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Amanda
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I apologize for the subject line, as I'm not very good at summarizing my thoughts.
I will try to get to my question first, then explain why I'm asking.
My oldest is only in 7th grade, so I haven't homeschooled a high school student yet. To me, one of the best things about homeschooling is the ability to go down all those rabbit trails, to decide to chuck the books for a couple of weeks and go to Williamsburg, to spend a week obsessed with a new, wonderful author. But when I imagine high school, it's full of textbooks and deadlines to register for standardized tests.
So, do high schoolers get to have any of the freedom & fun I've described? Or do they just have to keep their heads in their books (with breaks for volunteer work and/or jobs)? Or (insert third option here)?
Here's my personal interest: my 7th-grader and I are presently tolerating a public cyber charter school so that he can get speech and occupational therapy. I hope we can stick it out another year, because he really does benefit from the therapy. However, I'm afraid that if we stick with it another year or two, then homeschool for high school, he will have essentially missed all that fun stuff (because the cyber school really does require constant drudgery).
TIA for any insights!
Amanda
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ekbell
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When I visualize highschool, it's...
-Spending time figuring out what the child wants to do/learn for their future and then working together to make a learning plan which will lead them there.
-Progressing from a mostly parent chosen education to a mostly child chosen education.
-My role changing from leader/teacher to counselor/tutor.
-Reminding myself that it can be good to spend the 'highschool' years going down rabbit trails and discovering your passions, this is how many people find their life's work.
-Reminding myself that there are good reasons why 'mature students' can get into colleges/universities without the requirements that 'regular' students need. Life experiences and maturity really can subsitute for regular style school.
Better it take longer to get into a college/university (if that's what my children end up doing) then to go and putz around because they don't really know who they are and what they want yet.
The only reason I'd have my highschool students use textbooks and/or take standardized courses would be if they needed it to accomplish their goals (not my goals) or wanted to.
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lapazfarm
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I think my son would say he has fun.
He has no textbooks,does no test prep (yet), and he follows lots and lots of rabbit trails. His time is largely his own, and yet he is getting an education that I think rivals any other in terms of both quality and quantity of knowledge and skills learned.
High school does not have to be dreary.
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Theresa
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Amanda
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Thank you. You ladies have taken a load off my mind. I literally felt my chest ease when I read your posts.
I almost felt as if our homeschooling years were over. He will need extra time to mature before college, especially if wants to go away for college, so we will probably have plenty of time for the rabbit trails.
Thanks again!
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folklaur
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lapazfarm wrote:
I think my son would say he has fun.
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well, yeah. but *i* would have fun going to *your* homeschool, too! 
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Bookswithtea
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cactus mouse wrote:
well, yeah. but *i* would have fun going to *your* homeschool, too! |
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Funny, that's what I was thinking, too!  
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Bridget
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My guys have a pretty rigorous curriculum. It requires a lot of work. They still find time for their own interests and rabbit trails.
I also noticed that when they began Latin, Literature and Logic as subjects, it was not fun and hard work. Now they actually enjoy those subjects, discuss them and delve a little deeper on their own.
I guess thats your third option. It's not unschooling at all, but a curriculum that suits their temperaments.
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lapazfarm
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Bookswithtea wrote:
cactus mouse wrote:
well, yeah. but *i* would have fun going to *your* homeschool, too! |
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Funny, that's what I was thinking, too! |
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LOL! Grab your snorkel gear and come on down! We've got room for a couple more enthusiastic students here! Next week Cnidaria and Ctenophora are on the schedule, so we get to hit the coral reefs!
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Theresa
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Willa
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A local friend was talking to me about her plans for her 8th grader who is in a cyber charter-school at present. She said she is really thinking of letting her daughter take the GED next year and then just start taking community college classes. She could get a start on her college transcript and still have plenty of time for enriching activities. The details would have to be worked out, but still, I thought it was an interesting idea .
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Willa
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SallyT
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My highschooler works much harder than my younger kids do, but I think she'd say she has fun. This year she's a dual-enrollment student at the college where my husband teaches -- actually, she took Latin there last year, but this year she's getting college credit for it! She goes to work with her dad, takes all her schoolwork for the day, goes to class, studies in the library, goes to lunch with a homeschooling friend who's doing the same thing, people-watches a lot . . . It's not a bad way to spend three days a week. Plus, next semester she wants to sign up for ballroom dancing as a P.E. credit, so she's really looking forward to that!
