#goals

A dear family friend asked me how I set goals. 

That's a loaded question, and maybe I'll write a few posts addressing different facets.

But one of the subquestions was about goals for my children. I've written before about educational goals but today I'm thinking about grown children. Two fifths of my children are grown.   

I don't have goals for my grown children. 

All I can have is goals for MY relationship with my children. Which is about how I'M going to behave. Not about them. 

My goals for that are pretty simple: 

• That they enjoy spending time with me (which pretty much is about me keeping my mouth shut about their life choices and me being pleasant to them)
  
  
• and that I don't dread seeing or hosting them because I've taken on food or housekeeping tasks that overwhelm me.

Learning Shemona Esrei

E's mostly fluent in shemona esrei now. So looking back, it took him about 2 months.  We are practicing 3x a week for 10 minutes, and if he finishes before time, he can stop early.

The last 2 paragraphs need a bit more fluency, but now we've started the other shemona esreis. Maariv, shacharis, mincha, for shabbos. The same 10 minutes 3x a week. Then on to musaf for Shabbos, musaf for rosh chodesh, musaf for Shabbos Rosh Chodesh, and shemona esrei for yontif. There's plenty to go.

In the meantime, I'd like to learn Torah with him. I think he'd enjoy thinking about ideas. But we'll hold off on that for now, and work on fluency.

The goal is for him to be able to finish shemona esrei with the tzibbur before they start chazaras hashatz.

What Happens When Unschoolers Are 'Behind'

There's something I always say about homeschool:

There's no behind in homeschool; there's only where your child is at.

In homeschool, we have the luxury of teaching the child on their level, at all times. We can advance at their pace. We can teach the same thing over and over. We can slow down. We can stop. We can let it go for months or years and pick it up when they are ready.

In general, a lot of homeschoolers play more in the younger years than their classmate counterparts do. It's not that hard to "catch up" later. Especially because one-on-one learning is so efficient.

In unschooling, where the parent doesn't teach the child, and instead, the child learns what they want when they want, there is often a fear that the child will grow up and blame the parent for not forcing them to learn. After all, learning is unpleasant but needs to be done, and you should have made me do it, even though I fought it. And now I'm an adult and I don't know what I need to know and it's all your fault.

(Sure, homeschoolers worry about this too. But believe me when I say the fear is a little more stark when you've actually actively not taught your children [unless they asked] as a philosophy.)

I've written about "You Should Have Taught me X" at length (and it's worth rereading).

The more experience I have as an unschooler and as a parent, the more I realize that the unschooling philosophy of education is a radically different method of educating and is going to look very different. That's why testing doesn't actually give very good information about where an unschooler is educationally. 

Like if most kids (hahahaha as if) learn in a straight line, i.e. the older they get, the more math and reading they know

An unschooler can look like nothing, looks like nothing, looks like nothing, then BAM growth

the y-axis could be "math or reading"

Like a bamboo plant. 
A Chinese bamboo tree takes five years to grow. It has to be watered and fertilized in the ground where it has been planted every day. It doesn't break through the ground for five years. After five years, once it breaks through the ground, it will grow 90 feet tall in five weeks!

My point is that since unschoolers learn when they want to or when they feel they need to, they can often go for years without what society deems basic scholastic competency. (Or they work around it.)

But it's a mistake to think that they are "behind." They are actually perfectly aligned with the unschooling educational philosophy. Which says that the time to learn is when the child (person) wants to or feels motivated to because they need it for something they want. This could happen after childhood, once the person is an adult. 

I once heard my son explain: "Oh, you see, the way it works for us is that we learn it when we want to."

Unschooled children are never "behind." They are simply in a pre-state of "not knowing YET." And the happy state of "When I want to know it, I'll figure it out."

Testing Unschoolers

The pandemic was during a testing year for us, homeschool-wise. NY state has pretty strict reporting and testing laws, compared to, say, NJ, where you just let them know you're homeschooling and they don't ask what you're teaching or how it's going.

