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islamicrays · 4 years

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Subject: That's Not Homeschooling

Dear parents with kids forced home from school due to the Coronavirus,

As a homeschooler with 13+ years of experience I'd like to make it known that what you are doing with your kids right now is NOT homeschooling. It's way harder!

Let me explain:

1) Homeschoolers have an expanded view of what learning looks like especially for kids in the K-7 grade levels. We talk to the kids and find out what they are interested in studying. We follow their interests and passions into amazing depths. We aren't forced to follow a specific curriculum or a bunch of printable worksheets from a school textbook. Sure, we use worksheets, but we focus on teaching our kids in a way that inspires them and helps them retain what they are learning. We have a ton of freedom and creativity. That also means that as parents we teach in a way that excites us too. Basically, we all have a good time.

2) Homeschoolers aren't really....home. At least not all the time. The term is really misleading. It's better to think of actual homeschool as "parent directed learning." Homeschoolers spend a lot of time learning out of the house. We love the library, museums, nature centers, local parks, and field trips. Let me repeat FIELD TRIPS! We love them and try to add in as much hands on learning as we can. Being stuck in a lock down at home with kids 24/7 is not our life. We also attend co-ops, and take classes outside the home on a regular basis with experts. (Think outdoor science classes, robotics courses, speech and debate, art classes, etc) In this case, we are struggling right along with you being stuck at home.

3) Homeschooled kids have really rich social lives. While they might not see their peers every single day like kids at school, when they do see them they get to hang out for hours on end. Because we aren't regulated to the rush out the door/school/snack/homework/dinner/bedtime routine, we can plan activities with the kids during the week and let them hang out for 3, 4, or 5 hours at a time. Homeschooled kids learn a lot together but also hang out a lot together with more "endless" time to make memories. Our kids are suffering as much as anyone else's right now in not being able to see their friends during this quarantine period.

4) We've developed a rhythm with our kids, a learning style, and a relationship where we don't have to beg or force our kids "to do their homework." We start learning at the time that suits our family schedules best. What you're trying to do right now is really hard! Don't be surprised if trying to teach your kids anything is worse than pulling teeth. You can't replace a whole system overnight and expect it to go smoothly. Some kids might be easier to work with, but many will not want to work with you. It takes time to establish a new teacher/parent relationship. When anyone starts homeschooling for the first time after their kids have been in school we tell them to expect the first year to be more about "de-schooling" and finding a learning style and rhythm that works for you and your kids. So, go easy on yourselves and your kids. It's going to be rocky right now.

5) We take breaks as needed for our mental well being and for our kids too. Burn out is real for parents and even kids. We all know what happens when we over-schedule our kids activities or our family calendar. When nothing is working out, everyone is tired or grumpy or just meh... we focus on connection and bonding over something wholesome and fun. We put away the workbooks or to-do list and spend a day observing nature, riding bikes, or we plan a field trip. Or maybe we do "nothing" - but that nothing doesn't involve watching TV all day. We know our kids will pick up where they left off in a few days time and things will go more smoothly. We don't have to answer to an assignment turn in date which gives us a lot more flexibility and a lot less stress. If you're new "online school" is trying to keep things super regulated you might find yourself butting heads with your kids a lot to reach deadlines. Especially during this difficult time, that's going to be hard. Do what you can, but again, be easy on yourselves and your kids.

6) We don't dive into schooling and working full time at the same time. Many homeschooling parents DO work, and some full time jobs, but again, like in #5 there is so much flexibility for learning schedules. You are trying to do everything all at once and that can't be easy for anyone. (One reason why actual homeschooling might suit you if this quarantine thing goes on for a long time.)

7) Perk I had to mention: we can take family vacations during off-seasons and beat crowds and high prices! Maybe right *now* those options are limited, but in general it's one of the wonderful perks we have. Road schooling happens when parents make their vacations both fun and also educational for the kids at the same time. The world is literally an open book to learn from. (And yes, you can take your math and reading lessons with you.)

So in a nutshell, what you are trying to do, all of the sudden and all at once isn't anything like homeschooling and the less stressed lifestyle veteran homeschooling families benefit from. This time is really hard, and I feel for you.

My best advice is don't let your fear that your kids will fall behind turn into negative energy that has you threatening the kids to do their school work or else! If they keep plodding along, they'll keep learning, they'll get it done, and in much better spirits when they house is harmonious.

*note*

Highschool students are in a slightly different category. Their grades impact their future college options. Because they are older, I encourage open dialogue with them about setting a work schedule. When they have ownership over their schedule, they are more likely to stick to it.

For everyone - exercise, fresh air outdoors and brisk walks when possible, and quiet personal time each day. For little kids use your phones for little virtual play dates. I'm sure your older ones are already talking to their friends. 🙂

We'll get thru this.

Sincerely,

A homeschooling mom.

