Free Learner

John Taylor Gatto audio

For those of you who are homeschoolers (and those of you who aren't!), I discovered a treasure trove of downloadable John Taylor Gatto audio.  Gatto was a New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year, during a career in which he engaged in (as he puts it) "sabotage" against the system on behalf of his students.  In part, he provided official cover for them to escape school and pursue their own goals.  The year he won the New York State award, he quit--  publicly, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. (This page includes the op-ed / resignation letter.)

I particularly recommend The Guerrilla Curriculum and On the Scientific Management of Children.

Black and white

So I'm sitting here with Anya, reading the news while she's looking at her penny collection, and out of the blue she says "Well, I guess the Obama family is more white than McCain, anyway."

I said: "What?"

She continued on to explain that the Bushes are definitely a black family, but in her opinion, Lincoln was "mostly white".

Thankfully my brain kicked into gear and I remembered yesterday's dinner conversation, during which Anya got really mad at Seth for criticizing Lincoln.  This led to a discussion about how these things are not black and white, and most things fall into a gray area.  And then we got into what "black and white" means, and that the color white is equated with "good" and the color black with "evil".  Thus, the Bushes are a black family.

On top of that confusion, Anya doesn't know that "black" people are called black, because when talking about race I only use the actual skin color and geographic origin.  American slaves weren't black, they were brown-skinned people from Africa.  (The term "black" is itself racist if you think of how this word was used 200 years ago, as in "blackguard," an evil person.)

When Anya was about 3 she once said that a friend of ours was black, and he is African American, but I was shocked that she was using the term.  She had never before shown any awareness of race.  As it turned out, she wasn't talking about race after all.  This friend was "black and brown," while his Irish heritage wife was "orange and white".  She was just mentioning his hair.

Recently I've begun talking about race with Anya, but I never use the word "race," I just put it in really simple language.  Pale-skinned people took brown- and black-skinned slaves from across an ocean, but a few hundred years before that, other brown-skinned people (Persians) were taking pale-skinned people as slaves.  It's an unfortunate human trait that we dehumanize those who look different than us and live differently than we do.

I'm leery of much of what people teach their kids about race because they tend to focus on recent US and British history, in which light-skinned people have constantly victimized darker-skinned people.  That's dangerous, no matter how sensitive and left-wing you are, because children will often come to either of these conclusions: 1) light-skinned people are evil, or 2) dark-skinned people are weak.  You can get around this problem by taking the broader historical view and explaining that a few hundred years earlier, the light-skinned people in northern Europe were the backwater of the whole planet, constantly being pillaged and enslaved.  And around that time or a little earlier, Baghdad was the center of the civilized world, whereas now it is a bombed out hell-hole.  In fact, every color of skin and every part of Earth has had its own Empire, at some point in history, and with few exceptions (usually mountain peoples) every part of the planet has at one time been decimated by foreign enemies.  The center of power moves.  And as it moves, those who have been colonized, pillaged, and then abandoned by a Major Power are doomed to internecine warfare, famine, and plague for centuries afterward.  (See Europe, post-Romans; or Africa, post-British/French.)

I actually object to the terms "black" and "white" when they indicate race, although I use the terms like anyone else because it's a losing battle.  But I've never used those terms to indicate race when talking to Anya, and I'm annoyed to have to explain them now.  I guess I have to, though, to prevent some spectacular misunderstandings!

Pippi the unschooler

I recently picked up Anya's copy of Pippi Longstocking, and was surprised at how subversive it is.  I particularly enjoyed this scene, in which two policemen come to take Pippi away to a children's home (they fail, of course):

"But don't you understand that you must go to school?"

"Why?"

"To learn things, of course."

"What sort of things?" asked Pippi.

"All sorts," said the policeman.  "Lots of useful things -- multiplication tables, for instance."

"I have got along fine without any pluttifikation tables for nine years," said Pippi, "and I guess I'll get along without it from now on, too."

"Yes, but just think how embarrassing it will be for you to be so ignorant.  Imagine when you grow up and somebody asks you what the capital of Portugal is and you can't answer!"

