Interview with Jacqueline Davies, Author of The Lemonade War Series!

The boys and I have been huge fans of The Lemonade War series for years now, and I was so excited when Jacqueline Davies said yes and generously donated her time to answer questions here at The Stone Age Techie. Several of these questions pertain to The Sincerity Project; as you will read, Ms. Davies thinks about this kind of thing too. If you would like to know more about Jacqueline Davies, please go here. My questions are in black, and her answers are in red.  And now, without further ado, our interview!

1. Welcome Jacqueline Davies, author of The Lemonade War series! These five books are about a brother and sister, Evan and Jessie, and are so well written with such real characters that you feel almost as though you could knock on their door and asked them to play in real life. My boys and I loved the stories, narrated alternatively by Evan and Jessie so that we see the world from their perspectives; the challenges their family experiences, and the children's thoughts and ideas, are so well expressed. Are there aspects of The Lemonade War series, or what it is like to be their author, that you would like to share about?  

I do a lot of school visits (about 50 a year) and I love going into schools and talking with kids about their responses to the books. Many of them have a particular favorite out of the five, and it's almost always because of a personal connection they make to the story. I hear things like, "That book reminded me of my grandmother." "Jessie is just like my little sister." "My parents are divorced, too." I like to think that I've written stories that allow kids to seem themselves in the pages.

2. I love the feeling that we, the readers, are right there in the action, and there is so much action! How is it that you come up with your ideas? 

The first book in the series was unusual in that I wrote it very quickly; the first draft took just 19 days to complete. So the ideas for that story unfolded very quickly. A lot of the ideas came from things that had actually happened in my childhood or in the childhoods of my three kids. But some of the ideas just bubbled up out of that deep, dark unconscious place where thoughts and feelings dwell, just below the surface of articulation.

3. One of my favorite things about books is that you never label a condition or problem; as a result, a character with fairly severe autism or advanced dementia is treated as a regular person, and the other characters in the book approach that person not as A Person With X, but instead treat that person as they would treat anyone. I feel like, in our society, too much emphasis is placed on labels and not enough on people. I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue, and also I'm wondering if you planned from the start to have Jessie and Evan approach the world in this way? 

I agree with your thoughts on labels. Sometimes we use them because it seems to make a complicated world less complex—and I'm not sure that's a particularly good thing. Also, quite frankly, I think if we broaden our ideas about The Spectrum (and I'm talking here about any spectrum that can be applied to many conditions or states of being) then we're all somewhere on that spectrum. There are a lot of traits that Jessie and I share. I don't have Asperger's Syndrome, but if you stretch that spectrum far enough on either end, you'll find me on it somewhere down the line. So I suppose my inclination to avoid labels is also about strengthening connections—between characters in the books, between readers and the characters, and between myself and each of my characters.

4. Did you have to work to avoid labels, or is that something that comes naturally to you? I ask because I have spent more than a decade working to avoid them, in my interactions both as a teacher and as a parent. 

In this case, it came pretty naturally. It just "felt right" at the time of writing that first draft, and then later, as I pondered my choice more carefully, it continued to feel right. I can't tell you how many letters I've received from parents of autistic kids who thank me for writing the books without trying to turn them into some kind of lesson on autism. They're so grateful to have a book to share with their children and others that presents a character with Asperger's that isn't about Asperger's.

5. Do you think that not using labels helps avoid stereotyping? Is there any situation in which using a label might be beneficial, in your opinion? 

Plenty of kids who read the books identify Jessie as a child with Asperger's. They're familiar with the syndrome, and they recognize it and name it. There's nothing wrong with that. Other kids just notice that Jessie's different, but they still identify with her in a lot of ways, and so they have the chance to get to know Jessie and like her without first applying whatever thoughts, fears, prejudices they might have about Asperger's. That's a useful approach, as well. The same is true with the grandmother, who is an important character in the third book, THE BELL BANDIT. She's displaying signs of the onset of Alzheimer's, and Jessie and Evan are frightened by the changes they see in her. But without a label, they need to approach her and relate to her as she is, rather than how Evan and Jessie might expect her to be, given her condition. It makes their interaction more authentic, I think.

As far as when a label might be beneficial—in fiction, I would say almost never (it's often a shortcut, and a lazy one at that), but in medicine, I would say certainly (it provides the protocol for treatment).

6. It is clear that, in your books, nearly all the adults take the children very seriously, really respect their thoughts and ideas and treat them as rational thinkers. I'm thinking of Evan and Jessie's mom and teacher especially; do you have memories of being taken seriously by the important adults around you? 

Honestly, that comes directly from my experience as a single parent of three very different children who had very specific parenting needs. I've always liked children—I like their honesty and spontaneity and depth. But the concept of taking them seriously—which to me means seeing the world from their perspective and truly respecting that perspective—didn't come naturally to me. My own needs as a young, harried mother with three kids to raise clouded my view of their needs. So that was something I really had to work at, and I'd say it's the bedrock of my relationships with all three of my children, who are adults (or close to it) now.

7. Can you think of a time where a grown up in your life either got it right, understood and really took you seriously – or, failed spectacularly to do that? For example, when I asked my 14-year-old son, Max, if there was a time where I failed to take him seriously, he told about a time when he was six and his younger brother Jay was two; my husband and I were outside gardening, and the boys were inside, we thought perfectly safe as we checked on them frequently, but there was a two-or-three minute period were Max was trying to alert us to the fact that Jay was hanging by his hands from Max's loft! As he put it while we were talking about this recently, our not taking him seriously was an "epic fail." 

Growing up in my childhood home, there was one thing that was always downplayed, and that was illness. This is peculiar because my father was a physician, but perhaps that's at the heart of it. Spending his days taking care of truly sick patients might have made him less inclined to take our aches and pains seriously. So in my family, sickness was never taken seriously, until it was really serious! We had a motto: "If you're not dead, you're fine." I can remember a few times when even I didn't take my own pain seriously. When I was in the sixth grade, I was playing on the jungle gym after school and fell, broke both my arms, and then walked home, because I figured it wasn't all that serious. (I wasn't dead, so I must be all right!) My instinct wasn't to look for help or to assess my condition, but my instinct was to go home.