-Megan Wyatt

#patience #allah #muslim #reminder #muslimah #love #women #mother #parenting #good parenting #homeschool

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brettanomycroft · 7 years

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Help Triangle Mom Rule the Classroom!

Or, you know, the world. Whichever works.

As many of you guys know, I’ve been teaching middle and high school for the past 5 years. For three of those years, I’ve worked to build a triangle cult teaching English/Language Arts to 8th graders at a middle school with over 1100 kids (we’re the largest school in the district, and they keep cutting our teacher units!) and 76% free and reduced lunch (Title I. Don’t ask about the other 9 Titles. Seriously.).

This year, they’ve decided to move me from my long-time portable into the building like a real person, and this new-to-me room contains 18 computers that I’ve been lead to believe might work. However, I’m looking to make my classroom 1:1 this year, and with classes of upwards to 26 students (and accounting for inevitable tech issues) I am hoping to get more tech! I’ve set up a Donors Choose project, and am requesting support to purchase 10 inexpensive laptops so that my students can create digital portfolios, practice writing and typing skills, and learn how to responsibly navigate the murky depths of the interwebs. I went back and forth about reaching out to tumblr to support my IRL goals, but ultimately decided that this audience of giving, socially-aware people from all over was too important to overlook.

Click here to go to my Donors Choose page! From now until June 21st, if you make a donation, you can type in LIFTOFF, and DonorsChoose will match your donation up to $50.

Any and all support in funding my classroom is immensely appreciated - even if it’s a single dollar or a reblog! If giving is not an option right now, I would love if you could please spread the word <3

Donors Choose gave me a hard word limit, so here are some more details below the cut!

Why computers? Don’t you teach English? Like books and stuff?

Yes, which is why having access to technology is so important! Nowadays, English/Language Arts doesn’t just cover reading novels and teaching vocabulary - we’re out to teach our students how to read, analyze, and create all kinds of content, from novels, to blogs, to infographics, to podcasts and (yes) even tweets. With more access to technology, my kids will be able to engage and be challenged think critically about information and media on the internet.

Additionally, our 8th grade Standardized Testing is all computer based (for better or for worse), but if kids don’t work with computers in the classroom, they end up going into the test facing a completely unrelated set of challenges: they have to work all of the tools and tricks of using the computer and typing in long responses (and no, we don’t have a typing curriculum) as well as taking the actual reading and writing test.

Finally, with ever-increasing budget cuts (here’s looking to you, Slenderman Rick Scott), teacher access to print-based materials like student novels, text sets, and general copies and supplies, is becoming even more limited if teachers don’t pay for them out of their own pockets. By switching to computers, students can have 24/7 access to the paperless materials they need, saving time, money, and the environment.

Wait, you said you already have computers. And you want more?

Yup. This year, the room I’m moving into has 18 desktop computers. Thing is, the teacher who was in there before me... didn’t really monitor their kids to make sure the computers weren’t getting busted up. And tbh, our school-based tech guy is not always able to help in a quick and efficient manner. With 10 additional computers, I can make sure that each student can have access to a computer at any given time, even if one (or four) decide to act up.

Can’t kids just use their phones?

Yes, and no. This year, I let my students use their phones to supplement when the computer were all occupied... to mixed success. More often than not, I’d run out of computers, and end up with students who wanted to use the computers to complete their work, but didn’t have a phone or mobile data. That time ended up getting used pretty unproductively. I also have a number of students who don’t have consistent access to a computer/the internet at home. I have, and will continue, to provide paper-based alternatives, but they really want to use the technology, and I really want them to learn how to use it efficiently and responsibly.

What sort of things will they use the computers for?

Oh man, so many things. I am hoping to organize most of my lessons and assignments through OneNote. My classroom is a Personalized Learning classroom, meaning that I design a wide array of assignments and learning opportunities to meet my students learning styles, interests, and needs. For example, for one standard or skill, I’ll provide written notes with an accompanying lecture for students who learning aurally or through note-taking, find a video on the same skill for my aural/visual learners, and then provide an interactive tutorial for my kinesthetic learners. I’ll also take a single text and provide variations of it for different reading levels, and create options for alternate assignments. I do this for almost every unit, and being able to quickly stick these assignments and options in a digital binder for my students will be way more efficient for them, and me. I played around with this in some of my classes at the end of the year, and it worked out pretty dang well.

Typing essays. Simple, I know, but most students don’t get a lot of practice typing on a physical keyboard. Still, at the end of the year, they’re expected to plan and type a 5+ paragraph text-based essay on the computer in about 2 hours. For students who don’t have experience typing and therefore type very slowly, they have to spend more time pecking at the keyboard than organizing their ideas. Seriously, I have students who hit the CAPS LOCK button every time they want to capitalize a word. But by having computer access and typing expectations from the start, all they’ll have to worrk about on test day is the test itself.

