I’ve found two articles this morning that I think are well worth sharing.

1. So Smart It Hurts – An article about gifted education in Minnesota, but more than applicable to most areas in the U.S.

2. Brilliant speech about the state of American schooling by a valedictorian.

Happy Reading!

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

His original 2006 talk on education and creativity:

..and his recent follow-up on a learning revolution:

You can find more TED talks here.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

I feel like I need to share a little background given my last post. I really am not anti-school. If anything, I have a history of being less than supportive of homeshooling. Boy, have I learned my lesson! Our personal experience was this – we put Tornado Boy into “Mom’s Morning Out” one day a week when he turned 2 1/2. We chose to send him that early because he is an only child and we wanted to make sure that he had time to learn to deal with other children. We really weren’t too worried about the socializing aspect since he is a very outgoing child, but we wanted him to learn to deal with structure and to share, etc. We only left him there for a few months. The program utilized a carpool line. They can be fabulous if you’re dealing with other young siblings. For us, it was a drawback. I felt like I never got face time with his teacher and I really had no idea how he was doing in the program. His teacher also changed part way though the “semester” without warning. That was enough for me to want to move him.

The second school that we selected was much more formal. It was well-known and highly regarded. I really liked the first room as the co-teacher in his room really took to him. She always was with him when I picked him up from his half-day. I got good feedback and she was responsive to anything that I had concerns about. He learned his colors late compared to his peers. I wondered if he might be color-blind and mentioned this. Within two weeks, he knew his colors. Tornado Boy moved up to the next class and definitely presented more of a challenge to those teachers. His inability to sit still was definitely more of a problem in the next room, and I certainly understood their frustration as I dealt with it much more than they did. I wondered how well they really knew him when he received a “sometimes” score on his report in the section for “understands the correspondence between written and spoken word”. I had never mentioned that he had been reading for about six months at that point. Clearly, they hadn’t figured it out.

Tornado Boy changed classrooms again in a few months. The new teacher was really excited to have him in her class. She had seen me in the hall with him one day and saw that he was reading the signs. I was really excited that she was excited. During the summer, the school is in “play” mode, which is fine. We had asked the school to see their Kindergarten curriculum since they have a private K class and we were considering sending TB there since it was center-based rather than desk based. When we looked at the curriculum, we realized that at barely 4-years-old, TB already had covered nearly the entire program with the exception of writing skills. The school itself didn’t have a strong writing program – they were just tracing. They were also not going to put TB into their pre-K program because of his summer birthday. When I talked to his teacher, she told me that “they couldn’t support him academically this year.” My thought was “then why am I paying you?”

We were at somewhat of an impasse. We looked at several other area preschools. None of them thrilled us. We really liked the local Montessori school that went up through 8th grade. We toured and applied. I loved that the young children were already working on writing skills and that reading was part of the mixed-age classroom. The location was not convenient, and I wasn’t thrilled that the program was 5-days a week. It was a lot of money. We still felt like the hands on work would be a good fit for Tornado Boy. I was struck by two things when I toured – the classes were large – 25 3-5 year olds, and darn, it was pretty quiet in there. I loved their math manipulatives. We were hopeful. After weeks of back and forth, we were told that while TB was more than ready academically, they could not handle his activity level and lack of listening skills. They put him “on hold”. Back to square one.

Our hope had always been to hold Tornado Boy until 6 for Kindergarten. My husband and I both graduated from high school at 17, so we knew what that experience was like. TB is also short in stature. Everything that I’ve read about Kindergarten readiness indicated that willingness to follow directions was far more important than academic skills. We were clearly in a real bind. Tornado Dad suggested that we give homeschooling a try. My jaw hit the ground. I think it stayed there for about three days. At that point, I started doing serious research into homeschooling. How did it work? Could it work for us? We went ahead and pulled TB out of preschool in order to give homeschooling a ‘dry run’ of sorts while he was 4 years old. I was none-too-sure that I’d have the patience for it. Much to my surprise, it’s been a fabulous experience. TB has really enjoyed it and never looked back when we pulled him out of preschool.

I decided to closely watch the experience of other moms who had kids with TB’s activity level and advance learning tendencies who went to public school this year. No one really had both, but I learned enough to know that homeschooling is the right answer for us – for now. I’m not sure how long we’ll do it for. I’d still like to think that the Montessori school might work – but I’m not sure he’ll ever have the self-control that they require. We’ve also looked at a few private schools – a lot are out of range price-wise. One very small one for gifted kids seems like a possible fit. They’re interested in him, but I’m just not ready to put him into a situation where he immediately becomes the “problem child” and is ostracized. He’s such a happy kid and it would just break my heart if he hated school because he really loves to learn. I really don’t want to face having to undo such damage.

So, we head into homeschooling one year at a time. We’ll do Kindergarten and re-evaluate next spring. I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to pull it off academically, or financially, but I am committed to doing the best that I can for my son.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

This weekend, I heard a quote regarding my son – “They have a real PROBLEM because they’ve got a 4-year-old 1st grader who is going into 4th grade.” Ouch, that stings. First, my son is not a problem to be solved. Second, if my son was gifted in sports, the arts or music, he would be lauded for those talents. Instead, we have a “problem”. Thankfully, this “problem” has loving parents who are willing to give homeschooling a shot. It gives us the ultimate freedom to teach (or facilitate) subjects as my son has the desire to learn them. No government body can tell me that he’s not ready to learn about the human body or other topics yet simply because his chronological age is 4.

I know that I am wading through somewhat uncharted territory. I realize that not everything that I try will work. However, I am going to do my darndest to foster everything that I can in my son. My job is to help him learn, grow and to believe in himself; to explore the avenues that he is interested in, and to guide his growth as a human being. I want to be his greatest mentor and guide. I want him to love his God-given talents – any of them, no matter how our society tends to treat them. Hopefully I can help him grow the confidence to take pride and say “this is who I am” – no matter what others think.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.

©2012 One Little Room.... All Rights Reserved.