8. These days, you don't have to look very far to find a parent who is more engaged with his or her smart phone than his or her child; a private worry of mine is that children, and their thoughts and ideas, garner far less respect because parents are so distracted. Do you share this worry, or do you feel more optimistic about this than me? Any advice or ideas for parents to help them take their children more seriously? 

Oh, no optimism here. I think our brains are being eaten alive by the electronics in our lives, and the situation is only get worse as we allow ourselves to be more and more wired (think the Apple Watch). There's all kinds of research about the neuroscience behind our addiction to meaningless digital input, the ways in which those little hits of useless information and hollow contact stimulate the brain in an illusionary simulation of pleasure. The advice I have is simple. Get off the digital merry-go-round. Take control. At specific times of the day, in specific situations, turn off the device. I know it's hard to do. I live a large part of my day on my laptop (writing) and hooked up to the internet (doing research). But I set specific limits. When my teenage daughter walks in the door after school, I walk out of my office. I can't pay attention to her when I'm sitting at my computer. So I leave the computer behind. As for cell phones—oh, just put them away. You're missing your life when you're on your cell phone.

9. Are there any new projects on the horizon that you could talk about? 

I'm writing a four-book series about two smart girls in a very small town who can't help but get into trouble because they're bored. (Think Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as seventh-grade girls in the 21st century.) The pub date for the first book is Fall 2015. And I'm writing a middle-grade time-travel novel with a thirteen-year-old boy protagonist who finds himself traveling on a ship of ghosts, which will be released in Spring 2016. Also, in the Summer of 2016, I will have a picture book out that's called PANDA PANTS. It's about a boy Panda who wants pants and his father who just thinks that's ridiculous. (Back to the idea of parents not taking their kids seriously!)

Buzzwords

I am in love with Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E. Levin, two education professors who wrote a moving, passionate column arguing against national English and math standards in yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe. These standards are currently all the rage in education, at least up here in Massachusetts.

And that's where the title of this post comes in:
buzzword - n. A word or phrase connected with a specialized field or group that usually sounds important or technical and is used primarily to impress laypersons (from answers.com).

Fans of The Common Core Standards Initiative want parents to support national standards as The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. Proponents routinely describe standards, as Dr. David P. Driscoll does in a counterpoint column on the same op-ed page, as "strong," playing "a major role in the academic success of our [Massachusetts] students over the past decade."

Buzzwords like 'strong,' 'academic rigor,' 'challenging,' and 'clear improvement' are meant to persuade laypeople that we must adopt these standards.

Like, yesterday.

But I'm not persuaded.

Dr. Driscoll laments later in his ode to the standard: "We do not hold our kids to high enough standards of conduct [or] work ethic..." On the contrary, I think that too often we impose an adult's standard of conduct and work ethic onto children who are too young to understand why we have these standards.

The other day, when Owen enthusiastically greeted a very obese woman with "wow, you're really fat!" he learned something new: the standard of conduct is we don't speak of these things. Until the statement was out of his mouth, he didn't know there would be anything wrong with expressing it. This was evidenced by his question later: "can I tell really skinny people that they're really skinny?" At five, he just doesn't understand why - but from the reaction of the adults around him, he learned that commenting on somebody's size is not appropriate. Learning is what childhood is all about. (My face is red as I write this. I'm so, so sorry that my son caused such hurt feelings.)

'Work ethic' is another buzzword that really gets my goat. To make young children work at tasks they're not yet ready for seems to be priority number one in modern public schools - and if they express their displeasure, by hitting, or crying, or feeling nauseous and losing sleep, or biting others, they are condemned as having a 'poor work ethic.' (Some may even conclude, at the ripe old age of nine, that they are below average.) I believe that kids who are encouraged to learn on their own timetable end up with a far stronger work ethic than those who are exposed to school standards. The learning that they do is motivated intrinsically, because it's something they really need to know.

Drs. Carlsson-Paige and Levin write that these standards "contradict decades of early education theory and research about how young children learn best."

And they ought to know:
Dr. Carlsson-Paige has written extensively about learning through play, non-violence, and conflict resolution. One year at the Lesley Kindergarten Conference I got to attend her seminar on play and learning (best part: her description of how her two boys played together as youngsters, one creating costumes and sets and the other - Matt Damon - doing the acting). Many of her ideas show up in my parenting/teaching still.
In addition to teaching teachers, Dr. Levin writes about the sexualization of childhood and is a founding member of The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
Both women are on the board of The Alliance for Childhood, a group of prominent educators who, supported by a raft of research, have concluded that childhood in America is endangered... by all the damn standardized tests.

Now, I know what you're thinking: what about those pesky buzzwords that I use in favor of my arguments? What about 'play,' 'non-violence,' 'conflict resolution'? It's true, I do like to use fancy words, but the difference lies herein: the fancy words I use refer to Real Life, while the standards-fans' pertain merely to school.

I use them because I want to encourage people (laypeople, heh) to think about how there is nobody standing by while adults resolve conflicts non-violently, waiting to grade them on how 'strong' their position is. By adulthood we're supposed to have absorbed the standards of conduct. We're supposed to have a great work ethic.

But how will kids know those things, if they don't get the chance to learn them? Drs. Carlsson-Paige and Levin are two of my heroes today, for writing so eloquently about why standards won't help children learn what they'll need to know out in the real world.

The Unspoken Issue

Hello friends! I am still finding the beauty but, as my hands are a bit better, I thought I would blog about an issue close to my heart, instead of ranting at my hubby about it for like the fifteenthth time. More pics to come, and also a post about the zen of knitting, but in the meantime:

Our education system is broken. Newsweek's recent article, Why We Can't Get Rid of Failing Teachers, is the latest indication of just how bad it's gotten.

The article makes a persuasive argument in favor of wresting power from unions and giving it to administrators to fire teachers when the need arises. As a teacher, I feel conflicted about this; teachers get such a bad rap that the idea of firing them at will just appears to load on the disrespect. Need somebody to blame? Here, have a bad teacher!

But what really concerns me about the article are the assumptions that underlie it.

It's a foregone conclusion, for example, that current teaching methods and curriculum are fine. The emphasis on standardized tests as a reliable measure of children's learning, as well as the idea that all kids should learn the same things, at about the same age, are assumed to be okay too. A student's imagination and interest - the theory that a child should have a say in what he or she learns - has been totally sidelined. Are these ideas really so embedded in the national consciousness that they can be dismissed without mention, in an article about how to fix education?

