Homeschooling Badly: Grade levels? We don't DO that!

I stumbled across a home schooling blog called the Hmmmschooling Mom that I really enjoy.  Amy's posts show the type of level-headed thinking skills that benefit teachers of all stripes. 

The first post I read dealt with why homeschooling parents should know what grade level their kids would be in if they were still in public schools - and why they need to stop acting aggrieved when anyone asks.  Amy argues that grade level is a simple method of grouping children by age and ability level - and not a sideways attack on home schooling methodology.

I agree with that.  It's  also a safe question to ask kids who you have just met that allows for a short conversation about what they are doing at school.

Taking her idea one step farther, home schooling parents need to know at roughly what grade level each of their kids are working at in math, language arts, speech and social skills for pre-K through 2nd grade, for math, language arts, science, and social studies for 3rd-8th grade, and for math, language arts, science, social studies, physical education and foreign language in 9th-12th. 

Before someone tells me about how they don't measure their kid's progress against artificially contrived benchmarks again, let me explain the two major reasons these pieces of information is important.

First - this information makes moving back into the traditional education system much more simple for the student.  Hopefully, the student will be returning to traditional education as an adult in the collegiate system where having a detailed, accurate transcript will saves the student a great deal of time and money.  I've also had more than one student who returned to a public high school with no educational records from their homeschooling period because of their home schooling parent died, suffered a major disability or separated from the family.   When a student is dealing with a major stress event at home, having to test into or out of classes is a crap-shoot. 

Second - parents who have taken over the academic education of their students are morally obligated to assess when their kids need more support.  A kid who is working within the range of one year behind to two years ahead of their grade level most likely doesn't need outside support.  (Another way to think of this is that in the average 2nd grade class room most kids will be reading at 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade levels - and the teacher can probably deal with a 4th grade reading level easily.  Or that I often had 9th graders who could read at 12th-college levels - but I only had two kids who had maxed out the lexile levels at post-graduate.)  Students who are far behind - or far advanced - bring a different set of challenges that tax experienced teachers.  How do you find books that cover reasonably age-appropriate themes without being at the wrong reading level?  How do you teach a kid to read who is dyslexic or math to a kid with discalculia? 

Parents can be lead astray by assuming since a student is "researching" a higher level subject that they are learning the material at a higher grade level than they actually are.  I was volunteering at an agricultural demonstration when a parent overheard that I had taught high school chemistry in the past.  She introduced her fourth grade  public schooled son - who was in no way interested in talking to me - and shared with pride that he loved chemistry and was learning really advanced material on his own like hydrogen bonding.  I asked the kid to tell me about hydrogen bonds and he gave me a partially accurate definition of hydrogen bonding being when hydrogen and oxygen atoms are attracted to each other.  I asked if hydrogen bonding only happens with hydrogen and oxygen.  He said yes.  I smiled and said something like "Ok."  I asked what causes hydrogen bonds.  He shrugged and started digging in the dirt.   I gave him some recommendations for finding a worm (which was his goal) and dug with him for a few minutes.  When he had warmed up a bit, I asked him what his favorite part of an atom was.  He looked massively confused and said "Atoms have parts?".  Meanwhile, his mom had been telling me in great detail how the two of them had watched videos on YouTube that showed how hydrogen bonds formed in water.  I asked her if she knew how that benefited life on earth - and she looked at me if I grew another head. 

Part of teaching high school chemistry is knowing what material a student should be aware of on a topic.  The high school level answers to the questions I asked the kid included:

• Hydrogen bonds occur between molecules that have strongly polar covalent bonds.  Hydrogen and oxygen are common examples - but many of the elements in the same family as oxygen will form hydrogen bonds.
• Hydrogen bonds occur because some atoms share electrons unequally in bonds.  This unequal sharing causes the atom that holds on to the electron longer to act like it has a slight negative charge and the atom that get the electron less to have a slight negative charge.  A hydrogen bond occurs when two molecules are attracted to each other because the slightly negative atom aligns with the slightly positive atom.
• Life on Earth has benefited from hydrogen bonds because hydrogen bonds cause water to freeze into a less dense solid form.  IOW, hydrogen bonds are the reason that ice floats on water; most chemicals have solids that sink to the bottom of the liquid while freezing.  Since ice floats, it acts as an insulator so that bodies of water take much, much longer to freeze solid that an equivalent size body of liquid without hydrogen bonds.  This gives aquatic organisms the ability to survive in the liquid portions of ponds, rivers, lakes and oceans during the winter.

