Unschooling Smear

I clicked on an article on Parent Dish, which should have already warned me not to, and discovered this article about unschooling. The article is written by ABC news after the reporter talked to a couple unschooling families. My blood is boiling over this because it totally misrepresents unschooling and does not have follow-up about unschooled kids who are now grown. Why didn't ABC news talk to some of those people? Probably because it would not meet with their agenda to smear the homeschooling community and the more "radical" unschoolers. Can you tell it pisses me off?

My kids were unschooled. My son was 10 and my daughter was 13 when we first began the homeschooling journey that quickly led us to unschooling. They were in charge of their education, for the most part, even to this day. My son is graduating from the university in May with a degree in economics and my daughter graduated a few years ago with two degrees, one in real estate and one in finance. Obviously unschooling works and allowing your child to have control over his education is a good plan. I call it being respectful to your child. Is it for everyone? I would have to say NO WAY! However, if you are interested in unschooling pop me an email. It can be found in my profile. Unschooling, it works.

You can read the offensive article here:
The Unschooling Movement: School's Out Forever

Choosing to Homeschool

I know it is a difficult decision for many people. Do we homeschool, use a private school or public school? We've done all three. Here is what we found:

Public school in Virginia was pretty good. My daughter had Kindergarten and 1/2 of first grade there. I liked the school and the methods, except for teaching reading, but my daughter was reading by the time she got to school anyway. They were into "whole language" which pretty much did not work very well for most of the kids. Public school in Florida was a nightmare. Which brings us to.....

Private school in Florida was OK. They went to the Catholic school and actually had a good education there. for a while. They did with 30 kids per classroom what the public school could not do with 20. However, they also were still into "speed drills" for math and had some teachers who were just not very good and perhaps not really qualified to teach. But they were Catholic, as though that made up for the rest. Sigh. My kids got to be abused while we paid for it.

Which brings us to why we homeschooled. I pulled them out of the Catholic school after seeing the harm that was happening to my kids. Frankly, my daughter did fine there for the most part, but she was getting to the teen years and I could see the writing on the wall. My son had an abusive 3rd grade teacher who did not like his auditory learning style and was not compassionate about his hereditary dyslexia. She was totally toxic and completely changed him after all of the abuse. He got good grades, was a quiet and obedient kid, but she just could not stand him for some reason. Luckily she only taught one more year then retired. I do not wish her luck in her retirement. My son had vision therapy and reads all the time now with no problems. Duh. Here was a woman who clearly hated kids and mostly hated the boys, so why on earth was she teaching? Why on earth did they continue to allow her to teach?

My kids ASKED us to homeschool them. We had talked about it for about a year and they made the decision. Every year after that I would ask if they wanted to go back to school and every year they said NO. My hubby was a little worried that having the kids competing for my attention all day would send me to the looney bin, but it turns out that they never had to compete for my attention. They always had my attention.

Our homeschooling started out relaxed and then turned completely to unschooling. It worked. If you allow kids to get educated the way they want to, they WILL get educated. I thought my son would never learn how to spell. Guess what? Once he was in chat rooms online all the time, he learned how to spell. His desire to NOT look stupid was greater than his laziness about spelling. That pretty much sums up unschooling. Desire. If they desire something, they will work towards it!

Homeschool Memories, Dual Enrollment Rules

Finally feeling much better after a surgery and then complications from said surgery. Fun.

Schools here in Florida are starting up again this month, and one county started Monday! Wow! I grew up in New York state and we went to school the Wednesday after Labor Day. Those first few days would be hot as summer and then the cooler weather would come in. By mid-September the weather would be crisp and cool in the morning and then heat up to maybe 75 during the day. Those are great memories!

As a homeschooling mom I would start gearing up towards the end of August with school supply purchases (during the sales) and figuring out what we were going to do "for school" that year. Unschooling is extremely flexible, of course, so we did whatever we were interested in doing. The kids read a lot of books, we traveled a lot, we watched interesting videos about interesting topics and we did science experiments. Some days we didn't get out of jammies until lunch! Those were the days!

Locally, college classes start around the 24th of August so many students are getting ready to dual enroll. For all parents with Dual Enrolled students please, please read these simple "rules" for the homeschool parent. (or ANY parent)

1. Let your child handle the paperwork, advising and course registration - you told the college he is as mature as an adult, so allow him to be!
2. If there are conflicts in the classroom, let your child handle it! He must first talk to the instructor. After that he can talk to the department. But PLEASE have your student talk to the instructor first! Alone! One way to help is to role play what he needs to say when he talks to the instructor.
3. Do not call the Dual Enrollment office or any other office at the college to get information about your child. They can't tell you. It is illegal! There are privacy laws in place that protect the privacy of the student no matter what age.
4. This is a public institution and your child will be in a classroom with adults. Religion is not taken into consideration. Also, instructors can swear, show R rated movies, nudity and discuss adult topics. They are allowed. The students are adults as far as they are concerned. The instructors have no idea that your child is Dual Enrollment. They don't have a list or anything. As a parent, look at anything along these lines as a learning experience. If your child tells you she was watching some nude scene in a movie in Humanities, then you can discuss it! Great starting point for discussion at home!
5. Stating the obvious. Do not do his work for him!
6. When talking to the Dual Enrollment office or Advising, let your child do the talking! If he wants to be a fireman, but you think he should be an engineer, well, too bad! Allow your child his own dreams! Sure he may change his mind later, but I have seen pushy parents get bitten on the butt when their kids end up dropping out and getting a fast food job!

