Resources for inspiring academic excellence -x-post

[swimmermom3]

I have been pondering academic standards for the past few months while experiencing an ever-increasing level of frustration. My goal was simple in our first year of home schooling: produce better scores than the public school. Fine. Done. As is the way with human nature, now, I want more. And I want it in writing to refer to on the days I'm too tried to know where I am going.

 

I currently feel submerged in a "good enough" culture and I am in serious rebellion. "Let them be children." "Just this once." "It doesn't have to be perfect." Or there is the worst disservice one teacher delivered to my dd, "C's are just fine, it's average".

 

What inspires you to reach for more in teaching your children? What inspires you to ask for more out of yourself? For many of you, the pursuit of excellence is a way of life. Is that how you grew up? Do you talk about excellence with your children? Do you talk about why things like attention to detail, order, and self-discipline are important. Or do you just ask for them. Do you operate from a set of written academic goals? Do you have a family mission statement/philosophy? Are there books and people that get you to stretch your boundaries.

 

Tell me what excellence looks like in your home, in your life.

[Nicole M]

Just briefly, because I'm scurrying out the door, I have had to learn to streamline. At first I tried to do too much, and it was all getting done badly, or getting half done, and I was overwhelmed. What helped me the most in raising the quality of our work was to really set realistic goals. For me, there is such a fine line between excellence and killing yourself.

 

I am so fortunate to live right next to a small college, and to work on that campus. We have access to wonderful professors who have let me stalk them for information, and are thrilled to discuss their passions. Honestly, "excellence" is not a term I think about as much as "delight", which I think of not in a sentimental, superficial sort of way, but as deep engagement, deep thinking, deep pondering. Sometimes we're working on exasperating, depressing or ridiculously hard work. I mentioned here before that last summer we listened to Alan Rickman reading Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. Not an easy book. One day we were out and about running errands, and my youngest piped up that he was anxious to get home: “I can’t wait to hear Eustacia die! Die, die!” My oldest gleefully agreed. They may not have liked the characters, but they were certainly engaged, and we had wonderful conversations that flowed out of their energetic hatred of Eustacia Vye.

 

I guess for me, excellence looks like delight. Or, delight points the way.

 

This probably is not answering the question you asked.... But you ask hard questions!

Edited November 11, 2009 by Nicole M

[Jane in NC]

Here is my problem: modern education (and modern life for that matter) emphasizes that which can be quantified. My current lens on life is that of a parent whose child is applying to colleges. I have been seeing lots of little boxes on forms into which My Son Does Not Fit. Does it make his education superior or just different?

 

Frankly I am pleased (and perhaps foolishly smug) that my son is not reduced to numbers and boxes. He just returned from a college visit, flying by himself for an overnight. My son is confident and driven. Was he always? Perhaps more passionate than most kids, but this is probably a family trait. Did all of that cajoling through the years lead to this? Maybe.

 

I'm one of those "Keep your eyes on the Prize" people. Aim high but take baby steps to achieve your goal.

 

What motivates me? I do not know how to be unmotivated. Really. Life is just so wonderful and amazing--I want to experience all of it. Always have. But what opened the door to the world for me first and foremost were books. I am one of those people who experienced liberation from the mundane in the library when I was just a kid. Imagine how tickled I was when my son recently described a perfect Saturday: going to a library used book sale and listening to "Wait Wait" on NPR. Ideas and laughter. One does not fit that into a box on a form, but one does spend a delightful Saturday with this kid.

 

I am one lucky woman. Life is just so wonderful and amazing.

 

Jane

[Jane in NC]

 

I guess for me, excellence looks like delight. Or, delight points the way.

 

 

Delight! Absolutely!

 

Jane

[JennW in SoCal]

I'm with Jane and Nicole. Delight and insatiable curiosity about the wonderful and amazing world around us is what motivates me. The phrase "academic excellence" just makes my skin crawl because it doesn't inspire me to explore or create, it makes me feel defeated before I even begin! (I must have issues about not being able to measure up:tongue_smilie:) I'm not an "eye on the prize" kind of gal either, I guess.

 

I don't homeschool for academic excellence, I homeschool because I want my kids to have a lifelong love learning. Life is short, family time is VERY short and should be cherished and enjoyed. Absolutely let them be children, I say. We STILL sometimes skip school to go to the zoo and my homeschool kiddo is in 10th grade!