I was happy the kid was learning about chemistry - but he was learning about chemistry at a 4th grade level of understanding.  There's nothing wrong with that at all - except that his mother was assuming that her son was a budding prodigy when he was simply a very normal boy.  (He found two worms - which made my day and his :- ) )|

Every state has a series of standards and benchmarks available for K-12 education in (at least) math, science, social studies and language arts - and many have additional ones for foreign languages, physical education, health, and arts.  Start when your kid is young; the standards are cumulative and the earliest grades tend to have very concrete standards that are pretty easy to understand.  As students grow, the standards get more complicated - but a parent-teacher is only adding one new level per year; that gives them a full year to decipher what next year's courses need to have.

My next post in this theme will be on the home school boogeyman - grading students!

Preparing Single Income Sons: Spinning Stories for Sale

The Maxwell Family - of Titus2.com fame - have a fair number of publications to their name. 

Teri Maxwell's family, school and chore organizational blockbusters of "Managers of Their Homes", "Managers of Their Chores" and "Managers of Their Schools" seem to be a perennial favorite among large families.  She's also written "Homeschooling With a Meek and Quiet Spirit" which I reviewed here.

Her daughter Sarah has written ten children's books that are completely free of any objectionable material at all!  (I can't bring myself to read them - the free PDF chapters on the website made me feel like I was in the first part of a dysutopian novel.)

This lead me to Steven Maxwell's book "Preparing Sons to Provide for a Single Income Family".  Truthfully, I was curious what he recommended - and if his advice matched my experiences in preparing students for the workforce.   

The odd thing I wasn't expecting, though, was that his book felt like I was reading two separate stories at the same time. 

The official "story" goes as follows:  Steven Maxwell works for 20 years in corporate America after receiving a college degree in engineering - but God was calling him to start his own business.  Meanwhile,  his son Nathan who was home schooled and has not attended college was out-earning Steven during Steven's last few years in the corporate world through grit, hard-work, and (the implication of) contract work alone.  If Nathan Maxwell can jump economically that far ahead of his father through online certifications and a home-business, anyone can!

It's a great story - and I bet it's sold a bunch of $15.00 paperback books over the years.  The real story is more complicated - and a more realistic view at how career connections can be passed on from one generation to the next.

I haven't been able to run down all of Steven Maxwell's previous employers - but he mentions having served in the Air Force for four years prior to being saved on the family blog. 

• He earned a Bachelor Degree in Applied Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Missouri in Rolla in 1979 according to his LinkedIn profile.  
•  In "Preparing Sons...", he mentions working for an unnamed company in marketing followed by sales before leaving the company in 1986 for Boeing on page 34.  
• According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked at Wilcox / Thompson (sic) CSF from 1990-1997 as a procurement engineer.  (I'm assuming he means Wilcox Electric / Thomson CSF - a major electrical company during that time in Kansas City) 

This means that by 1996, Steven Maxwell had a long list of contacts in a variety of engineering firms that he could use for starting his own business and helping his sons launch their own companies.

In 1996, Wilcox Electric lost a large defense contract that crippled the company.  I don't know if that's what Steve refers to as a call from God to start his own company - but it was extremely prudent of Steve to look at other options for supporting his family.  I think "Preparing Sons...." mentions that Steve's original plan was that Communication Concepts, Inc was going to provide printing and electronic forms - but I could be wrong about that.  

When I compared Nathan Maxwell's LinkedIn profile, I was surprised - although hardly shocked - to realize that his first listed job was at Wilcox Electric in 1996 working on the company's computer servers.  

