A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls by Susannah Sheffer

This is the 9th post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling.

(See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

"Many reports claim adolescent girls' self-esteem fades in their teenage years. But girls interviewed in this book do not experience this loss of a sense of self. The difference is they are homeschooled girls, girls who learn at home and in the community rather than by going to school."—Susannah Sheffer, A Sense of Self

I read A Sense of Self: Listening to Homeschooled Adolescent Girls when my eldest daughter was entering adolescence and thinking about attending high school. Around the same time, I also read Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. What a different picture these two books painted of growing up female in our society! One describes how homeschooled girls feel about themselves and their lives when they are given significant levels of choice, autonomy, and control over what, when and how they learn. The other describes how difficult it can be for girls who attend school full-time to develop a sense of self when they are continually pressured to give up what they know and feel, to mold themselves to suit the needs of others. I read both books because I wanted to know whether sending my daughter to high school would be likely to have a negative impact on her. (A few years later, my younger daughter would also wrestle with the to-school-or-not-to-school decision.) Regardless of where my daughter opted to learn,  I wanted her to believe in herself and her ability to decide what was in her own best interest. I didn't want her to think she had to rely on others to dictate who she should be.

As I read Reviving Ophelia, I recalled my own adolescence and how I had felt unsure of myself, pressured to consider what other people would want me to say or do before I acted. Back then, I claimed I didn't care about anyone else's opinion of me, but it wasn't really true. I looked to teachers to tell me I was "good," boys to tell me I was "pretty," and people in general to tell me whether I had worth. I'm embarrassed to admit it now—as a fifty-something adult, I no longer feel the same way—but Reviving Ophelia brought back all those old feelings of insecurity and questionable self-esteem. The book described who I had been when I was a teen attending a public high school. But, oddly enough, it didn't describe my daughters or their homeschooled female friends very well. Not that these girls didn't have growing pains—of course they did—but their experience was quite different from what schooled girls go through.

As teenagers go, the homeschooled girls I knew were remarkably at ease in my company, unusually comfortable in their own skins, and very interested in being faithful to their own idiosyncratic selves. They were inner-directed, and it showed. I loved their authenticity and individuality, their courage and assertiveness. I wanted to understand what had allowed them to reject cultural pressures. How had they avoided becoming compliant, hyper-sexualized, and self-deprecating—the supposed "norm" for the adolescent girls described in Reviving Ophelia? Were they simply anomalies, or had homeschooling actually made it easier for these girls to form their own opinions and make their own decisions?

It's hard to say, but Sheffer's research indicates that it certainly helps to be free of the educational structures that diminish opportunities for making meaningful choices.

"If we want girls to be able to look to their own authority, we have to structure school in such a way that it is not always the external authority that holds the answers or determines when something is completed or learned or done well enough. If we want girls to identify with the goals they are pursuing, we have to give them the opportunity to choose goals with which they do identify and then to pursue those goals with our help."

But what happens when a girl in her teens who has been homeschooled transitions into a school setting? Are all the previous gains from homeschooling lost at that point? That's what I wanted to know. The answer seems to be "no."

In Chapter 5: Acts of Resistance, Sheffer considers this homeschool-to-school scenario. She writes:

"Simply being able to choose whether to attend school puts these young people in a very different position from most American teenagers. It's an opportunity to think seriously about what kind of person they are and what kind of life they want." 

I discovered the truth of this when my daughters decided to go to school after a lifetime of homeschooling. My eldest began attending an early college at age 16, and her younger sister attended our local high school starting at age 14. I saw how having the option to opt-out of school,  but choosing to opt in, was an empowering experience for both of them. To reach a decision, they had to consider what was important to them, what they wanted, what they believed would be in their own best interests. This one pivotal decision added to their understanding of who they were and what really mattered to them, and that in turn gave them the self-confidence to continue asserting themselves once they were in school.

Of course, as Sheffer points out, "homeschooled girls do face challenges to their sense of self, and they have to figure out whether and how to resist these challenges . . . [but] homeschooling gives them certain kinds of tools that help to make healthy resistance possible."

I'm not saying that all girls should be homeschooled, but I do think it's worth taking a look at what works, whatever the learning context might be, so that we can empower all young women and help them to develop a strong sense of self.

Writing Because We Love To: Homeschoolers at Work by Susannah Sheffer

This is the 8th post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling.

(See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

Writing Because We Love To: Homeschoolers at Work by Susannah Sheffer is a book about "what children do when they are in charge of their own writing lives." By "in charge," Ms. Sheffer means truly in charge—not simply free to choose from a teacher's pre-selected list of writing options, but free to decide what, when, how and why they'll take the thoughts in their heads and turn them into words on a page.

