And now for something completely different.

I have run away from home for a week, and I'm having a marvellous time! I enrolled in a class at Olds College, and I'm spending five days learning how to turn wool into yarn. It's the first time I've taken this much time away from home and family responsbilities in at least the last ten years.

About a year ago, my husband found a spinning wheel at a garage sale and came home to ask me if he should buy it. We went back to check it out and I became the woner of a spinning wheel that I knew absolutely nothing about. A friend gave me some indroductory lessons, and I have been spinning in my spare time since then, but I knew that to get really good at this, I needed more focused instruction. When I found out about these classes, I knew it would be a wonderful chance to learn morte about spinning, and to enjoy a break.

Learning a new skill (or improving an existing one) is a challenge. Often as a home educating mom, I have been exasperated with a child who isn't getting the lesson, because it seems simple to me. Going into a setting where I'm struggling to put together skills and information and achieve the correct result puts me where my child usually sits. It's not easy for the learner. It's not straight-forward to take yesterday's knowledge, and add a couple more bits, and do a new thing with that. And it's good to sit in the other chair and relive those feelings of frustration and realiuze that the way I'm feeling about trying to make fluffier yarn is exactly how my daughter is feeling about fractions. That's one of the extra lessons I'm learning this week.

Some helpful web sites

The government of Alberta has a couple of web sites that are particularly useful to anyone thinking about career options and post-secondary training.

The first one www.alis.gov.ab.ca is devoted to career information, including information about duties, working conditions, qualities leading to success in different fiels, training options and employment information. It is useful at every stage of career planning form jus tinvestigating what careers there are to specifics once the field has been anrrowed. So often, children have an idea they would like to work in some area but they don't know what jobs are actually available, and often we as parents don't know either. the Alis website is a marvellous starting place.

Anther very useful web site is www.acat.gov.ab.ca, the web site of the Alberta Council on Admissions and Transfer. This site lets you determine which courses tranfer with credit from one institution to another, all across the province. It's possible to begin a program at a college close to home (or one more accepting of home educated students) and plan a transfer to anotehr school knowing which courses will be most useful. This simplifies post-secondary planning and allows us as parents to give good advice.

The slogan on the Acat home page says "great planning leads to great futures." Both these site will help you and your children to make great plans.

Into the right path.

We all do get lost at times. We think we know how to accomplish a goal or objective, and we discover that we don't. We were very much off the right path to help Tim get into college, and it took far too long to find the right path again. We have learned more from his college entrance than we expected and that has had some unexpected outcomes. More on that next week; for now, here's Tim's admission story, part 2.

Because Tim's real desire was to study science, math or engineering, we knew he would need to establish some measurable level of success in those areas to be considered as a student. Writing diploma exams would have worked, but it is difficult to write a formal exam on material that was completed two or three years before the need for the test arose. (If we could back up, we would have had him write diplomas as he completed the course work that would have prepared him for them. In Tim's case, he probably should have been writing diploma exams when he was fifteen or sixteen.)

We considered enrolling him in distance courses through Athabasca University, but many of their course offerings are not similar enough to other first year college courses, or even to high school courses, to be considered as suitable substitutes for the prerequisites for acceptance. MacEwan college suggested their upgrading courses which require that the student complete the 10 and 20 levels in each course before enrolling in the 30 level programs that he needed.

Then we discovered that there are also college preparation courses available through NAIT that allow you to enroll in courses that are the equivalent to the 30 levels, and have absolutely no prerequisistes. Tim signed up for Algebra and Chemistry last summer. he achieved grades of over 95%, and earned back part of his tuition by tutoring a classmate in chemistry. In the fall, he took Physics and Calculus, again earning A+ grades. Those four courses, plus his college English credit, and he had everything he needed to be accepted into Engineering. He will take year one at MacEwan and then transfer to the University of Alberta to complete his degree.

So even though the path was longer than it ought to have been, we now have a third child enrolled in college. We're excited to see what the future holds for him.

And then the third child.

As our third child completed his home education, we began to look at his options for post-secondary, and rather than really considering who he is and what his inclinations are, we pushed him into what seemed an easy an proven path. He had similar musical ability to his brother, and it just seemed so simple for him to enter the same program at MacEwan that Ben had studied.

It was a mistake. Tim has a comparable talent to his older brother, but he had very different reasons for enjoying music, and very different ways of using his talent. The very structured format of the program was not adaptable to his needs, and after one semester, he left the program.