Creating a digital portfolio of essays, powerpoints, videos, and other digital, multi-media content. Reading isn’t just reading an article in a textbook anymore, and writing isn’t just essays. I gotta train these folks up on how to do all sorts of things - creating a coherent, engaging presentation, organizing their ideas through a number of different mediums, and using their creativity for good, not evil. By the end of the year, I’d like them to have a portfolio that they can take with them to high school and beyond, and the kind of digital-era skills they’ll need to stay informed and competitive as they get older.

If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me! Thank you so much for your support!

#personal #teacher lyfe #teaching #education #donors choose #donorschoose #ed #edu #teacher #middle school #donate #yes i recognize i'm giving out a good amount of personal info with this but i love my kids and want them to have an awesome classroom experi

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refusemyreality-blog · 6 years

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Doin’ Good, Anon

“I cannot even tell my boss I grew up in a mobile home,” she says to me. She’s my sister, not quite three years my junior.

She’s at the top of a large non-profit in DC. She still shops at thrift stores, buys groceries at Aldi, and drives used cars. Her thrift is #TBT. It’s a matter of pride to pare down our closets and pay five bucks for a nice jacket. It’s a gift from our mother who garage saled, goodwilled, resaled us through childhood and adolescence. We grew up “kind of poor,” like one pair of flip flops for warm months, one pair of quality mary janes for church during the school year. When we ruled the trailer parks, rugrats on bikes, we wore twenty-five cent knotty knit jumpers from garage sales or my hand-me-downs. It comforted me to be stacked three girls to a bedroom.

My sister and I had one authentic Cabbage Patch to our names. The third one of us got one my mom made from a kit. Cute as ours but not the brand and it did have that funny nose- two little upraised handlebars instead of a pert little nose. My sister’s had a funny name though. She could have sent in adoption papers to have it changed, but she kept it. At least the sister with the handcrafted patch doll got to name her own.

We each had stuffed animals of our favorite type. She had a mother-child monkey set. The baby sucked its thumb. All other toys were in the shared pool: battered tin kitchen set, Fisher price put-together train, riding horse, mini-tupperware dishes, fake food and grocery cart, plastic record player, Muffin Family Bible storybooks, and a box of cast off dresses for costuming.

Mom cut coupons on Sundays after dad picked out the parts of the paper he read with us on our orange swivel chairs in the living room. We’d help her organize them on those rare occasions she let us. Every morning, mom brushed our long locks into tight ponytails and trimmed the ends in the bathroom of our trailer (Baby curls trimmed by yours truly in great-grandma’s white bathroom while our parents were visiting. My mother discovered it the next morning and never let me forget that the gorgeous sweat curls around my sisters’ faces had be shorn away by me. Like I’d absconded with their beauty and made them plain jane white girls too early.)

I was the oldest of seven kids (eight if we count the one wasn’t born). Most of them came home to the trailer and several came in seventeen months succession. (Them winters was cold?) The big fat break between this sister and me is one of the longest. Almost three years, because mom was sixteen when my dad knocked her up. They married a few weeks after he graduated high school. While she finished up her junior and senior years, my grandmother babysat me. My parents cleaned up before this sister. They quit toking up, smoking, found Jesus and moved into a bigger trailer across the street.

This sister has a MA in Non-Profit Development from a swanky Philadelphia private university. She’s newly minted on the board of an East Coast private college in her denomination. She keeps her hair in a bob that she never has to curl. She barely blows it dry. She wears almost no makeup except black mascara to emphasize her eternally thick long lashes. She looks exceptional in a scoop neck shirt because she has thin broad shoulders that make her clavicles stand out. That’s a white girl beauty standard.

She carries herself like a queen. She’s barely been in debt since high school. She’s a saver, not a spender. A half-glass of wine makes her tipsy so she rarely drinks. She’s never smoked. Her skin has always been flawless except for that one well-placed beauty mark.

People say she and I are alike. We share traits. But not beauty. I’m thicker in the face. I have dad’s nose and everything about his side of the family. Bulbous nose, dangerous incisors (they’ve been ground to look more normal but still stand sentry in front of all my other teeth. We were too poor to get the traditional American braces. This makes me relate more to the Brits. Mind my gap.) I have narrow shoulders, thick bones, mousy brown hair that gets nappy on the underside. And zits, still.

I’m over forty and I still get zits. In high school I slathered them in toothpaste all night (some brute pranked me and said toothpaste would dry those red bumps. They only grew.) During the winter I smeared orange foundation from Big Lots over them. In the summer I baked them in the sun, then slathered more orange foundation on them.

But it’s not the variation in beauty that matters. It’s her comment.

“Why? You raise money for poor mothers and children.” Her organization gets women off the streets, provides medical care, connects mothers and children to basic assistance along with housing and education. I thought our upbringing motivated, at least in part, or that it would give her cred.

