Thanksgiving

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, the day we set aside to show gratitude, I’ve put together a list of things we secular homeschoolers have to be thankful for. Feel free to let me know of any others you can think of.

1. The Internet.

Whether or not Al Gore invented it, the internet is a boon for secular homeschoolers in so many ways. It’s how we research curricula and homeschooling methods. It’s where we find information on box turtles, Napoleonic era warships, and anything else that happens to catch our children’s interest. It’s where we can get free math worksheets and out-of-print books. Most importantly, it’s where we can find and connect with other secular homeschoolers through blogs, and websites, and, if we’re lucky, find a local support group to build a community.

2. Curriculum Choices.

When I first started homeschooling 10 or so years ago, there were very few curricula to choose from. There was Calvert, there was Saxon, but not much more. The number of homeschool specific curricula available now is astounding. I’ve looked at 10 and tried 5 Latin programs alone!

3. Libraries.

Well, this one is not quite fair. Everybody should be thankful for public libraries. But homeschoolers in particular benefit from libraries because we read so many books. Think of all the extra money going out the door if we had to actually pay for everything we read! Libraries also have programs for children and teens, which can help them build community with others, not just other homeschoolers.

4. Homeschooling Support Groups.

As I’ve written before, I believe one of the keys to successful homeschooling is a support group. I’m lucky to have such a group where we can meet in person once a week or more, but I think that online groups might fill the bill for some people who are the lonely secular island in a sea of religious homeschoolers.

5. Religious Homeschoolers.

They are the reason we have the right to homeschool at all. In my experience getting secular homeschoolers organized together for a specific, finite purpose is kind of like herding cats (as my Dad would say). You can do it, eventually, but neither the herder or the cats are happy about it. This is where religious homeschoolers have been, so far, better than the rest of us. They’ve been organized and systematic in their advocacy for homeschooling. They’ve put together grassroots lobbying groups and legal defense organizations to focus solely on keeping homeschooling legal and as few laws regulating us as possible. We owe a great debt of gratitude to these groups.

Video Wednesday

I absolutely promise this blog won't become just a place to post videos. But it IS Video Wednesday, after all. I really like this one. Enjoy, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post to bring you this very special video

Well, in all honesty, we've all just got a nasty cold here and I don't have the energy to do a post. This video also has nothing to do with homeschooling, unless you could adapt what this dancer does into an unschooling curriculum.



For more on this video click on this link.

Frugal Friday

I've mentioned before at least one book that's available totally online -- John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. There are other entire books available online, too. The Baldwin Online Children's Literature Project makes available books that are in the public domain. Many of these books are very old -- pre-1923, but there are a few more recent books on this site, too. I've used this site for a couple of books and found it very easy to use. You can print out entire books or just parts. You decide what font you want and whether you want the pictures printed, too. I look to this site first whenever I need an out-of-print book and have usually found what I need.

Please comment if you know of other sources for free books online.

Video Wednesday

First, you need to go check out the video on Homeschool The Revolution. I am, indeed, feeling a little demented today, so I thought I'd share this pop-punk/ska video with you. If you don't like your kids to hear the word "suck" used in this context, use earphones or turn down the volume.

Group Hug

Every Tuesday, at 1:30 in the afternoon, you can find the kids and me at a park – like clockwork. The park location changes weekly, but the day and time does not. This is when we connect with the community that nourishes us, consoles us, supports us. It’s our homeschooling group park day.

I can’t say enough about how great Tuesdays are. The kids wake up and immediately cheer. Just a couple of hours of lessons and then we’re off. We see our buddies and play and argue and share snacks and talk. It’s as important for me as it is for the kids. We get to be surrounded by our friends and feel normal for a change. Nobody asks us about “socialization” or tries to surreptitiously quiz the kids to see if their education is adequate.

Sometimes, we stay at the park until dark. The kids will often split into groups based on age and gender, but every once in a while, the whole group of them – maybe 10 to 15 of them – will work together on a huge project. One time they built a gigantic civilization in the sand, complete with a river to assist with trade, nature preserves, and a religion (Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

While all of these activities are going on, the grown-ups chat and complain and challenge and reassure each other, sometimes stopping to wipe away some tears or mediate a conflict. It’s a diverse group of parents. I would never have met many of them if we hadn’t come together with our mutual desire to educate our children ourselves. They are some of the best friends I have ever had.

