, the worst writers are the ones who never read for enjoyment. How can they write well? They haven’t seen any examples! We don’t expect kids to do much of anything else well without millions of examples, so why do we expect that of writing?
  • Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk!
    Talking about things cogently is how your child is preparing to be a writer. Our first babysitter was from Colombia, and she viewed part of her job as learning American culture. She was amazed that I talked to my kids “like they are people.” She said that no one she knew in Colombia ever talked to kids in anything but babytalk. I had to break it to her that this is probably true of most Americans, too. But at our house, we knew we wanted our kids to be able to talk well, so we talked to them like they were smart, interesting people with fascinating opinions. This is how you make a writer.
  • Let them see you write – the actual physical process of it.
    This is where some parents are going to groan. Oh, I hate writing. I have hated writing ever since third grade when Mrs. Evans… Exactly. And you don’t want that to happen to  your child. So get out your notebook and write. Write bad nature poetry, and read it to them. Write a letter or e-mail and read it to them. Read them something in the newspaper that really makes you angry, write a letter to the editor, and read it to them. You can even let them see you edit. My kids were fascinated when I read them the first draft of a book I’m working on with pen in hand, and kept making marks. “What’s wrong with that paragraph?” they asked excitedly.
  • Make writing physically easy for your kids.
    Let them dictate while you type/write
    Make a recording device available to them to dictate into
    Incorporate writing into things they love
    Don’t ever criticize anything about their writing
    Keep homemade blank books around
    If your child’s brain has developed ahead of his/her hands, get them voice recognition software or teach them to touch type
    If your child has a disability, work around it
  • Any writing is good writing: signs, comics, tracing. My daughter loves to make signs and for years that was her biggest writing output.
  • Don’t push good penmanship until they are clearly ready to improve, and don’t comment on penmanship when they write for pleasure. Ditto spelling.
  • Never, ever edit things they write for pleasure. (Unless they ask you to, and then make them beg till you do it.)
  • Never, ever assign them topics. (Unless they ask you to do it.)
  • Incorporate writing into project-based learning.
    This is a big one. A kid who is reluctant to sit down and write a book report may be very willing, even eager, to write up the results of a cool science experiment. (Who the heck ever thought up book reports anyway—that’s enough to ruin any good book!)
  • Create actual products that contain writing. Lots of kids are very inspired by this. Actual products can be:
    Letters to Grandma
    Newsletters for their friends or neighbors
    Reports that they present at their homeschool program
    Copied poems with drawings to hang on the wall

Relax! Remember that as long as they are reading and having interesting conversations, your kids are preparing to become good writers.

Here’s a self-assessment you can take if you want to think about what you’re doing to inspire your child’s inner writer:

  • How often do you read to your child aloud, even after s/he can read alone?
  • How often to you ask your child’s opinion about something you’re reading together?
  • How often do you read to your child from something you’re reading for yourself or something you are writing?
  • Do you ask your child questions about the things she is interested in?
  • Have you offered to type/write as your child dictates?

For most kids, creative writing is going to come first. They may incorporate words into their art from a young age. They will usually start producing creative pieces if they see it modeled for them. They can be very inspired to write if you write down the stories they tell and then read them back.

When kids are producing creative work spontaneously, that’s when you know that they are developing a healthy attitude toward writing. You might actually see them gravitating toward things that you could have “assigned” to them. When my daughter was in first grade, she decided to write a “report” about squid, since we were studying the ocean. She did it, then presented it to her teacher at her homeschool program to be put into her portfolio. She did this all on her own. And she, by the way, is a kid who swears she “hates” writing! (What else would you expect the rebellious daughter of a professional writer to say?)

Finally, we do have to address the obvious question: When is a child ready to do assigned writing? If your child is homeschooled and is not required by a charter to take writing tests (something I abhor about one of our local charters), remember that writing on a prompt is only a skill they will need on tests for admission to programs, high school or community college classes they take, and on their college applications. If you’ve already nurtured a happy writer, learning to do this will not be hard. This skill is best developed by: a) reading a lot, and b) not being forced to learn it till they actually need it.

