|
Article Excerpt
My work is digressive, and it is progressive too,--and at the same time. I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going;--and, what's more, it shall be kept a-going these 40 years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. (Tristram, the narrator of Sterne's 1760 experimental 18th-century novel; Sterne, 1965, pp. 54-55)
Home schooling a gifted child is much like the design of Tristram s novel, a series of seemingly unrelated digressions combined with planned learning that continually move the whole life-long educational enterprise forward with a pace and momentum unique to the individual learner. As David Albert, author of And the Skylark Sings with Me: Adventures in Home schooling and Community-Based Education (1999), has discovered, "One learns quickly in home schooling a gifted child that the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line" (D. Albert, personal communication, March 30, 2000).
I often hear parents say they are intrigued or tempted by home schooling--their hearts say "yes" but their minds are plagued with questions: Does home schooling really work? Is it based on sound theory? Won't my children just play all day? How do I know if they are learning enough? What about college? Teachers voice similar concerns, including questions about the home-schooled child's socialization.
In this article I do not attempt to answer all the above questions nor to discuss socialization or familial factors necessary for home schooling to be successful, but I do describe an approach to home-based education that is a fresh alternative to many people's understanding of what home schooling is and isn't. This approach can be thought of as creative home schooling, or home schooling for self-actualization. It is an approach adopted and adapted by our family and evident in interviews with over 30 other families who are home schooling intense, sensitive, precious, and otherwise gifted children. Creative home schooling is based on principles and an understanding of creative learning, divergent thinking, immersion learning, and self-directed learning. It is not an educational model that can be replicated exactly for multiple children. Instead, creative home schooling is an attitude toward education and life that can be adapted to the needs of individual children and families.
At Home with Gifted Learners
As home schooling parents of a gifted learner, we are not alone. A significant percentage of the estimated 500,000 to 1.2 million home-schooled children are gifted (Ensign, 1998). Parents cite several reasons for home schooling their gifted children. Sometimes schools are unable or unwilling to meet the intellectual needs of highly able or asynchronous learners. Some children require a smaller and more comfortable environment in which to develop social and emotional skills. Some parents choose home schooling because home-based education can address the needs of the whole child and integrate the child's individual learning styles, pace, and rhythm into the curriculum. For other families of gifted children, in particular families of highly gifted, exceptionally gifted, and profoundly gifted children, home schooling is a last resort after families' other available schooling options have been exhausted without success (Rivero, 2002).
Once a family has made the decision to homeschool a gifted child, the parents must decide what home schooling approach to use. Just as gifted programs in the schools come in several varieties and models, homeschool approaches vary from a traditional "school at home" model to classical education, unit studies or theme studies, and unschooling, among many others. These homeschool approaches are often loosely divided between the "school at home" model and the unschooling model.
School at Home or Home from School
The "school at home" model attempts to duplicate classroom education in the home. This approach to home schooling often involves extensive use of packaged curricula, on-line coursework, and classroom-like time schedules and graded assignments. The parent chooses the curriculum, sets the learning schedule, keeps the child "on task," evaluates the child's work, and indicates when progress has been made, taking on the role of a classroom teacher. This is the education model with which parents are most familiar; however, some parents may question whether it meets their child's social and emotional needs and whether it puts too great a strain on the dual roles of parent/teacher and child/student.
An alternative to the school-at-home approach for home-schooled children and their parents is unschooling, the child-led form of learning promoted and popularized by the late John Holt. Unschooling in its purest form means "learning what one wants, when one wants, where one wants, for one's own reasons" (Griffith, 1999). Many home-school parents who call themselves unschoolers combine child-led learning with more traditional educational techniques and approaches. Gwen, who has been home schooling her highly gifted son for more than 3 years, offers this description of her family's version of unschooling:
Unschooling doesn't mean foregoing all structure and all lessons. It means letting the child learn what he wants to learn when he's ready to learn it. It means providing an atmosphere of enrichment, a house full of books and videos and fascinating stuff to explore. It means taking your children to museums and historical sites, lying on your back at night identifying stars, introducing concepts and authors and ideas and following up on those things that catch his interest now (while leaving something in his head to draw his interest later). It's just a different style of teaching ... a style that's adapted to the child, instead of the child having...
|
