Homeschooling rhythms

I was talking today with a couple of other homeschooling moms about how we keep everything together. They perceived that I was very organized (though I had to admit that by my own standards, I’m frustratingly disorganized!). So they were asking me how I do it. It sounded like a really good idea for a blog post… one of these days when I get organized enough to do it.

The thing I can talk about today is Being Busy. I’ve decided that needs capitals, in order to distinguish it from normal busy-ness.

Busy-ness is when you have a kid like my daughter. In some ways, she’s the perfect unschooler: She’s always engaged in something. These days she’s too often engaged with her computer, but aside from that, she’s incredibly productive. Today I sent her off to watch a video on Brainpop.com so I would feel like we’d done something academic, and she came back with a quiz on translating decimal numbers to binary numbers… for me. Yes, other people’s kids go to school so they can take quizzes. My daughter stays home so she can give me quizzes.

You might want me to explain this, but I’m sorry that I will have to disappoint you. Please read on.

The big problem with Being Busy in our house is that I have two very different children. My son thinks that Being Busy Enough is having one event outside of the house for, say, a couple of hours during the day. That’s enough to satisfy him and to remind him that home is where he’d rather be, working on his projects, playing piano (when we ask him to), and being outside (when we force him to).

My daughter, on the other hand, defines Being Busy another way. As in, you can never Be Too Busy. We started this school year with a pretty manageable schedule:

  • Homeschool program 2x per week
  • Piano lesson 1x per week
  • Horse riding lesson 1x per week
  • Spanish class 1x per week
  • Book club 1x per month

We were well within the possibility of sticking with my rule that homeschooling families need to have one day of the week completely at home. Then a friend asked if she wanted to start a gymnastics class with them. She’d ride her bike from her brother’s history class, so it wouldn’t be any extra driving. Well, OK:

  • Gymnastics class 1x per week

She was enjoying that, and I loved how mellow the biking and gymnastics made her on Monday nights.

Then she found out that students in her homeschool program were eligible to join the band at the charter school next door. The band leader brought her instruments and let her try out a clarinet. It was love at first squeak. I have to admit, I’m a pushover for anything musical my kids want me to spend our money on. So, OK, the band meets 2x per week and about 1/4 of the time we wouldn’t be able to make it, but why not? Add:

  • Band practice 2x per week

Things hadn’t gotten ridiculous yet. In fact, she decided around the time that gymnastics started up that the Spanish class wasn’t for her, so we got to take one thing off our schedule. But could we relax? Of course not!

Enter softball, which she played and loved last year. Add:

  • Softball practice 2x per week
  • Softball games 1x per week

Sometimes, just for variety, there is only one practice but two games.

You may think that at this point she was just simply full up. Did I mention:

  • Assorted fieldtrips 1-3x per month

And then, enter IRIS. A new science education center opened way too far from our house, in a town I swore I would never drive to for classes. We went to the open house. “I so have to take a class here.”

  • Energy and the Environment 1x per week

All along, remember I have the Greek Chorus in the background, my son saying, “Really? We really have to be out 4 hours today? Can’t I just stay home?” Because of course some of the time, his activities piggy-backed on hers, and I wasn’t going to waste the gas to come all the way home…

Our homeschool rhythm is something like a building wave: At the beginning of the year there’s me and my son saying, “Let’s keep it simple this year. Let’s be home some of the time.” I schedule a reasonable number of activities outside the house. And then it starts to pile up. My girl can go go go all day long. In fact, she’s happier when she’s doing that. I end up not being able to turn down various great opportunities. And by the spring, we’re ready to crash.

I am very much looking forward to this summer, when my daughter is only doing horse camp, soccer camp, Camp USA, the homeschooling conference, and swimming.

Until she finds something else she just can’t live without.

Our Thorns and our Gifts

We just read The Case of the Deadly Desperados for my daughter’s book club. In the book, the narrator, P.K., is a “half breed” child living in the Old West. After his foster parents are murdered, he is chased around Virginia City by the killers, who want a letter that he has in his possession.