Also, if teachers are failing, how is that measured? There is not a word about how to determine this in the whole article. Who decides that a teacher is failing? Aside from the obvious, like those who sexually assault students, or overtly abuse them, the criterion I've read most about is... the height of students' test scores.

As this system slides down the rabbit-hole, it's taking kids and adults with it. The system nearly took my oldest son, and we only realized how broken public education is after we started homeschooling.

So, bully for us, right? What about the kids who can't homeschool, or can't afford private school? How do we make it right for them?

Below Average

This here post is a ticked-off, public-school-sucks kind of post; I just wanted to get that out of the way at the beginning. It's about a conversation we had tonight, over dinner.

We'd spent the better part of our meal discussing The Black Cauldron, Lloyd Alexander's second book about Prydain, and the funniest Calvin and Hobbes comics, and favorite specific quotes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and how the 'big three' Greek Gods figured out who was going to be in charge of what realm, and... well, the conversation ranged, I guess, to sum up. All four of us took an equal part, and I was thinking how cool it was that the kids engage in conversation like they do, when Ben mentioned something about parents' perceptions that their schooled children who are of average ability get average teachers, and that kids with either learning issues, who are 'below average', or gifted kids, get the better teachers.

Now, this would have been an interesting thread to follow - but Luke heard the words 'below average' and suddenly said, "Yes, I'm below average."

Very matter-of-factly, mind you, no wistfulness or emotion of any kind. He was just stating a fact. My stomach churned, and I could see my worry reflected on Ben's face, too. One of us, or probably both of us, asked Luke: "Why do you say you're below average?"

"Well, that is what [Mrs. First Grade Teacher, who should probably remain anonymous] wrote in my report card - y'know, after I was doing bad when we got home from vacation?"

Luke was remembering his first-grade report card, in which the teacher took special care to mention how much worse his behavior was after we returned from a two-week vacation, that May, to Myrtle Beach. Luke spent those two weeks frolicking in the warm South Carolina ocean, finding clams and brine shrimp with his Dad, wave-surfing with his Grandpa, reading (memorizing, actually) the Magiquest manual, roasting marshmallows with his Grandma. His every moment was spent learning in some way, and so he didn't find the time to complete the sixty pages of worksheets that Mrs. First Grade Teacher had sent along. And, surprise surprise, he was not thrilled at the prospect of getting his nose back to the academic grindstone; agitation at school ensued.

Well, Ben and I hastened to correct Luke in his belief that he is 'below average.' We reminded him that it isn't up to Mrs. First Grade Teacher to make judgments like that, and also we helped him to remember all the things that he does do well. I hope that we convinced him - but I'm not entirely sure we did.

How do you counteract years of negative self-perception like that? Luke referred to himself as 'below average' and 'doing bad;' I fear that no amount of rock climbing, reading, role-playing or unconditional love can counteract something so ingrained.

Effing school! Still capable of hurting, more than two years later. Sigh.

What is a Real Education?

Whoa. I've just read an article in The Atlantic Monthly, and let me tell you, it is a doozy. Entitled Cultivating Failure, the article disses California teachers and administrators who espouse gardening in school in addition to readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic.

It's a rant designed, it seems, to bring progressive educators, anyone who disagrees with author Caitlin Flanagan's near-Puritanical viewpoint about the 3 R's and, one imagines, garden-lovers, to spluttering rage. I must say, it worked on me. If you have a few minutes and feel like you haven't done enough spluttering today, go read it - and then come back, and let me know what you have to say. Go on, I'll wait for you.

So, what'd you think? Were you able to get past the deliberately inflammatory language, like the part where the author calls those who eat at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse restaurant "ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting [men] or [women] of the people"? Or, where she compares time spent by children gardening in school to sharecropping in the Jim Crow south?

The reader certainly gets a sense of what Flanagan feels kids should be doing in school instead of gardening: they should spend their entire schooling - 12,960 hours over twelve years of school, by my count - bent over their books, learning math and reading. Anything else, she seems to believe, is positively criminal, judging by her references to 'precious school hours' that should be spent, for example, 'writing paragraphs on The Crucible.'

But here is my question: isn't the kind of school that Flanagan wants a prison in itself? Isn't it a great way to turn children off to the excitement of learning? I think my head might explode if I spent six hours a day in instructional time, and I'm an adult without the energy level of a typical five-year-old! The author is very Professor Umbridge-y in her viewpoint about school, even as she claims to know how to teach children best.

Repeatedly, the value of a good education is reduced in this article to a score on a test. The question 'why learn?' is answered, both overtly and subtly, with 'to get into college' or 'to score well.' There is absolutely no discussion of creativity, curiosity, the thrill of figuring something out.

I think that this is because the gist of the article is that gardening in school is especially bad for - and a tremendous insult to - poor, minority students whose parents or grandparents picked (or even still pick) food in orchards owned by others. And I'm not saying that the situation for poor minority families in California is a good one - but, once they pass the test and get that all-important piece of paper that says they passed the test, what do the sons and daughters do then? Start working at some crummy job, exchanging mindless button-pushing for tomato-picking?

Maybe that is what they do; while I've always been lucky enough to have food on the table, I've worked some crummy jobs in my time. But when I wasn't cleaning toilets or laundering the skivvies of total strangers, I was still using my brain, reading because I wanted to, or playing board games because I couldn't afford a tv, or going for a walk or even... wait for it... gardening.

Because my curiosity and love of learning was NOT squelched by endless drilling in school. I went on field trips, performed science experiments, had the extreme luxury, by today's standards, of two recesses per day until sixth grade and gym twice a week, and spent plenty of time just playing with classmates. I learned that learning is about more than the times tables and how to tell a subject from a predicate.

I kept thinking about The Alliance for Childhood while I read Flanagan's article about how bad gardening is for children, and how offensive we should all find gardening in school especially if our forbears relied on manual labor (as mine did) for a living.

