I was hard hit after reading the book "The Over-Scheduled Child"
as parts of it are about what is now being called helicopter parenting. I am not a helicopter parent but some may label or accuse me that being a homeschooling parent would make me the most helicopter parenting type possible. The author may say that in my attempt to provide a high quality education tailored to my kid's developmental stages and custom made and protecting them from certain common bad experiences (i.e. bullying on the school bus) I am trying to shelter and hide my children by keeping them ina protective bubble. I disagree with that accusation, as many or most of the things that helicopter parents do, I do not do. I have always raised my kids to be independent and have actively been teaching them to take care of themselves and to become empowered so long as it is safe. As a result my kids have mastered tasks years before their peers being raised with other parenting methods. I mean little things like making their own breakfast, handling a sharp kitchen knife, tying their shoes and putting on their own coats and dressing themselves and choosing their own clothing to wear.
To me helicopter parents smother and dote and work to keep their kids dependent on them as they think the child cannot handle learning that skill or cannot be trusted to do the thing right or well. I am not like that at all. I see my role as raising my kids to be independent and well-adjusted people.
Anyhow it has been interesting outsourcing more of their education as I have had to place trust in the other teachers. Some are professional teachers, some are subject matter experts and some are other homeschooling mothers. These people are from diverse backgrounds and I have not interviewed them about their credentials or their teaching methods or what their philosophy of education is, nor have I grilled them about the content of the classes. I did have some information about the course content and accepted that. This gave me some feeling for what it would be like if my kids were in school full time right now.
Some things that happened that felt odd to experience are:
1. Not knowing really what was covered in the class. Not knowing if reality matched the plan. Knowing what was supposed to be covered but not knowing if it really was. (I guess I'm supposed to assume the affirmative.)
2. Having no sense for if my child really learned anything or if it went over their head.
3. Not knowing if the course materials (i.e. textbook) was really used to its fullest (espeically when I spent $100 on one book I'm kind of curious how or if it was used).
4. Not knowing if there is homework. More than once my child has said there was no homework but I have found out later there was homework and my kid didn't do it. We are now working on organizational methods but it's not working completely.
5. Wondering how my child did on the test but not knowing when it will come back so I can see the score. Realizing a week later my son got it back but he just didn't communicate the outcome with me.
6. Prepping my kids to take school supplies to class with them. Buying the stuff and helping them get it ready. Explaining to them the necessity of going to class prepared. Then hearing later my kid(s) showed up to class without said materials and (along with other students) caused an annoying administrative problem (more than once) as they had no paper and no pencil to write with.
7. Having to deal with getting up earlier than our bodies were ready to in order to get ready and get out of the house to get to the class on time.
8. Realizing in the rush to get out my kids did one or more of the following: 1) forgot to brush their teeth; 2) forgot to eat breakfast; 3) forgot their backpack with necessary papers in it; and/or 4) forgot to bring their lunch (having left it on the counter).
9. A kid can't do their homework as they didn't understand either the concepts taught in class or don't understand what is being asked for. As the parent I sometimes cannot help them as I have not been teaching this material and either haven't worked with this in 30 years or never learned it in public school or college myself! Thus I do various things to scramble to teach myself the information or operations in order to wing teaching it to my kids in a rush. (Then later not knowing if I helped them or hindered them.)
10. After homework is done not really knowing if it was looked at, if it was correct or incorrect. Having no sense if my kid is on the right track or is completely lost. I note that more than once my kids thought they had the information aced and mastered but they were completely wrong.
11. Pushing my son to study for a test when he feels there is no real reason to be tested and thinks he knows it. He studied but not enough in my opinion but what do I know? Later I see he scored a 67.5 on the test. So who was right? (Update clarification: after finishing the test my son thought he aced it and that it was easy. The test was handed back with checks and 'x' marks and no scoring. He told me he thought he got around 87%. I asked to see it, I scored it at 67.5% by assuming the points per question. The point is the mismatch between my son's perception and reality, and that he was confused about how he really was doing.)
12. Being told a class would cover a certain topic then hearing from my child later that no such thing was ever done. No reason is given for this. Usually this is some kind of "dumbed down" experience (when I'm made aware of it because my kid complains that the class was so ridiculous and a waste of time).
13. Getting no feedback from the teachers about my child at all. No clue what is going on. (Hey at least in public school you have at least two parent-teacher conferences a year.)
