A little bit of a ramble, and some useful links.

I think maybe, since homeschooling is, in fact, a hot mess right now, some newer homeschoolers might like a look at what this household is up to. Some homeschoolers might look at what I’m doing and shake their heads and silently walk away, perhaps throwing some paper flowers made of standardized tests on the casket of their hopes for instruction on “success” as they walk by. To each his own. While we are heavy on intellectual development here, we’re not traditional about it. People who seriously want their kids to be schooled will need to look elsewhere. We’re not quite unschoolers, but we’re not much interested in jumping through the hoops to prove ourselves, either.

There are more impressive people to follow. Believe me, I know. Not a single one of my kids has finished a course in Latin yet. A lot of new homeschoolers probably need permission to be ordinary, so I’m going to give out some permission slips for that today, free of charge.

When we first started out–lo, these 17 years ago!–we tried a lot of different approaches. We started out with Sonlight (just boring), then tried Tapestry of Grace for a year (too expensive, a little bit textbookish), and then I discovered Charlotte Mason through a blog by the late Wendi Capehart. While I wouldn’t consider myself the purest CM adherent, I do like the way of thinking about children, habits, and the living books approach. This method also appreciates that education consists of all kinds of work and play, all day long, and is not just about academics.

We really have been a hot mess, if you look at the whole timeline of Hillside Christian Academy. I’ve gone from Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons in the early days to McGuffey’s Readers now. While I vastly prefer the latter, the former did get my older kids reading, so I can’t really say I’m sorry. One of the hardest things for me as a mom of a wide range of ages is wishing I could go back and try a different approach with my older kids, just to see if they would have done better. Honestly, I don’t think it mattered which way I did it. Each child has needed different things, and we’ve adapted everything as we went along anyway.

When I finally found Ambleside Online, it clicked for me, but I’ve still changed all sorts of things as I found it didn’t suit us. We started out all wrong. Sonlight is absolutely fine! So is Tapestry of Grace! But not for us.

You’re going to choose a lot of suboptimal things (for you) at first, too, newbies, and that’s fine! Your kids will survive that. Do go out into the homeschooling community, whether online or IRL, and find somebody who has done this for a while–several somebodies–and see what they’re doing. But don’t get too attached, because they are not you. Their kids are not your kids. Their approach will not fit you perfectly. If inexperience is a disadvantage, it is also an advantage! People who have no idea what they’re doing often discover something nobody else ever would have considered, and that discovery is the thing that makes them successful in their own way!

So shake off your nerves–you don’t have anything to prove to anybody--and just start doing something. You’ll figure it out as you go, the same way I did.

If you’re thinking of using a Charlotte Mason approach, the first thing to do is read a living book about it! You can, of course, read Charlotte Mason herself, but I’ve found Laying Down the Rails, By Sonya Shafer, to be quicker for getting up to speed, especially establishing the habits that you’ll need to lay down, even if you’re not going full CM. If you don’t want to read a book, you can certainly go buy a pre-rolled curriculum, and there is nothing wrong with that, either. I’m am completely ecumenical about schooling styles. This might not work for you at all.

Here at the GAHousehold, our core curriculum has been drawn from Ambleside Online, but I substitute a lot of our own books, especially in the upper grades. For instance, I have yet to get a girl to like the book Robinson Crusoe, so even though it doesn’t quite fit the rest of the plan, I’m switching that book to something less repulsive to a nine year old girl.

I have a couple of children reading in the Civil War era this year. I learned with the first three kids (who have graduated now) that AO is lopsidely, maddeningly Yankee-centric. It is also fairly England-centric in the early years. I actually like that. But they’ve changed a bit over the years to make it a little more rounded, and it’s hardly noticeable at this point. I’ve added Lincoln Reconsidered and a few biographies of great Southern men, because the Narrative I want my kids to have wouldn’t be complete without those other points of view.

If you’re new to homeschooling, or AO, there’s no harm in going with the plan as written. But one thing homeschoolers are going to do, God bless us, is go off-plan. I’m just showing you a few of the ways I have done so. You don’t have to follow along.

AO doesn’t provide everything I need, of course. I’ve decided to kick traditional math texts to the curb after years of Saxon and Math-u-See, because all of my kids, even though they’re good at math (all but that one, anyway), hate math. That’s just not cool. So we’re doing Life of Fred exclusively this year, and quite looking forward to seeing how that goes. We’ve had the books on our shelves, but somehow never incorporated them. It might be great. Might be the worst idea I’ve ever had. I’ll definitely update you on that.