Most homeschooled kids–assuming you’ve been following the advice above–probably don’t need to practice writing from prompts before middle school. Of course, you are going to have kids who want to attain this skill earlier on their own, or perhaps who are so academically advanced that they will have to learn this skill in order to take the classes they want to take. But they are the exceptions. This isn’t a skill that needs to be forced on younger kids, who will only learn to dislike writing if it is “taught” too early.

If you have kids in school, you’re going to see that the educational establishment doesn’t agree with me at all. And, well, good luck with that. I hope that your child has understanding teachers who figure out how to meet the standards while still keeping creativity and ideas distinct from editing and correcting. Otherwise, they’re just going to be feeding that editor sitting on your child’s shoulder and it’s going to be that much harder for your child to find pleasure and learning in writing.

And that, really, is all it takes to become a good writer.

Taking your gifted learner out of school

I gave a workshop at the recent Homeschool Association of California Conference in Sacramento, and a few people suggested that I post it here for those who couldn’t attend. If you are the parent of a gifted learner and you’re thinking about taking him/her out of school, perhaps this will help you make an informed choice.

***

Parents generally assume that the year their children turn six years old, they will send them off to kindergarten. The children will use scissors and paste, learn the alphabet, and maybe even learn to read. They‘ll sit quietly while the teacher reads stories to them, and use manipulatives to familiarize themselves with basic mathematical concepts such as number recognition and counting. It will be fun, and parents will proudly display their children‘s artwork on the refrigerator at home. When the parents go in for their first parent-teacher conference, they will meet the wonderful lady (it‘s usually a lady, isn‘t it?), maybe for the first time, whom they have entrusted with their children‘s introduction to the world outside of their home, and they will be told how sweet their children are and how well they have learned to play with others. They will have no worries.

It’s a nice fantasy, isn’t it?

Making the Choice, When Typical School
Doesn’t Fit Your Atypical Child
(Goodwin/Gustavson)

When I read this quote, I imagined a classic frame from the Peanuts cartoon, with all the kids’ heads up and all you see is their big mouths laughing: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! This description fits me, and I’ll add one more piece: I considered the day that my second and last child started kindergarten as the day my life would get going again. Not that I didn’t love having babies and preschoolers, but I was itching to find my adult self again. Well, it didn’t happen. At least, not the way I thought it would.

My first child was your classic “smart kid.” Always at the top of his class. Well-behaved. Sometimes a bit of a smart-ass, which we respected him for. Our second child was… something else. She was clearly highly intelligent, but her need to “get into” things surpassed any parenting method you have heard of. Frankly, if we were the type to beat our children, we would have worn ourselves out trying to beat her into submission. She would never, ever stop following her own muse.

Her muse, it seemed, did not work in a classroom setting. I enrolled her in a small private school, joking that either the Buddhists would reform her, or she’d turn them all Catholic. I should go check out the church at the bottom of the hill, because none of their patience and compassion got her to settle down. Her three months in the classroom was awful. By the end of it, she was a psychological basket case and so was I. When I told her she wasn’t going back after winter break, she was sad.

I wasn’t.

We tried homeschooling for a few months on our own, but we just sat around and hated each other. We didn’t know other homeschoolers and I didn’t really have good friends with kids. It wasn’t until we joined a public homeschooling program that spring that I met parents who didn’t act as if my daughter’s bad behavior would somehow infect their kids. They just accepted us in our weirdness, which was such a relief.

Fast forward a few years. My daughter and I are seasoned homeschoolers, and my son was doing Just Fine in school. This is the sort of thing parents tell themselves when they actually know they have no choice. Things with my daughter were very difficult, and my son’s needs were taking a back seat. We were paying for a fine private school (I still think it’s a fine school!), and his teacher was impressed with his abilities.

But I started to notice something: My son started to focus on the minimum effort he had to put into anything. Where my homeschooled daughter did things because she enjoyed them, my schooled son did things because he was told he had to. On top of that, there was a rough personality clash in the classroom, and my son was making himself sick with worry. He’d get off the bus every afternoon with a new physical ailment. He missed ten school days in the first semester of classes due to “stomach aches” that disappeared as soon as the bus pulled away from the curb and he knew I wasn’t up to driving him 40 minutes to school.