I like what someone said about her role changing to that of counselor. That's definitely been our experience. We sit down and talk through what she needs to do and how she's going to accomplish it: college class, textbook on her own, CD-ROM-type thing, independent reading . . . She definitely wants to go to college and major in either classics, history, or theology, so we are doing a fairly standard college-prep course of study, but the fact that she is making a lot of the decisions and planning for her future, rather than having everything thrust on her, gives her a sense of purpose and motivation which I'm not sure she'd have otherwise. She works very, very hard, but I'm not the one making her do it, and that makes all the difference in the world.
I LOVE homeschooling a high-schooler. I've had my nervous moments, to be sure, but overall, as we race for the halfway mark of eleventh grade, I think we'd both say that we're very happy to be learning this way.
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lapazfarm
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SallyT wrote:
| My highschooler works much harder than my younger kids do, but I think she'd say she has fun. |
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Yes, I think it is important to remember that "fun" and "rigorous" do not have to be mutually exclusive concepts. There is a lot of joy to be found in filling up one's mind with fascinating information, understanding new concepts, and mastering new skills.I think as adults we see this for ourselves, but forget that learning can be joyous for our children as well. We stray into thinking learning has to be easy to be fun for them and that just isn't the case, or at least not that I've seen.
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Amanda
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I don't think I was worried about it being too rigorous, exactly. More worried that it would become exclusively the filling of the bucket rather than the lighting of the fire. It seemed that high school was just a matter of checking off tasks--"Three plus years of college-prep math, check."
One thing the responses here have made me realize is that my son is probably not going to be mature enough at 14 to take responsibility for planning for his future. I've posted on this forum before about possibly having him take 5 years for high school (yeah, I post here all the time and my oldest is 12...how much of a worry wart am I?). Now I'm thinking that maybe we'll postpone "high school" and have him start at 15. Hmmm...
Thanks again!
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ekbell
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Where I live highschool officially starts in grade ten (around age 15). It's three years instead of four.
Where I grew up everyone taking university prep courses took five years to finish highschool (it's changed since then). I had just turned nineteen when I went to university.
I wouldn't have a single problem planning on my children being closer to nineteen then eighteen before declaring them ready to leave home. I know that the extra year made a big difference to my maturity level.
There are two things that I'm trying to keep in mind, one is that it's very hard to know just how much more mature my children will be in six months let alone two years.
The other is to remember the most of the people I know who didn't go through the standard highschool then college/university route are doing just fine.
BTW My oldest is eleven, I know what you mean about obsessing 
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Willa
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lapazfarm wrote:
SallyT wrote:
| My highschooler works much harder than my younger kids do, but I think she'd say she has fun. |
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Yes, I think it is important to remember that "fun" and "rigorous" do not have to be mutually exclusive concepts. There is a lot of joy to be found in filling up one's mind with fascinating information, understanding new concepts, and mastering new skills. |
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Great point.
I always notice a big difference in my kids around the age of 14 or 15. I think Charlotte Mason was wise to point out that for small children, intense scholarly activity is very exhausting. But for highschool age, it's not so much so. Often, they appreciate a chance to tackle adult-level material... of course, provided it's not presented in a stupid over-schooly way.
I didn't really push my older kids through high school academics because I didn't have to. To a large extent, they saw the need for some work in subjects outside of their preference zone. And they also started relishing challenges in some areas. They wanted to learn, and expand their horizons.
When we put together their college transcript (usually in the late junior or early senior year) we generally found that they had done a LOT, way more than I would necessarily expect and more than they would have done in the local high school, in most subjects.
So it wasn't so much like checking off boxes as we went -- dull work -- as exploring new abilities and subject areas and then checking off the boxes in retrospect.
