I Will Now Take Your Questions

I was feeling badly for you guys.  Really - I totally was.  Because tonight?  I was going to write a very unprofessional yet highly spirited (!) review of the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I'm With You.  It was going to be so very good and awesome and totally uninteresting to 99.9% of my peeps. But I'm going to have to hold off on that because a reader left me an incredibly heart-felt and detailed comment with many questions regarding my last post about homeschooling and so I'm going to be hitting on that, instead.  But the Chili Pepper review is coming and c'mon...you know you're gonna read it.  You read my erotica critique, after all.  Don't deny it.  House of Holes in is in your Kindles.

OK.  So my reader has a blog and I checked it out and she has a couple of adorable kiddos she's considering homeschooling.  And can I just say, Dear Reader Considering Homeschooling, that we have the exact same picture of not quite exactly the same kid with the hair done up in the tub like a narwhal or a unicorn?  Made me chuckle.

So, the reader had this to say (and I'm going to interject my comments and answers in italics):

I'm strongly considering homeschooling my kiddos due to the deplorable state of the public schools in this city (some of the worst in the nation) and the high cost of private ones.

Many (most) people strongly consider homeschooling for the same reason or some similar and very specific reason. There is A Reason...mine was a child with learning disabilities....that serves as a catalyst for this monumental decision.  What I have found (and don't let this discourage you) is that The Reason, at some point, ceases to become "enough" if the lifestyle of homeschooling is one that is at odds with the family's structure.  Basically, what I'm saying is that tons of people choose to homeschool for This Reason or That Reason and then a year later you run into them and their kids are in school and it turned out to not be so horrible after all....because homeschooling, for them and their expectations, Just Plain Sucked.  So - good reasons you have there - but unlikely to sustain a long-haul experience in homeschooling unless, at some point, you find yourselves doing it because you love it and would do it even if good schools were available.  It has to become a lifestyle you cherish or you can't keep it up. That's what happened for us.  Obviously, not all of my kids are learning disabled - yet they are all homeschooled (except for the one currently in college).

My main misgiving isn't that my kids would turn into those *weird home schooled kids* or anything like that.
Good! Because I'd really hate to go all judgemental on your ass - but ahem - it would be hard because I'm pretty sure I worried about my kids becoming weird homeschooled kids at one time or another when I was agonizing over this decision myself so....yeah.  All I can say is this:  Good for you for not worrying about it....we know some spectacularly awesome and brilliant and smart and sweet and kind and incredibly loyal weird homeschooled kids.  I love them and their quirky selves to bits.  Also?  I have as Asperger's kid who might very well qualify for this....and Jasper definitely seems to be headed in the weird direction.  But I do know how the stereotypes and That Family You Saw At The Park That One Time can send chills through your body when you consider your own children forced into wearing tube socks and jogging shorts with polo shirts tucked in...oh and the tube socks are worn beneath sandals, by the way...while talking about Star Wars for twenty-nine billion consecutive hours.  I GET IT.  But - those kids are being themselves.  They are grateful for the opportunity to do so - they will accept your kids and their possible quirks without the slightest hesitation - and they will probably grow up to invent something quite amazing that you might be able to ride at Disneyland or watch in the movie theater or use to control the environment of your eco-bubble. Also?  There are weird kids in school.  They were there when I was in school - and they're there now.  Often they're bullied and humiliated and depressed instead of doing all the awesome things they would be doing if they were homeschooled and not bullied and humiliated and depressed.  Alnd?  You can make your kids be cool with Peer Pressure.  That's how we do it over here. Of course, in order for this to succeed, you yourself....must be cool.

There are a lot of social options for home schoolers around here.
Yay!  There are around here, too.  Our house is as full of cheap and meaningless trophies and ribbons as anyone elses. All the museums and nature centers and art places and dance and music schools offer homeschool classes.  There are homeschool groups out the wazoo and they are all taking field trips (I HATE FIELD TRIPS but a lot of folks enjoy them) and performing musicals and other such nonsense and forming co-ops and there is absolutely no reasons for homeschoolers to sit around at home unless they want to.

I'm mostly concerned they wouldn't respect me/listen to me like they would *a teacher.*
Talk to a teacher and ask them how much respect they're getting in their classrooms.  Also?  When I talk like a teacher to my kids they don't tend to listen to me for very long because I become boring and I begin to spoon feed them information they do not find relevant or are not interested in.  I know this happens because I am driven to do it several times a year for reasons I do not understand but am pretty sure have something to do with a past life as a one-room school teacher.  In fact, Laura Ingalls was in my class and my name was Miss Beadle. I have strong urges to ring bells on church porches and to whack kids across the knuckles with rulers.  Most of the time I can resist my urges, but sometimes I cave and put on my homespun dress. 