Deadly DesperadosThe most interesting thing about the book was the author’s choice to endow the narrator with what his foster mother called his “Gift” and his “Thorn.” The reader learns from P.K. that his Thorn is that he cannot show or recognize emotions, and that his Gift is his extraordinary memory and ability to do math in his head. Though child readers didn’t really notice it, P.K. is clearly portrayed to be autistic in a time when autism wasn’t recognized.

P.K.’s physical journey in the book is his attempt to keep one step ahead of his pursuers. His emotional journey, however, is one in which he learns to understand both his Gift and his Thorn and how to use them to his advantage.

I was reminded of his Thorn today, when my Thorn (or perhaps, one of many!) reached out and pricked my daughter as she tried to follow directions to make a handmade book. First we had to take apart and restaple the pages that I had put together wrong. Then we had to do it again, because I was distracted and did it wrong in another way. Then, finally, we got it (sort of) right.

Then as she glued down the end papers to the boards that would serve as her hardcover, she said, “Wait. Don’t I have to put down the fabric first?”

Well, yes. That would be the way it’s supposed to be done. But somehow I always find myself reversed: Other people decide on a career to pursue and take the steps to get there. I take a bunch of wild and seemingly random steps, turn around, and find a career behind me. Other people follow recipes when they are cooking and then start to improvise. I have scores of favorite recipes that I have never actually made exactly according to the recipe—the very first time, I found a reason to change it. (Usually because I didn’t read it closely enough and was missing an ingredient!)

I love the message of Deadly Desperados, that we all have Gifts and Thorns, and that we can learn to recognize them and use that recognition to improve our lives. However, living backwards as I seem to do, I find that whenever I turn around to look at my Thorn and consider how it could be used to my advantage, it turns out to be behind me again.

It reminds me of a young poet I once knew who told me that she figured that if the Buddhists were right and there was reincarnation, every other human on the planet had done it scores of times before and knew how to get it right. But she knew she must be on her first life, because she was so bad at it!

It’s a question to ponder: How do we help our children identify their Gifts and Thorns, and how do we help them learn to use that information without being paralyzed by it? How can we both recognize that we can’t do everything and that we can do anything we want? How can we learn to accept our Thorns without labeling ourselves and giving in, and how can we learn to treasure our Gifts without thinking that our Gift allows us to stop trying harder to reach the next step? How can we turn around to see what is always behind us? How can we know when to stop and enjoy what is in front of us?

It’s brain awareness week!

I just found out that it’s Brain Awareness Week, and brain awareness – a 21st century awareness if ever there was one – has its own Facebook page.

And just in time for BAW, a little bit of the gifted community squeaked into mainstream psychology with Allen Frances’s post entitled “Giftedness Should Not Be Confused With Mental Disorder.” Those of you who don’t know much about the politics of giftedness probably think that it would be, ahem, crazy to think that a brainy person would be confused with an insane one. However, research shows that gifted children are at a great disadvantage – they are more likely to be diagnosed with disorders they don’t have, and less likely to be diagnosed with disorders they actually do have.

The important book, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, by Webb et al offers a detailed analysis of how this happens, but check out Frances’s blog for Marianne Kuzujanakis’s shorthand version of why this happens. Kuzujanakis is a pediatrician and a Director of SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted), an amazing organization that is fighting for the mental health of gifted children and adults. Since by definition gifted children are a minority (depending on where you draw the line, from 1 to 10% of the population), it’s not surprising that they don’t get much attention from mainstream psychology and psychiatry.

But what attention they do get is quite shocking: Gifted children are more likely to be misdiagnosed with such disorders as ADHD, bipolar disorder, and autism because of the unusual characteristics that may accompany their giftedness. A gifted child, for example, might become belligerent when bored… and might be bored often in our modern test-obsessed educational system. Or a gifted child might exhibit what gifted psychologists call psychomotor overexcitability – in other words, the need to move around when they are intellectually stimulated. In both cases, teachers and administrators might push parents to pursue a diagnosis of pathology, when the child’s behaviors are actually indicative of a positive trait.