 

But we also spend long days on formal school work, surrounded by Great Books, pretty darn good books, and all kinds of science texts and materials. We read and discuss without it being considered school. The school part is when they write, I edit, they rewrite. They review math and language and science vocabulary, they do practice problems, and lots of the humdrum school work most kids do. And I push, cajole and nag, but I can't say I talk about excellence. I think by example their dad and I are teaching what it is to do things well, and that we've been successful due do having done things well. But it is up to our kids to decide for themselves what it is going to take for them to achieve their goals, to be a success.

 

Like Jane, I would describe my kids as confident and driven, and totally outside the typical numbers and boxes. They are interesting young men of good character who both have a great sense of humor -- that is so much more important to me than any kind of excellence that could be measured by SATs or APs or any other scale.

 

The only resource you need is your own enthusiastic attitude towards learning.

Edited November 11, 2009 by JennW in SoCal

[Jane in NC]

I'm not an "eye on the prize" kind of gal either, I guess.

 

 

Let me clarify: I believe in achieving the insurmountable by tackling the small pieces. But I also believe in deviating off the direct path. Ugh, the metaphor is inappropriate because life is not linear!

 

In my years of teaching mathematics, I have encountered a number of students who claimed that they wanted to work for NASA or NASCAR or whatever, but seemed to think that NASA or NASCAR was going to come knocking on their door, somehow having heard of their genius. Having reasonably small goals (passing Calculus, looking for a summer internship, etc.) was not part of their thinking. I guess that is what I mean by Eyes on the Prize. Know where you may want to go and figure out a way to get there--taking time out to smell the roses, of course!

 

Jane

[G5052]

I always keep in mind that "more is caught than taught." If you are a learner yourself and want to do things well, it is likely that your children will be the same way. If you care about what your children are learning and expect them to do their best, they usually will rise to the occasion.

 

I've been around the homeschool community long enough to know that parents who aren't reading and learning themselves and who just hand off materials to their students to complete tend to have very different results than those who are learning things themselves and who are involved with their students even if they're taking outside classes or in a co-op. The same is true of classroom teachers and the parents of students who are schooled by others.

Edited November 11, 2009 by GVA

[JennW in SoCal]

I *knew* I shouldn't write that post with the geometry teacher's guide on my lap while my son did his problem set. Talk about not reaching for success -- I'm a horrible multi-tasker!

 

I've heard so much about the book The Outliers that I feel I've read it! I do believe in the need for those 10,000 hours of practice in order to be great at something. I see it in the success of my dh and I see it in the lack of success in my playing violin -- 9,000 hours just wasn't quite enough to be really good.

 

Motivation to put in those 10,000 hours, the motivation to work hard and excel, has to come from within. I don't dismiss rigorous work, don't let my kids get away with half-hearted work yet I personally don't believe in schooling just for the sake of high test scores. That's all I was getting at in a round about manner.

[Nan in Mass]

I have been pondering academic standards for the past few months while experiencing an ever-increasing level of frustration. My goal was simple in our first year of home schooling: produce better scores than the public school. Fine. Done. As is the way with human nature, now, I want more. And I want it in writing to refer to on the days I'm too tried to know where I am going.

 

I currently feel submerged in a "good enough" culture and I am in serious rebellion. "Let them be children." "Just this once." "It doesn't have to be perfect." Or there is the worst disservice one teacher delivered to my dd, "C's are just fine, it's average".

 

What inspires you to reach for more in teaching your children? What inspires you to ask for more out of yourself? For many of you, the pursuit of excellence is a way of life. Is that how you grew up? Do you talk about excellence with your children? Do you talk about why things like attention to detail, order, and self-discipline are important. Or do you just ask for them. Do you operate from a set of written academic goals? Do you have a family mission statement/philosophy? Are there books and people that get you to stretch your boundaries.

 

Tell me what excellence looks like in your home, in your life.

 

I'm not homeschooling for academic excellence. I'm not like Jane or Jenn or Nicole. I'm mostly ducking and hiding because life hurts. I have a fantastic life, almost idyllic. I am homeschooling so that my children can share that life with me and stay sweet. Most of the time I am so worried about children falling off second story roofs or dogs being hit by cars or saving squirrels from cats or long icy commutes or fog and rocks while sailing or children traipsing around foreign countries or far-reaching issues like world peace and global warming, that striving for things like academic excellence sound comforting. If I have the energy.