Studies have shown the mental and physical health benefits of having a strong support system. I think it is imperative for homeschoolers -- who, as Charlotte so aptly stated in her essay, are often on the fringe of society – to have this kind of community. We all need to have people to commiserate with on a regular basis, people who understand the situation.

This group didn’t happen overnight. We’ve worked really hard over the last 5 or so years to get a good core group of families. Things have sometimes been a little rough when we didn’t all agree about the form or direction the group should take. We’ve made mistakes but we’ve always tried to rectify them quickly and, most importantly, together.

With the children growing older – we have several teenagers now – we’re looking to expand and change a bit to meet the needs of the kids. My family has started to attend another wonderful group’s park days, trying to make new friends at a time when friends are becoming so immensely important to my 12 year-old son. We’re hoping to get the teens and tweens from both groups together for some fun, age-appropriate activities. Making this transition to include what would usually be the “high school crowd” is going to be a challenge. But it is so worth the effort.

Guest Post -- My Homeschooling Roots

I am so excited to have our first guest post here at TRBAH. This essay is written by my dear friend, Charlotte Raby. Charlotte is a homeschooling mom of two brilliant girls and is also the author of A Breed Apart, 2002 Clara Award, http://www.readerseden.com/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=105.

I have been a die-hard homeschooling mom for many years. Yet I don't know how the initial urge came upon me or how it settled into conviction nearly ten years before my children were born. I had accredited it to a friend who said, while in the midst of planning her wedding, that she would home school her future children. Suddenly, I knew without a doubt that I would, too, and became utterly committed in that instant. But how could that be? I had never heard of homeschooling.
Or had I?
It makes sense that somehow, the homeschooling idea had been planted long before and that my friend's comment triggered recognition of my deep rooted belief. Yet, the impetus of what has structured my family's lives for the last twelve years has remained a mystery until now.
Recently, one of my daughters came home from an activity humming a tune that she had learned from her friends, and which she said she couldn't get out of her head. I knew the song very well and sang it for her. She wanted to know more about its source, so my husband and I shared with our two daughters one of our favorite childhood television shows --The Addams Family. As we laughed together, I was a little disconcerted to find myself feeling a communion with the kooky Addams Family. I dismissed it as a wistful nostalgia that one often feels when revisiting their past. However, as the feeling continued to grow, a truant officer arrived at the Addams' home to explain why Gomez had to send his children to school. Gomez replied, "Why have children if you're just going to send them away? I'm against the whole thing!" And then it hit me: the Addams Family homeschooled!
It got better. The parallels of their life style and attitudes to those of modern homeschooling families are uncanny. Truly. My husband asked if I was sure that I wanted to equate homeschoolers to the Addams Family, and I understood his meaning. Like the Addams Family, homeschooling families are considered the fringe of normal society, those strange people with unfathomable motives and ideas who spend every waking moment with their children, who are shunned and feared by others.
But, that's just the point.
Sending their children to school never occurred to the Addams Family as it also often never enters the minds of their modern counterparts. That we will keep our children at home is understood from the beginning, or becomes a strong desire as the time to send them away looms ever nearer. As Gomez said, "I don't think I can stand to be away from them, Morticia!" Maintaining family connections throughout the day feels right. Indeed, Gomez explained to the officer how Mamá (the grandmother) educated the children, especially in music, art, ballet, and history, while Uncle Fester worked with them in science. Most modern homeschooling families emphasize many of the under-funded and more humane aspects of society, like the arts and the sciences. True, we do it without dynamite and daggers (well, most of us do, anyway), but the fact is that homeschooling is a family affair.
Just as Morticia, an accomplished horticulturalist, includes her children in the feeding and care of her poisonous and carnivorous plants, and Gomez includes them in planning toy-train crashes and the mechanics of dungeon torture devices, homeschooling parents include their children in all aspects of their own daily lives and hobbies. In addition to regular academic subjects, homeschooled children are exposed at an early age to all of the humanities, in-depth science, a multitude of field trips and experts, museums, finance, logic, cooking, sewing, robotics, gardening, Latin, Chinese. And all of this is usually done before the end-of-day bell rings in traditional schools, but often naturally continues into the evenings and weekends.
The home of the Addams Family is a natural history museum, with a two-headed turtle, a preserved Hun warrior and giant Kodiak bear, and other taxidermy specimens and items of interest. Wednesday, their six year old daughter, breeds thoroughbred spiders, and Pugsly builds things. A typical homeschooling family's home looks much the same, with most surfaces covered by the children's various projects, such as breeding worms, dioramas, hundreds of books, bugs, rocks, written reports, musical instruments, owl pellets, goat hearts, mummifying chickens. The kitchen counter holds their experiments on gases; the dining room table displays their physics experiment on magnetic motors. And of course, all of this is mixed in with their parents' paraphernalia of various hobbies and interests.
The Addams Family enjoys their evenings together in the family room, at work on their own projects, communicating openly. Morticia might be knitting while Gomez has a drink and cigar with the newspaper; the children play on the carpet and Lurch plays the harpsichord. A homeschooling family looks much the same. The mother might be knitting while the father will have a drink with the paper; the children play on the carpet and play the harpsichord.
Both families often allow their children to seek out their own activities and gifts, without being bound to traditional roles and modes of thinking. When it comes right down to it, the Addams Family is bonded, loving, communicative, and supportive. The adults love their kids, they love being with them as much as possible, and they love talking with them. The family enjoys a hands-on approach to nearly all of their learning endeavors. I felt such a strong sense of connection to little Wednesday, when she learned about Marie Antoinette from Mamá and had Pugsly chop off her doll's head before they ran gleefully out to the cemetery to bury her.
Mystery solved.
I can't wait to find out what I learned from The Munsters!