"Oh, I can answer all right," said Pippi.  "I'll answer like this: 'If you are so bound and determined to find out what the capital of Portugal is, then, for goodness' sakes, write directly to Portugal and ask.'"

"Yes, but don't you think that you would be sorry not to know it yourself?"

"Oh, probably," said Pippi.  "No doubt I should lie awake nights and wonder and wonder, 'What in the world is the capital of Portugal?'  But one can't be having fun all the time," she continued, bending over and standing on her hands for a change.  "For that matter, I've been in Lisbon with my papa," she added.

This reminds me-- some time back I read one mom's advice for homeschooled kids who are asked a random schooly question, such as "Who was the 16th President of the United States?"  They should, she recommended, simply say "I don't know, who?"  And when the schoolkid informs them of the answer, they should say "Well, now I know who the 16th President of the United States is, and I didn't have to go through 13 years of schooling to find out."

Freddy the Pig: A Children's Classic

I've been wanting to explain why I've recently become obsessed with the Freddy the Pig series, but I couldn't seem to find the words to convey how excellent the books are.  Thankfully, over at the Friends of Freddy site, they had a copy of a May 1994 New York Times Book Review, written by Adam Hochschild, which says it all.  Here is that review, in part (and with minor editing):

That Paragon of Porkers: Remembering Freddy the Pig

The moral center of my childhood universe, the place where good and evil, friendship and treachery, honesty and humbug were defined most clearly, was not church, not school and not the Boy Scouts.  It was the Bean Farm.

The Bean Farm, as all right-thinking children of my generation knew, was the upstate New York home of Freddy the Pig and his fellow animals.  They were the subject of 26 books by Walter R. Brooks... that appeared between 1927 and Brooks's death in 1958....

Brooks had many admirers, from my fifth-grade classmates to the mighty Lionel Trilling, who called the books "delightful."  Other loyalists have claimed Freddy as the ancestor of more famous literary pigs such as those in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945).  In fact, in Freddy the Politician (first published in 1939 as Wiggins for President), the animals foil a crafty gang of woodpeckers who try to seize control of the Bean Farm by making extravagant promises - a revolving door for the henhouses, cat-proof apartments for the rats, and so on.   In his book Fairy Tales and After, the critic Roger Sale pointed out that Freddy the Politician "not only preceded Orwell's work but is a good deal more careful with its materials and, for that matter, shrewder about its politics… The actions emerge much less mechanically than do Orwell's."

. . .

Walter R. Brooks's gentle genius shines even brighter in his villains....  Almost all the villains foiled by Freddy are representatives of the Establishment.  The bank president, Mr. Weezer, who appears in many of the books, has glasses that fall off anytime anyone mentions a sum over $10.  General Grimm is "short, stocky, and red-faced and looked as if his uniform was too tight for him, but nobody had better mention it."  Mr. Gridley, the high school principal "never came close to anybody he was talking to but always stood off several yards and shouted."

The pompous, timid Senator Blunder flees the scene when pursued by the animals, because "should I be struck down, into what hands would fall the reins of the ship of state?"  The fabulously wealthy Margarine family tears up farmers' fields with fox hunts in Freddy Rides Again.  (The fox, of course, is a friend of Freddy's, and the Margarine's are undone.)  And, until he is exposed by the animals, a conniving real estate man pretends he is a ghost and haunts houses he wants the occupants to sell.

Poking fun at generals, realtors, bank presidents and the like was unusual fare for children's books of the 1940's and 50's.  Other volumes make a few digs at the space program and at the FBI - Freddy's bumbling Animal Bureau of Investigation often misses the evidence right under his snout.  In a subtle way the books even prefigured the spirit of the 60's.

In Freddy and the Bean Home News the animals start their own paper because Mrs. Underdunk, the rich, haughty newspaper owner, and her editor, Mr. Garble, distort the news.  When the evil Mr. Condiment hits Freddy, Freddy thinks: "He slapped me because I am a pig….If I were a boy or a man he wouldn't have done it...."