Granted our poverty is not like the women of color she raises money to help. We grew in Rust Belt white urban poverty. My mom organized and handled the church food pantry so she could work for the with government cheese and donations like endless pints of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, dented cans of vegetables and freezer burnt gas station sandwiches that we ate once there were six of us. (Gardening to feed six kids? She’d have to crazy on caffeine. She gave up on gardens after two years of building a house while home-schooling the lot of us.)

We were never homeless. We had a safety net. My grandfather owned the trailer court. He gave my parents “free” rental space in exchange for tapping my dad for snow plowing, road work and cement laying on my grandfather’s schedule, of course. (Um, yeah, I’m gonna need all day Saturday to help me lay cement for.... Sigh. My father just wanted a day off. Maybe that’s why he volunteered to lead worship, Saturday night church school, the youth group and a crap ton of outings for our church.)

When dad got itchy to get out of the trailer life-- Quote: “I don’t want boys coming to pick my daughters up for dates in a mobile home park.” -- grandpa gave my mother her inheritance of five acres of land and we moved into a camper for nine months so my parents could build the house. Not have the house built. No. They built it. The aunts and uncles and grandparents and church folk kicked in so we could have a real house.

So we grew up thrifty, boot-strappy, bleeding heart volunteering-types. Most of my siblings work with at-risk populations. Two work with addicts who have mental illnesses. My dead sister worked with high school girls in lock-up till she had kids and couldn’t afford daycare. Her husband works with teens on disability. One sibling is a nurse. Another sibling a programmer who adopted two kids with physical disabilities from the Philippines.

I teach at risk high schoolers. Most of my students have failed so many classes or grades they are just waiting on eighteen and the right to drop out. The ones who stay have babies, parents who are dependents, crippling anxiety and depression or other mental illness, full time jobs, a history of missing thirty or more days of school most years, or physical illnesses or disabilities. Almost all of them grew up in need. When my assistant principal pitched the program, she recruited me because we both grew up white poor. I didn’t want to say yes. Teaching general education high schoolers is daily triage. And, I would be aiming right for the hardest luck cases.

My other grade level teachers begged me not to go to the program. I tried some hang-ringing and soul searching and self-cajoling because this group of kids takes all my energy, but I couldn’t say no. I grew up around these kids, with single moms who have bad chunky highlights and don’t use the helping verbs before participles because they speak Hoosier. I might have been one, but I had what many of them don’t- a lot of breaks: my parents stayed together, my mom and dad kicked the TV out of the house and made music, talk radio and books our entertainment, then mom home-schooled us (with a rigor that surpasses most elite private schools, like “You will read the ENTIRE history textbook, answer all the questions and ace those tests. I don’t care how boring it is. Oh, and yes you will do thirty algebra-trig-geometry problems a day. I know you are cheating on the evens because the answers are in the back of the book and you didn’t show your work. Do you think I’m stupid?”).

We had a healthy diet, mostly. My mom and dad gardened a big ass garden and my mother canned most of our vegetables for years. She sweated with the pressure cooker and the bulging veins of a constantly pregnant woman while shooing us outside to either A) shuck the corn so she could freeze cobs, B) ride your bikes and stop letting all the cold air out. Do you think we are air conditioning the neighborhood?, or C) swing on the swings, go the park or just disappear peacefully for a while because I’m canning while a baby is attached to my boob.

Just after three pm, my father arrived from the warehouse. We’d spy his orange VW Rabbit coming down the road and run into the house slamming the aluminum screen door several times in succession and scream as we ran down the hall to “hide” so we could jump him as soon as he entered the house. Dad’s return highlighted our day. He’d shrugged us off after a lot of giggling and my mother chewing us out for waking whichever baby was sleeping. Saturday nights, after church, when we had popcorn and ice cream were the sanctioned “attack dad” nights. We throttled him with our pillows while he tried to tickle us. He laid on the ground while we beat him and he crawled at us threatening to tickle more than achieving it. Just the threat of his tickle made our sides hurt from laughing. Then he’d lay there, tossing us up and over his head in a twist, time after time until the butter brickle ice cream high, from servings the size of a tub of margarine, wore off.

The next morning, he made us pancakes and fake maple syrup and took us to church where we slept off our sugar haze during a two or three hour song and sermon service. In the middle, we saw some Pentecostal action- flags waved, people dancing in the spirit, blowing a shofar (an animal horn), and getting anointed then “slain in the spirit.” In other words, we had extraordinary loving parents with a great work ethic and a network of friends who spoke ancient tales and metaphors to embed in us all the advantages that working poverty can offer. Most of my students lack those safety nets.Our poor life wasn’t perfect but it was good. I keep thinking it was a life worth living and one worth telling.

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