5 ideas for homeschooling your children

Guest post from Heather Johnson -- who is is a freelance writer, as well as a regular contributor for OEDb, a site for learning about online education. Heather invites your questions, comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com

With government controls as stringent as ever these days, the far-reaching tentacles of bureaucracy can be felt very strongly in the realm of education. Consequently, many parents are turning to homeschooling their children. It is a daunting task to take over the role of educator as you want to make sure your children receive the best possible learning experience. Here are some ways you can ensure your children’s success:

1. Get ready to read. There are countless “how-to” books on homeschooling and you’ll go crazy if you try to master this craft from these manuals. Certainly use some as a guide, but read as much as you can on individual subjects like history, philosophy and the sciences. This will ensure that you have a solid background in a myriad of subjects.

2. Teach according to your children’s style. Everyone learns in many different ways but most children favor one method above everything else. Discover what their propensity is and dive into teaching that way. It could be visually, auditory or kinesthetically; whatever gets them in the best learning gear is how you should handle your teaching duties.

3. Give it some time. Don’t try to measure success immediately as it will take months to develop a steady routine that you and your child are comfortable with. A year is usually a good benchmark to reflect on your child’s progress. At this time you can better gauge how far your child has developed. If you’re unhappy with the results you can retool your style.

4. Balance academic skills and life skills. Try to give equal weight to academic subjects and necessary, everyday skills. While it’s imperative you cover the traditional subjects use this situation as a way to teach your children useful skills like driving, balancing a budget or sewing. While these don’t smack of “normal” school topics, they still require stretching your brain in directions it may not be used to.

5. Have fun. When you think back to when you were in school everything you learned probably seems like a blur. This is your chance to present material to your children in a way that they’ll want to learn and not feel like they’re going to work. Tackle subjects in a manner that you both have fun. You’ll immediately notice that they typical malaise most students feel in a traditional school setting is dissipating.









The Vanishing Cultivated Girl and her Replacement: From Reading Novels to Talking Trash on Campus

By Thomas F. Bertonneau

I

I begin with three vignettes, the veracity of which my patient readers will accept on faith.

First Vignette. It is the end of the semester in my "Western Heritage I" course, an undergraduate "general education requirement" that I teach as a large-enrollment enterprise, with over a hundred students in the auditorium. Even with the help of a graduate-student teaching assistant, keeping order in the classroom has required a massive and annoying investment of the teacher's energy. Students come late, complain about lost points due to missed quizzes, shuffle in their seats, and - most distracting of all - talk during the lecture. It is women, far more than men, who offend in this manner although men are not free from the vice. To allay student fears about the final examination, I have agreed to spend the last two days of the semester summing up the major points of the syllabus and offering reminders about what we have read during the semester. (Some, who have not done the reading, mistakenly think that by taking notes during these concluding sessions, they can fake their way through the examination.) I am carefully making my way through an outline, tying Homer to the tragedians, the tragedians to the philosophers, Greek literature to Latin literature, and pagan civilization to the early Christian discourse that it at last produced. I find that I cannot keep the thread intact. Something is addling my concentration. I cock an ear and discover the source. From the moment I began, two young women sitting halfway back in the auditorium and close to the right aisle (from the lecturer's perspective) have been chattering to one another in loud stage whispers. I shoot them a disapproving look. The chattering continues, as if no one else were present. I shoot them another look and clear my throat. No result. Finally, I must stop my lecture and address the two of them directly, with a mandate to cease gossiping or take their palaver out of the classroom. Both girls make it clear by their expressions that they feel put upon and abused.

