Thoughts on the Book "How to Be a High School Superstar" by Cal Newport

Viewing the book from the perspective of a homeschooling mother who was seduced into homeschooling by the appeal of the unschooling method I say this:

What the book "How to Be a High School Superstar" by Cal Newport does is presents a formula for (schooled) teens that Newport feels may help them gain entry into elite colleges. He take success stories of (schooled) teens who did something unusual, a project or a typically more adult task and shows how that helped them gain entry into elite or respected colleges.

In order to do those projects, the (schooled) students lightened up their traditionally heavy academic load. And the (schooled) students then (surprisingly to some) gained entry to elite colleges while their AP class heavy, sleep deprived and stressed out schooled peers did not.

What I want to say is that maybe what Newport doesn't know is that the schooled teens he picked out who did something alternative, are so similar to the stories of some unschooled and homeschooled students. As I read Newport's book I kept thinking, "This is not too different from stories I've heard John Taylor Gatto tell about his students in the 1980s" and "Gatto inspired homeschoolers to step outside the box and to do similar things and they did it and those who sought to also gained admissions to top colleges". Also, stories such as these have been discussed by John Holt and written about in the pages of Growing Without Schooling and Home Education Magazine.

Meanwhile with the inpsiration of Holt and Gatto, I have crafted my kid's preschool, elementary and middle school years to be something alternative and interesting, good and enriching yet not copying at all the way that school kids learn.

And I sit here, a homeschooling mother of a 9th and 6th grader feeling pressured to change what we do in order to make my kids look acceptable to college admission's officers by making them look like schooled kids. Some colleges have doubled down the requirements for admissions for homeschoolers, wanting even more than they require of schooled kids. If we jump through those hoops we have not time for "the good stuff" or "the alternative stuff". With the nose in the boring textbook and memorizing vocabulary words there is no time left to watch an interesting documentary or to go to the Holocaust Museum, let alone time to build a robot one designs oneself.

So it was a surreal feeling to read Newport's revelations about how to get school kids into college by doing stuff JUST LIKE RADICAL UNSCHOOLED KIDS DO. Especially shocking was seeing that the teens were doing "adult things" in their teen years JUST LIKE THE RADICAL UNSCHOOLED KIDS DO.

I was thinking about the lectures and panel discussions that I've attended at homeschool conferences. The ones where a parent or young adult tells how they had an alternative education and did get into a great college and were able to study what they wanted. They say that eventually they did buckle down and do the regular college traditional work after years of not being forced to parrot facts and not using flashcards and not doing everything else the schooled kids have been pushed to do since elementary school. (The stuff that some homeschooling parents worry will kill the joy of learning and leads some kids to hate school and to hate learning when actually schooling and learning are two different things altogether.)

The message at the conferences has been "be brave" and "follow your heart" and "maybe they never wrote an essay until age 16 but they did X, Y, and Z great cool things that they learned stuff from" and "it seemed they played too much with LEGOs and video games but they turned out smart and wonderful".

Well, when I finished "How to Be a High School Superstar" I was completely confused and my head was spinning. I actually started feeling that way half-way through the book and put it down for a couple of months while I thought about all of it, then I returned to the book to finish it up.

One thing I should mention is my opinion was, although it was not directly stated by Newport, was this:

It seemed to me that the kids who slowed down their academic classes in order to make time for a project and to keep their sanity and to get enough sleep had already had a solid foundation in The Three R's and already had solid study skills and a general competency to do "school learning" with success. Thus when they pulled back on doing high level academic courses and did other great stuff with their time which developed them into someone who their typically schooled peers could never be as they were never allowed to spend their time doing things like networking with adults in the business field or putting time to writing their own software or writing a book.

So, the take-away for me, a homeschool mom, was that if there are any gaps in skills when homeschool high school starts, skills that will be needed for one's future plans (which may include college) then it would not be alright to slack back and not address those in order to undertake some big project. My opinion is that any gaps in skills that are present should be dealt with as those skills will be needed in the future. I refer to writing composition, math and other things such that are necessary for taking the SAT and filling out one's own college application.

I also feel that the core subjects should be studied that are required for college admissions and so that whatever is on the transcript is not a fraudulent made up bunch of lies. If college is not in your child's goals then do whatever you want (to keep within your state's law) and revel in your freedom of choice!

I would like to see that a homeschooled student knows who they are and what their passion is and that they take the time to do interesting and enriching things they want to do in order to fulfill their curiosity and act as a true autodidact in their field of interest. I say field of interest because there is just not enough time in the day to study every single subject deeply and let's be honest, we all have different interests and there are some things we not just dislike but loathe. Not everything can or should be studied a mile deep before age 18. Must I mention the obvious fact that learning should be a lifelong pursuit and that even with learning something new every day of one's life you will never learn everything? There is just so much that can be studied and learned!

For me, Newport's book brought me back on track thinking that our family's original home education vision was good and right. I was not crazy to do something so out of the box. I had been led to believe that high school was time to abandon all that in order to do some kind of school at home to satisfy college admission's officers desires for my kids to look like the cookie cutters (that they say they don't want but really they set it up that they have to be). The two things were extreme and at polar opposites.

At this moment in time I have arrived at a more middle of the road position. I am back to supporting alternative projects even if they take a lot of time. We are addressing skills gaps. I am going to begin working with my ninth grader teaching different study skills and finding which he feels works most efficiently for him, using the book Study Smarter, Not Harder. And a broad typical curriculum is being studied that checks off the base requirements while also allowing for some customized learning in non-traditional ways (such as his fine art class in the history of comic books, comic art, and graphic novel storytelling and his literature class focusing on dystopian literature).




I'm back to feeling confident again. It is hard to do an alternative thing, it's risky and sometimes it is scary. On different days I feel different things: confident, worried, fearful, happy, brave, or uncertain. While the good feeling is with me I'm happy to embrace it.

P.S. My opinion is that the teens in the Newport book who did those projects which were borne from within themselves, did them because they had an internal drive, and they were improved by their actions by learning new things and becoming diffrent people in the process.

I do not have as much confidence in the teens who take that path as part of following the formula that Newport has laid out after they read his book. Anyone seeking to get admission to an elite college by taking on a project just because someone said doing that worked for other people, I think, is taking a big risk.

The projects that the others worked on were labors of love that their hearts, souls and minds were in alignment to do. Anyone going through the motions just because someone says it may be an easy ticket to get into a top tier college is, well, a faker. Such projects could wind up being transcript padders which would then undermine everyone else who really is doing different and productive things out of a true desire to do them.

Thus, college admissions officers will have to find more ways to figure out whether the applicants are authentic kids or posers. That's their job. I think the interview process is important and I wish all colleges did interviewing at some level of the application process because I think it's easier to sniff out the fakers in a face to face discussion than trying to determine it by reading lists and scores and essays on paper.

Since I feel I'm raising my kids to be authentic people I am telling myself that at college admissions time, their true nature will shine through on their transcript, in their essays, and in their interviews.

I have already seen this to be true in my kid's interactions with adults in the community such as with sport coaches and Boy Scout leaders and with parents of kids they interact with. Anyone who knows my kids can see they are unique and genuine people who know things and can communicate well and who have good character traits and are more often than not well behaved people that others want to be around. (They are imperfect humans who also display typical human traits and make mistakes, trust me. I mention that in case you mistakenly think I think my kids are perfect angels: they are not. They are human just like you and me.)