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 Customizing High School: An Email Conversation by Debbie Strayer, Ruth Beechick, and a homeschool mom This e-mail conversation is between an amazing mom of high schoolers and two homeschool consultants. The consultants, Beechick and Strayer, are presented as one composite person. Mom: I have been homeschooling for nearly twenty years and am finally getting my public school education out of my system. School was a nightmare for me, but I was locked into its ways. My big concern right now is my 15-year-old son, Kevin (not his real name). I am stumped with this one, my treasure. He is finishing up ninth grade right now, if you can call it that. He is not a book type of guy. He is not a math type of guy. He is a video editing, guitar playing, artist type of guy. At the beginning of the year, we bought the [brand name] geography book. It seemed to say to me, "Have him read this and you will fill your state requirement." But when Kevin reads it, and I try to talk about it afterward, it feels like a cup is missing a bottom. The water goes in and out without even touching the sides. That is how these textbooks seem to work with my son. It hardly enters. He wants it to be over with so he can pick up his guitar or something. The book is full of interesting information, but Kevin finished only one-fifth of it. I looked at the goals in the teacher guide, and felt overwhelmed. I know that stuffing his brain with all that would overwhelm him. Consultant: Yes. Textbooks don’t work for everybody. They usually teach facts and then test on them. That pulls us down to the fact level, when what most people really want is ability to think and to find specific information when needed. In geography, for instance, that would include facility in using maps and atlases, vocabulary enough to understand information about the earth movements, arctic and temperate zones, and so on. Just now, students should check out the location of Middle East areas mentioned in the nightly news (or talk shows) so they can follow the news better. Also connect some of that with Bible history and prophecy. Also talk about areas where you know of missionary work. This approach does not cover the whole earth evenly as a textbook tries to do, but it covers areas meaningfully, and enables a student to learn about a new area anytime he has need for it. Mom: Oh, I needed to hear this. I know this, I do! But I lost confidence when it came to high school. My daughter is graduating homeschool this year, but she’s a reader with a photographic memory. Kevin’s the one I’ve really hit the wall with, the square peg causing me to rethink the round hole. New York State requires that I teach him a certain list of units, a unit being equal to 6,480 minutes—or 108 hours a year. Consultant: Yes, counting hours does seem cumbersome. But you can use a simple logging method to keep track of the time you spend reading, writing, discussing, etc. Many schools use the Carnegie unit of 120 to 150 hours per course. Here's an example of counting. When my daughter was a senior in high school, she was taking world history, English and drama. We watched a video of Henry V by Shakespeare. It took about two hours to watch the video and discuss the events. She spent another thirty minutes writing a brief summary of the story and her opinion of it. That day in her log, we divided the time between English and World History. We thought about counting drama also, one of her electives. You might feel justified at times in counting one project twice. That would be like a school student turning in the same paper to his English teacher and his history teacher. Mom: What an encouragement! I will begin keeping track of everything Kevin does and counting it towards language and the other subjects. Consultant: Once you figure out a system with a notebook or file cards or whatever, turn the job over to Kevin. Mom: Ahhh, good point. Thank you. At the beginning of the year the state wants an Individualized Home Instruction Plan with learning goals. The art, music, and phys ed do not concern me, but the language and other subjects do. I wonder what he might do if we weren't worried about state requirements. For example, how much knowledge is enough where we might say "He deserves a credit for that"? I have a terrible time with this. Consultant: You don’t have to count hours for everything. Another way is to assign credit for a course after you cover its content or complete its goals. Homeschoolers often use this system for math, but you can use it with other courses, too. Some homeschool writers suggest course plans. Kathryn Stout gives help for designing courses. Her Movies as Literature would be a wonderful choice for Kevin in English, as well as for drama and maybe history or other areas included in the movies. Some math books teach just one topic, like decimals, measurements, fractions, percents. You could review with an earlier grade book and work up to Kevin’s level. In science my children really liked the coloring books found at Amazon.com. They were amazing. We would choose a topic (biology, anatomy, marine biology), use the very detailed coloring books, and then find library books or creation science books to go into greater depth on the areas we were interested in. Mom: I like that. Minutes or hours seem a silly way to measure learning anyhow, because we know in homeschool we can learn in one month what it might take a whole year for them to teach in a public school. But I cannot imagine what learning goals might be equivalent to 108 hours. Consultant: One good source of goals is World Book. The address, worldbook.com/wc/browse?id=pa/tcs, should get you to a page where you can select a grade level. That gets you to a page that lists topics for each course in that grade. Another route is to search Google for World Book course of study. From there you need to skip over other books and find World Book itself and the phrase “typical course of study.” Homeschoolers have been using the World Book lists for many years, even before computer days. Mom: I got to the course of study for ninth grade in World Book. My plan now is to choose the goals that make sense to me, and talk to Kevin today about how we might meet those goals. I do think he will like this idea: I give him things to research for science and history/social studies. He can do DVD reports with multimedia. I am inclined to add vocabulary in there, as in, give him a list of words to know every week and check him on it. Consultant: Be sure the words fit the current topic. You could post a few on the wall and he can use them when he works on his reports, or you can talk with him occasionally about them. It takes about fourteen uses of a word to become an owner of the word. Remember that conversation is probably the most powerful way to learn vocabulary. And you could give some kind of movie arts credit for his DVD work. Mom: I am reading about apprenticeship. Perhaps I can send Kevin to our local television station to follow a cameraman around, or he could even sit in on some of their video editing. I wish there were more reading materials for a teen his age that were easy enough reading but with information at a level he needs right now. Do you know what I mean? As an adult, I read a book on Hitler and WWII once. It was at about an eighth grade level, and I got so much out of it. It seems, sometimes, that we go from a third or fourth grade level to advanced. Consultant: This is a good observation. A useful trick for adults in an unfamiliar subject is to get children's books on the subject. They tell some main principles and use some of the technical words, defining them as they go. After a background like this, then the higher level books are not so hard. It is not important that Kevin read from highschool level books just now. He can learn enough from easier books and from other media. Many adult books have a lower reading level than high school. Mom: You know, I have been having some online discussions concerning end days prophecy, and have been sharing a few of my prophecy videos—Israel, Islam and Armageddon; A Woman Rides the Beast (both Dave Hunt); and Sudan, the Hidden Holocaust. I was thinking how I must use all this discussion in our homeschool. I have had a ministry witnessing to Muslims since around 1999 and my children knew quite a lot about Islam by the time 9/11 happened. They know much more than most children. Why didn’t I feel I could count our conversations as school? These days Kevin, his sister, and I are reading through Stranger on the Road to Emmaus for an overview of the Bible. Consultant: Of course count all this. You have been passing up the real-life learning, and trying to count just the fact learning from a dull textbook. (And kudos for your work with Muslims!) Mom: Kevin really likes Johnny Cash, so I got him a biography on Johnny Cash. Yesterday he was telling me how JC was put down by others who said that he sang country but it wasn't really country. Cash then goes on in his bio, saying he WAS country; he grew up picking cotton in the fields, singing hymns with his mama. Then he told about his home in Jamaica, when it was broken into and he was terrorized, how the Jamaican police handled it (getting political now) and why they handled it that way. We had a lot of chatter back and forth, and I took greater notice of all he was learning by reading something he was truly interested in—music, U.S. history, social studies, geography. I recognize that Cash may not have been the best shining example for my son to look up to. Even Cash realized that much of what he did was wood, hay, and stubble. He had his better moments, though, and as parent, I could help put it into perspective. Am I getting it? Consultant: Yes, it sounds as if you and Kevin will have some happy learning times ahead. © 2006 Debbie Strayer _____________________________ Debbie Strayer is author of Gaining Confidence to Teach, co-author of the Learning Language Arts Through Literature series, and editor of The Homeschool Answer Book. She has taught and administered in schools, and has homeschooled her own children through graduation. She now speaks at conventions, consults with homeschoolers, and is the Educational Resource Editor for Percipion.com. Dr. Ruth Beechick also has wide experience in education and has written many books on its topics. The latest is World History Made Simple: Matching History with the Bible. |
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