I'm an Ignorant Ass Homeschool Parent

Me as an Ignorant Ass Homeschool Parent

A few months back, I posted a "socialization" blog entry highlighting how stupid the topic is and how much of a red herring it is that distracts from a bigger issue (public schools are a source of societal problems).  I've come to learn that Homeschool Socialization is important for a reason that I was completely ignorant of.  I posted my commentary as an Ignorant Ass Homeschool parent.  The first of many I'm sure.

As shared in multiple other posts, the bottom line in doing this homeschooling adventure is to provide KJ and Dy the absolute best start in life that I am capable of providing for them.  There is no more important mission in my life than helping them become happy, independent adults.

To this end, in January 2017, I shifted my focus from reading blogs of other homeschool parents to reading blogs by adults that were homeschooled themselves  (especially girls).  The posts from adults that were homeschooled are like After Action Reports (AARs) that I did in the Army .... once an action is over, you reflect on what went wrong, right, and what could have been done better.

As expected, there were positive and negative experiences, and lots of great pieces of advice that I'm actively incorporating.  However, what struck me was the vitriol in some of the publicly shared stories.  They were composed of sheer anger, bordering on hatred for their parents at "what had been done to them."  This scared the hell out of me.  Sure, some kids grow up to hate their parents, homeschoooled or not, but this group of posts hinted a much deeper pain, stemming from a sinister plot.

I began to peel back the onion on these anger/hateful posts and learned of an entire sub-culture that I was ignorant of.  A sub-culture that actually subjugates women! What the fuck? Fuck you! Sorry, I had to vent.

Being raised by a single-mom, it has been my mission to help foster the growth of women who can carry on, on their own, as they see fit as my mom did without relying on someone else.  The entire notion of a girl being raised in an environment where they are taught to be subservient to a man is damn sick to me.  Homeschool Environments where this is norm and intent are in dire need of socialization.  This is where my ignorance of an entire sub-culture bit me.  In my ignorance, I just never considered that homeschooling would be used for such a diabolical means, controlling a human being (referred to Totalism).  All of you who do this are sick fucks and should die.

It is heartbreaking to read the stories of this group of homeschooled women.  To them I say, "Thank you."  Thank you for sharing your stories to help highlight a horrible problem that our societal construct makes possible. I can see the rationale, and passion source, behind your push to put more standards and oversight into the home education environment to help protect children from such caustic environments.  However, I don't agree with adding more rules into the system.  What happened to you is child abuse and negligence, and there are already laws and mechanisms to handle such things. Maybe they don't work well, and most certainly they don't work in 100% of the cases (child abuse and negligence happen even to public schooled children), but putting into the hands of bureaucrats the education of my girls wouldn't be best for them.  What is the right solution?  Creating awareness, just as you're doing.  Keep sharing as you feel comfortable.  I wasn't aware of this problem, but now I am and will stay vigilant in my circles for such bullshit, calling it out when I see it.

If you're ignorant of this problem, as I was, here is a good starting point to remedy this:
https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/

First Day of Homeschool!

Ahhhh, it is finally here!!! Yeah!! We are so super excited.  Today is the very first day of our homeschool!

Wait, what?! It is June 1st? The start of Summer.

Yep, it sure is.

You may recall the blog post about the Try Before You Buy homeschool model wherein you try homeschooling for an entire summer to see if it would really work for you and your family.  What we've done for a number of years is do summer homeschool, the Try Before You Buy model, so our girls simply expect to continue their learning all summer long.

So, what's changing in their daily routines?  Nothing from the previous summer.

Over the years, we've refined our homeschool summer model to fit with what actually works in our family.  Our schedule has turned into something pretty simple.

Today, for example, the girls got up at 8:30AM, and they are now finishing their breakfast. At 9AM, we will begin 30 minutes of morning Martial Arts training, lead by my eldest (she leads on Thursdays), and then they will do their academics.  They already know what to do and in what areas they need to cover.  They have complete freedom in the order they do their work, a lot of latitude in the modes of learning (digital, worksheets, book, dad taught, videos, ....) and how much time to spend in each area.  At 12 noon, the youngest will prepare lunch (she handles lunches on Thursdays), which we will sit down and eat together, and then it will be chore time.  Once chores are done, if they've achieved their personal learning goals for the day, then they can simply play/do whatever but if they've not made their goals, they return to what they need and want to get done. Dinner will be at 5PM, and we will play a strategy board game as a family around 6PM.  At 7:30PM, we will be at our Dojo for an hour long Martial Arts class.

