Morning by Morning

I just read most of a very enlightening book about homeschooling. It was Morning by Morning: How We Homeschooled our African-American Sons to the Ivy League by Paula Penn-Nabrit. I really enjoyed her style of writing and how much she taught me about families, racial interaction and race issues, and education. Maybe I just understood her well because I am also a religious, law-trained woman, but I was surprised at how much of her message resonated with me, a white woman who doesn't even look the quarter-Hispanic that I am. I highly recommend this book.

Homeschooling officially begins...

The local powers that be have decreed that my dd, age 4, is supposedly old enough to begin full-day kindergarten in just three weeks, where she will be expected to feed and care for herself for six consecutive hours, be surrounded by peers whose home environments and values are completely out of our control, and be taught over 100 sight words by the end of the school year. To that, I say "Pshaw!"

Seriously, how absurd! So, we're about to start being some of those counter-culture homeschoolers. Our dd will still spend most of her day with me, and she'll learn how to read (for real, not just memorizing 100 words) by Christmas by working with me for just a few minutes a day. She's been in a linguistically-rich home all her life, and she can already sound out simple CVC words. (Did I mention recently how much I love the starfall.com website?) We recently started doing one page a day (we do go back and re-read the little stories from previous days because she likes the pictures and accompanying text) from Reading With Phonics* by Julie Hay and Charles Wingo. I can tell she is ready to steadily and easily progress through the entire book as long as I don't push her too fast and burn out her interest. Hooray for great reading instruction books and more time with dd, who is very dear to me indeed.

*Note: this Lippincott book is old and has some humorously un-P.C. things in it. For example, yesterday's reading ended with the sentence "Toy guns are fun." (Well, they are, aren't they?)

Juxtaposition

The top headline on Google News for the subject "homeschooling" right now is "Homeschooling: America's Hidden Breeding Ground for Conservative Ideology" on www.alternet.org. Soon after seeing that headline, I was reading Joanne Jacob's website and read in a recent post that a professor is saying students today are unfit for a college education because of faults "in their 'educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process.'"

Seeing these two items together made me wonder whether analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities and good study attitudes are considered conservative these days? After all, I think most homeschoolers will tell you that they doubt the public schools would do an adequate job in developing these attributes in their children. Hence, the homeschooling by both conservatives and liberals.

Once I was able to get the alternet.org website to load, though, I found out from the comments that the article itself (written originally in French and actually titled "American Families That Defy the Public School") wasn't focused on conservative zealots isolating their children after all. It seemed a fair depiction of both rightwing and leftwing homeschoolers' motivations and circumstances. It's just alternet.org, I guess, that felt they needed to scare readers about parents teaching their own children *gasp* their own values (Merriam-Webster's definition of conservative: "tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or insitutions; traditional; marked by moderation or caution; marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners").