Castle in the Sea: Homeschooling High School: Planning and the ...

It's not that turtles couldn't fly --? You might ask how, but you'd better ask why.

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?-- faux-distressed antique maxim, ?made up by me just now

Welcome to the inaugural Homeschooling High School Carnival (hosted today by Erin at Seven Little Australians), in which we attempt, in some coherent fashion, to answer the question of educational philosophy and how ours, such as it is, translates into what our high-schoolers do day in and day out, by way of the pursuit of knowledge. Or wisdom. Or how to make macaroni-and-cheese. Or whatever.

(I should add here, ?as useful context for those who haven't been reading this blog breathlessly every day for the last five years, that our family includes, just now, a homeschool graduate/college sophomore, a ninth-grader, and two primary-aged children.)

The first thing we -- or, for those of us who aren't Queen Victoria, I?-- have to ask myself, as I sit down to plan for a new school year, is What do I believe about education? What do I believe education is? What do I think it's for? OK, that's the first three things I have to ask myself, though it all amounts to the same question more or less: ?What is it all about? Where are we going in the end??

I have to have some answer to these questions before -- well, before anything. Otherwise, presented with a colorful spread of curriculum catalogs, a wall of books, a credit card, and an unwitting teenager who isn't mowing the lawn right now and therefore manifestly and urgently?needs something to do, I'll just buy it all. Everything. Here, kid. How about we do ninth grade three or four times over, according to as many methodologies, just to be on the safe side? What say you to a transcript with A HUNDRED AND FIVE high-school credits? So you'd be the only twenty-five-year-old at the prom. You'd be the most educated twenty-five-year-old at the prom, that's for sure.

?Hello? Hello? Why are you mowing the lawn? I wasn't through talking to you yet.?

Yeah. That would be me without a philosophy. My personal default setting would be: ?EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING! EVERYTHING! Shakespeare and quantum mechanics and an apprenticeship with the guy rebuilding our porch and joining the Battle of Ramseur's Mill re-enactment group and writing a novel and starting a newspaper and a total-immersion German course and an internship with the Centers for Disease Control -- ?and that's the first semester of ninth grade done.?

To save us from all that, before I do anything I have to ask myself: what do I believe about education? More to our point here, what do I believe constitutes an education for the student who is beginning, in a serious way, to approach the larger stage of adult life?

It's not that I haven't asked myself a million times before what I believe about education, and it's not that, with the passing of the years, my answers change all that much. Still I have to ask, so that as I sit down with the blank slate of the coming year before me, those answers flash freshly, in brilliant neon, on the twilight of the middle-aged mind.?

I say those answers, plural, because what I believe about education has more than one prong to it, more than one level, which makes sense, because learning itself has multiple prongs and levels -- which maybe is the first thing I believe.

What is education about, then? It's about academics for sure. We are an academic family. Not going to college is always an option, but not going to college because you weren't prepared to go to college is not. And whether you go to college or not, if you're a child in my house you will leave it as a culturally literate person who has heard of the Trojan War, Hadrian's Wall, the Sea-Geats, the Round Table, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, the Reformation, the Reign of Terror, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, the League of Nations -- in the context of history as an unfolding timeline, and of literature as history's imagination. You should also be able to do math, speak a foreign language (or read a classical one) and have at least the rudiments of a scientific mind, but more about that later.

?At the same time, education is also about character and virtue (which I think is as readily developed by the pursuit of knowledge as by anything else you might do). It's about academics and character but also life competency (which includes the pursuit of knowledge, as well as ironing and lawn-mowing and making your own breakfast). Ultimately, it's about the kind of person I wish to release from my house into the world at the end of four years, a person who is well-read and articulate, able to express himself in speaking and writing, a person who can reason, a person with some clue that his ideas didn't originate with him, a person who isn't powerless to help himself with the rudiments of daily life and time management, a person of self-discipline and at least nascent virtue: ?humble, patient, charitable, and the rest.

So here, more or less, is how I break things down in my mind, on my way to making actual plans:

I.?