The Alliance for Childhood is a group of educators including some of my heroes in the field, like Dr. David Elkind, child development specialist and author of The Hurried Child and Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk, Sue Bredekamp, who co-wrote Developmentally Appropriate Practice, a book I reference even in homeschooling, and Alfie Kohn, who writes so persuasively against standardized testing. Two of them, Joan Almon and Edward Miller, have written a mind-blowing paper,Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School, in which they review several studies about how much time young children spend in teacher-directed activities (like math and reading) versus child-directed ones (like recess and imaginative play). Any guesses about how much time kids spend in each? Here's a hint: mostly teacher-directed and nearly none, or actually none, child-directed.

Miller and Almon also discuss the ramifications, for children and our entire society, of the overwhelmingly teacher-directed world school has become for Kindergarteners, and it's not good:

As one kindergarten teacher put it, “If I give the children time to play, they don’t know what to do. They have no ideas of their own.” This is a tragedy, both for the children themselves and for our nation and world. No human being can achieve his full potential if his creativity is stunted in childhood. And no nation can thrive in the 21st century without a highly creative and innovative workforce. Nor will democracy survive without citizens who can form their own independent thoughts and act on them. (Crisis in the Kindergarten, pg. 8)

But, what is the power of a child's own ideas compared with a great score on a test? I guess that is the real question.

The Carnival of Unschooling: First Edition

I am so proud to be a part of my friend Susan's newest endeavor, The Carnival of Unschooling. It's a monthly carnival, and if you have a post about your family's experiences that you would like to be included in the September Carnival, then you should submit it by August 30th.

But whether you do or you don't, go and check out the carnival for August, up at her blog, The Expanding Life. It's a great start to what I'm sure is going to be a great resource for those who are unschooling, and those who are thinking about it. Thanks Susan!

A Persuasive Essay on Education....

... by my friend Susan of The Expanding Life. I know, I said I'd stop being serious - but I couldn't not share this!

Mommy Break

From Spring 09

Luke and Owen are off visiting their Grandma for the week. That picture up there is of their napkin rings; Ben put them up on the windowsill, so that they could keep a lookout for when their owners come home. Think maybe he is missing the kids, just a little? I know I am... while I appreciate the quiet, and the chance to think entire thoughts without interruption, I definitely miss the boys.

That said, I've had more time to peruse the blogosphere, during daylight hours at least, than I ever have before! It is fun, and I thought I would share some of what I've been reading.

First, Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and the great blog that goes with it, has this great post up about kids, books, and the lead law. Try not to shake your fist too hard at the stupidity of this law while you read...

Then, by way of Principled Discovery, one of my new favorite blogs, comes this: an arrogant, I'm guessing fairly young, teacher opening up a can o' whup-ass on homeschoolers! Even I, with all my copious current spare time, could not read all 625 comments, in which he is lambasted thoroughly by probably more homeschoolers than he even thought knew how to read, or access the internet.

I did, however, read this Dude's next post, Homeschoolers: Do They Care Too Much?, along with most of the 142 comments - I even threw in a few myself, because it was either that or my head might explode from the sheer arrogance and ignorance of this blogger. I must caution you: if you read these, make sure that you've already been to the bathroom or you might just have an accident from laughing too hard! We homeschoolers can be pretty darned funny while we're putting pompous ignoramouses in their place.

And now, on to more positive posts! This week's Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Why Homeschool, with lots of great posts to read. Some of my favorites: if you enjoyed The Princess Bride, you'll love Home Spun Juggling's take on the Fire Swamp (note: scroll down, for some reason the post itself isn't hypertexting). Also, Homeschool Bytes has a review of a fun, free math game that my guys love in Timez Attack!. Finally, some food for thought - my friend Susan writes about rethinking higher education here.

Over at Topsy-Techie, volunteering is happening this summer; read about it in this funny, inspiring post. And finally, Susan of In The Kitchen is waxing philosophical about Thomas Jefferson's desk. I'm still trying to figure out how she's even finding time to post as they continue on their away-from-the-kitchen adventure!

So, get yourself a frosty beverage - or, a cup of tea - and settle in to enjoy these. I'm off to read some more, or maybe I'll go talk to the chickens for a while... when are the kids coming home again?

Higher-Level Mathematics

I nearly spluttered tea all over the place while reading this article in The Boston Globe today.

The gist: because lots of teachers-to-be didn't pass the new math section of their teacher-certification exam here in Massachusetts, the children they will go on to teach will suffer an inability to grasp the concepts taught in their eventual classes. Now, I can see that if you are going to teach higher-level math, or specialized math like trigonometry or calculus, you'd better know what you are doing. But somehow, I managed to be a pretty damn good early childhood teacher without extensive knowledge of calculus, trigonometry, or statistics and probability. In fact, I've managed to live a pretty damn full life without extensive knowledge in these subjects! (Recently, though, statistics and probability have piqued my interest, and so now I do know quite a bit about them - read about that here.)

My gut reaction upon reading this was outrage, and since I finished the article I've been trying to figure out why.

Partly, it's because of the attitude here in Massachusetts that testing is the key to all learning, and if we can only get everyone to pass the extensive testing required to graduate, they will miraculously be prepared for Life. So untrue! And thousands upon thousands of children who don't test well, or would rather be learning in their own way, or what they want to learn about, suffer for it. In fact, I think that they suffer for the rest of their lives - the lesson that they learned in school is to put away their interests and curiosity, to shut up and study for the test.

But also, there is the issue of educators' bragging rights. In this day and age, our young people graduate without the knowledge to compare credit card offers (it's true! read about it here), yet educators want them all to know high-level, theoretical math. From the Globe article: State education leaders enacted the new certification requirement so Bay State students can better compete internationally. Massachusetts lags behind parts of China and other Asian countries on international measures, even though the state routinely tops national standardized tests. Just last week, the American Institutes for Research released a report entitled "Why Massachusetts Students, the Best in the US, Lag Behind Best-in-the-World Students of Hong Kong."

I wondered, why do we care so much about our global standing in mathematics? More to the point - why does this standing matter to Massaschusetts' students? Chances are good that not many of them aspire to be mathematicians, and even if they did, how many actuaries or trigonometry professors could one state really employ?

But here is what got me maddest about this article: the assumption that because of the ignorance of the teachers-in-training in higher-level mathematics, their future students are doomed to ignorance, too. All the blame for the children's (percieved)shortcomings is put on their teachers, as if the children cannot learn without somebody force-feeding them the standard curriculum!