Second Vignette. It is a more recent semester. Again I am teaching "Western Heritage I," but in this little story the actual course plays only a small part. The public schools have a hiatus, so my twelve-year-old, a seventh-grader, is with me on campus. He sits through a lecture on Virgil while reading a book about UFOs. When the class-time has elapsed, he helps me pack up my chattels and we begin to walk to my next class, on the other side of campus. In the crush of students we find ourselves walking next to a female undergraduate engaged, like eighty percent of other students, in a peripatetic cell phone conversation. The young lady is well dressed - in the female equivalent of "junior executive." She walks briskly, oblivious of anyone's co-presence in the public space. Her dialogue grows excited. She is complaining to a sympathetic listener about one of her instructors, who has apparently assigned what she believes to be too much reading and who grades, as she sees it, harshly. "He f---ing thinks nobody's got other things to do," she says loudly. "Well, I'm f---ing not going to let him push me around. I'm f---ing going to report this f---er to the dean." In three sentences, she has inserted sailor-talk into her speech four times. At the second usage of the Anglo-Saxonism, I give her a disapproving glance. At the fourth I say loudly, "Thank you for sharing that with my twelve-year-old." She drops back, looking more irritated than ashamed, avoiding my eyes.

Third Vignette. Often it is in the freshman composition course that I have closest contact with students. Here, still a bit intimidated by the college experience and not yet cynically inured to education, students tend to show themselves most naively and candidly. Insisting that students share with me for consultation two drafts of each of their four formal essays gives me the opportunity actually to talk to them individually many times during the semester. Undergraduates come to college today with less literacy than ever. As a rule functional illiteracy little bothers the men - they imagine other spheres than the intellectual in which they might demonstrate some kind of prowess; women generally show themselves more amenable to constructive discipline in the domain of their written expression and generally make better progress than the men. "Better," however, means in comparison to a paltry norm. This semester (Fall 2007), the best writer, and the most mature eighteen-year-old in the class, is a young woman whom I shall call, by a chain of protective associations, "Veronica." No opportunity presents itself that would let me discern much about Veronica's background. She distinguishes herself from others, however, by doing the reading that I assign (most skip it) and by always turning in her required draft-versions of the paper; again, many fewer basic-language deformities mar her prose than is the case with other students. She has a mien of some awareness, a careful way of speaking, and a measure of poise, as previous generations would have named it. Veronica can make, rudimentarily, a logical and evidentiary argument, something few of her peers can. Her range of references shows much restriction; she has read a little - more than other freshmen - but nothing challenging or brave. I think to myself: Veronica might be much more intellectually and culturally developed than a jejune education has made her - and she is unaware of the possibility.

More than one commentator in recent years has bemoaned, and rightly, the decline of masculinity in college students. In place of the aspiring young man who seeks to add lettered cultivation to his purely physical development, the male undergraduate has become, for the most part, an infantilized, marginally overweight, video-game-obsessed consumer of rap music. In his sartorial habit and demeanor he resembles the slaphappy imbecile played to perfection by Huntz Hall in the old Bowery Boys comedies, right down to the invariable baseball cap worn at any angle except brim-forward, as the haberdasher sensibly designed it. He might be de-sexed or not yet sexually determined (this will be in parallel with his infantilism), or he might be crudely and pornographically sex-obsessed. What he avoids is balance. In class he tends to the surly, but a noticeable admixture of effeminacy often emasculates his surliness. A male student once told me, when I asked him in accordance with my rules for classroom decorum to remove his hat, that he couldn't do so because he was, as he said, "having a bad hair day." He intended this as a meaningful remark. Asked why he has come to college, the typical male student cannot say, unless he recites the empty formula about "earning a big salary" when - or rather if - he graduates. Another characteristic of contemporary college males is that their numbers have steadily decreased over the last decade. Fewer men come to college than ever before; more men than women drop out before completing a degree.

The blame for this etiolating of masculinity lies not solely on the men themselves although they contribute to it by making choices that they could make otherwise. Rather, for twenty-five years or more the American nation, in its public schools and through its commercial mass-culture, has been deliberately censuring real masculine behavior and deliberately feminizing males. I wish to explore, however, not the emasculation of young men, as catastrophic as that is, but rather its corollary: the equally enormous de-feminizing of females.