He and I started a casual discussion of “if you homeschooled for a year” and he jumped on it with much greater ferocity than I expected. He had made a best friend at school, the first really solid friendship of his life, and I thought this might dissuade him, but it didn’t. So in June 2010, we officially became a 100% homeschooling family.

Now that you know my story, let’s turn to what I know about the experience of gifted kids and schools in general.

How do schools not serve some gifted kids’ needs?

I want to be very clear about that word “some”: I am not including all gifted learners and all families here. So if you love school and your children are excelling in school, that is really wonderful and don’t feel the need to flame me. However, this is not the experience of all gifted learners and their families.

By their very nature, almost all schools offer few independent learning options. It’s just too hard to integrate a kid into a classroom if he’s doing different work than other kids. Few schools accept the research that shows that acceleration of gifted kids (either putting them in a more advanced group for single subjects or grade-skipping them) actually shows positive results. [Download and read A Nation Deceived for data on that.] No matter how they try, schools by their very nature offer an inflexible curriculum that is supposed to suit all the kids. A kid who is on a different plane of learning altogether can be disruptive. One mom of a gifted boy told me that his teacher had forbid him to ask any questions at all in the classroom. So the message was, “Not only are your questions irrelevant in our classroom, but you also aren’t allowed to have a legitimate question when you don’t understand something.”

On top of that, most gifted kids just aren’t the poster kid you’re thinking of: You know her — she’s well-groomed, well-spoken, the valedictorian, and top scorer on the volleyball team. Nope, gifted kids are as mixed a bunch as any group of kids. You have many who simply have bad social skills. On top of that, you have a good proportion who are “twice-exceptional”–both gifted learners and disabled in some way. A surprisingly high number of kids who test very well on IQ tests have disabilities such as dyslexia. Another chunk of gifted learners have Asperger’s disorder. That well-groomed valedictorian you know is not undeserving of her prizes — she worked for them. But there are lots of gifted learners who find that the one-size-fits-all approach to learning just can’t accommodate them. Try telling your public school that your kid who is in the 99th percentile on the STAR test needs special accommodations. It’s a hard world out there for 2e kids.

So it might surprise you to find out that the reasons that parents actually do decide to take their gifted learners out of school are largely not academic. Lack of intellectual stimulation and challenge are high on the list, but the parents I know talk more often about the lack of peers, the social isolation their kids faced, and the resulting health problems that were often the call that finally woke the parents up to reality: My smart kid isn’t doing well in school (even though he’s getting straight A’s).

Parents of gifted learners don’t take their kids out of school to insult the school or the other families. They take them out of school so they can follow their passions, work at their own pace, have healthy social lives, and do the unusual things that they are often drawn to.

Making a positive transition to homeschool

So say you’ve made the decision, and you’re going to take your kid out of school. You have a few hurdles to get over, and they aren’t academic ones. Most states have clear rules about what you have to do if you homeschool. California has an undeserved reputation as a state that is “hard on homeschooling,” but it’s easy. Go to the HSC website if you want details.

The big question is, how do you get your kid on board? Even kids who are miserable in school often prefer the hell they know to the one they don’t. Perhaps they’ve even heard bad stuff about homeschooling (perhaps even from you!). And isn’t quitting school “giving up”?

I recommend a positive path toward choosing homeschooling. Rather than framing the choice as “quitting” and “leaving”–all these negative terms–, consider how you can talk positively about the choice. I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve heard speak negatively about school in front of their kids, only to have to resort to that choice again later. Better not to do the damage now than to have to backpedal later. Also, chances are that your child has a healthy affection for, say, his teacher who was so kind even though she couldn’t integrate him into the classroom. Vilifying her forces your child into a psychologically difficult position.

An important thing to do is to introduce your child to homeschooling and homeschoolers. Perhaps you can have “days off” where you do what you envision doing as a homeschooler, so your child has an idea what to expect. Also, it’s great to meet other homeschoolers (and great for the parent, too). You find out that they aren’t all weird (though many of us don’t mind being called that!), and they may have a lot in common with you and your child.

Easing your child into homeschooling: Do gifted kids need to “deschool”?