I'm already noticing this attitude from my toddler.
Did you say toddler?  That means she's developmentally RIGHT ON.  Good for her!  The more egocentric she is at this age, the more capable an adult she will be.  The smart ones look out for Numero Uno - it's encoded into their survival DNA. They will continue learning how to advocate for themselves and devise ways in which to meet their needs unless this instinct is effectively stamped out by well-meaning adults....who will then later complain that kids don't know how to be independent.

She knows what makes me tick. She knows which buttons to push to drive me insane.
I knew it!  She's a smart one.  Good for you - you should be quite proud!

She knows that she can ignore me or be mean to me and I will still love her. 19 months old, and she knows this already.
This warms my heart.  She has a good mama.  Do not fret about this, my friend.

I have a feeling we would get into far more "battles" on a day to day basis than she would with an outsider.
Now I feel we might be getting into parenting issues rather than educational ones - and here's my revelation that we practice Attachment Parenting and subscribe to Unconditional Parenting.  *Read Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn for more info.*  But, that aside - you are absolutely right.  Your child will and should have more battles with you than an outsider.  If a child trusts an outsider with her emotions as much as she does a parent - there is a severe disconnect.  You don't want to have the same level of trust and intimacy with your child as a stranger would.  This means, a child is going to trust you enough to argue with you, to make her demands known, and to become extremely upset when her efforts as communication fail and she doesn't get her way or doesn't understand your reasoning. (Until the Age of Reason has been reached - Parenting is Pretty Much Hell unless you accept the fact that you're dealing with a tiny person who meets all the clinical requirements of Actual Insanity and adjust your expectations.)  The battles can be quite trying and stressful depending on the nature of the child and your relationship, and honestly, if it is too difficult - the break that school provides is welcomed by most parents and rarely results in the Actual Ruin of the Child.

My mom taught me the violin for 16 years of my life. I hated/loathed/etc. playing the violin. I learned in spite of that and became quite good at it too, but I didn't develop a passion for it, mostly because I felt like my mom forced it upon me all those years.

I'm truly sorry this happened to you - not uncommon for parents to wish certain things for their children thinking they have their best interests at heart - only to discover they didn't know what their best interests were.  We do not force our children to do anything.  Force doesn't play into our relationships at all - unless we're talking safety (they must wear seat belts, etc) and they are generally cooperative because they have so much control over their lives in other areas.  My daughter plays piano - she debuted with a major metropolitan symphony as a concert soloist at the age of 16 and is now studying Piano Performance in music school.  She had her first lesson at 11 - loved it - and we've invested much time and effort and $$$ into this pursuit of hers.  And just recently, when she was joyfully complaining about how much work it all is, I told her again..."You're not a prisoner of your talent.  Walk away at any given time and nobody here will blink an eye.  You have ONE LIFE."  She knows this - but I still like to remind her that she's in charge of her life - the last thing in the world she needs to consider when deciding what to do with it is whether or not she will disappoint someone else, who has their own life to worry about.

I'm intrigued by unschooling. It seems very logical to let a child drive his/her own learning in order to prevent the dying of passion. Similar to the Montessori method in that it allows a kid to just become fully immersed in a topic and direct his/her own learning without the distractions of the traditional schooling environment. Love that thought. On the other hand, what do you do when the kid shows absolutely NO desire to learn a particular topic that's super important to know in order to function in society?
I want to be frustrated by this question but again - it was one that I had - and one that I felt was never adequately explained to me.  I once said to an adamant unschooler (before I homeschooled) - "But they can't learn calculus from gardening or cooking experiences!"  To which she replied, "Most people don't need to know calculus."  She was right, of course, but I remained unconvinced. 

However, now that I can look at this from the other end of the rainbow - I can see just how ridiculous it was to worry about if they'd learn what they needed to learn.  We all learn what we need to learn.  If there's a particular topic that is super important to know in order to function in society - we learn it.  Maybe we don't learn it in 1st or 3rd grade....but eventually, we learn it.  Back to calculus - my oldest daughter took it.  She didn't need to know calculus in order to play the piano....so you might be wondering how it made it on the list of Things Super Important to Know.  Well, she needed to go to college or conservatory, and we knew this, and so we checked to see what was required by the colleges to which she might want to attain entrance.  There were a lot of things on their lists that my daughter then studied in order to gain admittance to the colleges - because she saw a reason for it. In fact - she was accepted into some very good schools because of her coursework and her SAT scores.

My 16-year-old just registered for an online distance learning biology course, he's taking algebra, and although he's unlikely to NEED these things in order to write storyboard animation scripts (what he plans to do with his life), he WILL need them if he decides college is in his future - a possibility he has not completely ruled out.  Again - he sees the need for this. Now my 7-year-old?  Doesn't see the necessity of knowing anything other than really long complicated dinosaur names.  At some point, I'm quite certain, that will change and he'll learn the things that are necessary for his particular life plan.  With the exception of the 12-year-window known as formalized education - that is how and why we all learn things.
 