 

Academic education just isn't a top priority in our family. Staying alive and living are. Not that I don't try my hardest to do a good job educating my children. I do. It just isn't always the academic part that worries me. People like the Nipponzan Myohoji monks inspire me. Books like Gaudy Night. People like Jane. My brother-in-laws, who are always doing cool projects for fun, like mapping the world in a new way or learning to cast bronze statues or reading interesting books. Lots of things inspire me. I do have a list of homeschooling goals, and those help keep us on track. But I let the children choose things for themselves, too. I find that having a fair amount of discipline in our lives helps, too. The children do gymnastics, which is very disciplined. We live on the edge of chaos, and that doesn't bother us particularly, but we like to achieve our goals with discipline and hard work and joy.

 

So I'm not much help. Sorry! I am loving your question, though! I hope lots of people answer you.

 

-Nan

[Brenda in MA]

Lisa,

 

In reading through the responses so far, these two caught my eye:

 

I always keep in mind that "more is caught than taught." If you are a learner yourself and want to do things well, it is likely that your children will be the same way. If you care about what your children are learning and expect them to do their best, they usually will rise to the occasion.

 

I've been around the homeschool community long enough to know that parents who aren't reading and learning themselves and who just hand off materials to their students to complete tend to have very different results than those who are learning things themselves and who are involved with their students even if they're taking outside classes or in a co-op. The same is true of classroom teachers and the parents of students who are schooled by others.

 

I am homeschooling so that my children can share that life with me and stay sweet.

 

For me, I would say that "academic excellence" is important, but in my mind, "academic excellence" depends a lot upon the particular child. I have an idea of the basic subjects/info that I want my children to learn, but sometimes I have to adapt them to a particular child. For example, in 8th grade, my older son used a specific history book, read it on his own and took notes. He and I discussed his reading twice per week. This year, with my younger son, I am reading the same history book aloud and having him take notes. Is the 2nd one less capable? No, but he is a slower worker and he is very outgoing and learns best when he discusses the material along the way. Adjusting my approach with him makes sure he gets the content and also gets his "need to discuss" met.

 

I also find, as Gail said, that the best way to instill in a child diligence and responsibility is to model both of these myself. It can be hard for me to keep my motivation every day, but when I loose it, so do the kids. This aspect of modeling good behavior ties into Nan's comment about keeping the kids "sweet". It seems to me that if kids spend the most time with people who respect them and treat them kindly, then that is how they will learn to treat others. They will have an optimistic view of other people and that is something I want to instill.

 

I also strive to find at least some engaging and/or interesting learning materials to balance out the subjects that tend to be tedious or repetitious. I want to make sure that we have some material to cover everyday that we look forward to. I do my best to stay motivated and enthusiastic about all the subjects we do, even though some of them are not my favorites. I've heard too many moms say that their kids either "hate math" or "hate history", and when you talk to them further, you find that the moms either hate these subjects themselves (and readily share their feelings with the kids), or they use very dry/boring materials that they just hand over to the kids to do by themselves and don't discuss it with them.

 

I read something somewhere a few years ago that said something like, "Every child deserves an enthusiastic teacher." This statement really made me think. It made me revise my outlook and approach because I've come to believe that a curious/motivated student is the product of a motivated teacher.

 

What gets me to stretch my boundaries a lot of the time are things that I read on these boards. I love reading about how others approach their teaching. It makes me think, and it makes me reevaluate my own methods. My children and I have benefited tremendously. I've also come to realize what a gift this time I have with my kids is, and I want to make the most of it. Life is too short to do otherwise.

 

Brenda

[swimmermom3]

Just briefly, because I'm scurrying out the door, I have had to learn to streamline. At first I tried to do too much, and it was all getting done badly, or getting half done, and I was overwhelmed. What helped me the most in raising the quality of our work was to really set realistic goals. For me, there is such a fine line between excellence and killing yourself.