Because we've been doing this for years, both girls know what is expected of them, and they do it.  It is rare that I need to step in and provide a parental push or adjustment.  Both girls love learning, and since it is driven by areas of interest, they go on their own ... and many afternoons will find them doing extra academics/research/pushing of their minds because they are so interested in something.  Eventually, they will make their way outside to bike ride, play with some kids, challenge me to a game of soccer, or play in the pool.  Each afternoon is different and we simply flow with whatever.

How To Make Travel and Vacations Meaningful Education Experiences for Kids

One of the many reasons we homeschool is the freedom to travel.  Our life experience is that visiting the world brings you closer to it, building a deeper bond with peoples of the world. It also puts muscle and color onto the dry bones of book based history, geography, and anthropology.  There isn't anything like talking about WWII with our girls, and then recalling our visit to Dresden.  History gets teeth this way. This, a huge part of our home education model is to include travel.

From our home school charter Philosophy section

III.4: "Actual experience is a far superior teacher to theoretical constructs.  As such, Exerevno Academy aggressively seeks to provide its students with experience based learning opportunities."

and from the tactics section of our home school charter

VII.3: "Cultivate self-driven inclusion in the human race with extensive travel"

Our girls have thus far been to 22 different countries, traveled by train, plane, boat, bus, automobile, motorcycle, bike, and their own two feet.  They've backpacked in Europe, Kayaked in Honduras, rode camels in the Sahara, and more.  We literally started when they were babies, carrying them with us as we explored the world.  All this experience has allowed us to hone our travel infused education model.

What follows are some of the ways we blend our girls education with our passion for experiencing the world.

Folders For Trips

For any trip we take, we start educating ourselves on the place about 6 months out.  In the case of Egypt, however, we started about a year out. Each week we do something related to the trip.  This something is always two or more hours in duration, and can span multiple weeks.

In the very first week, we discuss our upcoming trip in detail.  We talk about what we want to get out of the trip, why we are taking the trip, and the kinds of things we would each like to do.  We build out a tenative itinerary and plan together.  We then create holding folders for the trip.  The front cover is a map of the area to be visited.  These folders not only keep things organized, but are put away for the girls when we are done so that when they are adults, they have a nice keep sake.

Youngest With Her Map

Our first set of activities are always map related, and takes about a month to complete. The girls build out world maps, showing where they are and where the destination is.  If we are going through multiple countries, they mark each country on the map. With the world map done, we then drill in and they build out country maps (one per each country visited).  On each country map, they identify major cities and land features (such as rivers).  In some cases, like when we went to Paris, we had them do city maps too, showing where major things like the Eiffel
Tower and the Louvre were in relation to our hotel.

Our second set of activities is always history related, and takes about about a month to complete.  The girls start building out history time-lines, showing major events in a particular countries history.  We usually build these out using history podcasts from university history lecturers.

Our third set of activities is around the famous people associated with the countries to be visited.  Be they good, bad, or otherwise, we study the major historical people that are associated with a place.   It is neat because the girls have bumped into some of the same characters now multiple times like Napoleon and Julius Caesar. This approach has also let us view these people from multiple perspectives.  Napoleon's quest in Egypt, for example, with his 150 scholars, engineers, and scientists as a major part of his force highlights a different view than we got when we studied him before going to France.

Once we have our maps, history, and people noted, we then go in multiple directions.  We make dishes from the country, we listen to music from the country, we study art from the country and create our versions of it, we do projects related to the religion of the country, we study the political system of the country, we write fiction stories about the people in the country, and so on.  We create fiction stories

Stories, Colorings, and Paper dolls

about people in a country, and we write out own history books on a place.

The results, after years of doing this, have been astonishing. The girls have demonstrated tremendous knowledge about places, people, and history as compared to others their age (and older)  as they whip out facts, opinions, and thoughts based on first hand experience and study.

We have done a few TV shows as sources for material, but have found that the information does not stick as well as when they do their own projects or when the listen to the same information in a podcast.  This probably isn't surprising, but anecdotal evidence that TV isn't the ideal way to gain knowledge (at least not for our kids).

Abu Sunbil July 2016

It is a lot of work for me, to get all this material rolling.  However, the experience can't be beat.  It also helps increase the value of a particular vacation.  For example, traveling to Egypt ended up costing us around $12,000.  We were gone for 2 weeks, coming out to an average of about $860 per day, or about $210 per head per day.  However, looked at another way, we spent a year studying the place before we left.  We built dioramas, listened to songs, ate different foods, etc. that we wouldn't have and that is also time that could count towards the 2 weeks.  If I were to estimate, I'd say we spent 4 weeks of time doing these other things before we got to Egypt.  That makes the entire Egypt trip event 6 weeks (2 there plus the 4 actively preparing).  Now we have a spend of about $285 per day, or about $70 per head per day.  Well worth it!!!

