A Story About 1:1 Homeschool Teaching

Yesterday we had another one of those interesting homeschooling moments that can only happen when the parent is working closely with their child.

In grade three my younger son began using the next workbook in a logic series, labeled for grades 3-4 (Logic Countdown). He struggled with analogies because the examples used realistic examples but instead of following the "if-then" statement he inserted what he knew from real life which made the answer incorrect. He needed to just read what the problem said and to analyze that. He could not do it. That requires abstract thinking.




A friend who classically homeschools told me the mistake was that a child of that age is not ready to think logically as that is a logic stage thinking ability thing that kicks in at about age ten. I put the workbook to the side.

In grade four I pulled the book out again and he did a few pages but struggled with the same thing. This was not a priority for us so I shelved it.

So last week I pulled the workbook out again and we set about using it. I would quickly show him the example then he'd do the page and get them all correct. I was not truly spending a lot of time teaching it because he seemed to get it.

For days, my son was doing well with the multiple choice answers, getting them all correct. He had a little struggle with writing his own conclusions after being told some premises but we worked through it.

I was happy that he was flying through all those analogies with perfect scores. I thought he understood it.

Then yesterday I was correcting the workbook page where they finally asked him to write his own analogies. It went something like this:

grape is to cluster as ____ is to _____

The bottom line is that he only did a few right, all the others had crazy answers that made it plain to me he didn't know what the heck an analogy was after all.

I sat down to discuss the analogies he created, and asked him to explain them to me. He was winging it, basically, filling in nonsense that he thought might be correct. I asked him to explain the first analogy that they gave which to me, was plain and simple but he couldn't get what the analogy was. I had to explain and ask him to think about what is the relationship between the example "teacher is to student". I had to spell out what that relationship was (and that every example was different) then to take that relationship to think of something, anything in the world that had that same relationship. He really struggled with it, despite telling me "Oh now I get what an analogy is".

We worked together on about five before he said he wanted to sit alone and work out the others.

As he went to work on them alone, I was amazed yet again at how when children do workbook pages OR test questions with multiple choice answers it can look on paper like they know what they are doing when in fact they are clueless. The high score and perfect or near perfect papers they fill in can mislead even the best teacher to think the student understands the concept being taught and that it is mastered.

Well perhaps it's not crucial that a fifth grader at age ten is a whiz at analogies. I'm not worried about this. Instead I am thinking it's yet another example of how kids can fly through lessons with high scores but sometimes really didn't learn what the lesson was supposed to be teaching.

If you get my drift now think about school and the way kids are tested and then think about standardized tests and their scores and ask what really is the point of schooling? Is it not to learn? Are those tests really always reliable indicators of content mastered or of the child's thinking skills? And how much of schooling and education is geared toward getting high scores on the tests?

I'm happy to be homeschooling in which it is much easier for the homeschool parent-teacher to really see and know what their child knows and doesn't know. I'm happy to have the time to give 1:1 lessons so the lesson can be quick and effective (or be longer in duration if needed).

I am also happy to live in a state where few homeschooling regulations exist. Really the only tests my kids will worry about are SAT subject tests and the SAT and ACT, and perhaps some AP tests, which they'll need to apply to college to give some kind of proof and legitimacy to what we've been doing all these years in this mysterious to so many thing we call home education.