How it's going now.

Somehow, discussions of our children's post secondary education often end with the admission process. I'm trying to pay more attention this time to how things are going post admission. The short answer as we near the end of the second semester: Very well indeed.

Tim's entrance into post secondary took some time to work out well. His first semester three years ago at college was challenging and he chose not to continue in that program. To be accepted into the faculty he wanted to study in, he completed upgrading classes at NAIT, not because he did not know the material but because he had to be able to prove to the admissions office that he knew it, and that proof had to come in a form that they understood. We were told that we had abandoned our values as traditional home educators by having him take these courses, that we had had a chance to be trailblazers and had instead bowed to the powers that be. In reality, we had investigated every possibility and chose the path that would give our son the best opportunity to use his unique gifts.

Interestingly, he has definitely been the trailblazer and the positive representative of a home educated student. His professors comment to him about his knowledge. They read books he has recommended to him! One has said that Tim is the smartest person he has ever taught. His calculus professor is creating a summer research position with Tim in mind. All of these teachers know that Tim was home educated, and give credit for his skills and talents as a student to his innate abilities. (Much of that development was independent: Tim invented his own method of multiplying in grade 2. He thinks about math concepts and numbers in a way that I admire and do not remotely understand.)

We began the journey in faith that our children would be equipped by home education to find a unique individual place in the world. Tim, and his siblings, have proved our faith warranted. We are delighted to have been able to be part of the process that put him where he is right now, and we're excited to watch where the next three years will lead him.

Why doesn't everyone...

I had an interesting visit with a home educating mom last week. Her son attended school until part way through grade 5, when she brought him home and started him on a very structured DVD based program plan. He’s had a great year this year, starting in September on grade 6 curriculum after spending all summer catching up on grade 5. He will finish early and with good grades. He has learned so much this year, and beyond that, he has learned how to learn.

His mom had tears in her eyes as she described the change in his attitude about himself. He now knows he is smart. He can tell when he’s losing focus. He has learned how to read for meaning and how to tell what the main idea is. His penmanship has even improved!

Then his mom asked me the question I often hear when parents have seen remarkable success from a particular program: “Why doesn’t everyone use this?” It’s a reasonable question. Answering it made me think about the ways we structure learning and how different thought patterns almost demand different programs.

Her child is not an organized thinker. His main problem in the classroom was his distractability. He doesn’t see the connections between things unless they are pointed out. Once he has the framework for his learning, whether that would be an outline or a set of questions to answer or a series of visual cues in his text like bolded vocabulary words or names, then he can use that to learn and remember the information presented.

Other children find that structure limiting and confining. They are good at making their own connections. The connections they find on their own resonate with them and do far more to help them remember the facts than any text or teacher supplied ones could. Maybe it’s a fascination with maps that leads to a real sense of history, or a knowledge of scientific discoveries that links into history study, but because these children have their own network of connected knowledge the tightly structured course frustrates and limits their learning.

I think it’s the difference between packing ideas into boxes (metaphorically speaking) and tying them to a web. One child goes to an encyclopedia and looks up the fact that he was sent for. Another flips through the rest of the book (once upon a time encyclopedias were books) and learns twelve other things while he’s at it. One learns the lesson of the curriculum and may learn it very, very well. The other is learning to group and relate ideas outside the context provided. He may never learn the capitals of all the provinces, but he may learn which provinces have bears. Which is better? That depends on your child, your goals. Neither is bad, and neither works for everyone.

From the Kitchen Table to the Classroom-Part 2

(This is the second half of our daughter's thoughts about her college and university exerience.)

After my first semester at Macewan I began working at the Mustard Seed. During my employment there I realized that the problems facing the inner city population were more than psychological issues and that psychology was an incomplete perspective for dealing with systemic social issues. A colleague recommended I consider Social Work. I looked into the diploma program at MacEwan, but realized that with another 30 credits I could apply directly for the Bachelors of Social Work (BSW) through the University of Calgary’s Edmonton division campus. I completed the requirements for admission and was accepted into the program Fall of 2007.

I completed the program this spring. The faculty of Social Work was the perfect fit for me. The graduating class from the Edmonton Division was just over 40 people. The instructors not only knew me by name, but got to know me as a person and provided informal mentorship to me. I learn best when I am actively engaged in the topic and the process and the University of Calgary provided an atmosphere that I thrived in.

I did my Senior Practicum with the City of Edmonton and it lead to full time employment with them. I am working as a counselor and group facilitator. I enjoy and am fulfilled with the work I do and plan to return to school for a Masters of Social Work in the fall of 2011.

Home education prepared me for success. Throughout university my reading and comprehension abilities were my greatest asset. My mom always encouraged reading and approached it in a way that made it fun and rewarding. Home education taught me to enjoy learning and to seek the acquisition of knowledge. I still love learning and it enriches my life and improves my practice as a Social Worker.

Unfortunately, there are also limitations to home education. I always wanted to pursue an arts degree, but had I wanted to pursue a science degree my path would have been more difficult and I would have likely had to earn high school science credits before being considered for admission into a science faculty. In my pursuit of an arts degree I attended 4 universities. This was time consuming and costly. My tuition at Taylor was nearly twice the amount as a public institution, I had to pay application fees 4 times, applying to the University of Calgary was complicated by the fact that I had transcripts from 3 different universities, and I had to prove myself every step of the way. I took 6 years to complete a degree that usually only takes 4. This was due in part to the complications of not having a diploma, but I also allowed myself time to work while in school which provided me the necessary work experience to apply for Social Work.