The Socialization Nightmare

As we've prepared to homeschool, we've run into the Socialization Red Herring.  However, it is nearly always other homeschoolers explaining the issue isn't an issue! But it is an issue, just not not the way most talk about it.

Most public school teachers and administrators want to fix things and get them right, but the system has gone so far out of control with bureaucracy, politics, statutes, and regulations that they cannot pull the reigns back in.  So sad, for everyone involved.  Hats of to the teachers and administrators that continue the good fight to help the kids get what they need.  Enough of the rant.

We believe Socialization is important.  In fact, it is so important that it is another critical reason why we believe homeschooling is the best way to go if you can.

Wait? What?!? One of the reasons you homeschool is because of Socalization. Yes Sir.

Here is the Wikipedia definition of Socialization:

"Socialization is the term used ... to refer to the lifelong process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs, values, and ideologies, providing an individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society."

"inheriting and disseminating norms, customs, values, and ideologies"
Who is to do this? The teachers? Principals?  In reality, it is the kid's peer group that ends up doing this.  There is no child my child's age that can be entrusted to share norms, customs, values, and ideologies.   Period.

"providing an individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society."
It is my personal experience that the common school environment does not provide an environment that is like society and its professional working world, so the skills and habits acquired in navigating a public school are for a situation that doesn't actually exist in our society.  There are numerous points of deviation between school and the real world, but here are my top 3:

1. Segregation by age.
2. Weakest links dictate pace.  
3. Knowledge kept in silos 

1. I've never worked in a place that segregated by age, that would actually be against the law.
2. In offices where I've worked, the slowest person is ultimately the one who gets fired
3. At work, it is the fusion of knowledge across all domains that makes things possible.  Accountants, for example, use math and business and English and computer science and history.

So, if Socialization is important to you, find or create an environment where ages are mixed, weak links fall to the wayside, and knowledge is not artificially segmented into neat groups.  Find or create an environment where the norms, customs, VALUES, and ideologies match what makes our nation great. Oh, wait, that's homeschool. Cool.

A final thought.  Look around at society today ... are you happy with what you see in its behavior?  I'm not, so to me ... it isn't working.  As a society, we've screwed up big time. It is our fault, we citizens.  There are too many theorists pontificating ways of how things should be versus how they really are, and they inhibiting those undervalued public servants who have to everyday help get the kids ready for the real world.

School Toxicity Geiger Counter - Monitoring The Common/Public School Environment

If you're on the fence about homeschooling, or looking for a way to monitor when it is time to pull that trigger to start homeschooling, maybe our model would be of some use.

You may recall from an earlier post that we were watching our girls in the public school environment very closely, ready to extract our kids before our target grade (6th) should things go really bad.  But what is really bad, and how would we know?  There is so many things going on, some good and some bad, some matter and some don't.  To this end, we created a School Toxicity Geiger Counter that helped us watch areas that mattered to us.

We decided that there were three primary dimensions that we would monitor:

1. Values - Standards of Behavior
2. Attitudes - A Perspective or Viewpoint
3. Academics - The study and acquisition of knowledge

In each of these dimensions, we would monitor what our children perceived as coming from their school environment (*) as well as the actual adjustments to them we observed, and then compare those who what we wanted for our children.  The larger the deviation, the more frequent ping on our School Toxicity Geiger counter.

[*A subtle, but important, point is that it what the children actually receive and become Attitude wise may not be what the school intends, and this could be from two sources.  It could be that the school professes a particular Attitude, for example, but the children themselves don't get the message.  Put another way, if the Golden Rule is expressed in Chinese, it doesn't matter because we don't speak Chinese.  Secondly, it could be that the policies and procedures of a given school have resulted in the inmates running the asylum.  That is, the culture of the school's students has become more powerful and influencing than that trying to be expressed by the teachers and administrators.  This is another unfortunate reality. Since it is our children we care about, whatever message they actually receive is the important point regardless of the source. ]

In the category of Values, for example, we believe in Individualism, Equality, Self-Reliance,  Competition, and Patriotism.  As you can see, our Values are concepts that you may or may not be able to rationalize as to why they are important, but they are important to us none the less.

In the category of Attitudes, for example, we view life as a wonderful, happy experience, to be tasted and enjoyed in every way.  We view actual experience as more meaningful than theoretical mental jaunts.  We view consumerism as a key mechanism that powers the nation, but view materialism as a dangerous path.  We view all knowledge as being fair game for consumption. We view intellectual engagement (when the mind has to work with it) as good when information is sent, while its antithesis (just knowledge pushing) is bad (e.g. watching TV is primarily bad).  We view learning as a natural, life activity that doesn't have boundaries of when it starts or stops (school, home, whatever, always always always learn) and all opportunities to learn should be taken.