Recognition of the traits of gifted children is a low priority in the mental health field – few psychologists and fewer psychiatrists have any training in giftedness. It may be an even lower priority in mainstream education, where any child who acts differently from the norm might be tagged as ADHD by overstressed teachers, who, not coincidentally, are unlikely to have training in giftedness.

I have the greatest respect and appreciation for Kuzujanakis and SENG and all the others who are trying to get this message out: Different doesn’t mean wrong. Different doesn’t mean bad. Different doesn’t always have to be fixed or medicated.

During Brain Awareness Week, let’s express our appreciation and affection for all the different brains that made our world the way it is: Einstein, Ghandi, Mozart. Charles Schultz, Gary Larson, Art Spiegelman. Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Louisa May Alcott. Mary Shelley, Boris Karloff, Ann Rice. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Abraham Lincoln, Socrates. Johann Sebastian Bach and his son, Felix Mendelssohn and his sister, Ann Landers and her sister. How about Steve Jobs, Hedy Lamarr, Nicolas Tesla? Heck, if we’re celebrating different brains, I’d like to include my childhood friend Sharon who knew the entire history of the British Royal Family, the entire team of men who remodeled our house and each of whom, it turned out, had diverse skills in poetry, philosophy, or art, and pretty much every homeschooler I’ve ever met.

None of us is “normal” or “typical” and the human race is stronger for this. This week, let’s give thanks for different brains.

If nothing else, be thankful that Nicolas Tesla isn’t in charge of the Federal Reserve, Emma Goldman isn’t charged with making sure our garbage gets taken out on time, and I am not in charge of enforcing brevity in blog posts…

have fun. learn stuff. grow. (And that’s from yet another different brain I know…)

Using the G-word with kids

This post was inspired by taking part in Natural Parents Network’s Carnival of Natural Parenting: Tough Conversations.

One of the recurring themes that parents of gifted children hash and rehash is the question of whether we used the G-word (gifted) with our kids. It’s hard enough for parents to start using the words in their heads, and then with their friends and adult family members, and especially with their children’s teachers. I’ve never met a parent who likes the word itself, with its connotation of value judgment and ranking. But we use it when we have to in order to get certain things to happen: Understanding from friends and family; better educational practices at school.

Using it with your child, however, is another thing altogether. Unless your child is in a GATE program and knows that she has been designated “gifted and talented,” she is unlikely to run into a need for the word in her daily life. More and more gifted children are being homeschooled, and in case, there seems even less reason to use the word.

Surprisingly, however, parents seem to be split on this issue.

Research has shown that gifted kids generally know that they are different, and that having a word to put to their difference can be easier than living with silence, as if their difference is something shameful. But on the other hand, society is not kind to people who use the G-word. Every so often the gifted community passes around yet another blog written by an irate parent or sometimes teacher about how parents of gifted kids think that their kids are “better,” vilifying the use of a word that we didn’t make up and that causes us discomfort. These pieces tend to follow similar themes: that parents of gifted kids are “bragging,” that gifted kids aren’t different, and most damaging, that gifted kids will “grow out of it,” so why treat them differently now? Parents of gifted kids react by pulling back into our little community, mostly online, of people who understand what a double-edged sword our kids’ “gifts” are.

And yet again, a parent asks timidly on an e-mail list, “So should I tell my kids they’re gifted?” And the conversation goes on.

In my own home, we don’t use the term much. This may surprise people who know me primarily through my writing about gifted children. But in our daily lives, we don’t find much use for it. Since my kids are homeschooled, we don’t take part in a GATE program. And the other homeschooled kids they play and work with straddle the full spectrum of humanity – some of them way more advanced than my kids; some struggling with basic skills.

In our “real life,” I think that experiencing this spectrum is good for my kids – they know that they will be judged by their achievements and by the kind of people they are, not by a number or a label. But twice the conversation has come up, and each time it reflected my children’s personalities and self-awareness.