Despite the strictness, NYS still has laws that are considerate of unschooling. You aren't required to test until 5th grade. That means if your children haven't learned to read by age 10 or so (which is normal for unschoolers), that's not a problem. (Even in those cases, there are approved testers and tests that can work with that.)

With the pandemic, we haven't had to test in 2 years. So we haven't yet had to engage with the academic standards "the state" thinks children that age "should" have. 

This year, Jack, who is born in one of those "can go either way" months, decided maybe he wanted to be in the younger grade. When he was 5, he was reading, so I popped him to first grade. But in camp he chose to be in the younger grade, and now he wasn't sure which way to go. So I submitted that he'd be repeating the grade.

They asked me why.

So we decided to test Jack and see where he is. If he gets his 33rd percentile of his grade level, then we can keep him as is. If not, that is justification, and we'll hold him back. (You can still get under 33rd percentile and remain at grade level, but that's a different topic.)

A few observations about testing:

• Jack didn't really know fractions before this test. So we took an hour and I taught them to him, and he understood it pretty quickly, even though he needs some practice doing them. As an unschooler, I think it's kind of silly and feel with a child like Jack, who is mathematical, then he can wait until he wants to learn it and it will be quick. (He wanted to learn it when he discovered fractions were on the test. But in terms of long term life skills, he'll probably really learn fractions when he needs them, later, and this was just more playing around and seeing a bit about how they work.)
  
  
• My niece saw him taking the test and said, "I hope you don't fail!" Jack looked puzzled, like he had no idea what she was talking about.
  I realized that there is no failure in homeschool. There is no stress about failure, no thinking about failure, no worry about failure. It's just not on the radar. To Jack, testing is something we do for legal reasons and it gives no actual information on his true academic process nor progress, nor his value as a student or person. It got me thinking about all the times in school I worried about failing, how often I had that sick feeling during a test or after a test. And about children worrying about failing. 
  In homeschool, if you get the answer wrong or don't understand something, it just means you do it again until you do understand it or acquire the skill.
  
  
• For the first section of the test, I peeked a bit at Jack's answers as he wrote them. I estimate he got about half of them correct.
  When he finished, I asked him if it felt like it was suitable for his grade level or not. Was it very difficult? Super easy? He said it felt appropriate for where he was. It wasn't so easy but it wasn't very hard. He said, "I think I did well."
  My college aged child remarked, when I relayed this to her, that in LIFE, getting 50% of something right with no preparation is considered "doing well."
  
  
• I noticed a big difference in myself and my attitude regarding testing. I've been homeschooling for about 25 years now, and experience makes a huge difference in confidence and in philosophy. I remember so clearly worrying about every answer my kids got wrong and how, afterwards, I made a point of going over the question so that they'd have that so-important information about comma usage or decimals.
  But as I was looking over Jack's shoulder, watching him get the answer wrong, I kept thinking, "Meh, he'll have naturally learned that by the time he's an adult." or "No big deal, he can easily learn that when he wants."

Learning Shemona Esrei

 E is a year post bar mitzva and he's been learning shemona esrei on his own time. That means that when he is fluent with a bracha, he moves on to the next bracha. On the regular day shemona esrei he is up to birkas haminim. 

He wants a phone because he's getting to the age where people are exchanging phone numbers and he can't keep up with them without a number. I said earn it by learning weekday, shabbos shacharis and mincha shemona esrei, yomtov shacharis and mincha shemona esrei, and shabbos musaf shemona esrei. He said no thank you.

I said right now we are working on your reading 3x a week for 4 minutes a time. How about we work on shemona esrei. And how about making it 8 minutes. He agreed.

Right now it takes him 8 minutes to read from V'lamalshinim to Modim.

He said he's tempted to take medication and learn how to read it all in a couple of months. I said if he wants to, that's an option.

He said Nah.

Unschooling College: "I did it my way"

I was asked for an update on how Chen is handling college. Short answer--it's working out beautifully.