Here is a short-list of Things My 8-Year-Old Knows More About Than Me: How to do preferred searches on our library web site. Comets, the solar system, and space in general. Dinosaurs. Dragons. Greek and Egyptian mythology. Volcanoes, fossils, and rocks. There's more too, but the point is, Luke knows about all these subjects because he desired, very much, to learn about them.

I know with certainty that, should he want to learn about trigonometry, algebra, organic chemistry, or countless other high-level subjects that I, his teacher, know little or nothing about, he will learn about them.

I'll help by guiding him to the books and/or people who'll help him learn - not by becoming an expert in the chosen subjects. I mean, whose learning is it, anyway, his or mine?

Dreaming Big

I have been reading Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, a book that rapidly rose to 'favorite' status for me. Which is weird, because I'm generally not a fan of books about Life's Little Lessons, or Lofty Reflections On Life - usually, I go all morbid when I am even in the same room with them.

But Pausch's book has kind of a back door in: the lecture he gave at Carnegie-Mellon University just after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Feel the morbidity creeping? ... you are free to ignore it, Randy Pausch's 'engineering problem,' as he referred to his cancer, was not really the subject of his last lecture. Instead, it was about the dreams of childhood, and how they made him into the man he became. (I tried to find this on YouTube, but it wouldn't play :-(

Reading the book got my friend Shannon thinking about her childhood dreams, which got me thinking about mine - and Luke's and Owen's, too.

When I asked Owen about his dreams, he gave them to me right away: to be a Dad, cook breakfasts, and "sleep without pajamas." At four, I'm not sure he can really give voice to some of his other dreams, which, judging by his play and the conversations he has with his stuffed buddies, include journeying as a knight and joining the Star Wars universe.

Luke dreams bigger: he wants to be an inventor of time machines and other "trans-dimensional" modes of transport, and he wants to live with the dragons in the woods behind our house.

Here are my childhood dreams:

To do a split all the way to the ground.

To play ice hockey.

To be in Narnia.

To run away and live in the woods, like the boy in My Side of the Mountain.

To be an Olympic skier or ice skater (as a transplanted Canadian, winter sports were BIG, and still are).

I look at my list now, and wonder if it can be said that I've achieved any of my childhood dreams? I am a Yoga instructor and, while I can't do a split all the way to the ground, for me Yoga is a direct result of that first childhood dream.

Ice hockey was out for me (because of my gender - no daughter of my Dad's was going to sit in stinky locker rooms with sweaty boys), but I played field hockey for five years, LOVED it and have several lifelong friends because of it.

I go to Narnia still, every time I read the series - also, I am able to escape reality with great literature all the time, and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was the original doorway into that world.

While I do not technically live in the woods like the kid in My Side of the Mountain, the appreciation for nature that this book instilled in me continues to be a part of my life, every day.

And, while I'm certainly not an Olympic skier, I love winter sports and want Luke and Owen to love them too.

I look at my list, and realize that there is a direct connection between these childhood dreams, and the grown-up I have become. It makes me wonder about Luke and Owen: will their dreams come true? And if not, will the fact that they dreamed them at all help contribute to the kind of adulthood they have? I sure hope so.

Well, those are our childhood dreams... what are yours?

Why Do You Homeschool?

About a year ago, I started wondering why other people homeschool. We began because the academic pressure at Luke's primary school made him sick - but I thought it unlikely that everyone, or even most homeschoolers, had the same awful impetus that we did.

In the non-homeschooling world, the conventional wisdom is that people teach their children at home because A) they belong to a freaky religious sect, or B) because they desire total isolation from their fellow humans. Certainly around where we live, homeschoolers are seen as radically separate from their communities. In that world, before we made the switch to homeschooling, it was hard to imagine that the conventional wisdom could be wrong.

Once we started, and I learned how truly awesome homeschooling is, and how very un-radical homeschoolers are, I began to wonder: where are all these weird, unsocialized people I'd heard so much about? The homeschooling families we meet seemed so well-adjusted, involved in their communities, and generally very together that it's hard to imagine their children having the same kinds of problems Luke did when we started. With this in mind, I wondered, what made them decide to homeschool?

To find out, I conducted a survey of homeschoolers in our local email newsgroup, asking why parents removed their children from public schools to homeschool and how they feel their children fare now, socially and academically. I found out that Luke's experience was far more common than the conventional wisdom holds: all 24 parents who answered my survey, from dozens of school districts in 3 states, withdrew their kids from public schools because of problems with academics, such as the curriculum or teaching methods. Their children were bored to tears - either that or driven to aggressiveness, impassivity, or illness by school teaching methods, rules, and regulations. Many were also labeled, punished, and/or bullied, as often as not by the adults in schools to help develop a 'thick skin.'

A few parents cited religion, a few cited social/peer issues, but all placed blame squarely at the foot of the institution itself, both for what was being taught and how it was being taught.

And now, a year has gone by and I'm wondering, not just about the northeast, but about why we homeschool nationwide.

So, I have a question for you: why do you homeschool? Whether you have always homeschooled, or pulled your kids out of school to start, I'd love your input. The survey itself is seven questions long and I am happy to get responses of any length, from the brief answer to pages about each question. My plan is to spend several months getting as many families, from as many states as possible, to respond. Then I will review the responses and write a paper about the results.

To take the survey, please email me at whywehs@yahoo.com; you will remain anonymous, in case you worry about that kind of thing, and your responses are very valuable, whether you have one child or a dozen, whether some are in school, or some were in school, or none have ever been in school... you get the idea.

I hope you respond to my survey. I believe that schooled children will benefit from our stories, because we homeschoolers show every day that education must be shaped to fit the child, and not the other way around. If we can be open about why and how we educate our children, then we give hope and strength to non-homeschooling families everywhere. We are saying, loud and clear, that there's more to life than school, and many ways to become educated.

Thanks!

P.S. - If you have a blog or website, and would like to link to my "Why Do You Homeschool" button, just copy the text in this box below and paste it into your website. Thanks soooo much to Jena at Yarns of the Heart for teaching me about buttons, and for making the box o' text itself... they don't call me the Stone Age Techie for nothing, and I would not have even known where to start without her!