 

I am so fortunate to live right next to a small college, and to work on that campus. We have access to wonderful professors who have let me stalk them for information, and are thrilled to discuss their passions. Honestly, "excellence" is not a term I think about as much as "delight", which I think of not in a sentimental, superficial sort of way, but as deep engagement, deep thinking, deep pondering. Sometimes we're working on exasperating, depressing or ridiculously hard work. I mentioned here before that last summer we listened to Alan Rickman reading Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. Not an easy book. One day we were out and about running errands, and my youngest piped up that he was anxious to get home: “I can’t wait to hear Eustacia die! Die, die!†My oldest gleefully agreed. They may not have liked the characters, but they were certainly engaged, and we had wonderful conversations that flowed out of their energetic hatred of Eustacia Vye.

 

I guess for me, excellence looks like delight. Or, delight points the way.

 

This probably is not answering the question you asked.... But you ask hard questions!

 

But Nicole, you did answer the real question written between the lines and hidden behind that awkward phrase “academic excellenceâ€. It went something like this, "I feel like we are slightly off course. I want to do better; I'm just having a heck of a time figuring out what better means. My usually reliable internal navigational system is infuriatingly quiet these days. Can you help me find the right direction again?â€

 

Delight is one of the main reasons we home school and there has been far too little of it recently. Instead, there has been too much flu, to much travel and work (dh), and too much worry. A lot of that worry has to do with showing those around me that home schooling works and that my ds is thriving. I am pushing hard on the academics and following fewer rabbit trails. Then I read some of the posters here and worry that I am not pushing hard enough. Yet, it's always the rabbit trails that get us through the hard stuff. And yes, we are doing too much school and I need to streamline.

I'm so glad you all can read minds and not just posts.

[swimmermom3]

Jane, Jenn, Gail, Nan, & Brenda,

 

Thank you so much for your responses. It's been a long day and I need some time to think. I did want to tell you how much I appreciate your ability to see beyond what is in some ways a rather superficial question. You have spoken from the heart and it is my heart that doesn't sit lightly or rightly at this moment.

 

Nicole-you have an eerie way of being one step ahead of me. Thank goodness.

 

Warm regards and :grouphug: to you all.

[rwjx2khsmj]

in my mind, "academic excellence" depends a lot upon the particular child.

 

This is the reason that I began this homeschool adventure. I could see my children, so unique, struggling to be average in a classroom setting. How could I leave them in that situation?

 

Now, excellence to me is defined by trying something new, stretching to see if we can learn a bit, share a bit and live a bit.

 

Do I know that we are exceeding the education they would be receiving in our ps? Absolutely. I don't say that with any smug superiority but with a certainty born of knowing my students like no other can.

 

Do we have academic excellence? On a good day, yes. On a great day, YES! Over the course of week, yes. On a bad day, we look forward and know that our efforts will average out to more than average.

[Nan in Mass]

You know that saying about it being darkest right before dawn? I've noticed that in the figurative sense, anyway, it is often because we become dissatisfied with the dark and make a dawn.

 

I am very, very lucky in that I'm not having to justify homeschooling to anyone. My whole extended family looks at what my children are doing and tells me that I am doing a good job. The problem is more the other way around; I feel that they aren't seeing many of the places I am failing because they aren't trying to teach academics to my children. They are assuming that academics come just as easily to my children as they did to them. (They don't. Can you hear the wail when I say "don't"?) But at bottom, what they are saying doesn't have to do with academic excellence. They don't tell me that I am doing a great job at teaching my children academics. They tell me that I have well-educated children. They are judging my children not by theirr ability to produce a neat, accurate page of history questions or French translations (academic excellence that we don't come anywhere close to - my niece's third grade papers were better). They are judging my children by the enthusiasm they display when taken to the art museum and the interesting history tidbits they produce when looking at the bas-relief of Gilgamesh, and by my youngest's ability to converse with my mother's friend from Paris. I worry greatly over that academic excellence because I think those academic skills are very handy in real life, at work and whenever you want to learn something, and I want my children to be able to continue their education in college. I worry so much I sound like Tigger. But if I had to choose between being able to produce those papers and being enthusiastic about the art museum and understandable in French, I would choose the second. I would be far and away more worried if I felt I were trading the second for the first. Instead, I am most definately trading the first for the second. And here is where my post connects up with yours: those bunny trails are when the education excellence is happening. It is happening even when it is severerly interfering with the academic excellence. You know that. You are just too tired from the chaos of living to feel it at the moment. You are right - if you wrote down your educational goals, not your academic ones, although those can be part of them, but your educational goals, you could go back and read them at times like these and that would help you get through. Remeber, too, what SWB says about academic skills. She says that it is a "nibbled to death by ducks" situation. You just keep doing a bit here and a bit there and eventually, they are aquired. Those bits of academic excellence you are trying to do in between the rest of life's (and education's) chaos are going to have to be enough, because you don't want to substitute the academics for the education.