Unschooling Math Idea

When we started homeschooling back in 1998 my daughter was 13 and had just finished 7th grade at the Catholic school. I didn't have any particular math plan for the homeschooling right away since I was not sure she was ready for Algebra so I made up something for her to do. I drew out a very basic house floor plan with two bedrooms, a kitchen, living room and bathroom. Some of the walls had length in feet and some did not although one could figure out the dimensions of the entire house with the information given. Along with this floor plan I gave her a budget (can't remember the dollar amount anymore) and then I gave her various "projects" that she had to do on her house. Sadly I can't remember the whole thing anymore but one of them was to buy carpet for one of the bedrooms where she had to figure out how much she would need (figuring out room dimensions in feet and carpet sold by the square yard). Another was to figure out how much paint she would need to paint the walls of one room if the ceiling was 8 feet and she needed X number of gallons to cover Y amount of square feet. The last thing she had to do was buy furniture for the house all within the budget. There was much more to it but I can't remember it now. Damn getting old! She actually liked this project a lot! Maybe it prepped her for last summer when she and her husband bought a house that needed a lot of cosmetic work! They painted all the interior walls and had all new flooring installed. Oh and they bought furniture as well. I wonder if she had thought of this project? Maybe I prepared her for it back in 1998 when she was 13!

Unschooling for lazy moms - part 2

Yesterday was all about my son and his unschooling experiences. Obviously he did more than play DiabloII during this time although I am trying to think what else there was....

My husband used to travel a lot for work back during the home school days. What was great about his travel was that having the family tag along was pretty inexpensive. His airfare was paid for as was the rental car and hotel room. If I played my cards right, the hotel breakfast turned into lunch with the help of zip-lock bags and creative use of breakfast items. Many times I would call ahead to be sure we could have a small refrigerator and sometimes we had a nice suite with kitchenette. Frozen dinners were the dinner dejour many nights but we made sure to eat out to sample the local fare at least a few times. My kids have been all over North America and have seen things most people will never see in a lifetime. They were 10 and 13 when we started. Do you think they learned anything watching right whales from a lobster boat in the Bay of Fundy? Maybe they saw some new stuff while living in a condo on the beach on Vancouver Island, in the winter. (remember, these are Florida kids) Sigh. They have no idea just how lucky they were to have these experiences. We could write a book about our travels and some of the interesting things we saw!

Unschooling. That's right, the lazy way to home school. My daughter was 13 when we pulled her out of Catholic school and it was just in time! I could see that she was turning away from us, being more secretive and less open. What's funny though is that SHE asked US to home school! It was June and we had missed a trip to Newfoundland a month or two earlier when my husband had to go. Why didn't we go? The school threatened parents who wanted to take kids out of school for a trip. How nice. And we paid tuition. I am so glad we did get to go the following September! My daughter was a bright child who always seemed older than she was. I guess maybe she is an old soul.

Once home, we pretty much de-schooled for a while to get school out of their systems. Did they watch a lot of TV? You betcha! Did they get tired of it after a while? They sure did! During that first summer my daughter heard about the new boy band (at that time) called N'Sync and simply went crazy for them. I joke that we did the all N'Sync curriculum for a few years. Living in Orlando, we had the opportunity to see the band fairly often and I actually made her cry when I told her I saw one of the band members in Petco with his new puppy. Poor girl. We were always on the "find an N'Sync member" mission and our hairdresser actually had some of them come into the salon quite often. Pretty intense stuff when you are 13 and really into a band. I saw more N'Sync concerts than I want to admit to and we did a "meet and greet" one day where we got to shake hands with the band members. Heady stuff!

Now you ask, when was she learning anything? Luckily she learned about "fan fiction" writing and a fan fiction website where you can read and post your fiction. This girl spent HOURS and HOURS writing about N'Sync. I did not pry and I did not make her show me her writing. I knew she was editing it herself and doing rewrites. One day she asked me if I wanted to read one of them. Of course I said "yes!" I was stunned to find that the writing was not only good, but near-perfect technically and extremely well thought-out. Was her time going crazy over N'Sync a waste of time? HELL NO! Some of her best memories have to do with that time and the memories have me in them as well! We were together in our N'Sync sightings and concerts. I never made her feel that going band crazy was anything other than exciting.

I forgot to mention all the reading my kids did as well as DiabloII and N'Sync. They always had a book and they STILL are always in the midst of reading a book.

Reading, traveling, doing stuff you love. What else is there?