Video Wednesday

I hope you enjoy this little ditty!

Too Cool for You

A few weeks ago, my husband showed me an article from the New York Times called “The Anti-Schoolers.” The article describes the decision a woman, Joanne Rendell, had made to not send her 5 year-old son, Benny, to kindergarten. Ms. Rendell, who is a novelist, had written a post for the website Babble, discussing her family’s choice to “unkindergarten.” In her post, she describes the ability they have to go out whenever they like (to bars, of all places) and to go to Europe on the cheap fares because they don’t have to work their schedule around a school schedule. She also describes a play date where all the kids get extremely muddy while playing and the parents discuss homeschooling while drinking beer. Ms. Rendell makes it clear that her choice to unkindergarten is their choice for now and she and her partner may decide to send Benny to school at a later date. Her post is beautifully written and brings out the absolute joy of having a 5 year-old child and being able to live life as you choose.

What struck me the most was not the New York Times article or Ms. Rendell’s blog. What struck me the most were the comments to her original post. Out of the 249 comments posted when I looked at the blog, 112 were negative, 112 were positive or somewhat positive (I took even one positive sentiment as a positive remark), 20 were commenters snipping at each other or saying nonsensical things, and I apparently overlooked 5 comments, which I’m not going to take the time to revisit.

The vitriol was palpable from the 112 negative comments. Some called for Child Protective Services to step in to take care of Benny. Most were absolutely astounded at the Ms. Rendell’s selfishness (“THE MOST SELFISH PARENTS I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS!”). Others, of course, mentioned that Benny will never be properly socialized (although one sympathetic commenter noted, “Benny is missing out on hours of standing in line, waiting, being told to put his head down because the kids are too noisy, being told to be quiet, and being forced to sit quietly in his seat.”). Quite a few talked about Benny needing to find out what it’s like to live in the REAL world (‘Not everyone in the world gets up around mid-day and spends their waking hours comfortably numb”). One comment talks about how the author is negligent because she’s not preparing Benny for “cutthroat global competition for increasingly rare jobs.” There is a long discussion of how people who homeschool and unschool must be rich because normal people have to send their kids to school so they can go to work (I wish this was true).

A couple negative comments struck me as strange because they were from self-proclaimed unschoolers saying that Ms. Rendell is not unschooling properly because she has never read a John Holt book. I’ve read John Holt books and I think, although I can’t absolutely know, that even John Holt would not say you need to read his books to successfully unschool. I would love to know what other unschoolers have to say about this seemingly dogmatic objection.

I think, though, that one positive commenter hit the nail on the head when he or she asked, “is the problem that her kid out-cooled your kids?” This question illustrates what I think is the basis for the commenters’ anger. Nobody is the boss of Joanne Rendell. She and Benny are rebels, not willing to let the schools tell them when they should go to bed and when they should play in the mud. For some reason, this lack of obedience to some higher power, whatever that power may be, makes many who do obey normal societal structures downright nasty.