My correspondents had two answers to this question, and those answers were: Yes and No. (You didn’t think this was going to be easy, did you?)

*If you need to learn what “deschooling” is, visit this page. Generally speaking, deschooling is the time you take to decompress before you start to homeschool.

Yes:

Your child has learned to do only what is required.  Your child is not self-motivated.  Your child is way ahead academically and needs some downtime.

It sounds like taking time to deschool and get a sense of why you’re homeschooling is in order. Time off will not hurt your child — it can only help. In this case, don’t push too hard.

You need to watch your child and learn more about his learning style.  Your child lagged academically and you are eager to teach.

In this case, you may be tempted to jump right in. I don’t know how my child learns, so we’d better start now! Bad idea. I am so sure I will do a better job than his teachers of whipping him into shape and getting him to show his true brilliance. Definitely time for you to chill for a while and get to know each other.

Your child is resentful/angry about leaving school. You don’t know any other homeschoolers and the process is new to you.

You are leaving behind a lot of cultural assumptions that you’re going to have to learn to shed…slowly. Take some time before you think you know what homeschooling will look like in your home.

No way!

Your child has projects lined up because schoolwork took so much time. Your child is begging to get going on learning new things.

You know your child better than anyone else does. If deschooling just seems completely wrong to you because your child is so ready, go for it. I know one kid who left school and within a couple of years he was the top student (as a young teen) in all his community college math classes.

You and your child are “in sync” and you will notice if she goes into overload.

Here’s where you have to be completely honest with yourself: Are you really as clear on your child’s needs as you think? If so, then go for it. But watch carefully and be willing to step back if your child starts to resist.

What does gifted homeschooling look like?

Let’s face it: The homeschooling parents of gifted learners are taking on a bigger job in some ways. Our kids are more likely to be drawn to careers that require college, and thus we have a lot more riding on our decision to homeschool than a family whose child has no college aspirations. If your kid is fascinated with astrophysics, your choice to homeschool could literally dash his hopes into a million pieces. Then again, so could school, but no one person would have to take the blame. One of the hard parts of homeschooling is the level of pressure that society places on individual parents, whose kids may just as well have bombed out in school, too.

The great thing about gifted homeschooling is that it is just as varied as the homeschooling of any kid. It depends on the child, the family, and all sorts of other variables.

In my experience, there are gifted homeschoolers trying out all the variations on homeschooling:

  • School at home: This is where homeschool basically mimics school, but with only one desk. Many new homeschoolers try this route, especially if they sign up for a charter that requires lots of documentation.
  • Classical homeschooling: This approach centers on going back to a more old-fashioned definition of the educated mind. Here’s a magazine that could teach you about it.
  • Unschooling: Also called child-led learning, this is pretty much the polar opposite of school at home. Instead of being the teacher, you the parent are the facilitator. Whatever your kid expresses interest in, you try to help make it happen. Very pure unschooling is hard to do, because that would mean that the parent never makes a suggestion or prods in any particular direction. But lots of people who call themselves unschoolers do a bit of prodding and stealth education, just making sure their kids don’t notice.
  • Eclectic homeschooling: This approach works for families who don’t follow one particular philosophy. A little of this and a little of that. For example, my family is pretty unschooly in many ways, but I insist that my son (who is not terribly fond of math) keep up to grade level in math. So I’m unschool-y in language arts, and a little more structured in math.

My personal experience is that no matter what philosophy you are drawn to, most homeschooling families of gifted learners end up somewhere on the eclectic scale. Yes, there are those gifted kids who just learn all they need to with nary a prod from a parent, but they’re pretty unusual. Most gifted homeschoolers do take some classes or online courses, and do have some idea of academic goals, such as when they plan to take the SAT, or which gifted education program they might want to test into. By definition, these homeschoolers really can’t be called unschoolers in any pure sense.

The things you should take into consideration as you start building your homeschool life are:

  • relationship between homeschooling parent and child
  • the child’s maturity
  • the parent’s ability to teach subjects
  • availability of local resources
  • sporadic learning rather than constant change
  • depth over breadth
  • resistance to certain subjects
  • child favors certain learning modes
  • child may resist parent as “teacher”

Remember that no choice is forever. If you sign up for an online charter and your child is bored silly, just drop it. Don’t feel like you need to stick with a full school-year of anything. Remember, you’re homeschooling for more flexibility in your child’s education.