<a href="http://stoneagetechie.blogspot.com/2009/04/why-do-you-homeschool.html" target="blank"><img width="200" alt="Survey at StoneAgeTechie.blogspot.com" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfeO0NMSn-QoSSW_YN5AiciS2c0ZzvfmZNuAV_dvJS85-FW6Ru-yUh0tDVnfDNMVRObUhhm5dMx2rJFch2cf1q2JPIWpOQzo1u5qpcZrnchVgowORaciSs7cr_QeEyVs5s15s-pXry2fY/s240/study+button+v+5.jpg" height="148"/></a>

Another Subject Better Played Than Taught

We are unschoolers, or as Jena says, interest-led learners. This means that our kids learn about what they want to know, and they learn with all of their senses and through lots and lots of play.

Luke bounces back and forth among a few favorite subjects, right now primarily dinosaurs and dragons. He reads almost unceasingly, non-fiction for the dinos, and stories (such as Eragon or Dragon Slayer's Academy books) for the dragons, and he visits web sites to play dinosaur trivia games, watch Walking With Dinosaurs, and find out where dragon sightings have happened all over the globe. He sketches elaborate dragons while out in the woods, 'playing' at observing dragon behavior behind our house, and even uses his math skills to figure out how many weeks he'll need to save up for new favorite books about dragons and dinosaurs.

My point is, all the work that 8 year-olds need to do - reading, writing, thinking, mathematics - happens naturally in their play. And from everything I've read about interest-led learning, this continues as kids get older; the play may change a bit, becoming more abstract and about more sophisticated topics, but it's still play at heart. After all, if you really love your job, is it work or play?

Today, I read this article from yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe, about 'teaching' emotional intelligence. A growing number of educators and psychologists, worried that schoolchildren lack this type of intelligence, are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that will overtly teach it, as the article's author writes, "just like trigonometry or French grammar."

Well, I just spluttered. And then ranted, when I read about the types of lessons planned: identifying different emotions on the faces of children in pictures, for example. Why, I wondered, don't they let the kids play a little more? Then the kids would see 'expressions' on the faces of their friends, and perhaps figure out ways to resolve conflicts - a stated goal of emotional intelligence proponents - based on their interactions during play, too.

Luke got involved in the discussion over breakfast this morning. I expressed my disdain for the idea that emotional intelligence should be taught this way - how do you grade somebody's knowledge of emotional intelligence? what would this standardized test look like? why, why do educators so like to break everything into little lessons, why do they think that's the best way to learn everything (or, for that matter, anything?) Would they use the Saturday Night Live skit about the sarcastic clapping family to teach sarcasm?...

While I ranted away, Luke wondered, why was I smiling? That question stopped me cold. I answered that it was because I was angry about the absurdity of this idea, and that combined with my anger was a feeling of (I don't know if this is a word even, but it made sense at the time) bemusedness.

I told him that my smile was a cynical one, too, because the idea of teaching all children emotional intelligence through a curriculum instead of firsthand, through interactions with others in which emotion is bound to play a part, is one that could only have been invented here - in the country that doesn't believe in down-time or recess for schoolchildren.

I thought it was so interesting that during our talk about emotional intelligence Luke wondered why the expression on my face didn't match the tone of voice coming from my mouth. And because he is attuned to emotions and a verbal kid, he's capable of forming this question and then understanding the answer. (Yes, he'd get an 'A' in Emotional Intelligence :-)

Luke's questioning, and then understanding, represented a teachable moment which any canned curriculum about emotional intelligence is bound to miss. They'll be too busy grading the children on how well they remembered the sequence of facial expressions to address questions that stray from the curriculum.

And that's a shame, because children really do need to hone their emotional intelligence; they need to cajole, question, tease, debate, laugh, and sometimes even fight.

In short, they need to play.

On the Virtual Field Trip

Finally, the big day arrives!

Good morning, and welcome to the Virtual Field Trip! Please make sure that you are sitting comfortably:

From winter 08 09

Also, have your passport ready for better service.

From winter 08 09

Previously, the bus was driven by expert driver Owen:

From winter 08 09

...but today he has graciously ceded this post to two very competent professionals, Dog and Panda.

From winter 08 09

Now, sit back, grab some cushions, blankets and a snack, and let's hit the road!

From winter 08 09

What a wonderful, wonderful trip! From the moment we heard the Magic School Bus theme song, we were hooked - and then, when Luke found out about the passport links he was jumping for joy. Anything 'official' like that really brings him in, and as Luke is a duel citizen of Canada and the US, he had a choice of official passports, so he was just over the moon.

Owen, still only 4 and not really inclined to sit in any one place for too long, enjoyed the whole passport-creation event, and some of the postings, but Luke and I sat, captivated, in the bus for more than an hour, and still only got into Utah - giving us the rest of the posts to visit later this week!

Some of Luke's favorites were Goblin Valley, the Pirate Adventure, and the Lincoln Log Cabin, especially for the 'build-a-log-cabin' game. I enjoyed the Lincoln Log Cabin too, and also Mt. Vernon in Virginia, and so many other places...

Best of all, now that the kiddos are asleep I can go back in and check out the whole trip again!

Jena, thank you so much for this. It is a true gift, from a talented blogger.

Why We Homeschool

Last spring, I surveyed parents in my area who had removed their kids from public school in order to homeschool them. And, even though I took Luke out because the academic pressure in the early grades made him sick, I still felt in my heart of hearts that he was unique in this respect, and that most other families homeschool for religious or family values reasons. These reasons are perfectly valid, but as it turns out, not the main reasons given by the parents who responded to my survey.

Anybody have a guess as to what the #1 reason, cited by every single parent, might be?

Yep: academics.

A few parents cited academics and religion, a few cited academics and social issues - but they all expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the curriculum and teaching methods their children received in the local public schools. They ran the gamut from gifted children who spent the bulk of their school days giving quizzes and correcting their peers' papers - I'm sure you can imagine how popular those lucky children were - to very bored, smart kids who became behavior issues in class, and on to children with special needs whose education plans were not honored and who were harmed emotionally because they were part of the 'dumb' class, and who didn't learn anything to boot.

With all this in mind, I'm excited to share an article of mine, published this month in both the online and print versions of Parents and Kids. You can find it here.

Update, 4/12/09: Unfortunately, Parents and Kids has no archive, so my article is not currently on the web. If you are interested in reading it, please email me at whywehs@yahoo.com and I will send you a copy.

