For many homeschool parents, teaching writing is a major source of frustration and friction. Why? For starters, there’s the question of their parents’ ambitions for them. Many homeschooling moms planned and dreamed about how they would mold their children’s mind by teaching them in two big areas: a love of reading and of writing. The reading will open their children’s minds to an endless supply of fiction and fantasy to learn about history, science, our world, religion, and ideas. In writing, they hope their children will learn to express themselves elegantly while exploring their own thoughts and creativity.
While I don’t have any statistics, I think it’s the writing area where most parents get really frustrated. While some percentage of kids have trouble learning to read, a much larger number have trouble learning to write well. And, frankly, the parents probably are less skilled and patient at teaching writing. Also, when kids learn to read, they are younger and I suspect many parents start running out of patience as the kids get older. And the nature of teaching writing makes it very difficult for parents.
Also, many parents are concerned that they themselves do not write well. Sometimes without reason, sometimes justly so. So their insecurity creates some tension. Many parents are confused by the twin goals of teaching writing. On one hand, like drawing and other artistic forms of self- expression, one goal of writing is creativity to draw out thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, teaching writing also involves mastering how to structure sentences, paragraphs and essays for clarity and efficiency. In teaching writing, the student should show a mastery of sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling with all its nuances of plurals and possessives, and of grammar. So should a parent who is teaching writing focus on creative expression or GUM (Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics)? Many parents are clumsy in handling these two often-conflicting directions.
And, when the students start to succeed in learning to write well, oddly, the writing lessons can sometimes get even more tense. Remember, in teaching writing, there is no answer key. Who is to say if a student’s word choice or sentence structure is optimal or not? Who is to say if an essay is unnecessarily wordy or beautifully lyrical? If Hemingway and Mark Twain’s writing style is so different, how is a parent to guide a budding seventh grader writer in questions of style? And the kids, proud of their creative efforts, tend to be overly-sensitive to any discussion of their writing style. Many students emerge as writers in early adolescence and of course, that does not help reduce tensions.
I have no cure-all for these issues. I created Time4Writing.com as a resource for homeschool parents who want some help teaching writing. Oddly, I too tread some of this ground in creating this writing program. Here’s a few examples.
- I started with ambitions of teaching creative expression such as story-telling and exploring thoughts. Once I launched the courses, I found that the overwhelming need brought to us were students who needed help with basic sentences and paragraphs. Even teaching essay structure was too ambitious for the level of many of our first hundred students. I redirected our course development towards writing mechanics to help students at not just elementary but also middle and high school level, with writing mechanics.
- I found that it wasn’t just homeschoolers who signed up, but many students in schools that weren’t getting the hands-on feedback that they needed to improve their writing skills.
- Sensitivities. I started the course by hiring only experienced licensed writing teachers who had a deep interest in helping students write and were well-aware of the sensitive nature of teaching writing. Nevertheless, I found that many students and their parents are very sensitive to anything other than positive feedback and that the teachers, some new to online teaching, needed to build a new awareness of how feedback can feel in cyberspace. The students take their teachers feedback very seriously. We had some vigorous in-house discussions in which we struggled to build an online teaching methodology that balances the need to maintain a positive relationship while also identifying and correcting writing errors. Many of the same questions of the arbitrariness of formal writing styles and the methods of interpreting them were evoked.
Many parents find that teaching writing is difficult and it’s often a good idea to shift tactics and do some delegation. Time4Writing.com is a set of online writing courses taught by professional writing teachers. These teachers are specialists in their areas. The courses are eight weeks in length and reasonably priced. Time4Writing has been created by Time4Learning, whose integrated K-8 online home school curriculum is indepth and priced at a surprisingly affordable $19.95 per month. Many parents were initially skeptical about the quality of Time4Learning given the low price. Thousands have now learned that quality can be affordable. Time4Writing too has a surprising amount of substance packed into one eight week $99 course. If you have questions about Time4Writing, you can ask in our parent community about Time4Writing or on your choice of parenting homeschool forums such as those managed by Homeschool.com and the Homeschool Swap.