Typically, teachers are the ones deciding what will go on during a writing lesson and what kind of feedback they'll offer their students. The problem with this approach is that it turns students into passive recipients. Or, as Ms. Sheffer writes:

"If you're sitting in a class that you didn't choose to take, being taught something you're not sure you wanted to learn in the first place, it may be difficult or even impossible to think about what you want from a teacher and whether you're getting it."

Contrast this with a situation where a student has "sought out a teacher because [she] has already come a certain distance on [her] own and now thinks a teacher would be helpful." That's the situation my homeschooled daughter was in when I first contacted Ms. Sheffer back in the late-1990s.

At the age of seven, after two years of public schooling, my daughter had lost nearly all her early interest in writing. The way in which writing was being taught in school killed her desire to write. She felt frustrated and betrayed by her clunky fine motor skills, which couldn't keep up with the pace of her thoughts, and so she abandoned writing altogether for almost an entire year. (One of the perks of homeschooling was that we had the freedom to set aside a despised subject for a while and take it up again later.)

During her year off from formal writing instruction, my daughter learned how to touch type (thanks, Mavis Beacon), and when she was able to type fast enough to suit her purposes, she went back to writing poems, stories and journal entries. Her passion for writing had returned, as I'd hoped it would.

By the time she was approaching her teens, she had written stories she didn't particularly want to show to her mother—not because they contained anything particularly shocking or inappropriate, but because she knew the sort of feedback I was likely to provide wasn't what she needed at the time. She sought an impartial mentor, someone who could give expert, unbiased advice on how to make her story more compelling. She might ask me later to proofread her work before she submitted it to a writing contest or magazine (such as Stone Soup, New Moon, or Teen Ink), but during the early stages of her writing process, my copyedits were not the answer.

So I was grateful when I found a notice for Susannah Sheffer's services in an issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine (discontinued as of 2001, unfortunately). After calling to make arrangements, I slipped my daughter's cover letter and printed pages into a large manila envelope, with a check to cover the consultation fee, and put them in the mail. Within a week or two, the pages came back with Susannah's edits and responses to any questions my daughter had asked. It was exciting for her to be treated like a real writer, getting feedback from a real writer, and it inspired her far more than any contrived writing prompt or scripted exercises ever had.

As for me, I learned from Ms. Sheffer that it's important for students to be able to tell their teachers, "Here's what I'm deciding to write about, here's why I'm writing it, and this is what I want from you." As a home educator, I had examined hundreds of writing tutorials and mountains of "language arts" curricula, but none of them advised me to start by asking my kids what—if anything—writing meant to them. (Well, that's not quite true: Families Writing by Peter Stillman came pretty close.) Looking back now, I shake my head when I recall the times I attempted to "teach writing" to my children by focusing on their spelling, grammar and punctuation. It's not that writing mechanics don't matter, because of course they do—eventually. It's just that learning how to write well demands so much more of us.

About a year ago, I found a paying job doing work I love: I'm currently an editor for Author Accelerator, and I help writers who are eager to finish and publish their books. Every week, my writers submit their pages to me electronically and, within a few days, I send them back my detailed feedback. Over time, I get to know the writers with whom I'm working, and it is always a privilege to be on the receiving end of their stories. Like Ms. Sheffer, I "will always struggle with how best to help them, how to respond appropriately, meaningfully, and in ways that they can truly use." And I'm continually awed by the courage and tenacity of those who are determined to improve their writing and get their novels finished.

Looking back now on the work that Ms. Sheffer did with my daughter, I realize she must have felt similarly about the students she helped. In the Introduction to her book, she writes:

"More than anything else, I hope readers [referring to readers of her book] will come away with an appreciation of the competence young people can achieve and the insight and reflection of which they are capable. . . . We can all learn from these writers who are writing because they love to rather than because they have to, and who have the time and the opportunity to figure out what best serves their work."

I wish you and all students of writing the precious gift of time and opportunity to express yourself with words.

Home Learning Year By Year by Rebecca Rupp

This is the 7th post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling. 

(See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

"There are many roads to an educational Rome," writes Rebecca Rupp in her book, Home Learning Year By Year: How to Design a Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School. While she isn't the first to advocate moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to education, she is the only experienced homeschooler I know who has written a comprehensive book aimed at helping those who want to design their own course of study.

I remember when I first came across her book. I was feeling anxious, eager to try something new but not entirely sure how to go about it. I hadn't been homeschooling for long, maybe a few months, but I had already reached a point where I knew the curriculum I'd borrowed from the school wasn't going to work for us. The pre-planned activities were contrived and unrelated to my daughter's interests, and she quickly became bored with the worksheets and textbooks. Now what? I wondered. My trouble was that I had no experience with designing my own curriculum. I'd been assuming I'd be able to depend on McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton-Mifflin to lead the way.