In it, I tell our story about why we homeschool, discuss last spring's survey, and answer commonly asked questions that we homeschoolers get. If you enjoy it, I hope you'll pass it on; the more dissatisfied parents learn that homeschooling is a great alternative, the more kids can get out of school and start learning.

Practical Knowledge

Even though Luke is so healthy, vibrant, and knowledgeable about almost any subject you'd care to mention, I still worry about the traditional sorts of things that he doesn't know yet. Math facts, long division, the diagram of a sentence; these are subjects Luke does not know much about because they don't particularly interest him.

While I do worry, I have confidence in Luke. It springs from the knowledge that, should he suddenly become interested, he will learn those subjects faster than you can say 'standardized test.'

At the Life Without School blog over the weekend, I read a great post about what kids should know, when. Laureen, the author, wonders where practical knowledge fits into a child's education. For her family, living on a seafaring Catamaran, 'practical knowledge' takes on a different meaning than for us landlubbers. Still, Laureen's point is made every day, right here in our home.

Each time Luke cooks himself an egg, asks a question and then says 'hey, I know where I can find this out!', begs to get on the library website to search for books on his favorite subjects, makes connections between seemingly unrelated subjects, says 'I don't get why this is funny' when reading the comics and then really listens while I explain it to him - he learns so much about metaphors, sarcasm, facetiousness, mottos, and other conventions of English as well as our culture, just from the comics! - each time he pokes his head up from the blankets in the morning, he learns infinitely practical stuff.

It doesn't stop at practical, though. Luke is capable of seriously high-level critical thinking, and participates actively in family discussions about any topic from chicken-keeping to the American Revolution. He may not remember each and every fact he's ever learned - although, he does a better job with this than his mother, for sure - but I think he is expert at a more important skill: how to research, really learn , about a subject.

And, I ask you, what is more practical than that?

From The Stone Age Techie

How to Teach Thoreau to Little Guys

From winter 08 09

We needed an outside-type field trip, so today we went to Walden Pond, ostensibly for a walk, but really to check out the tiny house where Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote, by himself, for two years between 1845 and 1847.

I wanted to give Luke and Owen a sense of Thoreau, even though I knew it would be hard to explain to them what he wrote about and why. How do you translate across time and a serious difference in language to help young children understand the motives of people who lived so long ago?

I started talking in the car on the way there, about imagining no cars, no airplanes overhead, just the sound of the wind in the trees... I told them we were going to see the place where 'Thoreau lived, all by himself, so that he could see if he could do it.'

Luke piped up with 'oh - like Johnny Appleseed!'

'Kind of the opposite of Johnny Appleseed,' I replied, 'because Thoreau wanted to see if he could go to the woods and pretty much avoid people, do most everything on his own, and write about his experience whereas Johnny Appleseed wanted to bring apple trees to as many people as he could. One wanted alone time, the other wanted to be with people.'

Both boys thought about that for a while, and then Luke said, 'hey, maybe we'll find his little shack while we're walking!'

I thought, 'small steps, Karen, small steps!'

Today, a pretty windy, chilly day for walking, both kids enjoyed themselves. The first thing we did was check out Thoreau's house, rebuilt closer to the road than the house site. Luke was so excited to find the 'shack' and truly captivated when he heard that Thoreau built two trapdoors into the floor. I swear, he went to bed tonight puzzling out why anyone would build trapdoors into their floor - if you know the answer, send it along our way, please! - and so we set off into the woods to find the house site.

We walked along the water of Walden Pond, and every couple hundred yards we came upon a stone staircase leading right into the frozen water. The boys were fascinated, and kept wondering aloud why Thoreau built these; they finally concluded that he really liked to swim, so he needed these stone staircases to get to the water.

We ate lunch at the house site, largely because the wind wasn't quite as howly there as near the water.

From winter 08 09

Thoreau had a lovely view from his front door:

From winter 08 09

I cannot be sure if 8 and 4 year-old boys truly appreciate living as Thoreau did at Walden Pond. They may not have a clear understanding of who Thoreau was, or why he went to the woods, but their interest has been piqued.

I will say this - going there on a windy, overcast day in February brings the true experience a lot closer than visiting in summer, with the rest of the tourist world.

Plus, we got a nice walk out of it; driving there, Ben and I listened to a talk-radio show about television, and were shocked to discover that the average American watches more than five hours of tube a day! As we listened, with one kid reading in the back and the other one looking out the window at the scenery going by, I felt thankful that tv plays such a small part in our lives.

I would much rather be out enjoying the natural world than in front of the tube, and today my family seemed to feel that way, too.

Stone Age Techie in the Boston Globe

We've gone old-school around here this week.

Last Saturday, I read this Op-Ed piece about the importance of high scores in educational testing. While I disagreed with the whole piece, one part in particular left me speechless.

Author Kathleen Madigan wrote: "Just a decade ago, Massachusetts had lower reading scores than Connecticut. But while the Commonwealth's reading scores improved more than any state's between 1998 and 2005, Connecticut experienced some of the nation's most significant declines. Leaders in Hartford chose to focus on "how to" skills like critical thinking and problem-solving over academic content ... Connecticut has recently seen the error of its ways. It has discarded the focus on how-to skills and joined the growing number of cities and states adopting Massachusetts' academic standards as their model."

I wondered how anyone could dismiss critical thinking and problem-solving skills, arguably two of humanity's most important talents, in favor of high scores. And, in part because I've been watching the John Adams series on DVD, I decided to voice my opinion in a decidedly old-fashioned way - I wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe's editorial page.

I didn't think it would get in to the paper, I understand that the Globe gets hundreds of letters a day, but it felt good to write it anyway. I was taking part in an age-old tradition, the debate of ideas.

But I guess they decided it was okay, because here it is on today's Editorial Page!

Mine was not the only letter that the Globe received about this topic. The editor printed 3, all in stark disagreement with the original author's belief in test scores as the be-all and end-all. In this one, a 40-year teaching veteran rails against assessment. Also, Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stamford University, takes offense with both Madigan's argument and with the part Madigan accuses Darling-Hammond herself of playing in it.

Reading these other letters, I felt so validated. That my letter was published along with those of a teacher and a Stamford University professor, both of whom expressed themselves so well, gave me goosebumps. How exciting to be counted among such people!