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A few times a year, I focus on getting caught up in the latest thinking in education. Here’s what I’m finding:
Disrupting Class is a book (and blog) by a HBS Professor, apparently the same who wrote the  Disruptive Technology Business Book. I just ordered it and am excited. But, from listening to the interview, I fear that I will both be in rampant agreement and be somewhat bored by it. What I heard in the interview is that he has woven together a number of ideas that I’m totally into and trying hard to implement. Basically, that with different intelligences, a class-centric education model fails and that our salvation will be technology that will provide individually leveled and paced education. First of all, I totally agree. Secondly, the best implementations of this are currently done in the 4% of the population who believes in education as a priority. Yes the homeschoolers. If you want to see what the future of education looks like, go visit some homeschool families and look at how they blend online curriculum, group classes, one-on-one distance learning, experiental learning, and traditional text-based education on a customized basis for each child. Go ask in homeschooling parents forum. Let me add that so far, most of the technology is disappointing. Pearson & Scholastics & Voyager & Compass & Harcourt etc are all saying this same thing about customized learning but mostly aredelivering very mundane automated textbooks with somevideo and multimedia but without the advanced modular architectures that nextgen systems will need. SpellingCity is a decent example of what the next gen building blocks will start with. So, btw, is TeachingTextbooks.com. Both have their start in the homeschool world and are taking the traditional educational markets by storm. BTW, on a personal note, being a Bulldog & HBS grad myself, I might like to get to the now team that wrote and is promoting the book. Another thing about the Disrupting Class blog is the blogroll on the side of important blogs. I’ll try to work through all of them this week.
I just whipped through a post on $.02 Worth about reading instructions for board games and how that illustrates the difference between the generations. Makes me want to get on my high horse about writing better software but there was a good point there about the disconnect between todays teachers and students, a real generation gap like we haven’t seen since my youth.
The Blackboard blog is a little promotional but it’s interesting to see how ambitious and apparently successful BlackBoard is becoming. The local fancy private school uses Blackboard for it’s school so maybe they will dominate both post secondary and K12.
I love the name of the next blog: Changing Higher Education. It’s really by a very distinguished guy named Lloyd. I only scanned a few articles but he seems to be playing it safe by mostly citing interesting studies about higher ed and their funding and fulfillment of mission. For the record, I’ll point out how completely I love the name of his blog since I feel that higher ed in this country is on a disaster course in which they live only to give out credentials. So much of the system is overpriced, ineffective, and dangerous (the drinking and other atrocities) on college campuses are out of control. Since most of the brands of colleges in this country mostly stand for sports teams….well, don’t get me started.
Digital Education is Education Weeks Blog which makes it a central one for K12.
Andrew Trotter maintains a blog called Digital Education Today also writes for EducationWeek reports that students say that schools don’t use state of the art technology and it impedes learning. No duh. Have you ever seen a teacher trying to hold a mouse? They remind me of my grandfather.
Ok, that’s enough blogs for tonight….
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This post might disappoint or surprise you, I’m not promoting any curriculum here, not Abeka, not Time4Learning, nor Saxon. What’s on my mind is the question of what curriculum should be? Should our kids learn about subatomic particles as part of their education but not how to build a house or how a flush toilet works? What literature and history and social studies should be studied? Is calculus as important as statistics or econometrics for advanced math?
My personal view is that education needs a pretty dramatic reform to catch up with society’s needs, todays learners, and the potential of technology based learning.
Educational standards get decided through a messy process but mostly, they don’t change very much. I’ve gotten very interested in alternative approaches to education, partially due to my work with homeschoolers, partially because I’ve never been in agreement with the educational process. So I’m starting to explore:
I’m attending an online conference on “Choice a la Carte” by the Education Sector to explore much broader approaches to education.
I just joined a few groups dedicated to curriculum studies: The American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies.
I’ll keep you updated on what I learn about what others are thinking. Of course, I’m working on my own version of a very next generation set of curriculum tools and materials. It’s slow going since I’m simultaneously trying to think it through, build the content, develop the technology, and finance it. Stay tuned.
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