The Summer 2017 Mountain Series Episode 2: Take Time to Acclimatise

This summer series about homeschooling was inspired by my recent family trip to the mountains, and will be added to weekly. Be sure to subscribe by leaving your email in the right-hand menu bar, or “like” our Facebook page to get updates posted directly to your timeline.

Whether you're brand new to educating your children at home, or finding yourself at a transition phase such as secondary school, there is a period where you'll be tempted to rush when actually you need to take it slowly and ease into it

I think this period is like our mountain trip when we arrived at our condo and found that it was over 10,000 feet.

High Condo - Waiting for Adventure

For native Texans who live at at 496 feet above sea level, this was a real challenge to our systems. We felt like all the descriptions of acclimatising for Everest - sinuses dry out, tummies get rumbly, headaches abound, breathless, listless.

These are warning signs that we were now in a place that are bodies were struggling to maintain normal function.

After a terrible night's sleep (another effect of altitude), we decided to see how far we could climb up the mountain in view of our balcony - Kuchina Peak.

Kuchina in our sights

Long story short, we ran into two problems: first was our unfamiliarity with the terrain (this will be the subject of the next blog post!), and the other was, no matter how fit and experienced we were with hill-climbing at sea level, we just weren't ready to tackle the exertion at 12,000 feet higher.

Some of us had headaches, malaise, nausea: all symptoms of altitude sickness! They told us that we needed to get back down a little lower and wait till our bodies were more accustomed to the thinner air.

Not ready for prime-time mountain climbing!

However, by the end of the week, we were able to climb not only it but its higher valley-mate, Wheeler Peak: New Mexico's highest mountain at over 13,000 feet. That was because we waited to get used to the elevation, and meanwhile, made sure we prepared a little at a time.

So as you're hitting transition periods in your home-educating journey, just keep in mind that rushing it is probably a poor idea. You'll find yourself ill-prepared and perhaps even in danger - if not in terms of your health, then probably in terms of your purse!

What am I suggesting instead? Take your time. Research. Read through Rainbow Resources detailed catalogue with lots of reviews by homeschoolers for any curriculum you're thinking of buying. Have a look at last year's Series 1  about starting out home-ed where I encourage you to take a look at your values and your aims, and above all remember this: if you are starting home-ed from scratch and have removed a child from school, you both need to deschool first.

The reason you deschool is this: going to school is putting yourself under an institution and there are rules and requirements and expectations that have become second-nature to you, most of which have nothing to do with one's real desire and aptitude for learning. Motivation often needs rediscovering; self-directed exploration of interests has almost certainly been dampened down; realising that one can find curiosity and something intriguing to delve into further 24/7, 365, and yet, it rarely requires 6 hours a day of sitting at a desk.

There is a big world out there, but if you're transitioning, then I would suggest putting your feet up and getting used to the new, rarefied air.

Take Time to Contemplate the View

The Summer 2017 Mountain Series Episode 1: Finding Yourself in the Heat

This summer series about homeschooling was inspired by my recent family trip to the mountains, and will be added to weekly. Be sure to subscribe by leaving your email in the right-hand menu bar, or “like” our Facebook page to get updates posted directly to your timeline.

In this first episode, I want to share about how homeschooling teens can feel like the hottest journey you’ve ever undertaken.

A blog post about a hot road trip ...

No matter where you live now, you have probably taken a trip somewhere that taught you all about assumptions. In my case, I thought I knew all about packing for a self-catering trip to the mountains, having done so almost twice a year in England for the past five years.

So my brothers and I loaded up our three cars and caravanned west to New Mexico. Once we got west of Post, Texas, the temperatures soared over 111º F (44º C). 

It ultimately reached 113!

We stopped for gas, drinks, etc, and my brother who was driving the pick-up truck announced that all the food that had been stashed in the back of his truck had melted. We threw out butter, yoghurt, milk, cheese, and all the chocolate, and though the boys liked to blame me for it, I did point out that they were the ones that loaded it back there in the first place!

Anyway, in hindsight I should have realized that perishables in a pick-up bed in Texas in June weren’t going to survive a 15-hour road trip anyway, but having only experience of Lake District trips in April and September, I recognize the biases I brought to the planning stage. 

So here’s where I think our journey in homeschooling teens is like this trip into the unknown. We know what it has been like to teach our children when the stakes are low - whether we follow set curriculum, something more flexible like the Charlotte Mason method, or even unschool, we haven’t had the pressures to prepare for national exams, worry about credits and transcripts, or hone down to our child’s interests and vocational pathways.

