Dealing With Standards

I used to stress over standards. In my early years of homeschooling, I had looked through and used an assortment of “What Your Child Needs To Know” books, grade-appropriate workbooks, and Spectrum Test Preps, in the hopes that my children will know everything they needed to for their grade levels. I poured through the school language arts texts to be sure they were able to answer the comprehension questions at the end of each reading excerpt. I leafed through science and history texts to make sure they were up to speed with the rest of their school-age peers. Heck, I wanted them to be ahead of their peers.

To this end, I drew up countless schedules incorporating every conceivable subject and then some — writing, spelling, math, reading, grammar, biographies, foreign languages, science, history, geography, music appreciation, and art studies. I admit, the planning of the schedules, reading assignments, and history chapters was all very exciting. If we went at top speed, I reasoned, we could finish such and such text in half the time as our school counterparts and come out ahead. Being ahead of grade-level was a very enticing carrot.

The actual implementation, however, was less than desirable. For us, it was just way too much seat work and more often than not, way too rigid a system to follow. It was a roller coaster cycle of starting on a schedule, being overwhelmed by the schedule, getting tired of the schedule, ignoring the schedule, and feeling guilty for not having followed the schedule. I hated the feeling of having to finish a lesson because the schedule dictated so.

Sure, I wanted my children to succeed in school, but more than that, I wanted them to enjoy the process, rather than being enslaved to it. I had to remind myself that the reason I homeschooled was not to imitate school or complete a to-do list someone else made up. So I did the unthinkable. I stopped competing with the system. In fact, we spent a few months just hanging out and working on the projects we never had time to do — conducting science experiments and producing an amazing amount of art. We read our history books and drew cartoons depicting what we have learned. We took field trips to all the neighborhood places I never knew existed. We reviewed math concepts through picture books, working out the problems with the characters in the stories. And of course, we read many, many books on whatever we were interested in at the moment. I added other subjects in slowly, and usually, they were somehow connected to something we were already doing.

I admit we do have workbooks, which the kids fill in every now and then. And we still use the Test Prep books once a year, right before the standards tests. Maybe it’s a residual school thing, I’m not sure.  Ironically, my kids find these fun and love “filling in the circles”. They see it as a game and not an assessment of their worth. Perhaps one day, we will disregard the workbooks entirely and fill our days with richer experiences. Until then, we are at least learning in a much more relaxed atmosphere, and editing our own to-do list as we see fit. In doing so, we are striving towards much higher standards than those set forth by some unknown entity.

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Tagged as: comparisons, rubrics, scope and sequence, standards, written by Amida