The most important thing you can do is to make sure to set up a support system:

  • Local homeschool programs: Hanging with other homeschoolers is so helpful. Be aware, though, that this is a general community group, and using the g-word in their presence will probably invoke those “all children are gifted” discussions that won’t do you or your child any good. Best to get your gifted support elsewhere.
  • Co-op classes: Join with other parents to offer variety of classes. This will work best in a population center where you’ll be able to find a good group of learners who resemble your children in some way.
  • Online classes: There are tons of classes both for pay and free. I always suggest trying the free ones first! Check out Hoagies’ Gifted and Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum for lots of links to resources.
  • Online support: Join the Gifted Homeschoolers’ Forum Yahoo Group or other online forums to ask questions and seek advice.
  • Mentoring: As your child’s interests develop, find other adults willing to help. This is particularly useful if your child’s interests are far from yours. If you care nothing for astronomy, your astronomy lover might seek out mentors in the local astronomy club.

Do homeschoolers get into college?

Yes! In fact, a number of the best colleges now have special applications for homeschoolers, whose applications are apt to be very different from schooled kids’. Here are some ways your child can approach college:

  • Concurrent enrollment:
    Kids take some college classes at college or online while homeschooling. In this case, the child does not get a high school diploma, and thus registers at the cc as a special class of student. With the budget cuts at the community colleges, this option is becoming more difficult.
  • Community college leading to transfer to a university:
    For this option, the homeschooler matriculates (through getting a private school diploma or taking a high school equivalency exam such as the CHSPE in California), and enters CC as a student. The drawback to this is the it’s likely that your homeschooler will get so many credits, s/he won’t be able to apply to university as a freshman. It’s a great option if this doesn’t bother them.
  • Early 4-year:
    Some gifted kids are ready emotionally and academically to go early. In this case, your child needs to find out what the requirements are and how s/he can fulfill them as a homeschooler.
  • Traditional route:
    There is no reason why your child can’t wait until 18 if having a traditional college experience is important!

The only right answer is what’s right for your child’s temperament, areas of interest, and future plans. To get more information on these options, join the Yahoo Group Homeschool2College. Here are a few more considerations:

  • Prepare early: Start researching options a few years ahead of when the decisions will have to be made.
  • Get involved with others on the same path: Use local resources plus online support groups.
  • Get ready to let your teen lead the way. College readiness starts with ability to make their own decisions.

Evaluating success

I think this is one of the hardest part of homeschooling. Since homeschooled kids tend to move into a more natural way of learning — intense periods of growth followed by long periods of what seems like stagnation — it’s sometimes confusing and frustrating to decide whether they are on the right path. Some advice:

  • First of all, don’t compare: Kill those school demons! Your child will probably not develop and learn like school kids.
  • Second, remember that how long it takes to settle into homeschooling will vary from child to child.
  • Finally, remember that homeschooling is about whole child learning: Do you see your child’s growth in all areas?

It can be very helpful to observe before & after:

  • Confidence
  • Social skills
  • Focus on interests
  • Willingness to try new things
  • Follow-through

For older kids:

  • Goal-setting
  • Self-motivation
  • Willingness to face a challenge

Lots of parents, used to their schools testing all the time, wonder about assessment. I think it’s helpful to assess occasionally, but not to rely on it more heavily than on your own observations of how they’re doing. Consider:

  • Younger children: Occasional grade-level assessments if you’re concerned or want a benchmark.
  • Older children: College readiness and covering a set curriculum becomes more important.

Lots of parents wonder about whether their homeschooled child has to go through all the testing that they do at public schools for gifted programs. For homeschooled kids, I.Q. testing is not necessary unless you think it will offer you valuable information. Some parents find out valuable information about how their kids learn and what they need help with. But the raw score isn’t going to tell you anything particularly useful to homeschooling.