The stakes - like the temperatures in West Texas - suddenly become higher when our kids hit those teen years. Here are a few suggestions for navigating our way through an environment out of our comfort zone.

Navigating the path ahead ...

First, give yourself some grace if you make some mistakes. Yes, we’re in charge of the planning and the execution, but if we get some of it a bit wrong, then it’s not the end of the world. Our children’s education should, hopefully, be a life-long experience, and not something that finishes at 18 or 22, so there’s wiggle room even in these crucial years of high school.

Second, don’t be afraid to ask for help from someone who has been there before. If, for example, someone else is planning a road trip to New Mexico in the summer, I can now warn them about looking after the food on the journey. I can also tell them that there are plenty of big supermarkets in Taos so packing all those perishables was unnecessary in the first place. 

In homeschooling, there are now so many great forums and FB groups with people who’ve been there and done that, you really need only to ask.

Getting directions can be a good thing!

That being said, my third point is this: don’t just take someone’s word for it, but confirm what people say online by doing your own research, too. In the case of my road trip, I was only tagging along on my brother’s trip at the last minute, and I didn’t check out the shopping facilities in Taos for myself. As my brother is a bit more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of person, there ended up being a lot of gaps in his knowledge where I’d have been more inclined to fill them in (this theme will come up again and again in this series - believe me!).

In the case of homeschooling, I have already seen people’s advice running counter to someone else’s state or country regulations. In the UK, there are HUGE changes afoot in the national exam system as it switches from the A-E grade system to a 9-1 system, plus many of its public exams are ditching the controlled assessment for exam only, a change that favours homeschoolers - except for one important fact! These new exams don’t start being offered till 2019! So for many of you who are now entering the phase of UK exams for your teens, few people will have the experience of the new system to guide you more than saying what they did in the old system.

You have been warned!

In the US, there are still people who talk about the old SAT system rather than the new one, about dual-enrollment arrangements that are often dependent on the processes at the local college, about CLEP or AP or other advanced options that vary from university to university as to their acceptance.

It can still be a minefield for you, even with helpful guidance from those who’ve done it.

Our road trip through the West Texas oven was on Saturday. On Tuesday, I picked an apple out of the fridge for our hike up Kuchina Peak. It was covered in some strange kind of wax. I started washing it and the wax wouldn’t budge. Then I realised it was butter - the butter that had melted into the box in the back of the pick-up truck. Clearly, this apple had been in that same box, and though it had survived the heat, it still had some residue of the debacle on its skin.

Sometimes in homeschooling, there may be long-lasting effects from our past mistakes, and they can arise at the strangest times, even years later. 

It may be hot, but the sun WILL go down!

Just do what I did when I cleaned off the apple: I turned up the heat of the water to melt off the butter. You, too, can just “turn up the heat” - ie, put in extra effort, focus intently, make phone calls or write letters: in short, do what you have to do to rescue the situation.

That apple is worth saving!

"The Practical Side" -- Part 6 of Transitioning your Teens to Secondary (Home)school

This is the sixth post in a series about transitioning your teens to secondary-level home-education. In the other five parts, I have covered topics like routine, vision, a new approach, thinking about university, and routes to your destination; now it’s time for the practical suggestions.

Assuming you have carved out your 2 hours or so of academic time as I mentioned in the post about routines, then you will want to know what to do with these hours.

Are you surprised that I said only 2 hours? Yes, that’s right — to start with. You may end up building to three or four, but right now, since these posts are about transitioning to higher-level work, I would suggest that a two-hours stretch is plenty.

Two hours of focused work beats
eight with distractions!

Further, I would encourage you to limit these two hours of learning time to only four days a week, and leave a fifth day for field trips, workshops, out-of-home activities, and general get-togethers. These are all still valuable learning activities and should find a place in your home-ed plan, but keeping them to only one day will help your teens gain momentum in their studies.

(See a blog post I wrote on my Boyschooling site about Free-day Friday)

Finally, I think you will need to consider whether you want to stick with school terms or work steadily throughout the year. Some people like the focus that occurs when avoiding breaks, but I’m more of a start-stop kind of personality, and find it helpful to have periods where we get a bit bored: that’s when we tend to try new things, like creating board games, engineering a backyard zip wire, or planting a rose garden. 

Leaving time for boredom
leads to creative moments.

It may also be helpful when you’re starting out to have a finite period of focused learning, such as a six-week period. You can then take a week off to reflect on how you’ve done so far and perhaps tackle a mini-project, or go camping, take holidays, etc. With that in mind, you might not keep the same six weeks on the calendar as schools do (unless, of course, you have other children in school).

