Mommy Moment – 100th Post!

Note – this is a very long and very geeky post – my apologies in advance! It also makes it very apparent that I am OLD! Good thing I’ve got a youngster running around the house to keep me feeling young.

I noticed last week that I was about to hit my 100th post on this blog. I’ve been rolling around what I’ve wanted to say for about a week. I’ve postponed writing my regular posts while giving this one some thought. I’ve really enjoyed this blog and I’ve learned a tremendous amount over the past (almost) year. Part of the learning has just been through the experience of homeschooling, and the other has been through the interaction with the people who read the blog. I’d written blogs before, but I really didn’t expect this to be such an interactive experience for me.

I had two main goals when I started the blog. My first was to document our “experimental” homeschool year. The second was to keep our families informed about the things that we were working on at home. I got a lot more than I bargained for in every way. I have thoroughly enjoyed the homeschool experience; far more than I ever thought that I would. I think about all of those hours that I would have given up if I had sent Tornado Boy to pre-K five days a week. My best guess is that it would have taken away about 750 hours of time that we’ve spent together. That’s a LOT of time. Instead, we had so many rich, bonding experiences during that time. I probably learned just as much as he did, if not more.

I also gained a ton through interacting with my readers and the writers of other blogs. It has been such a valuable lesson for me. I’ve so enjoyed reading about the things that others have done with their children. I have so many ideas about things that I want to try and I feel like I have such a great resource available when I have questions about how to approach something. I really love that.

I also have put a tremendous amount of thought into education in general during this time. I’ve read a lot of books this year on the subject. The two most thought provoking were Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers isn’t directly about education, but it sure got me thinking about my own.

I’ve always enjoyed school and I was by most measures a very good student. We moved a lot when I was very young and I attended 8 different schools from Kindergarten through 12th grade. I was the perpetual “new kid” for the first 8 years of my educational experience. I’m pretty sure that my outgoing, adaptable nature is partially because of those experiences. I was finally entered into a gifted program in high school and given some acceleration opportunities – the best that my very rural high school could offer them. I had the opportunity to take concurrent college classes towards the end of high school but chose not to enroll because it would have taken up four time slots in my high school class schedule in order to take one college class because of the drive time. I don’t regret that because it allowed me to take some electives like typing (very helpful for a computer geek) and sociology – which later became my college major.

Outliers really got me thinking because Mr. Gladwell talks about how success is the culmination of access, insane amounts of practice in the chosen field (around 10,000 hours), and to some degree – chance. I thought about my own history with my major passion – computers. When I was young, PCs were extremely rare. My family never owned one when I lived at home. I babysat for a family that had one when I was in jr. high. I loved to go over and type in games from a basic programming magazine for their boys. When I was in 8th grade, my science teacher had one in the back room of his class. I loved to skip lunch or study hall to go in and tinker with it. In high school, there were 4 PCs, but they were limited to use by the “business” students – essentially the students who were going into the secretarial fields.

I got my next taste of computers in college. At that point in time – Information Systems was a class, not a major. I took word processing (WordPerfect) as part of my freshman English class. I did take one programming class in Pascal and I hated it – mostly due to the teacher. I swore that I would never be a programmer. I worked in the computer lab, though, and I loved that. I got to tinker with a Vax mainframe system, some PCs running DOS, and an early Apple computer that had a really fun little program called HyperCard which gave me a taste of what the WWW might be like in the future. I logged onto (Internet-like college network) BITNET during the late 80′s. I sent e-mail and chatted with people at other colleges. I did a research paper and oral report on what the impact of BITNET could be in the future during my senior year in a communications class. The majority of people in the class had never even heard of it. I installed my first internal modem – a “blazing” fast 1200 baud model – so that I could log into BITNET from my dorm room.

After graduation, I had very little access to computers until I bought my first PC – a Packard-Bell in 1993. I had access to CompuServe, Prodigy and then America Online (version 1.0) when I finally got Windows 3.1. I knew that the future was here and I really wished at the time that I had more than two nickels to rub together because I totally would have bought stock in AOL. I just knew that it would take off because it was so easy – as long as the $6/hr fee didn’t scare people off. AOL and then the explosion of the World Wide Web totally changed the job possibilities related to computers. In 1998 I returned to school to work on post-baccalaureate studies in Information Technology. It was a very long road to get there – but I finally entered the technical field for work in December of 1998 – to become – you guessed it – a programmer. I worked in IT for 8 years before having my son and I really loved it. I had finally found my niche.

So.. that’s a long story to circle back my thoughts on education and the concepts explained in Outliers. I never would have been a Bill Gates – but what if I had had real computer access and a mentor back in 1981 instead of 1998? 10,000 hours of experience would have cost me about an hour and a half per day. I would have loved to have spent it learning more about computers. Likely I would have an entirely different early career path. I also probably would have chosen a different college since mine was not at all known for their math or technical programs. That also means that I wouldn’t live where I do today. Who knows where life would have taken me?

Rather than crying over potentially spilled milk, I wonder what we can do for the future? How can we as a nation – as public schools, private schools and homeschools – truly diversify education and allow kids to really explore their true passions and interests? How can we meet the needs of the individual and allow them to soar? Can we design a system that will get past the basics and onto producing creative, passionate students of the world? Higher education, also, is so ripe for change. The tuition costs are staggering as it is. Add in room and board and you create a larger gap between the “haves” and “have nots” in our country. Something has got to give. It might be year-round, three year Bachelor degrees, it might be living at home and tele-commuting to class. It may be more specialized, trade-type schools. It may be something totally different, but I really think that the system must change if we are going to be able to continue to educate our children.

I have no idea what Tornado Boy’s passions in life may be, but I sure do hope that I can help him find the right combination of access and mentors to help him to explore it to the fullest, no matter what version of “school” he ends up in. I really, really hope that we can expand our schools to really give our children great life skills, individualized curriculums and opportunities to prepare them for a bright future.