I’m getting back out a Latin curriculum for this year, and we’ll see if anybody of the right age likes it at all. If not, I’ll put it away again until the two youngest are old enough to try. We have a language requirement every year, and my second born is quite the linguist! I think he’s up to six languages he reads and understands now, though he has nobody to converse with. But he still didn’t want to do Latin. That’s where the un part of my schooling comes in. I don’t make people finish things they hate, nor are there any subjects so important that I won’t find a different way to fulfill the requirement if things aren’t looking good after a few months.

I have a lot of resources to talk about in a further post, and I hope you’ll have questions to drop on me, either in the comments here, or by email. Happy homeschooling, friends! It’s almost time to get started!

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Who doesn’t love a hot mess?

I recently stumbled across a substack post by someone I assume supports homeschooling called “Homeschooling is a Hot Mess”. Possibly to my detriment, I didn’t read much of it, nor am I conscientious enough go back and find out if my impressions of where it was going are fair or accurate. It probably went far better than I expected it to. No shade on the writer at all, I was just really busy that day, and now I’m on to something different. What that post did, though, was spur this sorry blogger on to consider a presumably different topic I’ve touched on over the years. I thought I’d piggyback on just the title, since it was such a banger.

Is homeschooling a hot mess? Are we failing before we even get started?

Our family held a graduation ceremony and party for our third-born child last weekend. It was a nice to-do (though I wish I’d done better with the brisket), and now I only have five students left. Having three more-or-less mature people to show for my efforts, and having hung out with many other homeschooling families these seventeen years or so, including the newest crop of public school refugees, I guess I’m at least somewhat qualified to talk about homeschooling’s current condition.

In an older post, Permission to Be Ordinary, I made a prediction:

The first generation of homeschoolers was almost certainly an unusual group of people. It seems to me that they required a unique set of characteristics–qualities that usually go hand-in-hand with high intelligence and academic achievement–to be able to boost the homeschooling movement from the gravitational pull  of traditional education. That first generation had, at the very least, enough imagination to dream it up, confidence to follow through, ingenuity to figure out how, resourcefulness to keep it going under pressure, and courage to fight the courts and social stigma.

As homeschooling becomes more mainstream, though, we are going to see some regression to the mean (though I doubt that we could ever regress to the abysmal performance of public schools). Because homeschooling really is a viable and superior alternative, and for reasons that have little to do with math, more and more parents who would never have considered such a thing before are going to jump on the bandwagon.

Those stellar statistics are going to level out, homeschoolers.  At some point, our neighbors are probably going to notice that some of us are pretty awful at math and science, and most of our children are going to trade schools or straight to the workforce instead of to Harvard. For that reason, it would be good if we kept our debating skills sharp, so that we can explain why homeschooling is well within our rights, regardless of our outcomes. If our best defense of home education is that other homeschoolers are really smart, we are sunk, because most of us are going to be graduating children who become ordinary people.

If you hadn’t heard it before, “regression to the mean” is a term (though I’m being flexible in my use of it) meaning that we can expect extraordinary data to smooth out as the thing that made them extraordinary mingles with the ordinary. What can’t last, won’t. Initial measurements contain different and fewer data points than later ones.

Early homeschoolers have less in common with later homeschoolers than later homeschoolers do with the public school population from which they are drawn.  

We will regress to our mean. I stand by that prediction. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening yet. Right now, most homeschoolers are not even homeschoolers. They’re public schoolers brought home. This is not where we’re going to settle. Right now I think what we see is more like a tidal wave sucking the water from a shore before crashing back in, or a pendulum swinging. Whatever metaphor you like best, what we’re seeing right now–everybody trying different things, infighting, chaos inside and out, and some parents doing a very poor job while others are crushing all expectations–is, indeed, a hot mess. It’s a mess caused by a whole bunch of new people jumping in to something they’ve yet to understand. They panicked. That is completely understandable, and now they are completely unprepared.

This was bound to happen, as people began to finally discover that public education is every bit as bad as the first generation of homeschoolers said it was. The pendulum is still swinging, or the tide is going to come back and cause some devastation, or the dust is going to take some time to settle, choking us for a while. Please forgive all my conflicting metaphors. My point is that we can’t really judge the thing right now. People need time to figure things out.

Whatever they do, they cannot do worse in the aggregate–individual results notwithstanding–than the public schools have.

Our nation has done a very bad job with its children for a very long time. There is no way to straighten this mess out without bringing it home first. Just let it be what it is and stop worrying. Homeschooling will have results and methods as widely varied as the families themselves are. We will not turn out a uniform product. We have no assembly line or precise formula. We’re turning out souls, not cogs. As in my previous posts on the subject, I call on homeschoolers to defend, not the process of homeschooling, nor their preferred method, nor their results, but the right and duty of parents to raise their children free of interference by the competing, coercive system of secular education.

God has ordained each parent to do this. We can do this.

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