My own family, for example, begins our school year in the second week of September, taking our holidays in the first week. The price of accommodation is often 1/3- to 1/2 less than the week before, and we enjoy near-empty museums, swimming pools, galleries, and even abandoned beaches. 

Holidays during school terms are cheap and quiet ...
relatively quiet, that is!

What’s not to love about that???

So, a quick re-cap: my suggestions for academic time as you’re starting out with your home-ed teen is two hours a day, four days a week, six weeks at a time, for a total of 48 hours of concentrated work, not including all the informal learning that’s going on the rest of the time.

In these two-hour slots, I suggest you choose the basic subjects of English, maths, history, science, and if you’re religious, something connected to your faith. If you’re not religious, then maybe current events, geography, philosophy, or comparative religions.

That’s five subjects in 120 minutes, or 20-25 minutes each.

The trick, in my experience, is to have your subjects and their resources lined up at the start, then set the timer for 20 minutes per subject, and just work through them for that long. This is the same basis as a very popular home-ed method expounded by Charlotte Mason who wrote about it back in Victorian times, but there’s a lot of evidence that her philosophy worked for a wide variety of students regardless of social status, ability, opportunities, or background.

And it still works today. The short-sharp-lesson approach will keep your teens focused for those 2 hours, because no subject will drag on till they’re bored.

At the beginning of implementing this system, you will probably need to sit with your teens and coax them, direct them, and encourage them. They’ll know it’s important because you have set aside the time to do it with them, and that will give them confidence that you have the courage of your convictions.

You might want to use a checklist, so you have a visual motivator. It seems that boys like a check list, particularly. I laminate mine so we can use the same checklist each day, simply wiping off the water-based marker for next time.

If you laminate your checklist, you can re-use it every day.

Twenty minutes of English? Check. Twenty minutes of maths? Check. And so on.

Finally, once we’ve done our two hours, I record what we’ve covered, so if we read Chapter 2 of Ivanhoe, do problems 1-7 in the maths book, read pp 17-24 in our history book, etc, I write that in my diary for that day. 

You’ll notice that I don’t plan how much of our books we're going to do before hand: that’s because we may not get through all of it, or end up having an interesting discussion about the treatment of Jews in Scott’s novel and read only a couple of pages, or occasionally, miss something out entirely because of a family emergency. When this happens, we would get behind anything we'd set out to achieve, and the knock-on effect causes me too much stress, which just isn't necessary.

If you record instead of plan, you are never behind!

Snippet of the way record our work.

Next time, I will give some examples of a typical day with families who are home-edding teens, so you can see how there are different strokes for different folks. 

"Widening Your Radar" -- Part 5 of Transitioning Your Teen to Secondary (Home)School

This is the fifth post in a series about transitioning your teens to secondary (home)school. In the other four parts, I have covered topics like routine, vision, a whole new approach, and routes to your destination, but there is one more preliminary point that deserves consideration, and that's about university.

I need to tell you a hard truth: a university education is actually very important.

Is uni in your home-ed future?

Yes, I know plenty of you will disagree. You will say your child is not that kind of person, that there are extenuating circumstances with disabilities or personality issues or what-not, that you don’t have a degree and you’ve done all right for yourself, that we need to have plumbers and car mechanics and hair dressers in this world.

In order, I say: maybe not, there might be, that’s probably true, and that’s definitely true.

But notice I didn’t say that YOUR child needed to go to university. I simply said that a university education is very important. The reason is that all studies show that the earning power of a university graduate is vastly superior to that of a non-graduate, job opportunities are wider, and career paths are longer and more diverse.

For example, statistics say that an average young person of 22 will earn about £15,000 per year. At 34, the non-graduate’s earnings will peak at £19,400, but the graduate’s earnings won’t peak until 51, at which time, annual salary averages £34,500. Even if you calculate the difference in salary (less current tax rates) between the graduates’ peak at 51 and the retirement age (set to be 68 over the next 4 decades), the graduate will earn £175,000 more than the non-graduate in that 17-year period alone.*

That's roughly an extra £900 a month!

A degree can make a big difference in salary

These are the CURRENT statistics, but the future could be quite different still. That’s because the numbers going to university are soaring. Between 1995 and 2015, for example, the number of young people attending university has gone from 20% to 49% of school leavers. As more and more students opt for university, the job market will most likely start to demand some level of higher education as the norm — a trend experienced in the US where 65% of high schoolers enrol in post-school education.

It’s not a cut-and-dry decision, this university plan I mean. There are issues about funding it, about the future of online modular routes, not to mention that maybe your child just really, really isn’t cut out for higher education.