***

I’m now in the fifth year of homeschooling my daughter and the second for my son. It’s always a roller coaster and I’m the last person to say that it’s been easy. It’s not. But here is the question I ask whenever I feel a need to: Would my child be better off in school? If the answer isn’t a definitive “Oh, Yes!” then I figure I’m still on the right path. School can be great for many gifted learners. But if it’s not right for your child, don’t think of it as failure. Just choose a different path and discover where it leads you.

Against prescriptive parenting

I’m spending the weekend with my tribe: a ragtag band of people who call themselves homeschoolers. We each have different reasons for choosing this path, and our kids are as different as kids can be. Some of us homeschool because we want our kids to go to college. Others homeschool to keep our kids away from school, period. But the thing we have in common is a passion for kids and learning.

But that doesn’t mean we always agree.

I started out this morning going to a talk that I had to walk out of. The speaker is well-regarded and I’m sure she was going to say lots of things I’d agree with. But she gave herself away in the first ten minutes. She told me that she knew what my kids need and want.

Good way to get me to stand up and walk out.

Some of us have unusual kids. Even saying that is against what a lot of homeschoolers believe, which is that all kids are unusual. Well, yes, but if you could make a chart of all the kids in the world right now, behaviorally speaking, you’re going to see most kids falling into some wide center, and then the outliers. Those in the center have more in common with each other than the outliers have with anyone else. That’s my kids.

This speaker showed a picture of someone wearing a baby in a Baby Bjorn. The baby was old enough to hold his head up. He looked perfectly content, his eyes on the camera.

“Never, never do this!” the speaker said.

And I was transported back.

My first child was unusual. I didn’t know how unusual my kids would be as they developed, but I noticed right away that my son was an unusual baby. He didn’t sleep. Or rather, he did, but in little catnaps throughout the day and night. He didn’t go through a short period of stranger fear at the appointed time — he only wanted to be with me or his father, and his father only if I wasn’t there. He was interested in everything. Right away, his eyes met ours and focused on us. He watched things happen.

His first two words were his own: “Datz” meant something like “I want that.” “Dis” meant something like “Wow, this is cool!” Around the time when he was using these two words with great frequency, my husband and I took our annual spiritual pilgrimage… to Santa Cruz’s Open Studios. And here’s the memory that came up when the speaker told me I had done some horrible, irreparable harm to my son.

We got out of the car at the 17th Avenue Studios, a group of artists populating decaying industrial buildings sprinkled amongst acreage of auto body repair shops and machine shops. I strapped my son into the Baby Bjorn, facing out.

Why did I do that? Well, I knew my son. He wasn’t in that “I need to cuddle with you and be protected by you” mood. He was primed to look at and marvel at this world he was discovering.

We started to look at art. His conversation was sprinkled with occasional “dis”es and “datz”s. I moved into the studio of an artist whose work didn’t particularly grab me. I was turning to leave when my son, facing outward, came face-to-face with a painting that just blew his mind.

“Dis! Dis! Dis!” he cried. He pointed. He kicked his feet in a happy dance. He noticed that the painting was enormous! He was thrilled to see little bits of newspaper incorporated into the surface. He used his full vocabulary to tell me what he was thinking: This painting is exciting! There’s Mommy’s newspaper, ripped into little bits and glued! I love looking at Mommy’s newspaper! Look at that red paint! I love red paint! This painting is so big that I have to crane my neck to see the top! Look how far away the top of this painting is!

“Datz! Datz!”

I want to take it home with me! Please, Mommy? Please can I go into that painting and be in that world? Please will you spend $3000 dollars on something you don’t even particularly like?

I did not make the wrong choice. I did not violate any rule of human love and nurturing. I knew my son, and I gave him a gift. Not a $3000 painting, but the gift of his first experience by being blown away by a work of art. I have never forgotten this experience and never will. I loved my funny little boy who kept me up all night so, so much right then.

All parenting books have the potential to help you think about your parenting and improve it. But no parenting book can tell you how to parent your child. Even if your child would fall into that wide center of dots close together, your child is, as the homeschoolers will tell you, unusual.

I hate prescriptive parenting because it makes all of us feel like failures. We can’t please everyone. So instead, let’s figure out how to be the best parent we can be of the children we get. And let’s not vilify a parenting tool and blame it for bad parenting. It’s a tool, and that day, I used it well.

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