 

I find that I have had to rely on gymnastics to teach my children some of the lessons that other children manage to learn through the academics. The self-discipline, breaking a goal down into steps and working on each step, hard work, etc. are all there in gymnastics. They probably are there in swimming, too. I think often times boys learn these lessons better through the their bodies than through their brains. At times I have been very, very tired of having our lives revolve around gymnastics. We give up so much for it. But then I watch my child walk between Boston and DC and realize that it has made him strong. Or he says something like he did yesterday, when we were discussing Gilgamesh: "Of course I'm self-confident. For my whole life, I've had my coaches telling me to do things that look impossible. They make me try over and over, and then after awhile, I discover I can do them. They never give me things to do that I can't eventually do. By now, I'm pretty sure I can do anything."

 

There are usually many ways to learn a thing. Why don't you make a list of what (to you) makes an educated adult? Then try to figure out a way of covering each of those things. They might be non-academic, like travel or swimming, or they might be academic. Then, when you are floundering around feeling like you aren't getting anywhere, or you are panicking because someone said something upsetting, you can read the list, as you suggested.

 

Go read my recent post about NEM versus Dolciani if you want to hear about my latest panic. I am able to write this because I just came through a dark spot and made the changes that I realized we needed to make. The hive helped me to see that my question wasn't really about NEM and Dolciani. At least your academic excellence question was closer to your real question than which math program should we use LOL. The conclusion I came to is that we need to do more bunny trails involving technology and skip French academics a few more times. We just built a small electronics kit and I am scrambling to remember what little electronics I ever knew so I can answer some very excellent, thoughtful questions. Because my son is asking the questions, I feel like we are back on track. I think perhaps it is when he isn't asking the questions that I get panicky. I just realized that now as I wrote it. Cool. It could be very useful to know that. Someone on the old accelerated acellerated? board used to say that you had to keep doing whatever made your child's eyes light up, that that was how to tell if something was working or not.

 

My son is just about done with struggling through NEM's problem solvers, so I have to go do French now. If he doesn't present me with a series of questions about circuit boards and persuade me to make him reread the electonics section of the ham radio book we did a few years ago.

 

We're not a very academic family, so if this advice, which I've worded fairly strongly, lands well below your standards, just ignore it. And forgive me. It isn't that I don't respect those whose families are more academic than ours. Our family just isn't like that, so I can't offer advice on getting there.

 

-Nan

[Tullia]

I've never gone so far as to write out a mission statement, but probably should have for those nights when I could not sleep and worried about all kinds of awful things--and most of them did not come to pass! However, I always did and continue to talk about excellence with my ds who is now in college. Excellence is reflected in overall goals and choices of curricula but it's really more about how you implement your theories.

 

Day to day, excellence is about sustained effort, good time management, making changes when things don't go well, alternating the acquisition of skills with their application, and keeping in mind the difference between education and credentials. Education is a lifelong process, so keep in mind that it's not all on your shoulders but more about preparing your dc to gradually take more responsibility and eventually carry on without your active supervision.

 

I loved the freedom of being mostly free of worry about credentialling (is that a word?) issues during the elementary years because NM is generally a hs friendly state. In high school, though, I spent more time planning how to pursue our vision of true education while writing course descriptions and a transcript suitable for college and scholarship requirements.

 

We did not have the perfect home school. Ds would be having an easier time now if we'd gone further in math during high school. He's going to have to deal with the consequences of that for at least two more terms.:tongue_smilie:

 

We opted for reading fewer books than I would have liked, and I have to confess that our exploration of American Literature (with a couple of exceptions) was perfunctory. That said, what I've been most pleased about since ds started cc classes is not his grades (so far good) but his ability to talk with his instructors (and others) with enthusiasm about economics, literature, history and science in broader terms than simply what's being covered in some particular class.

 

Nan has a good point about rabbit trails. They always made me nervous...what about OUR SCHEDULE??? The truth is that high school at home is a lot of hard work. For my son those rabbit trails provided the extra intellectual nourishment without which he'd have given up.