However, I just wanted to urge you to think about the long-term destination of your home-education journey before we discuss the short- to medium-term stops along the way. 

You don't need to know the answer:
just be aware of the questions for now.

I don’t mean to say that you have to force your child into making a decision about degree courses when he or she is only 13 or 14; I only mean that getting university on your radar now will undoubtedly influence your intervening steps.

Next time, it will be these steps that I’ll explore.

* Salary estimates are for men (annoyingly). Women with degrees earn 20% less of their male counterparts’ salaries in England. Studies suggest the disparity is partly due to career breaks taken by mothers, and partly the industries that women tend to enter (education and health care, as opposed to finance and business). The disparity is worse for non-graduate women, where earnings are 23% less than their male counterparts.

"The Vision Thing" -- Part 3 of Transitioning Your Teen to Secondary (Home)School

This is the third post in a series about transitioning your teens to secondary (home)school. It is the second of two parts about teens and routine, the one that is going to focus on choices in academics and how routine fits in with that.

Let's Do The Vision Thing

However, before getting stuck in to a discussion about books and hours of study and methods, I think it’s important to cover what your vision is for your child. That way, you can better tease out the details that will work for your family.

I think a decision-tree here would be helpful, so you can see how this series is being organised.

According to this schema, today’s blog post is the top line of the green level: “Your visions/aims” of the academic-side of your child’s home education.

I’m a vision-kind of person, so this is always in the back of my mind when I make decisions about any of my four children’s education. Even if you’re not into “the vision-thing”, I think it’s crucial that you stop for just a short while to think about your vision and aims, or you will find it difficult to settle into the kind of routine for your teen that will achieve results you can be happy with.

Here’s a quick check-list for you. I want you to rank the statements in order of most important to least important (from 1 to 14, with 1 being the most), as a way of helping you clarify your vision.

For me, a chart like this is tough. Do I really want my teenager to keep doors open to the future more than I want her to have good morals? Of course not! However, I am likely to put the academic success ahead of character training if I don’t think through my vision beforehand.

Let’s now just look at two extremes of responses to the check list. You can imagine that parents who seek their child’s happiness, social life, and extra-curricular activities is going to seek an entirely different programme from someone who is emphasising exams, academics, and university entry.

Would someone really put a child’s happiness behind some of the other issues on the list? Of course – I’m sure you see it all the time. It can be argued that many people do this when they send their children to school rather than home educate, because they think the child needs the education more than they need to be happy (especially as it’s likely their happiness ebbs and flows anyway). 

Or when, as some homeschoolers do, parents force a dry and boring workbook-style curriculum on their little dears, from which they require six hours of toil for five days every week. Or, make them play the violin, or enrol them in knitting classes, or take on a paper round.

I do it, too! My son says he doesn’t like swimming, and yet, four days a week, we have him plying up and down the swimming pool. My reasons? I value things over his happiness – partly, it’s the only sport we have time for him to do, and I want him to do a sport, ergo …. Partly, I think there is a chance to build his character through it. Partly, I’m hoping he will come to his senses and see how good he could be. A little success, I’m sure, will see him suddenly enjoy it and be glad he toiled for so many years. Who knows? On balance, swimming is better than no swimming, so I have decided that he will continue to do it.

Am I wrong for valuing these other things over his happiness? One day, I might think so, but for now, this is my vision, and this is how I make choices for my own children.

Some kids go, some kids stay --
You know your own child best!

Equally, I would not try to judge the decisions that you make for your children. You know them better than anyone, and you know how certain values and aims will suit your children. I’m just wanting to help you clarify what might be otherwise a vague idea, because you will be in a better position to help your teens transition to secondary (home)school that way.

Once you have ranked the 14 statements, you should get a fairly good idea about the kind of thing you’re putting the highest value on. If it’s academics, then you will want to pursue a more strenuous approach to your child’s studies. If it’s more about personality and well-being, then you will want to open up opportunities and activities that will probably be less focused on books and such.

In the next post, I’m going to suggest ways of transferring your vision into practical application, so that you can get the best out of your teen while still going “up a level” for secondary (home)school. If you want to make sure you get notified when the next post is available, then please subscribe via the various options in the sidebar to the right.

Dr Kat Patrick is a veteran homeschooler of 12 years. She grew up in Texas in the USA, taught at American university and then at secondary schools in Oxford, England. She is an examiner for the prestigious Cambridge board of exams at both GCSE and A-level, as well as founder of Dreaming Spires Home Learning, online tutorials for homeschooled secondary students all over the world.