14. The class ends and still I have no idea how my child interacted in the class, if they mastered the content, or anything else. What choice do I have but to assume the goals of the course were met and the learning objectives were mastered by my son?
After being so in control of my children's education it feels strange in a not-good way to relinquish control to these other teachers.
These are some of the same complaints my friends whose children attend school deal with.
I would like to think that if I ever enroll my kids into school that they would be going to some wonderful school with teachers with rigorous academics planned and that my child was always prepared for class and understanding everything and was an asset to the class due to his positive class participation and his non-annoying personality and good social skills and etiquette. He will have completed all his homework and scored well on tests then remembering it all in long term memory long after the test date has passed. My kids would be model pupils.
Well I guess that's asking too much, now isn't it? No one is perfect! What a pipe dream!
Some parents I know speak this way about their kids and their schools while others label them as "drinking the Kool Aid". You see it sometimes makes for a happier life if you assume your hoped outcome is reality. Some people seem to not really want to see reality for what it is and instead don't look to closely but close their eyes and look at the pictures in their imagination instead and tell themselves that wishes really do come true! Oh how wonderful life is when perceiving things that way! (I wouldn't know. I've been a realist since birth, and sometimes a really cynical one.)
And what can a well-intended, responsible and supportive parent do anyway? How far can a parent go to try to get their kid to do the right and best thing? Even the most diligent parent may not be able to produce the model school student.
I guess if I wind up enrolling my kids into school it will be a time of lowering standards all around (not just what I expect from the school but what I expect of my kids too). It would be a time of accepting my kids for who they are and loving them unconditionally through any errors they make and the bumps in the road they'd encounter. I'd have to gently push them along the right path but honestly there is only so much a parent can do. Really the learning is the responsibility of the learner. How a child or teenager responds to the demands made upon them and how they can handle the responsibilities given to them comes from within them and can't be put upon them by the parent (no matter how hard the parent tries or no matter how hard the teachers wish the parents would "do more" to "help" their children).
If my kids end up in school it will be a growing time and a time for letting go, for me as well as for them.
For now we are still homeschooling and I'm feeling grateful for this gift of time. I'm choosing to make the most of it as really I don't know if our homeschooling days will end sooner than we'd anticipated (such as out of financial necessity if I have to return to full time employment).
7 comments:
This is a wonderful post. I pray you can continue to homeschool as long as you possibly can!
So your kids learning to arrive at class with the proper materials would be lowering standards?
And communicating with others in a timely manner...
learning to ask questions if they do not understand material in class. Yes, it is much easier to ask Mom for help, than a teacher.
Won't they have to learn things like this to succeed in the workplace as adults.
I am perfectly fine with homeschooling for parents that want to. It's just kind of funny that you don't see how your complaints might sound to others.
Mary
Inland Northwest, You misread my post. Perhaps I should have written it differently with more spoon feeding to avoid misintrepretation.
See today's blog post for clarification on my points for this blog post. Direct link below.
http://tinyurl.com/2fzw5nc
To Mary - Inland Northwest, your comments are in quotes and my reply follows.
"So your kids learning to arrive at class with the proper materials would be lowering standards?"
No that's not what I meant. The point was parents can do what the teacher asks but the kids can fail to execute the simple task. Very frustrating. Meanwhile the teacher may accuse the parents of 'not caring' or 'not trying to help their kids succeed in the classroom' by sending them off to school without paper and pencil (or whatever else they need).
"And communicating with others in a timely manner...
learning to ask questions if they do not understand material in class."
No my kids do well with asking the teachers if they have questions. When they are confused they ask. I have taught them to be assertive and unafraid to ask the teacher questions.
One odd thing though is sometimes they miss things like thinking no homework was given out when it was, so they are not aware they need to ask anything.
Also if a kid thinks they 'get it' they don't ask for clarification when in real life they may be misunderstanding the concept.
"Yes, it is much easier to ask Mom for help, than a teacher.
Won't they have to learn things like this to succeed in the workplace as adults."
Mary you and I are in agreement here. If you were a regular blog reader of mine you'd already know that I feel this way. There is only so much that I can repeat in each blog post without it sounding redundant or boring my regular readers to tears after 5.5 years of blogging on these topics.
"I am perfectly fine with homeschooling for parents that want to. It's just kind of funny that you don't see how your complaints might sound to others."