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Willa
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SallyT
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Yes, that's exactly when my daughter turned a big corner. Before then, while she was very involved in valuable personal projects -- writing, drama, music, etc -- which covered a lot of academic bases, she wasn't that into the idea of academics. I had figured that she'd wind up being an arty non-traditional student. But then she fell in love with Latin, which surprised all of us: she had a good priest-teacher in a co-op in ninth grade, and for the last year and a half she's been taking classes on the college campus with a very inspiring professor. So now she wants to major in classics or classical humanities, and she's teaching a little Latin class for younger kids at church, so the idea of being some kind of teacher (not excluding being a homeschooling mother) is really lighting her fire. *I* could not have motivated her in this direction, but she's steaming ahead. I think the awareness that the rest of your life is right there in front of you really kicks in, at least for some kids, and even if they don't lock in on what they're really going to do at the next stage, the possibilities are exciting.
She does also have plain old fun-fun. We don't have an organized homeschool group, but a number of homeschoolers have gravitated to our parish, including a bunch of kids who do Irish and swing-dancing and like to have folk dances. For the last two years they've organized a "ceili prom," called by a mom in our parish who teaches Irish dance, which is a non-date kind of affair, and is loads of fun. She's also just back from a three-day parish pilgrimage to Mother Angelica's in Alabama -- she and her best friend were the two youngest people in the group by probably twenty years, and they had a blast. Even with the rigor and relatively-less-flexible schedule of high school, we still have the freedom to do things like that from time to time.
And we're doing some combination of checking off boxes in advance and in retrospect, but I'm trying not to be too "hoops"-oriented, even though this is our first high-school experience, and we all get a little nervous sometimes.
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Cay Gibson
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We're on our 3rd high schooler right now (he's a sophmore) so you would think I'd have something of substance to share. Wrong! We are having a far more academic year than we ever did before and I'm not enjoying it. He goes to co-op classes twice weekly and his workload is heavy and I can't say he's enjoying it w/ time or learning to do it well. He has settled into his classes and appreciates them and is learning a lot from them (and actually enjoying several) but the fact that there are assignments and tests and grading do not show the factors which I think are so important. And I'm a little unclear as to what those "factors" are.
What I'm finding (and struggling with) is that I can't seem to find the "joy" this year. As great as it is academically and socially for the children, I'm feeling very void and deficient. I'm longing for those rabbit trails. I'm not enjoying this rigor and formation at all.
I just pulled out my Laura Berquist book "Teaching Tips and Techniques Across the Classical Curriculum" and plan to spend the holiday reading and thinking about her suggestions regarding teenagers. I'm hoping it gives me some much needed insight and appreciation into what we're doing this year.
Good luck!
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Kristie 4
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I'm with you Cay- this year seems to be lots of feet dragging, areas that should have been covered when he was younger that the CM ed. didn't quite fill for him, and I am so not there in the joy department- unforunately it is spilling down into the youngers....HELP would be my plea this year but I am in an unschooling vacuum here with my group of homeschooling friends...
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donnalynn
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Oh goodness some of the same frustrations here too - as I had expressed in another thread.
But she does have fun with her outside interests - she has a great time with her bagpipe band and a Choral group. She has also been assisting the 2nd grade CCD teacher and is really going out of her way to prepare things for the class on her own.
So one of the big benefits of homeschooling - the ability to arrange her own schedule - is still a big plus here. But a lot of the academics is feeling overwhelming and something to get *finished*.
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Kristie 4
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BTW...not that I am against unschooling- probably my biggest lean but it is balanced with some have to skill subjects and CM and such....
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Angie Mc
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Yes, my senior has had fun! We would define fun as choosing and accepting challenges for yourself and finding enthusiasm and purpose in your work. It's fun to be open and flexible to finding opportunities that you never could have imagined or hadn't planned. Fun includes the relief of bouncing back from errors made and realizing that you CAN live on to tell the tale. Fun and ease include having good relationships with your family and having friends to share your fun with. For me, the fun is watching my once-little-baby grow into a fine - not perfect - young woman.
My dd has combined informal and formal academics in a way that I wouldn't have guessed even just 3 years ago. I don't see any of my other children following this exact path because the point *is* the uniqueness of the path God calls each person. It is very humbling to watch it all unfold...and a relief to know that it isn't about me, but about my child's relationship with God. I do see us continuing in a similar way...a combination of informal and formal academics with an eye on opportunities that arise. That's fun .
Love,
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4Real Forums : High School Years and Beyond
Topic: Do high schoolers have any fun?
