“Homeschooling and Unschooling Growing in the Valley” plus 2 more |
- Homeschooling and Unschooling Growing in the Valley
- Teens talk about the academic freedom of homeschooling
- Living it
| Homeschooling and Unschooling Growing in the Valley Posted: 23 Jul 2010 08:06 PM PDT It's a growing trend in Virginia. More parents are choosing to homeschool their kids and some are taking it a step further with something they call unschooling. They play, eat and read when they want. They are never punished or told what to do. Unschooler, Joe Sullivan, tells News 3, "When you have a system of telling other people always what to do and how to do it and what is necessary, you're not going to foster in the population the ability to decide that for themselves and to make better choices in the future." His wife Gleamer agrees, "We were using awards and punishments to manipulate Riesling's behavior, when she was four, it wasn't working." It was then Gleamer and Joe Sullivan started unschooling their daughter Riesling and son Cashel. Although unschooling has just started to catch on in Virginia, especially around the Valley, the concept dates back nearly 100 years in England to Summerhill School established in 1921. Unschoolers believe children are born yearning to learn and adults are there to help kids learn using a method known to first year law school students. Joe Sullivan says they use the Socratic Method to teach the kids. Joe says unschooling is a "flavor" or subset of homeschooling, but there is no set schedule or curriculum. The children discover their own passions and follow those passions. Ironically, his kids are enrolled in an unschool school. They are more than 30 Valley families who send their kids to the Raw Learning Center in Staunton. It is a school Gleamer and Joe found and teach. There are no assigned desks, no set lunch time, and no homework. The Sullivans believe that learning should not just occur inside a "school" setting. Learning, Joe says, should be done all the time. But a school for unschoolers? How does that even make sense? Gleamer puts it this way, " It's a whole community of learners coming together to go deeper and find out more of what they are interested in and through that they learn reading, writing, mathematics, everything they need to flourish." They learn math through cooking by measuring out ingredients. They determine how many half tablespoons make two full tablespoons. They take a field trip at least once a week, from airports to television stations. Often they take "spontaneous" field trips where the kids plan the mode of transportation. Gleamer tells News 3, this teaches the children life skills. She says the kids have the trolley schedule memorized and are always on-time, a skill they learned by realizing the trolley never waits for them. Contrary to popular belief, there ARE rules for these unschoolers but, it's not the adults who make them. The kids propose, debate, make and enforce their own rules. Gleamer says,"by deciding that, they follow the rules. Because they "chose" that the rule. They decided it was important." Coming up on WHSV News at Six, we explore the growing trend of unschooling and homeschooling in Virginia. We speak with a local Delegate about the changes he thinks Virginia needs to make in public education in order to compete with homeschooling. We also talk to a former teacher and mother who is choosing to homeschool her children this fall. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Teens talk about the academic freedom of homeschooling Posted: 23 Jul 2010 03:28 PM PDT According to research by the National Center for Education Statistics, there are currently 1.5 million students nationwide who receive their primary education through homeschooling, and this figure is on the rise. Homeschooling is an alternative to standardized education. Students, working at home, have their parents and sometimes private tutors acting as the principle teachers responsible for their education. Reasons for choosing homeschooling are diverse, almost as diverse as the various methods of homeschooling themselves. But what does studying "at the dining room table" mean academically for students? How is learning presented when you don't have the day structured into periods and classes? Many homeschool students work through textbooks which serve as their primary educational curriculum. "I get textbooks and I have to either do three quarters of the book or finish it," said Rachel Hargenrater, 15, of her bookwork. In addition, students in Pennsylvania are expected to have a minimum of 180 days of school time to complete an academic year. As long as they achieve these goals, home-schooled students may do their work whenever they wish. "Usually I just kinda do it whenever I feel like doing it, just so long as I get it done in a year," Rachel added. Courtney Reeser, 17, has had a similar experience with her homeschooling. "We don't have a particular order of subjects or anything. If we want to just do math one day, we can, and then English the next. We don't necessarily have to do every subject every day, just so long as we finish our work," she said. Both Courtney and Rachel, who have been home-schooled their entire lives, said that in addition to having a flexible and rolling schedule they also are free from the hours of homework they often hear their friends talking about. "You don't have to come home and do homework like in public school. But my friends who go to public school get home and always have homework and I always think, why do you go to school and spend hours or whatever for homework?" Rachel said. While textbooks may often constitute the backbone of the curriculum for some, homeschooling gives the student the freedom to choose exactly which subjects they want to study. "For me, the biggest thing with homeschooling was definitely the ability to go outside of the prerequisite, the ability to not just read or learn about what was on the curriculum but to take the subjects that interested you and to really expand upon them early on," said Tanner Anthes, 18, who just graduated and plans to attend Millersville University in the fall. "In areas I was not so strong in, I was glad I had that much more help," he added. Advocates of homeschooling assert that when students have the opportunity to choose what they want to study, subjects relevant to their interests and passions, they become motivated and learn more through this self-study than they would if they had been forced to choose from a pre-determined and an often limited set of classes. "I have the chance to learn pretty much any language I want to learn for that year," said Rachel, whose language of choice is Japanese. She's taken French to satisfy her language requirement in the past but feels Japanese "is just more interesting." "It's easier than French, and I understood it more, like how it works and everything," she said. Courtney studied American Sign Language to satisfy her foreign language requirement because "everybody does Spanish" and she didn't want to be like everyone else. She also said that she's considered pursuing jobs that utilize this skill. Anthes has a passion for Latin. Homeschooling has allowed him to focus on this language for seven years. "In a lot of ways I think it's a beautiful language to listen to and a beautiful language to read," Anthes said. "If my interest was going into business or going into government, then a more useable, practical language like Spanish, French or German would have been a good idea. But for me, with my interest being more the root of where a lot of languages come from, I think I do end up using Latin a lot more." Anthes feels that this self-motivation comes "in doing work and in finding the things that you do, not just because it's worth a grade at the end of the semester or because you need to know it for your term paper, but because you want to." Anthes, who attended a private high school before returning to homeschooling for his senior year, found learning often took a back seat to preparing for a test, and the information being taught had little or no connection with the student. "Doing schoolwork and educating yourself not for the benefit of the education, but to take a test, was the biggest change for me. The focus was a little less about what you were actually learning than how much of it didn't go through you like a sieve in two weeks. And after that, no one cared," Anthes said. For some parents, one of the motivations behind homeschooling is concern with America's established educational system. That said, Courtney, who is planning to attend Elizabethtown High School for her senior year this fall, feels that while there are obvious advantages to homeschooling, one can get a good education in public school too. "As far as my experience of homeschooling goes, I would definitely say that experientially it's something that everyone should have happen once," Anthes said. "I don't think it's for everyone, but I definitely think it's something people should experience because it's so radically different in a certain sense from what they're used to. I think it's good to get that kind of perspective on education. I really think it's a transition that lets you find yourself easier and younger." Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 23 Jul 2010 08:37 PM PDT I am a homeschooling mother of three. My husband was laid off in January 2009 from his employer of just over 10 years. On just one salary, we could not afford COBRA benefits, so our kids went on Medicaid, and we became uninsured. Unfortunately, the foreclosure help offered by the government did not address unemployment, so we lost our home. With no savings at all, our only option was to move in with my parents. Then my stepfather, who works for a road contractor, was taken off salary and had his pay cut in half. Now this week, my husband's unemployment benefits have run out. What this means is that my children may be facing their second foreclosure and move in one year if we don't get the help we desperately need right now. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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