The first time, I had just started to write about giftedness. My older child, who was in school, came across the book that started my foray into the gifted world, A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children. Looking at the cover, he asked, “What what IS gifted?” I gave him a basic rundown: “Gifted children are those who show advanced abilities or potential in some areas. Sometimes their advanced ability are accompanied by challenges in social and emotional skills. It’s not a word I like, because it makes it sound like people are saying that gifted children are better than other kids, but it’s the term that people use.”

My son pondered that information.

“Do you know anyone who fits that description?” I asked.

“Well… my sister, for one. And my friend who is years ahead in math.”

And there I was stuck with the question: Do I tell him that he, too, qualified as gifted, even though he wasn’t advanced in math like his friend? Or just leave it hanging?

“You’ve probably noticed that school is much easier for you than some of your classmates,” I said. He agreed. “Though you’re very different from your sister, you are also a gifted learner.”

And that was it. He pretty much shrugged off the information, which told him nothing new. Any child can tell you who the fastest learners in a classroom are, and if that information is presented simply as part of “we are all different and have different strengths,” that’s as far as it needs to go.

My daughter took much longer to come around to the question. She knows about my writing career, of course, and knows what my book is called. But perhaps, because the structured classroom can be so difficult for her, she had never made much of a connection between herself and what she had probably learned as the stereotypical gifted child.

But one day she and I were talking about something completely unrelated to giftedness or learning, and she just out and asked the question: “Am I ‘gifted’?” True to her rather strong interest in sarcasm, the word was positively dripping with meaning.

The question that came to me was, what meaning did “gifted” have to her?

“Well, what do you think? Part of giftedness is the ability to learn more quickly than average. Does that description fit you?”

In her case, the question probably brought up much more history than it did for my son. She had had a terrible time in preschool, couldn’t make it in a kindergarten classroom, and once we started homeschooling, had needed her mother beside her as an unofficial aide for a few years during any structured activity.

“I hate studying,” she said. “But I can pretty much learn anything I want to learn very quickly. So I guess it does.”

Yes, I explained to her, she did learn quickly. But like many children who fit the “gifted” label, she also had some significant challenges that we were working on. I didn’t need to mention what those are: the years of therapy and mommy-as-classroom-aide and visits to yet another professional in yet another field of care made it all clear enough.

The one thing I needed to add for her, which I knew that her more socially savvy brother, who’d also spent 6 years in school, didn’t need to have explained, was the information about how using the word made others feel.

“The word ‘gifted’ sometimes makes other people feel uncomfortable, so we don’t use it when we talk to people who might not understand what we mean. You can just say ‘quick learner’ if you need to explain that you’ve already learned something and are ready to move on. Mostly I have used the word to find information that would help us help you be able to do all the things you want to do.”

And as in any conversation, years of background passed between us: how she hadn’t been able to handle a gymnastics class, out on the floor alone, at the age of 5 but was now happily attending a class that I don’t even drive her to. How at the age of six she’d loved her science class and was annoyed that I needed to be there, but now is excelling in a class where I drop her off and go to work in a cafe. How our household, turned upside down by the arrival of a child with special needs, has become – if not calm – somewhat normal in the amount of turbulence we experience on a typical day.

All parents of children who differ from the norm have to face this conversation. Our choice was to wait until our kids were ready for, and asked for, the information. We may have to have the conversation again for each child, but at the moment, they have the information they need and know that if they need more, their parents are there to help.

Using community to make our schools safer… and better

The other day I wrote about the question of school security. I argued that no reasonable person would want our kids to go to schools that were equipped to repel any possible invasion by a hostile adult.

But there are other ways to make ourselves more secure, and improve our schools at the same time.

A recent article in The New Yorker (“Adaptation,” Jan. 7, 2013) brings together research that urban planners are using to make cities safer. The most shocking research was done in the aftermath of the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed 739 people. When researchers compiled the data, they found that the deaths were largely concentrated in poorer neighborhoods, which was unsurprising. The surprising thing was how neighborhoods with very similar demographics fared so differently.