The whole episode has left me thinking, thank heaven for newspapers, Op-Ed pages, and good old-fashioned debate.

Not Hooked on Phonics

Recently, I was thinking about Luke's last school teacher, just before he left 2nd grade, telling me about new research that showed kids retain spelling better when they memorize it properly the first time, kind of the direct opposite of inventive spelling.

At the time, I thought only of making Luke's school life a little easier, by stopping the memorization of 'sight' words. He was supposed to have memorized about 100 of these by the end of 1st grade, and the pressure on him to 'practice these every night' and have them committed to memory was making him sick - really, really sick. We're talking night terrors at least 5 nights out of each week, migraine headaches, and weight loss - Luke lost 20% of his body weight in 1st grade. By the time his problems started up again in fall of 2nd grade, after taking the summer off, I didn't care so much about how many sight words he had memorized, I just wanted him to stop feeling bad.

But, because his teacher had this new research, I put aside my education, all I was taught about how kids learn in many different ways, everything I had experienced in learning to write myself - I used inventive spelling until at least 3rd grade, and I'm one of the best spellers I know - and allowed her to persuade me that this decision about my son's learning was for the best.

Needless to say, it was the wrong decision. And now, happily, we've rectified it.

What matters more than children's ability to spell each word properly is fostering their creative spark, the one that will get them interested in lifelong writing and reading. As a homeschooler, Luke reads voraciously, and spelling doesn't hinder him from reading books, graphs, selected Newsweek and newspaper articles, even books written for adults. (A fact that I'm sure confounds teachers everywhere - how can an 8 year-old kid read at a high school level, but be unable to spell!)

Recently I decided to look up this research and see it for myself. Here is what I found: an article which 'critiques' inventive spelling. My reading of it gives only one valid (from the author's point of view, anyway) criticism, that teachers do not have enough time in the day to decode children's inventive spelling. And, my thought on that is: some things you just can't rush, and one of them is written communication.

But what really galls me is the author's position that there is only one method by which children will learn to spell, and write, correctly, and this is phonics. He puts the fear of God into parents that should their children be exposed to "Whole Language" (in quotes, of course, like any radically ludicrous idea) they will suffer from an inability to write or spell, pretty much ever.

Next, I wandered down to the bottom of the page and clicked the 'home' link; it brought me here, to the home of The National Right to Read Foundation. And, hey ho, guess what they're selling? Yep, phonics stuff. Their mission statement reads, in part, "Explicit and systematic instruction in phonics is a non-negotiable component of comprehensive reading instruction." The italics are theirs, showing how very much they want to drive home this point.

Now, I can see the value of some phonics instruction, for some kids. But to state that phonics is non-negotiable, even for kids (like mine) who learn, as it were, by osmosis, that statement is a death sentence: learn these rules, or you'll never learn to read. It's simply not true, as many thousands of kids are learning the hard way.

Why not expose kids to both phonics and whole language? That way, if they learn better one way than the other, at least they'll still learn. Kids don't need to memorize sight words to read, and Luke is a living example of this.

As a wise yoga instructor I know says, "Take what you need, and leave the rest."

Recess Research

We got back from our indoor park day today to find a link to this article about experts agreeing that recess improves children's behavior and academic performance. Which left me scratching my head thinking, well, duh!

I felt like calling up the experts and saying really loudly, 'how would you like it if you were allowed no time to stretch your legs or breathe the free air all day?' I mean, is this a surprise to anyone, that kids need recess to be at their best?

While I had those experts on the horn, I'd also mention my concern that they seem to think that kids ONLY need recess to behave better, perform well academically, or "resolve conflicts" on the playground, as one expert helpfully points out in the article. What's the matter with kids having recess because it's FUN and they are KIDS?

That may be my biggest beef with public education today: nobody's allowed to do anything just for the fun of it. Everything must have some higher purpose, some lesson learned, some Important Point. Do the experts not realize that kids at their creative, curious, problem-solving best got that way by either daydreaming or enjoying something so much that they just had to know more about it?

As you may have noticed, this is a topic that I feel passionate about; kids are KIDS, not robots that can be programmed to behave or perform.

From The Stone Age Techie

On Writing

Back before we started this whole homeschooling thing, Luke's anxiety about school was largely due to the copious amounts of writing required of him in Kindergarten, First, and Second grade. We would get notes home about how he was unable to work independently, more likely to be staring off into space than getting his jobs done, unable to get to the "fun" stuff because he couldn't concentrate. For us at home, who could not tear Luke away from projects and books he was really interested in even to come and eat dinner, this was mind-boggling; how could he possibly be unable to focus?

The answer, it turned out, was two-fold. First, he concentrates wonderfully, on stuff he's interested in. Two, he is emphatically not interested in writing.

Our first months of homeschooling passed, with parents making no demands upon his time, and Luke reading anything he could get his hands on, asking questions, exploring, playing, conversing. So long as he didn't have to write, he was happy - but I worried, especially on those rare occasions when Luke would write something and find he'd forgotten how to make, for example, a three. I kept my concerns to myself and gave Luke as much time as needed, mainly because my gut told me to. But sometimes it was hard.

Then, a funny thing happened: he began to write spontaneously. Lists, letters to his favorite Harry Potter characters, an accounting of his allowance money and how it gets spent are all part of Luke's repertoire. Not coincidentally, these are all topics of great interest to him.

Last Friday, I read this great post about teaching writing at my blogosphere-friend Jena's page, Yarns of the Heart. Jena is more towards the graduation end of homeschooling, with one in college and two younger teens, so reading about how she handled 'school' when they were small has been wonderful, and very reassuring.

Jena writes, "Here are some specifics for today's student:

1. Let them read.

2. Let them think and express opinions about what they read.

3. Respect their opinions and insights so they will feel the freedom to talk honestly with you.

4. Share your own insights and wonder at a writer's ability to communicate.

5. Don't kill the fun of writing by pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes all the time."

Since reading this post, I have stopped worrying; this list is, quite literally, how Luke spends his days.

Already, he's a capable, intelligent boy. Our hope is that he will grow up to use writing as a communication tool, a written extension of his voice.

Personally, I don't think he will be able to help it; communication, just like Harry Potter or his allowance, is of great interest to him.