Nathan left that position in 1997 to work at Western Auto for nearly three years in their information technology department where he ran some pretty intense systems.

By 1999, Communication Concepts, Inc was running strongly enough to support at least Nathan and Steven.

The real story is pretty darn cool - and nothing that needs to be hidden.  Steven Maxwell used training through the military and college to provide for his family for 20 years and had the business acumen to start a fledgling business when his original career area hit a major recession.  His son Nathan had the right experience in computers to land a series of solid jobs that gave him the experience to become an computer security expert in his own right.

The only problem is that "Preparing Sons..." sells a fantastic world that doesn't represent the actual way that the Maxwell Family has reached their well-earned success.

Homeschooling Badly: Kids Just Need to Know How To Learn!

As a licensed teacher, the thought of personally homeschooling my kids - or anyone's kids - is frankly terrifying.  I could probably make a high school science curriculum that was solid and possibly a forgivable junior high science curriculum - but I have no idea what an appropriate curriculum for third-grade math looks like or fifth-grade language arts.  What if my kid wants to learn Swahili?  Oh, God - what if my kid has a talent for two-dimensional art?  I'm so bad at that!

I'm honestly sweating bullets right now at the thought of trying to teach drawing at home.

This is partially why I find homeschooling parents' answers to how they are going to teach advanced subjects fascinating.  Each option is my summary of the blog post attached.

Option One: "I'm going to graduate my 16-year old from high school having completed badly flawed 10th grade Biology and 9th/10th grade Geometry using Khan Academy.  Education isn't about getting a job, after all."

Thanks to Amy from Raising Arrows for this plan.

• Her son was completing Biology using Apologia Science.  I bought a copy of Apologia's Biology textbook; the material is horrible. 
• The "evolution" section is a joke, but I expected that.  I didn't expect the genetics section to be convoluted to the point of being incoherent. (The study of Mendelian genetics somehow fails to label the "Law of Independent Assortment" and "Law of Segregation" with those terms.  That was surreal.)  
• I didn't expect the entire field of ecology to be ignored outside of biogeochemical cycles (and, no, that term was never used to describe those cycles). 
•  Honestly, most of the book is a study of animal and plant taxonomy without evolutionary grounding which is roughly 60 years outdated.
• In Michigan, a student is expected to have covered either physics or chemistry before leaving high school.  I wouldn't be opposed to a student doing some in-depth biological or earth science topic (think botany (with field section), astronomy, geology, etc.) in lieu of physics or chemistry - but doing two years of high school science is not considered adequate for a high school diploma.
• In Michigan, the minimum high school graduation requirement in math is Algebra II.  Most students take Algebra I in eighth grade or ninth grade.  Geometry is the next class in the most common math sequence so most kids would take it between 9-10th grade.  It's not considered a math capstone class.
• I like Khan Academy as a resource for students who learn well from videos and I linked some of the videos on my old classroom website for students to use during and outside of class if they wanted.  Having said that, I have deep concerns about using it as a stand-alone curriculum.
• All of the problems given by Khan Academy must be rapidly graded by a computer algorithm.   This limits the types of questions that can be asked severely.
• I've been working through Algebra II, Trigonometry and Precalculus on Khan Academy for mental exercise.  So far, all problems that have addressed theoretical concepts have been marked as 'challenge' problems that required to reach mastery. 
• Khan Academy doesn't provide either cumulative tests or projects to be completed.  I accept a wide variety of ways for students to demonstrate mastery - but they've gotta do it at some point.
• I have no idea how a home-schooling parent would convert information from Khan Academy to a 4.0 point GPA.  Is completion worth an A?  
• Education is not about getting a job - but education is required to get certain jobs.  A weak STEM background in high school is expensive to remedy.  Remember, public schools cover whatever classes a student can take in K-12 for free.  Taking remedial classes or college classes that count for credit, but do not count for a major (which I had several friends who needed to do to reach the requirements for General Inorganic Chemistry) is more expensive.
  
  

Option Two: If we can't teach it, the subject must not be that important.