“Englewood and Auburn Gresham, two adjacent neighborhoods on the hyper-segregated South Side of Chicago, were both ninety-nine per cent African American, with similar proportions of elderly residents. Both had high rates of poverty, unemployment, and violent crime. Englewood proved to be one of the most perilous places during the disaster, with thirty-three deaths per hundred thousand residents. But Auburn Gresham’s death rate was only three per hundred thousand, making it far safer than many of the most affluent neighborhoods.”

The neighborhoods that fared better had far more interconnected communities. Individuals did not solve their problems on their own; they relied on their community to provide support, while they provided support to others.

Our public schools have largely become like the neighborhoods of Chicago where elderly residents suffered and died alone. Where once schools were used as community centers and viewed as central meeting places for neighbors, now in the name of security the community is locked out of schools. Where once parents were considered part of a community that educated children, now parents are on the outside and are brought in only to meet with the professionals whose job it is to teach the children.

The more locked away our schools have become, the more inaccessible and remote, the more they have been seen as “the other” by members of the larger community. Most of the news about schools is negative. People whose children don’t go to the local schools are likely to have a vaguely negative opinion about them. There is no sense that our schools are part of our community, functioning to help create more productive members of our society. The punitive testing environment created in the last 12 years has nurtured a sense that our kids are running behind in a race and will never measure up, and that our teachers are lazy slackers who are taking advantage of taxpayers.

In this time, violence in our schools has risen while violence elsewhere in our society is falling rapidly. We live in the safest time ever to be a human being, yet we feel anxious and fearful for our kids’ safety. In this post-9/11 society, we see security being increased everywhere, and it seems natural to call for an increase in security in our schools.

But as The New Yorker article points out, this increase in security measures has not increased our actual security—our safety on a day-to-day level.

“Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times. Contrast this with our approach to homeland security since 9/11: the checkpoints, the bollards, the surveillance cameras, the no-entry zones. We do not know whether these devices have prevented an attack on an American city, but, as the sociologist Harvey Molotch argues in “Against Security,” they have certainly made daily life less pleasant and efficient, imposing costs that are difficult to measure while yielding “almost nothing of value” in the normal course of things.”

Bullet-proof doors and electric fences will not solve the problem of violence aimed at our schools. We can’t fortify ourselves against an unknown enemy and still go about our business in a comfortable, socially healthy manner.

What we can do, however, is learn from the past in order to find what really will bring positive benefits to our society. In the case of school security and improving education, we can bring our communities back into schooling. We can not only welcome but expect that community members would want to take part in the education of a new generation. We can make our schools places where caring adults interact with needy children.

In “Why You Truly Never Leave High School” (New York Magazine, January 20, 2013), writer Jennifer Senior points out that teenagers of the past were not separated from adults and made to feel like “the other” in our society:

“Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults.”

Over the last century, we have grown a new teenage culture due to the fact that teens spend so little time with adults and so much time getting “socialized” into a culture that is a parody of adult relationships. We expect our kids to get excited about STEM careers, but they’re spending most of their time with people who are excited about playing video games. We expect our kids to develop kindness and empathy, but they are spending most of their time in “Lord of the Flies”-like mini-societies where kid rules trump anything the occasional adult may teach them. Sure, you can have anti-bullying campaigns and rules enough to fill a 3-inch binder, but if you don’t have enough adults to model what it is to be a scientist, a business owner, a nurse, or simply a mature, productive adult of any profession, how do we expect kids to learn these things?

Learning happens when the learner sees a purpose for the learning. Security happens when we connect with each other and care about the connections we make.

Opening a school back up to a community model will not fortify its walls against an intruder who bought a hand grenade from someone he met at a shooting range, but it will make our schools safer and more effective, nonetheless. We all need to feel that we have a stake in how well the next generation is educated, and once we do, we’ll also feel that we are part of a safe and interconnected community.

 

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