alighted in the tall bushes and old trees that border our front side yard. And my children knew these friends by name -- common and Latin
(Bombycilla cedrorum). Two of them are now drawing the trees and the visitors. The third has returned to his reading.
He is reading, and he is conversing with the book's author in the margins.
And every once in a while he steals a glance at the twenty-five cedar waxwings that alighted in the tall bushes and old trees that border our front side yard.
And he smiles.
And now I remember -- all over again --
why I simply don't care if your students are ahead of or behind mine.
We do what we do with joy and confidence and laughter and love.
And, as it turns out, by all of the conventional standards (
e.g., the ACT, college acceptance, advancement in work, success on teams, and more), what we do -- whether it is more than what you do or less -- is, in fact, more than enough.
______________________
When I read
the much-linked article about Joshua Bell's experiment in the DC train station, in which he offered harried morning commuters the precious jewels of his performance and was all but ignored, I realized in a flash, "If I've done nothing else here, I've parented and taught three young people who would know -- intuitively -- to stop and listen."
This realization did more for my parent-teacher's heart than my son's solid ACT scores and my daughters' progress in music.
They stop to look at cedar waxwings. They stop to hear the music at O'Hare. They "talk" to the authors of the books they read. They think before they speak. They write to see what they think, and then write it better the second or third or tenth time.
They do this because they have had the space-time to stop and look at the twenty-five cedar waxwings alighting in the tall bushes and old trees that border our front side yard.
And when they do, it means something to them.
Added laterI've been called an elitist and an academic snob, particularly when I launch into
one of my tirades against mediocrity. I am, after all, one of those parents who was motivated to home-educate in order to ensure a standard of academic excellence I didn't see at work in either the public or private schools to which we had access.
But a pursuit of excellence need not preclude a deep appreciation of everything else. Folks become alternately discouraged or, curiously, triumphant about standards when the conventional wisdom is challenged, and sometimes, well, they lose sight of the cedar waxwings.
______________________
As I've said
before, the fact that we homeschool is the very last thing I share with people because I don't want my children to labor under the stereotypes -- socially ill-adept, unevenly educated, zealously religious, etc. -- currently associated with homeschoolers. We could argue all day about the veracity of the stereotypes, but they
do exist; therefore, I think that I have a responsibility to ensure that my children are not only well educated but also that they can comfortably function in the society and culture to which they belong. In other words, I think that it's my job to ensure that they not only meet the vision of the well educated conversational partner I carry in my head but also that they meet conventional standards of achievement and success.
In short, I've failed them if they can't pass the same tests their similarly skilled peers do -- whether those peers are educated in a conventional classroom or not.
I
repeat myself when I say that we need to dispel the myth that simply because we homeschool we're doing a better job than our classroom counterparts.
We're not.
Not all of us, anyway.
And the ones who aren't make it hell for the rest of us. The ones who aren't make the admissions counselor think twice about my son's application. We're lucky that he thought the same thing the second time, but still -- someone else prepared her son poorly; now my son's credentials are more carefully scrutinized.
That said, though, I still don't think it's my business to prescribe what other homeschoolers or public schoolers should be doing, any more that it's theirs to prescribe what mine do.
______________________
The short story is this: Academic excellence and joy are
not mutually exclusive concepts (any more than
a clean home and well educated children are).
We can teach them to read and to look; to watch and to learn; to think and to speak. We might even throw in some science and math, eh? Heh, heh, heh.
I want it all for my students, which is why I
work so hard to provide it.
We'll let you know how it turns out.