This pearl of wisdom comes from Kimberly at Raising Olives.  The only redeeming value is that she seems not to have enforced that idea on her offspring.

She lists a series of "other" options instead having a parent actively teach their kids advanced subjects.

• Pick a good curriculum and a teenager who knows how to learn should be able to teach themselves!. 
•  I know how to pick out a good curriculum in high school science courses because I have enough college level classes in science to do that.  I would struggle to do that in History or music or a foreign language; I just don't have the background to figure out if a given curriculum covers US government or Economics well.
• How much time is it worth to have a student struggle on a concept within a good curriculum that could be cleared up by a trained teacher in the area in 5-10 minutes?  I get the benefit of wrestling with a hard concept - but often a student isn't wrestling with a hard concept; they are spinning their wheels because of a minor misunderstanding.  Other times, students need more scaffolding (education jargon for "break it into smaller steps") than the text provides.  Some people advocate simply sending the student off to find different resources until they learn it, but that has its own issues.
• KimC at InAShoe wrote a blog post about how she used progressively finding different textbooks to teach herself math up and including calculus.  That's genuinely impressive and deserves kudos.  The part that broke my heart: she remembers crying over functions before she got how to do them.  For people who aren't math geeks - functions shouldn't be hard for a kid with as much raw talent as KimC had.  I suspect she got stuck on the notations of functions which a teacher would have straightened out for her in....oh.... 30 seconds maximum.
• Have a sibling who is talented in that subject help them out!
• That's not much help for the first kid to cover the subject, is it now?
• Ever notice how worked up homeschool bloggers get over the theoretical idea that advanced public school kids will be expected to help other students instead of getting more advanced work?  Ironically, that indignation completely evaporates when siblings are involved.  I find that irritating since I worked hard at making advanced materials for my students who needed a challenge and I never pretended that all advanced students made good tutors.  
• Take high level subjects from subject area experts in your church without passing off educating your kids to them!
• There is some weird, hair-splitting, angels-dancing-on-a-pin semantics going on in that section.  I doubt God's going to smite a family who chooses to let a subject-area expert teach an advanced class because the parents have abdicated their duty to educate their children.  On the other hand, I did teach in the public system so I might be terminally warped.
• There is a very important reason that I didn't assume that advanced students made good tutors: a sizable subset are horrible at teaching.  Being good at a topic does not mean you can teach a topic well.  I have an overwhelming sense of pity for the scientist at a CP/QF church who went into research because he still has nightmares about being a TA while getting his Ph.D.  Being told he has a moral duty to teach the congregation's teenagers chemistry and physics is going to suck for him.
• I can't imagine that every homeschool friendly church has a math and science career guy who is willing and able to teach physics, chemistry and all math above geometry while supporting his massive family.  Oddly enough, the subject of paying for his time is completely ignored because he's a church member. I guess that's an issue for men as well as women! 
• We've never used them, but online options and co-ops exist!
• See all of my earlier objections for picking subject area texts for online options.  When does a homeschooling mom have time to look at the major online options for Calculus?
• I refer to co-ops as "unregulated private schools who hire unlicensed teachers".   There are some excellent parent-teachers in the world and there are some really bad ones. 
• How does a co-op deal with a well-meaning parent-teacher who is a weak teacher?  In school systems, new teachers get a mentor teacher plus the help of plenty of other experienced teachers in their building and system. Can a co-op do that?  
•  How about a parent-teacher who is well-liked by the students, but creates classes that are academically below expectations?  Would anyone ever know?  (That second question caused me to break out in a cold sweat.)
• Can a co-op remove a parent-teacher without causing the entire co-op to shatter into factions?  Is it worth the risk of shutting down a co-op to remove a subpar teacher?  Who makes those kinds of decisions?  

Well, this post has gotten long and I'm sweating bullets at the thought of kids being taught chemistry badly by a dad who was guilt-tripped into teaching by his local congregation because he's an agricultural engineer.  *shudders*

Please teach your kids.  If you pull them out of a school system, you take on the responsibility of their academic future. If doing that gets to be too much, put them back in the system.