Why would this be? Is it because they feel guilty because they didn’t question authority and think things through adequately before following the customary practice of enrolling their children in school? Are they jealous of the way those who unschool disregard the traditional wisdom of mass education? Do they wish that they had the guts to take their kids out of institutional education, but they’re too afraid to do it now? Are they just lazy and it’s just easier to criticize than to consider the implications of unschooling? Really, why would they care so much that they would spew this kind of malevolence at Ms. Rendell?

I wish I knew.

Frugal Friday

When you can't get a book you need at the library, what do you do? There's always a second-hand book store like Half Price Books. It's often hard to find books in stores like that, but you can find some really good deals if you are willing to take the time to search through the shelves. Another option is to get an educators' discount at bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble. All you usually have to do is show proof that you are a homeschooler -- like a copy of the affidavit we have to file here in Arizona -- and you will receive a discount card that is good for a year. Both Borders and B&N give a 20% discount on materials, excluding DVDs and periodicals, used for educating your kids. At least once a year, those stores also have an "educators week" when you can receive an even better discount.

When I was first homeschooling, those stores didn't offer us the discount. We've made some progress!

Video Wednesday

This is pretty funny. I don't think that's their real mom, though.

You're not the Boss of Me

Most of my friends happen to be homeschooling parents. Sometimes, however, I have to converse with adults outside the homeschooling world. These conversations are what have helped convince me that secular homeschooling, particularly, is a revolutionary act.

Here are some examples:

One or more of my children has participated in the local Little League for about 6 seasons. As a conversation starter, most parents ask which school my kids attend. We all know what my answer is.

Well, one time, one of the moms involved in this dialogue with me said,”You know, I believe the schools have become a sterile environment since all religion has been removed from them.”

All sorts of thoughts were whirling around my head at that moment. I kept telling myself to be quiet and to just nod and smile. But then I said it. “You know, there is that nice section in the Constitution about the separation of church and state.”

The other mom nodded and smiled. And never said another word to me the whole season.

I would have just passed off this mom’s distaste for me as a basic distaste for snarky remarks if this next conversation hadn’t occurred with another mom during the first game of the season. We had the initial part of the discussion wherein I state that my child doesn’t attend school and then she says something like, “Oh, I could never do that,” and then I assure her that she certainly could. Same old, same old. But then she asks me what church I attend. I tell her that I am basically a non-believer and haven’t gone to church since I left home at 17. She raises her eyebrows and then excuses herself from continuing the discourse -- forever.

When I thought back over the 12 years I’ve been homeschooling, I realized that these discussions are only two examples of the dozens of the same sort I’ve had in that time.

I started wondering at the revulsion that seems to come not so much from the fact that we homeschool, but more from the fact that we don’t homeschool for religious reasons.

Then it hit me.

These people are upset with me because nobody is the boss of me.

As I’ve described before, I believe that mass schooling has become a replacement for religion. Parents buy into the structure and rules and live their lives accordingly. I had a parent describe an outside school reading program to me – a certain number of books required at certain graded levels, comprehension tests that need to be passed with 80% of the questions correct or the book doesn’t count, all administered by the parent – and when I acted horrified at these onerous rules, she looked shocked and told me how great the program was. So when I say that my kids don’t go to school, many parents are offended that I am, in essence, rejecting the organizing principle of their lives

But then, they think, it will all be o.k., if my religion tells me what to do. When they find out it doesn’t, it blows their minds.

I’m speaking, of course, in broad generalizations. There are a lot of people who don’t have a problem with secular homeschooling. But the incidents I’ve described happen more often than not.

Secular homeschoolers pick their level of structure, from using a boxed curriculum all the way to no curriculum. But we pick these levels of structure based on our needs and those of our children, not based on societal norms or religious expectations. For my family, at least, I’m hoping that my kids’ background in homeschooling will help them, eventually, feel confident in their ability to control their own education.

I guess that’s really what makes it a true revolution, right? We’re producing a future generation of people who can think for themselves.

Imagine.

In Which I Flip-flop

So, based on conversations I've had with other homeschooling parents and the thoughtful comments on this blog, I've decided to go back to saying "secular" homeschooling rather than "inclusive" homeschooling when discussing someone's motivation for homeschooling. So, to make it clearer, for purposes of The Revolution begins at Home (this blog):

The word "secular" will be used when the primary motivation for homeschooling is something other than religion.

The word "religious" or the term"religiously motivated" will be used when the primary motivation for homeschooling is religion.

That is all.