Homeschooling In Exile

We only started homeschooling at the end of the last school year. It's what I'd always wanted to do, but being a single mom, working at low paying jobs, with a young child, well, it just wasn't possible.

Last last year, when I realized I was managing to pay the rent and feed the fam on my own without a partner and without having a job outside the home, I revisited the idea. At that time, however, Clara was attending Sunnyside Environmental School in Portland, OR. Sunnyside is a wonderful school. Volunteer work is required of the students, and community involvement is encouraged and rewarded. The kids go on field trips weekly, have an annual week-long camping trip referred to as "Outdoor School," make regular visits to the zoo. The curriculum was rich, the kids were diverse, and the parents were involved. There seemed no reason to remove her from school. She was happy.

So then we had to move from Portland to small town Texas. Clara didn't fit in.
She suddenly found herself back in Elementary School in the 6th grade, after having gleefully graduated 5th grade at Sunnyside a year prior. In the hallways of the school there were posters glorifying the war in Iraq, and a huge poster of George W. Bush with the caption, "SMART PEOPLE READ."

The kids here are a homogeneous collection of mean, white, blond-haired, cheerleading and football playing, sexual-intercourse-in middle-school having , name calling, fundamentalist "Christian" twits and virtual Aryan youth. The pressure to conform to this cookie-cutter idea of what it is to be human is immense and inescapable.
They called Clara a "goth," which, though totally laughable and ignorant, when spat at her with such disgust and venom, really hurt her. They said she was a freak. They laughed at everything she did. No one would talk to her except to hurl some nasty comment her way. Each day, she came home at best depressed, and at worst in tears.

So, after nearly 2 weeks of this and after finally having gotten settled into our home, I withdrew her from school and homeschoolers we suddenly became, by default.

Hurrah, I thought! Finally!

...and it has been fun - fun and frustrating and challenging and infuriating and gratifying and wonderful and just plain hard.

Little did I know that Clara, although she's always gotten good grades, had managed in 7+ years in school to learn remarkably little. When I withdrew her from school, I quizzed her knowledge of some basics that she should have readily known but surprisingly did not. For example, she could place only 3 of our 50 United States on a map: Oregon, Texas, and Florida. Oregon and Texas she recognized from having lived in them, and Florida she recognized from the Simpsons as "America's Wang." It's a sad state of affairs when your kids have learned more from the Simpsons than they have in school.
(Not to suggest that Clara spends a lot of time watching TV. We have never had a television in a shared room in the house, nor has she ever had a TV in her bedroom. The TV has always "lived" in my bedroom and a point would has to be made to go watch something [usually the Simpsons and, many times, PBS]. We have never been the kind of family to just sit around watching the boob tube. I used to be one of those people with a "Kill Your Television" bumper sticker on my car - for a period of years, we didn't own a television, and I disdained the thought of having one, so it's not TV's fault she wasn't learning, it's school's. Well, school's and mine.)

I guess I just assumed she was learning. She was doing her homework, she was getting good grades, and when I asked her questions about things, about what she was learning in school, she seemed to know what she was talking about. I didn't think I had to sit at home and quiz her on things to make sure she was learning. I guess I was wrong.

So we started homeschooling in earnest, and although I'd always leaned more toward the "unschooling" ideology, it became clear that we were going to have a lot of catching up to do, and it would involve lots of tedious memorization and worksheets and drills and such. My goal is, of course, for her to be able to get into any college she wants, and to be able to succeed there and go on to succeed, ultimately, in her chosen career and in life.