One last thing: Even though I had many rich and close relationships and countless interactions with a variety of people during my time in university, the first and often only question I would be asked when people learned I was home educated from k-12 was always, “but what about socialization?” often followed by, “but you don’t seem home schooled” (despite that fact that most of them had never met someone who was home educated other than me). I think that question will probably haunt me (and all other home educated people) the rest of my life!

Thanks for reading about my experience.

Today I'm sharing with you the first part of my daughter's reflection on her education. More to follow!

From the Kitchen Table to the Classroom

When I completed my course of home education I knew I wanted to continue on with post-secondary, but since I had taken the non-diploma route I was unsure how to do this. I knew the publicly funded universities had no policies to accept individuals without a diploma so together my mom (Kathy Put) and I approached Taylor University College (which has since closed). They had an informal process for accepting home educated students and after submitting writing samples and a transcript of my grades I was accepted into the Bachelors of Arts in Psychology program.

I found the transition to post secondary much smoother than I had anticipated. In university you are expected to self-motivate and to do the bulk of the learning independently. Home education prepared me for this and I found the course load and reading assignments manageable. The biggest challenge during my time was with the other students and their lack of commitment to learning and lack of participation in the classroom. It was discouraging to be excited about learning a new topic and have my classmates behave in a distracting and sometimes disrespectful way towards the process and the professors. However, I managed through my frustrations and formed informal study groups with a few fellow classmates who were as excited to be there as I was.

I spent two semesters at Taylor and earned top grades. I used Taylor as a spring board into public university. Once I had proved myself capable and earned a university transcript, I applied to open studies at the University of Alberta. I took two courses there over a semester. I struggled with the large class sizes and found it more difficult to be engaged in the learning process. Second year psychology courses at the U of A often have 200+ students and I felt lost in the crowd, so I applied at Grant MacEwan college and was accepted there following my semester at the U of A. MacEwan has smaller class sizes and was a great fit for me.

Tonight I am speaking at Home School Christian Fellowship in Edmonton about our family experience in transitioning our children from home education into college and university. I have come to see just how different this part of our home education experience has been. We have had remarkable success in helping our children achieve their goals, a success that is perhaps rare.

I plan over the next week or so to turn portions of the talk I give into further blog posts, but for today, I want to focus on really useful web sites.

Alberta Learning Information Service, at http://www.alis.gov.ab.ca/ gives career preparation information including on-line quizzes, occupational profiles, college admission standards and job seeking information. I love the career profile information which clarifies the details of any job, and gives suggestions in related fields.

Since many home educators use a "friendly" institution to begin their post-secondary studies and then transfer to a biger school, it is important to know about the Alberta Council on Admissions and Transfers, at http://www.acat.gov.ab.ca/. Before you enroll in any post-secondary class, you can be certain whether it will be accepted at another school. The site includes an overview of the upgrading course offered through Alberta colleges that are accepted at all universities at http://www.acat.gov.ab.ca/pdfs/AcadUpgrading.pdf. This is an excellent help to those who discover late that they lack a credit or equivalent for a specific program, since it shows you the options to fill in the gap.

There's a good overview of high school possibilities for home educators at the THEE web site, at http://thee.ca/content/road-high-school-and-beyond….

More thoughts on all of this in the coming days.

For beginners

I meet families every fall who are just beginning home educating. When the family has chosen to home educate from the start and the child has never been in a public or private school, the first steps are fairly clear. Learning to read is the most important task in those early years of home education, along with the basic math and counting skills. For the content subjects like science and social studies, often field trips followed up with related library books, or simple nature studies and basic geography are all that's needed. There's no old habits to break or remedial learning to think about.

However when there are children who have been in school, there are more challenges. Choosing curriculum depends on the skills already in place. Thankfully, most math programs have on-line placement tests that clarify which program is appropriate. If there are serious academic challenges, there needs to be a focus on identifying the problem and fixing it. Even for a teenager, if the phonics skills haven't been taught there may be reading challenges that necessitate reviewing the most basic skills. If the mental arithmetic skills are not in place, they need to be learned before continuing on with algebra.

Beyond the academics, there is also the change in thinking about what school means. At home, the student is not learning to pass the test or trying to keep up with the rest of the class. The student is learning to actually know the subject, to acquire skills that equip them to understand what they read and to meld those skills into abilities that will enable them to do their life work, both in employment and in fulfilling their God-given role in the world. We are not just about completing the book, we need to be focussed on growing, changing and becoming better at all the things we are already good at. Learning is challenging, interesting, fun, sometimes difficult, but finally satisfying and enriching. Communicating that to our children is one of the greatest goals and challenges of home education.

The other part of my fall

Fall has always been about back to school, whether it's the back to school of home education, or of sending one or more of my children to college, and the start up of all the activities that follow the school year.

For me, it is also about starting the other half of my home education activity. For fourteen years, i have been a home education facilitator, working with families to help them plan their own families' home education programs. I count myself very fortunate to be able to be a support and encouragement to other families. By far the greatest part of my work consist of affirming choices and convictions parents already hold in regard to their children's learning. Sometimes more direction is needed. Very rarely a family just is not achieving what they should be, and they need help with setting up structure and consistency.

I have met such a diverse set of people, each with a unique story that led them to home education, each motivated by the earnest wish to give their children the education they need. I have seen an incredibly varied set of approaches to the task of home education, and I have seen remarkable success across that whole range. I have seen enormous pride in the growth and success of each child, and in the awareness by moms who have been the driving force behind that.

Next week, I begin again to make fall visits to families I have known for years, and to some I am just meeting. I look forward to all that I will learn as I sit down at kitchen tables to talk about the learning that takes place around those tables. It's a great blessing to me. I hope that I can be a blessing to them.