In the category of Academics, we monitored factual accuracy and completeness of comprehension of the basics.  That is, did the information dispensed at school match the commonly accepted facts within the discipline, and if not, was there a good reason.  For example, I listened to a lecturer dispense to my daughters class that there was no gravity in outer space because there is no atmosphere.  This is factually incorrect and hence, a ping on the School Toxicity Geiger Counter.

With our School Environment Geiger counter in place, we simply kept tabs of incidents when things deviated from our Values, Attitudes, and Academic expectations. For example, the girls had a fundraiser at their school.  It was one of those big productions where they had a team of people come in  to do a rah rah event, to charge the kids up to go out and peddle those widgets! Oh Yeah. Not.  Anyway, those that sold a certain amounts got charms, and bracelets, and stickers, and ... oh ... got to attend a special BMX bike trick show.   yeah.  Anyway, the girls came home and were puzzled by something.  They shared that if their class sold certain amounts, then their class would have any homework for the next night.  My girls didn't understand why this was a reward.  They had the Attitude that homework is a good thing, an activity that allows for learning to be bridged between home and school, an opportunity to dig into the material on their own at home at their own pace.  They were actually disappointed.  They knew other kids didn't like homework, but they didn't understand why the teachers/school shared the "homework is a thing to get out of" view. Big Big Big ping on the School Geiger Counter. For our family, this was the wrong Attitude. It was fundamentally opposed to our view.

You no doubt can imagine how many times our core values have been bumped into.  Self-Reliance was a common Ping.  The school system teaches a lot about relying on the system, both directly and indirectly.  Many times, this isn't even an overt intention, but because of our litigious society, school environment and rules have evolved this way.

So, if you're looking for a way to monitor the situation at their school and want to have a trip-line to pull them out, my advice is to codify your Values, Attitudes, and Academic standards if you haven't.  Watch for any deviations only to those things that fall within them.  There is simply too much going on to see everything, so focus on what matters to you.

The Middle School Way

Happy New Year!

Val and I always knew we would probably home school our kids.  The question always was, when.  When and what grade would we start.  For us, that really depended upon what we were seeing in their school environments.  That is, we would have them in public schools for as long as we thought it was to their benefit and that no major damage to them was being done.

With very cautious eyes, we enrolled our eldest into school; we found that were very happy with what was going on.  The teacher was a delight, and kindergarten for KJ was great.  Then we moved to Florida and put the kids in a new school.  It wasn't just any school, but one of the "best schools in the state" and "number one in the county" according to the standardized testing.  Wham! Not so good, at least in our opinion.

This particular schools great testing achievements were at a huge cost: our girls were not only being homogenized but their zest for learning was fading fast.  The cruel, slow pace Baton Death March of intellectual development carrying every child forward together was grinding out their natural joy of learning.  Our youngest, in particular, was having a very hard time going so slow.  We met with their teachers, and we were told point blank that this was the pace and that the class would be going together.  Yep, sure, eventually everyone will make it together, but at what cost .... and where, ultimately, were they going?

Within 2 months, we pulled our youngest out and put her into a very small public charter school where they adjusted to the child's level.  As soon as the school year ended, our oldest was also pulled from the "great" A rated school and joined her sister in the small charter school.  We've been there ever sense (finishing 4th year there now).

With the move, we began discussing the right transition time into homeschool. We were in a much better place in the small charter school, but it was clear that short of a middle school charter of the same type, our girls would be screwed.  The Education System is engineered for the masses.  Period. So, it was decided that we would begin homeschooling in 6th grade, the start of middle school, for each of our daughters.  Sooner, of course, should the environment at the small charter school change in a bad way.

Our working modeling for the past 4 years has been that once a daughter hit 6th grade, she would be in Daddy School.  Amazingly enough, that starts in 6 months! Time sure does fly.

With all the discussion of homeschooling at our dinner table, the youngest has made it clear she wants to homeschool too.  She really wants to explore things at a much faster pace, and in areas of deep interest to her.  So, we've decided that both our girls will begin homeschooling at the same time.   This is an adjustment to the plan, but plans change so we will simply flow with it!

They have made friends, enemies, did school talent shows, faced bullies, worked with home room moms, participated in fund raisers, experienced incorrect gradings, enjoyed group work, did big group field trips, and more.  Lots of wonderful, good experiential things.  Now it is time to switch gears, and allow each of our daughters to unfold at their pace, in their way, and in their own direction.