Still, you don't have to be in the 60's generation to appreciate Freddy.  As with all books that last, their attraction is broader and deeper.  Essentially, they evoke the most subversive politics of all: a child's instinctive desire for fair play.  Brooks speaks powerfully to his young readers' moral sense without ever overtly moralizing.  The local sheriff, for example, tells Freddy's sidekick, Charles the rooster, that he will get much tougher penalties for pecking the face of a rich man than that of a poor one. Truer words were never spoken.  But how can a reader feel preached at when it's someone talking to a rooster?

Some dozen years ago, says Dave Carley, a Toronto playwright, he "stopped in at a children's library to see if they still had any Freddy books.  The librarian told me that she was photocopying pages and binding the books with hockey-stick tape because they were in such demand."  Mr. Carley found others who remembered the books as fondly as he and formed the Friends of Freddy, who meet every two years for a weekend of book trading, talk, and pork-free dinners....

"I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario," Mr. Carley told me by telephone from his home in Toronto.  "A Friends of Freddy member from [Peterborough] told me recently that when he was a boy there were two thugs who came to the library on Saturday mornings.  The bigger one blocked the door, and the smaller one ran upstairs and checked out all available Freddy books.  I had to confess to him that these two were my brother and me."

. . .

Above all, it is Brooks's moral words that stick with his readers.  "I distinctly remember learning things from the books that I could apply to my own life," Mr. Carley says.  "For example, that if somebody says, 'To be frank with you" it means they're lying."  Geoffrey Stakes, in a 1992 article in The Village Voice, pointed out that the Bean animals had "a one-animal, one-vote rule in place long before the human Supreme Court established our version."  Wendy Wolf, a New York book editor, learned that the Nuremberg defense is no good: "Like when the children of Simon the Rat say, 'Our father made us do it,' they're told: 'Forget it, you're going to jail'."

. . .

"They represent the very best of American fantasy writing for children," says Mr. Cooper [of the New Yorker] of the books.  "They are the American version of the great English classics, such as the Pooh books or The Wind in the Willows."

Thoughts on reading

Yesterday I ran across a good post about reading, which had this to say about reading in schools:

What was more disturbing was that the second a child succeeded in reading a level with only a few mistakes, they were given a harder book. There was never any ease or comfort in reading. It was always a hard, boring chore. Children were not allowed to linger in a level to achieve fluency, to enjoy the reading, they were always being forced to struggle through to the next stage to try to keep up with provincial requirements.

I left this comment:

You make a great point about kids being moved on to the next reading level as soon as possible, keeping them constantly frustrated. That's really unfortunate. Even when kids are reading books below their reading level, they are still cementing spelling & grammar rules simply by absorbing them from the text. Plus, not only does it make them more confident readers, but it allows them to read the book more dramatically (whether out loud, or just using their internal, mental voice) because they aren't distracted constantly by challenging words. My daughter used to say that yes, she could read, but she couldn't read "like the audiobooks." She meant that it was hard to imagine the setting, the voices, & the emotions because the text itself was still quite challenging. I submit that if you can't get wrapped up in a book enough to imagine the characters & their tone of voice & so on, you are not fully reading that book. But of course, in school it's simply a matter of being able to say the words aloud. (I'm sure we all remember listening to other kids reading aloud in a total monotone, with no regard for the ends of sentences!)

When we found the Freddy the Pig audiobooks, I realized that my kids can learn an immense amount of vocabulary, random cultural knowledge, figures of speech & proverbs, grammar and syntax, all from audiobooks. All that's missing is deciphering symbols (reading, as it's often measured in school) and correctly arranging symbols (spelling and punctuation). They get everything from an audiobook except the mechanics, in other words. In fact, they get more, because the voice acting is usually quite good, and those vocal cues help kids understand unfamiliar slang or vocabulary. The Freddy books are chock full of old proverbs and odd slang (plus the word "phaeton"). I guarantee my daughter learns more listening to Freddy than reading any of the crappy early readers used in my old elementary school.

A blogger (I wish I remember who it was) once said that the early schooling years are all about symbol manipulation, and I agree.  There is a great deal of focus on the mechanics of language, and very little focus on why we read and write language in the first place.

Don't mess with reading

Tonight, for the first time in many, many months, Anya read out loud to me.  She normally hates reading out loud, as she does not like being evaluated.  But she had this rain forest frogs book and wanted to share it, so, out of the blue, she asked if she could read parts of it to me.