Home Learning Year by Year was just what I needed at the time. It offered me guidance without being prescriptive. Instead of mandating "What Your First Grader Needs to Know," it outlined a typical program of study while allowing for individual differences. Her goal was to help parents become familiar "with the general course of the standardized educational curriculum," but only so that they could use it "as a reference point and a guideline rather than a set of predetermined assignments."

And that's exactly what I used it for: a reference and a guideline.

As a reference, the book offers recommendations for books, websites, games and more. While the recommendations—particularly the URLs—are mostly out-of-date now, they were incredibly helpful during the pre-Internet years, back when I first started homeschooling. Thanks to Rebecca Rupp, my kids and I were introduced to:

• Funny history books by Kathleen Krull and Jean Fritz
• Entertaining math stories, creative hands-on activities, and the remarkable Marilyn Burns
• Janice Van Cleave's science experiments (for all grade levels)
• . . . and much more

As a guideline, Home Learning Year By Year was essential to me because my kids straddled multiple grade levels throughout their homeschooling years. I would skim the chapters to get a sense of how my children were doing in various subjects and adjust my plans accordingly. For example, if at the age of seven my daughter was already comfortable with "fourth-grade" mathematics but hadn't yet figured out how to use a dictionary, I might spend a little time showing her how guide words work instead of recommending yet another math game to her.

Home Learning Year By Year was a book I turned to again and again because it comforted me to see that even though I wasn't dictating what my children should learn from one year to the next, they were always making progress, mastering different skills each year. I took Ms. Rupp's wise advice to heart, and I share it with you here:

"No parent should view the standardized curriculum as cause for worry. Children vary, and homeschoolers inevitably will find that their more-or-less first grader isn't quite standard. . . . The standardized curriculum can indicate academic areas in which kids need extra help and support—or creative substitutes and alternatives, or stress-reducing periods of being left alone. Variation, though, is normal, and our many individual differences are what make the world the interesting place it is. Kids are natural learners, and each will find his or her own best way to learn."

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

This is the 6th post in my series about books related to teaching, learning and homeschooling. 

(See my earlier post for a description of the series.)

I first came across Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1st edition, 1991) at a homeschooling conference. At the time, I was trying to understand why my mostly positive memories of elementary school in the 1960s were not enough to overcome my adverse reaction to sending my daughter to school in 1996. How had something that had felt so right for me, when I was a child, become something that felt so wrong for my own free-spirited little girl?

At first, all I had to go on was a gut feeling, because I hadn't yet found the words to describe exactly what it was about the school environment that bothered me, but the feeling wouldn't go away. I just knew there was something about the way my daughter was being instructed and confined all day that didn't sit well with me. What had been OK for me was not something I was willing to accept for her.  It was as simple—and irrational—as that. What I needed was a rational explanation for what my instincts were telling me.

I think that's why Dumbing Us Down caught my attention. "Strong Words from the New York State Teacher of the Year" the cover proclaimed. Glancing at the back of the book, I learned the author was a teacher who had broken ranks and turned against the system that had employed him.  He had resigned "after 26 years of award-winning teaching in Manhattan's public schools." What had happened to provoke this teacher, who in his book describes school as "a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned"? 

Strong words, indeed, but was there any truth to them? I bought a copy of the book to decide for myself. In the first chapter, I read about the seven lessons that make up the "hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling." They are, according to Gatto:

1. Confusion—"Everything I teach is out of context."
2. Class Position—"The variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of the numbers they carry."
3. Indifference—"The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?"
4. Emotional Dependency—"By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command."
5. Intellectual Dependency—"Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do."
6. Provisional Self-Esteem—"I teach that a kid's self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged." "Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet, is never considered a factor."
7. One Can't Hide—"I teach students they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues."

Although I didn't agree with all the libertarian rhetoric in Gatto's book—too many sweeping generalizations and not enough evidence to convince me—his list of lessons validated what I had been feeling. My daughter had already complained (in first grade!) about doing work that seemed meaningless (i.e., out of context). She grumbled about not having enough time to finish her work and the lack of "alone time." And, as her mother, I was concerned about her lack of freedom: her teacher made all the decisions about what, when and how to learn, leaving little opportunity for self-directed learning or "free play." 

So, why hadn't these things bothered me when I was in school? I think it was because I was the kind of child who needed a place that was predictable, where expectations were clear and consistent. I thrived on the gold stars and approval I got from teachers. For reasons I won't go into here, I didn't expect to have control over my own life, so I was ripe for schooling.

But a child who has always been encouraged to believe in herself and pursue her own dreams knows what freedom feels like. She takes for granted her ability to branch out and explore, gradually widening her reach as she grows older. I think that's why putting my daughter into school felt so much like putting her into a cage. Compared to her life at home and within a larger community, it was too limiting, too confining, too prescriptive. I wanted her to have access to a bigger experience than school could provide. 

That's what Gatto's book helped me to see:

"Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die."