It's been my longstanding joke that my #1 educational goal is to raise autodidacts who do their own laundry. So, here it is, #1: ?self-reliance. By this I don't mean the radical autonomy of the individual -- it's hard to be a radically autonomous individual who also lives in, and with, a family every day -- but rather habits and practices which emphasize self-motivation and confidence in the student's ability to learn, rather than being taught. ?I don't step back completely from my high-schooler's education, or say, when confronted with a frustrated teenager, "You'll just have to study until you figure it out." Nobody, after all, learns things in a vacuum; ?seeking help and knowing that you can find it is part of proactive learning. ?At the same time, I do try to set things up so that responsibility for reading and learning -- all the pursuit of knowledge stuff -- is the student's and not mine, because I, after all, have been there already. Having been there already, I'm here now to talk about books and experiences once they've been read and had, to listen and ask questions and probe and generally be a conversation partner. This vision shapes, in large part, the way my high-schoolers' education plays out day to day on a practical level, as you will see. (and yes, they do their own laundry!)?

II.

If one one level I believe education is a certain way of doing things -- the autodidact/laundry way -- which builds self-reliance and an earned sense of one's own competence, on another level I also believe that education is composed of certain things. Well, and who doesn't, right? I have yet to meet the educator who believed -- or would admit to believing -- that education is composed of nothing, though surely such a figure exists, at least in satire. But when most of us consider what we believe about education, we consider not only how we ought to accomplish it, but what exactly it is we want to accomplish. In other words, what content do we believe in? What do we want our children to leave home knowing? What are our non-negotiables?

My hierarchy of must-have literacies goes roughly like this:

1. The Catholic faith, as practiced daily (read: ?Mass, Confession, Adoration, private prayer, pursuit of knowledge about the faith) in the context of the student life. What my kids believe at the end of the day is the one thing over which I have virtually zero control -- God gave them free will, and it's not within my power, or my desire, to tamper with that. But I can provide a daily routine in which the faith is lived, and I can practice my own faith alongside my children, not as an example so much as a companion on the road.

2. Knowledge of where we come from as a culture, why we think and speak and behave as we do, what lineages our ideas claim. This is why I place such a premium not only on the study of history, but on the chronological study of literature which is the imagination of a culture and an era, and why we do history and literature as an integrated study over the course of four years: ancient and classical in grade 9, medieval and Renaissance, with an emphasis on English literature, in grade 10, post-Renaissance and New World, with an emphasis on America, in grade 11, and in grade 12, a semester survey of philosophy and literature, covering some of the same ground as previous years but with more focus and challenging readings, plus seminars in poetry and the novel.

I emphasize all of this in high school 1) because these are the things you have to read and know to be a literate biologist, or a literate anything else; 2) because all of these things serve, ultimately, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; ?and 3) because there's no guarantee any more that a college education will cover this body of knowledge. For the cultural patrimony of Western Civilization, it's now or never. Or so I feel. To the extent of being a little deranged about it all. (you'll see just how deranged when I host the High-School Homeschool Humanities Carnival some months hence)

3. Uh . . . everything else. This would include math, science, language, electives . . . everything you'd study first, of course, because it does good things for your mind and your character to study it, but also because it's what people in high school study in order to produce transcripts that aren't blank, because colleges frown on blank transcripts (see prepared for college, above). Actually, I have a high-schooler right now who's mathy and sciency far beyond the boundaries of my paltry abilities; ?all I can do for him is to give him the tools to learn what he needs and wants to learn, and outsource wherever possible. My own limitations shouldn't limit any other person in my house, and here I do what I can to fling the doors wide. Here, too, for obvious reasons, the self-sufficiency thing comes into play. There are things I can help with, and things I really can't, beyond pointing a person in the direction of help.

4. And then everything else: ?Scouts, altar serving, sports, chores, hobbies and pastimes, some of which bleeds over into school. It's hard to know sometimes where to draw the line between curriculum and extracurricular.

All of this, then, drives the plans I make, which I've posted, or posted about, already: ?here, here, here, and here. Our plans explain, pretty much, what we do every day, which is . . . on my part, not much.

Here's how a typical day goes:

The 9th grader gets up around 6 to run and bike, because he's training for a triathlon. After he's showered and had breakfast, he then goes to his room to do his work, which generally lasts until fairly late in the afternoon, depending on how long he runs and bikes and when he settles down to school. Three mornings a week, he runs and bikes really, really early, then goes in to work with his father the professor, so that he can attend biology class and lab, then do the rest of his work in the 3rd floor science resource library, where he's staked out territory. Apparently none of the college students have been desperate enough for quiet yet to venture up there. Before he and his father come home, they go to Mass together on campus. On the afternoons when he's not at the college, currently he's working on his Eagle Scout project, which is to interview local World War II veterans for a recorded oral history, to be archived by our county historical association.