However, she is definitely not doing the typical college route. 

First of all, psychoeducational testing was absolutely VITAL. As you know, we did not pursue testing until age 16 when Chen wanted extra time to take the ACTs to get into college. (As we will do in the future for E, if he wants to go that route.) Chen gets double time for tests (which she needs), class notes, breaks, and calculator use. She may have some other accommodations, too. Testing needed to be done within 3 years of college admission to be current.

Because of her learning differences, she only goes part time (though last semester she ended up being full time). Reading is still difficult for her (I still on occasion read her assignments aloud to her but she can often find peers in college to do it or go to the office hours and the Professor is happy to help). She's great at class discussions and has difficulty with tests. And she has trouble in the sense that she tends to run out of steam emotionally at the same point a little more than halfway through every semester. So she has to work with her rhythms and abilities and still keep up with the work enough to pass. She started with 2 classes a semester, then moved up to taking 3 classes, but for her the real value of college is turning out to be...

INTERNSHIPS.

Yup, that's right. This kinesthetic learner is hands-on learning her way through college. She's getting internships because she is in college. And she's learning a lot.

In the beginning she just chose classes that looked interesting to her and that fit into her schedule, being clustered together with rest days in between. Then she joined the Honors business minor, which was a very valuable experience. And she found a field she's suited to and began pursuing internships in that field. She worked for free, for a very small stipend, and for credit. Within a few semesters, she had the experience and ability to get a great summer internship for pay.  

She got a lot of advice from reddit, where she asked questions and got helpful answers with useful suggestions and information that she implemented. They told her what certifications to pursue and to find internships and how to find internships. A lot of opportunities were available to her through college.

So when you look at college not as something to get a degree with, not something to be done "full time," but as an amazing place with lots of fun and exciting people (peers and professors) and lots of interesting offerings intellectually and experientially, and lots of unusual classes to explore and clubs and trips and opportunities, then it has great things to offer even a student who does not fit the mold. 

Bribes/Earnings/Negotiations

I never did write about our Seder this year. Last year I was so demoralized (to be fair, it was the middle of a pandemic) at how much nobody seemed to be able to read Hebrew. It felt like I had failed in homeschool. ("In homeschool, the kids don't fail; only the teachers [moms] do!")(I just made that up.) 

 This year it turns out that everyone's Hebrew reading improved and they were pretty engaged and it was a lovely learning experience. I made a grab bag with some discussion points/scenarios/questions to answer and they really enjoyed that.

Jack and I have started learning for half an hour once (or twice a week). He's often running out of money so he earns $5 a session. He practices Hebrew reading and R' Winder. It's a joy to teach someone with the ability to sit. After two ADHD kids, it's a nice change of pace. He's doing great with R' Winder and I'm optimistic about his future ability to translate Tanach. 

Elazar has been working on the ability to tolerate minyan. He still is reading with me for 4 minutes at a sitting a few times a week. He's still not through Shemona Esrei.
He woke up on Shabbos morning before shul was over so I asked him to go to shul. He was very reluctant. After a bunch of back and forth negotiations, we agreed that if he can go to shul with his father when his father goes (if he gets a 10 minute warning), and if he goes to shul for musaf time if he's awake Shabbos morning, and if his over bar mitzva friends go to shul on Shabbos for mincha if he is with them then he'll go to shul for that. If he commits to that for a year, he can get a Nintendo Switch plus 4 games. 

This got him pretty excited but he's not sure he can commit to that. He's thinking about it.

In the meantime, he's still crossing off his Xs on his minyan chart (when he hits 30 he earns a game). He seems to be under the impression that he will simultaneously earn more Xs for new games if he commits to the Switch. That's not my inclination (when a new rewards system comes into effect, doesn't it knock out the old one?) but on the other hand, I'm not sure I want to mess with his enthusiasm. 

I think of it like this: Would I pay x dollars to see my child be excited for minyan? Would I pay double that? Yes. Yes, I would.