Do comparisons run to unfairness? So be it. In my graduating class at Santa Monica High School (1972), I knew many already formidably cultivated young women. They were, for one thing, readers. They read books on the bus traveling to and from school - the usual girl's fare of Jane Austen but also surprising things like the Tolkien trilogy, just then issued in paperback. By the tenth grade, Diane S---------- had finished the last installment. They read Demian, Siddhartha, and The Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. They read The Stranger by Albert Camus and Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. They read Love Story by Eric Segal, too, but this had its context in their other literary involvements. They read John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which no boy did. In Mr. Johnston's Senior Honors English course, they sustained their part in the discussion and often left the boys looking like they had little to say. One really had to compete with Regine W---------- or Janet M---------- or Ruth K---------- in the endeavor of interpretation. Those girls sang in the chorus or in the smaller Madrigal Society or they played an instrument in the school orchestra. They had their favorite Top Forty hits, I'm sure, but they could appreciate a symphony concert or a song recital. When an exhibition of Impressionist paintings came to the Los Angeles County Art Museum on a weekend, Regine and Janet and Ruth would come to school on Monday able to talk about it. I once spent a memorable afternoon with Regine in the Huntington Gardens, whose grassy and flowery beauty she grasped much more vividly than I. Again in college, at UCLA, despite the pull still exerted on adolescent habits by the descent into Hippiedom of the previous few years, one yet encountered straight-backed girls, well dressed, well read, and serious in their spiritual pursuits.

The privilege fell to me of dating such a girl, stately in her possession of Episcopalian form, during my sophomore year. Elizabeth ("Liz") A----------, who later earned a law degree, played piano (Bach and Mozart), spoke French, and did not find an Ingmar Bergman film foreign to her experience although she could equally well laugh her heart out at a Woody Allen movie. Among their accomplishments Regine and Elizabeth knew how to dine. Their interest in cuisines embraced the adventurous and both knew to stand to let the lad seat them. I can imagine neither of them eating a fast-food chimichunga. In the incipient wisdom of my early thirties, right in the shrillest Harridan days of academic feminism, I had the luck to marry a genuine lady of the same species as Regine and Elizabeth.

Maleness impels me to the usual sex-related interest in women, including frankly the coeds in my classes. I don't say that I fancy them, as a predatory humanities professor of my UCLA days was known to do serially. Indeed, most of these nymphae exert moderate repulsion by virtue of their personal qualities or, as it might well be, their amorphous lack of definite personality and their culturally bereft condition. Nevertheless, at an organic level, the presence of young ladies solicits a mixture of curiosity and avuncular protectiveness that informs my sense of them despite reason. Plato says that Eros is intrinsic to and necessary for education so perhaps this influences the fact that my innards kick in. I expect the males to avoid humane discipline like a plague; I expect them to behave and speak crudely and to mumble their lame "I dunnos" when addressed in the interrogative. Emotionally unmoved by them, I have learned to shrug my shoulders at their barbarian imperviousness to knowledge. For the coeds, although facts militate against it, I stubbornly await a freshening of the wind, a calm sea, and a prosperous voyage. In respect of them the thought whispers to me: There is a physiological beauty in this girl that ought to be matched by intellectual formation; a bit of genuine knowledge might refine her expression or positively alter her posture somehow. Elizabeth, my sophomore-year girlfriend, and my wife, Susan, in their common upright and clear-eyed self-presentation furnish the ideal. Perhaps a prospect of discovery will loom. The ship of this hope usually breaks its keel on the Siren-Rocks of classroom reality, as in the first of my three vignettes. Men in their grimacing apathy sleep during class or stare at the ceiling. Whispering to one another lies outside their repertory of offenses. No longer a rare intrusion, the chattering girls turn up ubiquitously, holding forth in private parliament during the lecture, while registering alarming non-susceptibility to rebuke.

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