As you can see if you check out my lesson-plan links above, I've put some time (like my whole summer) into typing up reasonably detailed syllabi in an easy-to-read modified grid format (thank you, Donna Young), which I email weekly -- each week's plans are a separate file -- to my 9th grader, who works from the plans. I plan weekly, so that written work is due on Fridays, but he is free to structure his own daily time. Generally, being the methodical sort, he opts to spend an hour a day on each subject, but he could as easily do Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes and Tuesday-Thursday ones, or he could opt to spend an entire day doing, say, all of his history for the week, and be done with it. The only thing that really has to be done daily is algebra (well, he's also doing German, and that requires daily practice as well). Right now, too, he's taking a college class three days a week, which provides a useful shape to things. ?Most of his literature readings are e-texts, for which I've provided him with links: ?fewer books to lose as he's plodding back and forth between home and campus. With his weekly literature assignment I include a reading-journal prompt, composed of questions which the discerning reader would naturally ask as he read (sometimes the discerning reader doesn't know how discerning he is, and has to be nudged a little in the right direction).

Otherwise, I choose materials which are as self-teaching as possible: ?algebra with a DVD or CD-ROM component, grammar and composition with self-explanatory exercises, interactive online German, a set of Great Courses lectures on CD to accompany his history reading. ?If he has questions, he asks. Several times during the week, I strike up a conversation with him about what he's reading and writing. He goes off to the college campus with his professor father to attend his biology class (see outsourcing, above), and they talk on the way home, sometimes in German. At the end of the week, he shows me written work, but essentially I trust him to get on with it, as if he already were the adult he's in the process of becoming, and as if the learning were his personal project to get on with. As indeed it is.

Because he has some fairly ambitious goals in mind and has demonstrably been very serious about pursuing them, it's easy to trust him. ?I realize I'm not describing every kid in the world -- I'm not even describing every kid in my house. And I guess that's the other part of the process of distilling philosophy into everyday action: ?knowing who it is you're dealing with and just how far, exactly, your philosophy meshes with the reality of that person. My first child at this age would not have been quite as ?successfully autonomous, though by her senior year this was our M.O., and as a warm-up for the demands of college, the autodidact approach has proved to be a good one. She has actually thanked me, as in, Thank you, Mom, for making me read The Iliad in 9th grade; ?she's also remarked more than once that she's grateful to have had the opportunity to develop self-direction and time-management skills before she got to college.

Have I been philosophical here? To be honest, I'm not sure -- I haven't, after all, talked about any of the major schools of educational philosophy to which homeschooling families tend to subscribe: ?no Charlotte Mason, no classical, no unschooling. I don't know what to call what we do, but so far it seems to work for us.

P.S.: ?I should add that my high-schoolers have always been involved in the planning for each year of work -- it's their work, after all. The history/literature business is non-negotiable, but we do talk about it, and I keep the person in mind as I'm making decisions about what readings, exactly, will end up on the syllabus. We bat math, foreign-language, science, and elective ideas back and forth and discuss what courses, if any, might be available to take on campus. I want my high-schooler invested in the process, and although everything he has to do doesn't make him turn cartwheels of delight, I want there to be things on his weekly schedule that he's actively excited about.

Most importantly, though, early on, we talk about where that person might see himself or herself at the end of four years. My first child was tremendously motivated, at 12 or 13, by researching colleges and imagining in what environment she might like to find herself one day. Her vision changed significantly in the course of her high-school years, but fortunately college admissions requirements don't change all that much from school to school, so the initial idea she had of what hoops she'd have to jump through remained useful, even as she discovered unforeseen academic interests in the course of her high-school years. She's wound up doing something completely different from what she initially envisioned herself doing, but that early vision was a step on the way to where she is now.

My second child, as I've said, has some fairly ambitious goals, which he's entertained since he was nine or ten. Those goals may change, but until something else replaces them (as may or may not happen), they serve as a driving force for self-discipline and a desire to work hard. I tend to think, actually, that in and of itself the vision of being out of the house in the foreseeable future is a powerful motivator for many teenagers. Mine have been very happy to be home educated and, so far, have not at all wanted to go to brick-and-mortar school, but the idea of being somewhere else doing something else at the end of these four years is a potent one. A lot of our mutual planning conversation turns on that idea.?

Source: http://fineoldfamly.blogspot.com/2012/09/homeschooling-high-school-planning-and.html

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