He did complete all his classes successfully, giving him credits that may be useful down the road. More importantly, the learning that took place in those classes is part of him now. He continued with the second semester of university English, so he will never have to take English again. Those are positive outcomes, even though he did not continue in the program.

Tim began working and studying independently while we took a second look at what college admission might work out better for him. I'll write about the rest of his story tomorrow.

More of Ben's story

Ben's route into post-secondary was a music diploma, but working as a musician was not his ultimate goal.  Ben has known enough musicians to understand that very few support themselves solely by performing and teaching.  We have two friends who are outstanding gifted musically, very hard working and have achieved reasonable success.  Both men also have construction jobs.  So Ben was always planning to continue his studies after finishing his diploma from MacEwan.

Somewhat ironically, Ben moved on from a college that is relatively unfriendly to home educated students to a university college that welcomes them.  Despite his mother's warnings, he completely missed the application deadlines for the University of Calgary, so instead he applied to Ambrose University College (Alliance University College/Nazarene University College at the time he started there.)  There were two factors leading to this choice:  He had earned significant scholarships through Bible quizzing, and he wanted to be closer to his girlfriend who lived in Calgary (and who he had met through Bible quizzing).  

Ben was able to use his MacEwan diploma for two full years credit towards an Arts degree, probably because he had graduated with distinction.  He completed his Ambrose degree summa cum laude, with highest honours.  His ultimate goal is to attend law school, probably in 2010.  He will have used his musical gifting well as the starting point to a professional career.  

Of course, he continues to play every chance he gets.  He is part of the music ministry at Centre Street church in Calgary, he plays in a country band and a jazz trio, and he fills in in other groups as opportunity arises.  The advanced musical skills he learned at MacEwan will always be a very fulfilling part of his life.  Sometimes our children's passions will not be their careers but they will be vital to their joy.  

And for our encore

As our second child neared the end of his home education, his passion was clear.  He wanted to study music in the jazz focussed performance program at MacEwan College in Edmonton.  We checked the MacEwan web-site and their printed calendar and found little help with the admission requirements for a non-diploma student.  Then one day, I was chatting with a neighbour who works in recruitment for MacEwan and he told me that there is an admissions test for the English requirement, which is the only specific academic requirement for this program (sadly, MacEWan very much limits the programs in which you can use this exam.)  Ben studied some grammar terms as a refresher and signed up for the test.  

He not only passed the test, he received a high enough grade that he qualified to take "real" English and not the music-program specific adapted English course.  So that solved the academic challenge.

The real deciding factor for the music program is the audition process.  This required writing a music theory exam and an ear training test, playing a prepared piece of music and a sight reading piece.  All of this was well outside of my ability to help and Ben was very blessed in having an excellent bass guitar teacher who worked with him to prep for all of the requirements.

My role was limited to hearing him practice his performance piece so much that I can still hum his line along with it every time I hear it on the radio ( if I don't instantly change stations!)  Hearing that song will always remind me of his diligence in pursuing his dream.

Lessons not on the curriculum

There's the course description given in the syllabus, the outline of what the professor hopes to cover during the course.  And then there are the extra things the students learn that aren't part of the official class, that aren't mentioned in the text book.

As a never-before-in-the-classroom student, our daughter had a few extra lessons like that to learn.  One of the first was that many students were much less prepared than she was, and that the simple matter of reading ability made up so much of the difference.  Even through her last year in university, she could see that her classmates struggled just because they couldn't get through the required reading in a timely way, and they didn't retain as much from their reading.  Because she had never had fellow students to compare herself to, she hadn't known just how smart and capable she was.

Another college first for her was the practice of group assignments.  I was surprised by just how many classes used group assignments at a university level and by the fact that they work as well there as they do in junior high:  the motivated students do the lion's share of the work, while hoping that their fellow group members won't mess things up too badly and everyone gets the grade that the motivated people earned.  Perhaps this is good training for some office jobs, but it certainly is an unnecessary and misplaced tool in a college class.

Of course the biggest difference from home education to university was the fact that the teacher is no longer named Mom.  Kaylin had been blessed throughout her university education with professors and instructors who are motivated and well-informed, interested in the needs and progress of the students in their classes, and especially so when they can see that there are students who are highly motivated and desiring to learn.  She benefitted greatly from the teaching and mentorship of these teachers, and often learned much more than the curriculum had promised because of their interest and help.  Of course, she had her share of average teachers too, but the shining light of the excellent ones was one of the greatest gifts of the university experience.