Here are two of the paragraphs she read aloud, with only 2 pauses on the words "chemicals" and "moist":

Poison dart frogs don't need to hide or escape.  They hop fearlessly about on the forest floor during the day.  Their bright colors warn predators, "Don't touch me."  Only a few animals can eat them, because their skin contains bitter-tasting chemicals.  Some of these chemicals are very poisonous.

. . .

Many rain forest frogs do not lay their eggs in the water.  The eggs of some frogs are protected by foam nests along the water's edge or on overhanging leaves.  The foam keeps the eggs moist and helps protect them from predators.  Often, the tadpoles hatch within the foam, and rain carries them into the water.

She read about 20-25 such paragraphs very well, the way an adult would, changing the tone of her voice and indicating the ends of sentences.  I am not patting myself on the back, because I did not teach her to read.  I gave her the very basics of phonics, those unreliable rules which are violated incessantly in our idiomatic language, and she taught herself from then on.  I have not even tested her reading in any way in quite a few months.  I saw her with books, I assumed that learning was taking place.  (Even when, for months, those books were almost entirely Garfield comics; we now own virtually the entire series.)

Her reading tonight was not like the student readings I remember, where texts were recited in a monotone that made no exceptions for periods, commas, or dialogue.  Anya read "very poisonous" quite dramatically, as she did other phrases and sentence clauses.  She also stopped to insert her own comments, making connections between the text and her existing knowledge of rain forests, frogs, endangered species, etc.  So I had no doubts about her reading comprehension.  It was, altogether, nothing at all like "reading group" in my old elementary school.  This is not so much because schools are doing something wrong, it's largely because they are failing to do something right, namely: let children choose what they read.  If they find something they want to read, they're going to learn to read it.

Anyway, I have no idea what a third grade reading level looks like, so I went and googled "third grade reading level example."  Argh!!!!

Apparently, one is not allowed to merely... like... read books in the third grade.  No no no!  You have to play games & do quizzes about "rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration" and "consonant blends and digraphs" and "using an index" and "root words" and "compound words, contractions, and common abbreviations".  It's all about jargon, people!!!  Have YOU taken the Homophone Challenge?  Have YOU read 'Success with Suffixes'?  Have YOU played 'Feast of Antonyms'?

As my husband says, institutional schooling is all about making you use your left brain, and your LEFT BRAIN ONLY.  No wonder reading comprehension is difficult.  These kids have been trained to the see the trees and nothing but the trees, and never the forest.

Another thing I came across was a list of spelling words for the 3rd grade.  Now I ask you, does anyone seriously believe that a child won't learn to spell "park," "size," or "about" at some point?  Even in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods?  If you know that a kid is going to pick up words like "bike," "team," and "wash," and probably within another couple of years, is it really necessary to take up class time making them "use the word in a sentence" in third grade?  Why not use that time to let them read what they want from the school library, instead?

Proper spelling simply gets absorbed, as do most grammatical rules, during reading.  The other day Anya was doing a math worksheet that said "Name" and "Date" at the top, only she didn't know the date.  So she wrote "UNKNOWN" in the Date slot.  I had no idea she could spell that, and I don't think she considered whether or not she knew how to spell it... she just wrote it.

I think it is very useful to learn parts of speech, the definitions of prefix / suffix / root, and all of that.  But it is trivially easy to teach this in, say, 7th grade, when kids have probably already noticed the ways that words are put together.  By then, they will eat up jargon like "adjective" and "root word" because those terms will give a name to something they'd already noticed, if almost subconsciously.  But to insist upon such knowledge in 3rd grade is simply a means of standing in the way of real reading.

You want kids to read better?  Give them a library and a wonderful librarian*, and then stay the hell out of their way.

* We have one at our local public library who shares Anya's love for Bunnicula and first introduced us to Freddy.

Nice moments in homeschooling

Since Monday, we've resumed our ritual of doing homeschooling around the dining room table after breakfast.  (Or during breakfast, since some days breakfast lasts for 2 hours.)