Mary I find nothing funny about the fact that it seems nearly impossible to have high standards for learning and high outcomes for learning in classroom settings. Even the best intentions of a school system and well meaning and trained teachers may find challenges with execution. I believe why this fails is a complicated thing with no simple solutions. These are challenges that school reformers have not been able to fully change in over 100 years of school reform in America.
I think it is very hard to have high standards for group learning environments and to have them be effective in real life. Part of this is because kids are flawed, as people of all ages are. The simplest thing to teach one on one can be hard to teach a group.
The issue of relying on test scores as indicators of learning is a problem also, it's a challenge. I have worked it from the other way around in my past job when human resources wanted the new hires to be tested to prove their training was effective at prepping the workers to be able to do their job accurately. The team I was on had a very hard time writing a multiple choice test that could be done via computer and scored easily that was accurate and not flawed and not subjective in its scoring. (HR ended up nixxing the idea after thousands of man-hours of developing them and failing.) Through working on that project, I developed a new insight on testing back then. How would one test that a concept was learned? How do simple job processes and procedures get tested with written questions with multiple choice tests? It was difficult even when I knew the person could do their job, did do their job, but was not scoring well on the sample tests. This situation is not unlike school learning with kids. Not all learning can be shown on traditional written tests.
To Mary - Inland Northwest, your comments are in quotes and my reply follows.
"So your kids learning to arrive at class with the proper materials would be lowering standards?"
No that's not what I meant. The point was parents can do what the teacher asks but the kids can fail to execute the simple task. Very frustrating. Meanwhile the teacher may accuse the parents of 'not caring' or 'not trying to help their kids succeed in the classroom' by sending them off to school without paper and pencil (or whatever else they need).
"And communicating with others in a timely manner...
learning to ask questions if they do not understand material in class."
No my kids do well with asking the teachers if they have questions. When they are confused they ask. I have taught them to be assertive and unafraid to ask the teacher questions.
One odd thing though is sometimes they miss things like thinking no homework was given out when it was, so they are not aware they need to ask anything.
Also if a kid thinks they 'get it' they don't ask for clarification when in real life they may be misunderstanding the concept.
"Yes, it is much easier to ask Mom for help, than a teacher.
Won't they have to learn things like this to succeed in the workplace as adults."
Mary you and I are in agreement here. If you were a regular blog reader of mine you'd already know that I feel this way. There is only so much that I can repeat in each blog post without it sounding redundant or boring my regular readers to tears after 5.5 years of blogging on these topics.
"I am perfectly fine with homeschooling for parents that want to. It's just kind of funny that you don't see how your complaints might sound to others."
Mary I find nothing funny about the fact that it seems nearly impossible to have high standards for learning and high outcomes for learning in classroom settings. Even the best intentions of a school system and well meaning and trained teachers may find challenges with execution. I believe why this fails is a complicated thing with no simple solutions. These are challenges that school reformers have not been able to fully change in over 100 years of school reform in America.
I think it is very hard to have high standards for group learning environments and to have them be effective in real life. Part of this is because kids are flawed, as people of all ages are. The simplest thing to teach one on one can be hard to teach a group.
The issue of relying on test scores as indicators of learning is a problem also, it's a challenge. I have worked it from the other way around in my past job when human resources wanted the new hires to be tested to prove their training was effective at prepping the workers to be able to do their job accurately. The team I was on had a very hard time writing a multiple choice test that could be done via computer and scored easily that was accurate and not flawed and not subjective in its scoring. (HR ended up nixxing the idea after thousands of man-hours of developing them and failing.) Through working on that project, I developed a new insight on testing back then. How would one test that a concept was learned? How do simple job processes and procedures get tested with written questions with multiple choice tests? It was difficult even when I knew the person could do their job, did do their job, but was not scoring well on the sample tests. This situation is not unlike school learning with kids. Not all learning can be shown on traditional written tests.
One more thing,
I have high standards for my kids which sometimes leaves little wiggle room for imperfection such as me wanting them to actually take their school supplies to class.
I would have to lower my standards for them and accept that they, like other kids, sometimes forget to take what is needed to class.
I guess after lots of practice they'd get it, they already have learned some new habits this fall, but my kids are "newbies" in many respects since their learning has been in out of the box, non-traditional ways. They may be older kids (aged 13 and 10) but they are new to some (easy) classroom stuff like bringing the backpack with homework and pencil and paper to class. They will learn!
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