It's an interesting process, homeschooling, when you're not using a prepared curriculum and you're not starting from scratch. Some things Clara is able to do better than many college students. Other things she is learning she should have learned in the 4th or 5th grade, sometimes even earlier.
Also, Clara is an interesting kid. Although I WANT for her to be one of those kids that is so madly curious and sees an opportunity for learning in everything (like me) she simply is not.
Left to her own devices she would read manga and gaming magazines all day, along with playing the occasional video game and drawing the occasional picture. She would not on her own pursue a sport or music, or research some scientific concept that interested her. She's happy just to sit and not do much, which I can understand as being natural and OK, even though it's not my style. It is, though, a challenge to keep her focused. She learns better through enforced rote and repetition then through discovery and self-motivation. For this, I do blame school, and school alone.
I remember when she used to prance through the park, catching bugs and looking them up to see what they were. I also remember how she wanted to be an artist until the second grade, when her sadistic teacher commented thusly on the hearts she had cut out of construction paper and was affixing to the bag that would hold her Valentine's Day cards, before ripping them off the bag and making Clara start over: "Those aren't hearts! I don't know WHAT those are!" That was the first time Clara came home from school crying, and the beginning of my spending an awful lot of time having lunch with her, observing her classroom, and meeting with the teacher and principal.

So our curriculum is weird - I try to keep it loose and creative and fun, but it sadly needs to be, and thus ultimately is, a bit dry and boring.

Here's what we've been working on.
The basics:
We learn spelling (a real weak point for Clara), grammar, and vocabulary, both in the form of boring stuff like writing the words over and over, spelling them out loud, and oral quizzes, and in ways I hope are a little more engaging, like crossword puzzles and word searches.
We learn math - lately it's been pre-algebra concepts, like fractions and decimals, basic equations, etc. Most of this is review, but some of it (though she should have learned it long ago) is decidedly not. She's very skilled at math, but she's still behind from not having learned things she ought to have before now.
We are working on spelling skills beyond memorizing specific spelling words. I found a terrific program online that is helping with that.
We have done less science than we ought to, but I am increasing my efforts in this area. Right now we are working on Scientific Classification.
If something interesting has happened on a particular day in history, she will do some reading on that.

Then there's what I like to think of as the fun stuff - the meatier, more thought provoking fare.
Texas law requires homeschool instruction to include "A Course in Good Citizenship," which in our house means examining current events, talking about politics and the state of the world today, and discussing our values and how we can put them into action. I would like for Clara to start volunteering soon, but it's complicated by the fact that we're so rural, so far from everything - it would take all day to take Clara somewhere for this, let her do it, and bring her back - and we're already so pressed for time...
Last week was Banned Books Week, so we did some reading on that.
This week we read and talked about Columbus Day - what the facts (when, where, and who) are, but at greater length, the meaning of it. Was Columbus a good or bad guy? Was he a hero, a monster, or something in between? What did this mean for the indigenous people already living on the land Columbus Discovered? How do they feel about Columbus Day now? We talked about Adam Nordwall claiming Italy by right of discovery in 1992, since Italy'd not yet been officially discovered. We talked about Columbus not even being the first European to "discover" the New World (Leif Ericsson did that, nearly 500 years earlier). So why is Columbus important, and why does history recognize him as having "discovered America?"
The day before yesterday, the 11th, she spent some time looking at the photographs of and reading about Dorothea Lange, since Dorothea Lange died on Oct. 11, 1965.
Today we're looking at the Nobel Prize, since the prizes for this year were just awarded. We'll go further into the Peace Prize in particular, and Clara will write a report on Mother Theresa.
Also, we are looking at why people are superstitious about Friday the 13th. (Turns out that this apparently has much to do not only with fear of the devil, but with fear of and loathing for women in Christianity. Interesting!)
She read Cannery Row before, during, and after the trip to Monterey where we stayed on Cannery Row, and she's now reading through the Spark Notes on the book. When we're done with that, we'll do some more intensive analysis of it.
Every day she does a Sudoku puzzle, and a brain teaser of some sort to exercise her skills in thinking and logic.
These are the things that I hope are fun and will keep her engaged.

I want her to work on the blog I had her set up, to help her with her skills in writing and typing, but for the moment there simply isn't enough time.
There is so much I want to teach her, and so much that I want her to learn that I don't myself know. It's overwhelming. There's no doubt in my mind that she's learning more and better than she did in school, but is it enough? Can she catch up and get ahead? Specifically, will we ever again live in a community where there are abounding learning opportunities, and where she can volunteer and participate in sports and take art and music classes for dirt cheap and sometimes free, where she can make friends outside of school, rather than being isolated here in the country with nary a like minded soul around? If only we could only get back to our beloved Portland, our homeschooling, and our lives, could be whole again.