I was a writing tutor in college and it was mind-boggling how many college students didn't know how to follow basic grammar rules. Their sentences were a mess to the point where I felt like I had to hire an interpreter to understand them sometimes.
And had these other college students been homeschooled?  If not - it's obvious that having been enrolled in institutionalized learning environments didn't amount to success in this area.  As a writer, I feel your pain.  When I was in college (back in the day), I was also amazed by the lack of writing skills of my fellow students.  I continue to be amazed by the lack of writing skills of adults I interact with (oops!  I ended my sentence with a preposition!!!).  Anyway - another reason to homeschool!

I recall learning grammar through pure repetition/ritual back in gradeschool. The teacher *made* us do "easy grammar" worksheets where we had to underline the subjects, double underline the verbs, cross out the prepositional phrases, put the implied "you" in commands in parenthesis, etc. We even had to memorize the most common prepositions. "Busy work," yet so invaluable.
Here's the part where Real Radical Unschoolers call me a fraud.  Are you ready?  I freaking LOVE the Easy Grammar Systems curriculum.  We go through spurts where we actually do this stuff!  We have the Daily Grams (takes like 5 minutes) and my 9-year-old eats it up.  She goes through periods of whininess where she does not eat it up - and then we just don't do it.  But often she is quite happy to sit at the table for a few minutes doing these things. She can string a sentence together and is already ahead of 60% of the average incoming college Freshmen LOL.  (*I just typed LOL - shoot me now.)   Early Intervention is simply not necessary.  Let me give you a lovely little example.

We sometimes participate in a very loosely run and somewhat insane small family co-op.  I use Great Books Foundation to teach the teenagers how to think and how to write (the program requires them to record their thoughts in the form of essays).  I had a delightful unschooled 15-year-old boy who had never written a word in his life....(he's at Rice University now, having earned an impressive academic scholarship).  He read a lot (I've yet to meet unschooled kids who don't love to read) and he was good at organizing his thoughts.  There were, however, a few grammar issues.  "Galen," I said...(I just outed him on my blog, didn't I?)...."You should begin your sentences with a capital letter and you should end them with some form of punctuation."  

"Okay," he said.

And from there on out, he did.  The next grammar class he took was a college course.  I know!  You people are kicking yourselves now for all the hours spent trying to teach a 6-year-old who wasn't listening to you that he needed to start a sentence with a capital letter while wishing that someone was pulling your fingernails out with a rusty pair of pliers instead because it would have been so much more enjoyable!

My 16-year-old and my 13-year-old do NOT care for doing any kind of Easy Grammar work and they rarely, if ever, cooperate with me on this.  But recently my college kid said, "Hey, when did Jules learn to spell and use punctuation?  I noticed on facebook that he's like almost literate..."  And he is!  In fact, compared with his peers (many of them in school) he writes like Hemingway on the F-Book.  "Hey mom!" he called from the study.  "When do you use the too with two o's? I'm writing a status update!!"

"Double o's are used when the word means ALSO or in front of the word MUCH."

"Okay - thanks!"

The end.  Once we get down the concept that "there" and "they're" and "their" are not interchangeable - he's ready for the Big Leagues.

In short, I'm curious how you teach a kid to write properly if they show no interest or motivation in wanting to take on that goal themselves. Is there a point at which you just go "it's too bad you don't want to do this. You're doing it anyway" or do the child's whims reign supreme i.e. if they don't want to do it, you can't make them do it?
I do not say, "Too bad," to the 7-year-old - or even the 9-year-old.  And I don't even say it to the 16-year-old, preferring instead to be passive-aggressive and say things like, "Don't blame me when you're rotting in jail because you had to resort to ripping off liquor stores in order to provide for all of your illegitimate children...."  Like I said, with goals in mind - the kids simply WILL do the things they need to do in order to meet those goals.  They might not be doing it in elementary school - but by about the 7th grade - they have some loosely formed dreams and ambitions and it is super easy to get on the Internet and Google "What Kind of Education Does One Need to Become an Anthropologist?" and then devise a road map. 

In summary, I'd like to point out that, as a society, we only approach education as an All or Nothing on a Timeline for twelve years.  It is a hysterical 12-year-window and we've convinced ourselves that it shuts and then we're ruined for life if we didn't get through it in time when in fact, the average human lives to be what....80?  Don't you think that if everything we need to know about life and general subject matters could be compressed into twelves years it would be a very sad state of affairs?  The reality is: We learn new things and utilize that knowledge to better our own lives and the lives of others from the day we're born until the day we die.  The 12-year-window of opportunity can be completely ignored with the same (or better) results.

I liked answering these questions!  Should I do it regularly do you think?  Let's try it out occasionally.  If you have any questions pertaining to Unschooling, Attachment Parenting, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers - send them my way!  I will now take your questions.