On Monday my kids just did coloring and jigsaw puzzles.  Yesterday was much the same, except Anya did three math worksheets.  The worksheets were clock math, coin math, and reading thermometers.  I was trying to ease her back into "schooly" stuff.

Today when I got out some math worksheets, Tristan (4 1/2) announced he wanted some too.  He has these worksheets where you count up the number of shapes in a line, and circle the correct number.  Normally he spends like 20 minutes coloring the shapes, and 1 minute circling the right numbers.  But today he did away with coloring altogether and just circled the numbers, and he did worksheet after worksheet until we ran out and he demanded I go print more of them.  That was surprising... and nice.  Sort of like him printing letters randomly on his coloring pages on Monday and Tuesday.  It was a pleasant surprise.  On Tuesday he asked me what "S T" spelled, so I told him the "st" sound, as in "stop".  He had me write "STOP," and then he copied it twice.  I don't even recall if he's ever made a "P" before, but he's now at an age when the brain-hand connection is good enough that you can copy a foreign symbol if you want to.  Anyone struggling to get their 3-year-old to make letters should just chill and wait 6 months, if you ask me.

Now, when Anya was three she could write her name, but I am not proud of that fact.  Actually what I remember is making her write "ANYA" on 17 Valentines and making her do several of them over again because she'd written AYNA instead.  Not one of my better moments.  The biggest mistake I have made with Anya (so far) was sending her to preschool.  Without the preschool, I would never have gotten so competitive.  I'm not excusing myself, I'm just saying that the parents are socialized along with their children, and they want us to be competitive.  It keeps you from questioning their system.  You're too busy measuring your child vs. other children to step back and go "Wait a minute-- why are we doing this at all??"

So anyway, with Tristan I decided I would do total unschooling until he was 6 or 7, and I have stuck to that so far.  He is just learning to spell his name and it is totally, 100% because he wants to.  I only write his name out when he asks me to.  He has also, wholly on his own: asked me which letters were which, asked me to draw letters, insisted on typing letters himself in various computer situations, drawn his own letters, asked me the sounds letters make, asked me what words start with a certain letter, and invited me into little phonics games such as "What starts with D?"  (Or as he puts it, "What spells with D?")  So, to see him write "STOP" of his own volition was nice.  To play the "What starts with Y?" game was nice.  And a few minutes later, he wrote TRISTAN -- the first time he has ever written his own name.  For a long time now, he has marked things simply with "T".  He doesn't like it that there is a T, S, and A in his name (for Tristan, Seth, and Anya) but no "H".  So we have agreed to write a separate "H" in the corner of all his papers so that I might be represented.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of intellectual development with Anya (8 1/2), but it's not easily described.  There is this huge imaginative component, where she considers how anything and everything might have been different.  "I guess it's a good thing fish don't swim in air," she'll say out of the blue, "because when they fell asleep the cats would get them."  Or: "Good thing our noses aren't on our butts, or we'd have to turn around to smell our food to see if it was safe to eat and that would just be ridiculous!!"  She spent an afternoon on "what if there was no gravity," which was amusing since I had to write a report on this very thing in 6th grade science class.  Today it was: "You know, if cats were as different as dogs there would be some the size of mice and some that weighed like 100 pounds... and I don't know which kind I'd want.  I mean, a tiny cat would just get eaten if it got outside, so maybe a big one is better, but if a cat weighed 100 pounds it could probably kill a chihuahua.  Whaddya think, Mom?"

[That last one, by the way, turned out to be a long discussion about breeding, natural selection, and whether it was "fair" that humans spend more time breeding animals they use for work, such as dogs, than animals they merely appreciate aesthetically, such as cats.]

I am also now spending a fair bit of time talking about Star Trek with Anya.  She realllllly likes Spock, but does not care for The Next Generation.  In the tradition of the true Trekkie, she likes The Original Series best.  Last time we went to a play date -- and I kid you not -- she made both the other adults there do the Vulcan hand thing and say "Live Long and Prosper" when we left.  She is all in a tizzy about an upcoming Star Trek exhibit in Detroit, and hopes to buy a Spock poster for her room.  (With luck I can turn this into a physics lesson or something.)

