Lesson 8: Homeschooling for the Long Run
You’ve set up your school and learned to create lesson plans and even full units. You’ve worked out accommodations and resolved the initial challenges of homeschooling your own child. It’s time to look ahead and prepare for the years to come. Your school will undergo many changes as you and your child become more experienced and more comfortable with homeschooling. Some of you will fall in love with the lifestyle and keep going. Others will continue to homeschool from necessity, and still others will return their children to public school. Whatever happens in the future, your child is benefiting from knowing that you love him enough to take this time with him right now when he needs you. It’s time to make some plans for the days and years ahead.
Becoming an Independent Learner
If you want to avoid burning out and if you want your children to be life-long learners, you must teach them to teach themselves. This goal is the one that makes homeschoolers so successful in college and in life.
This goal is not possible for all children. A child with intellectual or strong emotional challenges may never be able to teach himself. Some children refuse to care, particularly those who had many years in public or private schools. In general, the younger a child is and the less traumatic his school experience was, the easier it will be to teach him to teach himself.
Independent learners, also known as life-long learners or self-directed learners, know how to teach themselves whatever they want to know without enrolling in a class—or at least know if a class is really necessary. They can create a plan for their learning, seek out the resources and figure out how to master the material.
Children have to learn to do this step-by-step. At first, you are doing most of the teaching. Gradually, you will turn over responsibility to your child, as you see that he is ready for it. You will take the process as far as is possible given your child’s challenges and personality.
Think about the steps you went through to prepare your lesson plan and unit study. To some extent, your child will learn to follow this same process. However, as he grows in independence, he will spend less time on fun projects and more time reading, writing and doing hands-on practical applications.
The first step is to involve him in choosing what to learn. Our school district was on a year-round school program. We chose to follow the schedule we had been on after we started homeschooling. This allowed me to teach for three months and take one off. The session off was spent planning the next three months. During the school year, we did three science units, each lasting one session. Each of my two younger children, who studied together, chose one. I chose the final topic. They learned to choose something large enough to last three months, and they got a topic they cared about. My right to choose the final topic allowed me to toss in whatever I knew they weren’t interested in.
Later, they helped me decide what we should learn during the three months. They learned to break the topic into three one-month segments. They helped me find books, videos, materials and later, web sites. Eventually they were ready to study more independently. At that time, we met together to discuss what each child wanted to learn. Together we listed the required subjects and discussed a focus and the methods that would be used. We talked about how evaluations would work and laid out the pace of the course.
Now both children are in high school, and one is also in college part-time. They completely teach themselves. Each year they talk to me about their plans, and select their own materials. They prefer to learn through reading, writing and research. They decide if they have mastered the material. Sometimes one will say, “I finished my algebra book, but I’m going to do parts of it over, because I don’t think I’ve really mastered it.” Another might say, “I’m adding a term paper to this subject, even though it wasn’t on the list. The subject is more complicated than I thought, and I want to explore this part in more detail.” They aren’t geniuses or nerds in the traditional sense. They are as happy as anyone when Christmas break comes along, but they do enjoy learning things. They can make themselves tackle a subject they dislike. They even know when they really do need a teacher. My daughter decided to take her math at the college because she dislikes it and wants someone else to make her learn. This too is part of being an independent scholar. Some things we will always want teachers for and others we will tackle alone.
This method is excellent for preparing a child for college, because colleges don’t force feed the material. You hear the lecture and are handed a textbook, but you’re on your own, in most cases, to figure out how to master the material.
For our special needs children, there is an added component in this process. Our children must learn to work within their disabilities. This means they must understand how they learn so that they can select learning methods that work for them. You won’t be there all their lives to make it easier. Make sure they understand their disability and can explain it to others. Let them help to create the solutions to their learning problems. The methods they choose to learn may look odd to others, but if they work, it doesn’t matter, so they should learn to be comfortable being different. This is not easy, since teenagers dislike being different.
When I took my first college class as a returning adult student, we had to memorize famous paintings—the name of the painting, the artist and the year. Knowing I have serious memory problems, I photocopied the pictures and glued them to file cards. I put the information on the back and then tested myself. My children helped to drill me. One day my oldest daughter was testing me and I was stuck on The Last Supper. There were two paintings with that name and I always forgot which was which. My two youngest were watching, and my three year old burst out impatiently, “Oh Mommy, anybody could tell that was a Rembrandt!” My flashcards made me the subject of teasing by my classmates, but I knew that if my toddler and preschooler were learning the paintings that way, it would work for me. Interestingly, one day a student borrowed my cards to do a quick review before the weekly quiz. There were several he didn’t know, and he discovered he learned them in minutes with my cards. The following week, a dozen students showed up with cards just like mine. So, you never know when the method that looks funny to your child’s friends will turn out to be the next fad! What matters isn’t the method, it’s the knowledge.