I'll end by saying that I have to believe games & puzzles are beneficial in brain development, because we know they're beneficial in preventing dementia.  I think there is a degree of truth in the idea that your brain is a muscle.  It's not literally true, since your brain is almost totally cholesterol and fat -- but if you exercise it, it works better.  So what does that mean for kids, whose brains are just developing?  What if they spend time at Yahtzee, Quirkle, Apples to Apples, chess, checkers, Blokus, adventure games, DnD style games, word searches, sudoku, mazes, Go Fish, poker, Boggle, Scrabble, etc?  My kids love games, so I know I am biased, here.  But I have to imagine that these games are helpful to children even though they may not be "learning" anything they can regurgitate later, on some standardized test.  I even think that computer games based on solving puzzles, exploring lands, and finding hidden objects are likely useful.

Better than gym class dodgeball, anyhow.  That I can say with certainty.

Logic vs. convention

Anya was doing some worksheets this morning, and I just loved the way she converted these numbers into Roman numerals:

53 --> LIII

9  --> VIV

57 --> LIIIX

47 --> IIIL

19 --> XIX

85 --> LXXXV

56 --> LIIIIX

Mostly wrong, and all perfectly logical. I wonder just how many "wrong" answers in traditional schoolwork are in fact completely reasonable.  And I wonder how often adults pretend that there are important reasons why those answers are wrong, instead of simply explaining to kids that we need conventions to reduce confusion, even when the conventional way is not necessarily superior.  I mean, IIIL takes fewer characters than XLVII, and is less complicated.  Or, to take a famous example, there is no reason for "Wednesday" to be spelled that way.  If anything it should be spelled Wedensday, since it means "Wodin's Day" after the Norse god.  A great many spellings make no sense, but it is much easier to read if we all agree on common spellings.  Similarly it is much easier to read Roman numerals if we all agree on a common system for writing them.  But I always go out of my way to point it out to Anya when a convention is simply that-- just an agreement used to grease the wheels of communication, which may or may not make a whit of sense.

Yes, we're still homeschooling

I don't often write homeschooling posts these days, because they would tend to be a collection of miscellany and short anecdotes.  I guess I exhausted the bigger philosophical and political considerations at my old blog.  But we are indeed still homeschooling.

Anya went through a major reading and audiobook phase over the past 3 months, so I left her to it, and we haven't done much else, recently.  It was about one year ago that she began reading, and she has been learning on her own, since "doing reading" together does NOT work for us.  She really likes an old book series featuring Freddy the Pig, written by Walter Brooks in the 1920s to 1950s.  There are 26 of them, each around 220-250 pages, so we are in hog heaven (sorry, couldn't resist).  I like it that the books have old slang, old figures of speech, and old words (such as the word she learned that her dad didn't know: phaeton; I wouldn't have known it either, had it not been for regency era novels).  They also have moral messages that are not overdone or heavy-handed, as well as witty social commentary.  And they introduce ideas from the adult world, such as how banks, trials, and political campaigns work.  I think these books are brilliant, and can't believe they were out of print for so many years.  I came across this NPR piece [scroll to the bottom] on how the books got republished, after a small regional publisher was talked into attending a mass Friends of Freddy meeting.  He was so inspired by these fanatical Freddy fans that without knowing a thing about the copyrights or anything, he got up and gave a short impromptu speech promising to publish them.

In the last week or so, we've returned to math after a long hiatus.  Anya's been finishing off equations with a mix of symbols (+, -, x), where a different number is missing.  E.g., [blank] + 5 = 9, 3 x [blank] = 21, etc.  There was an equation written out like this:

    [blank] = 5 - 4 + 7

She had written in 6 as the answer.  This is a perfect example of what used to happen to me in school all the time-- her reasoning was absolutely logical, even though she got the wrong answer according to mathematical convention.  I asked her why she'd put 6 there, and she said "Because 7 plus 4 is 11, and 11 minus 5 is 6."  That is, the equals sign was on the left, so she read the entire equation moving from right to left, assuming it should be read in reverse order.  In school, this would have been marked wrong, no explanations given on either side.

A friend of Anya's who is about the same age went back to school this year, after having been homeschooled for a year and a half.  Today I was talking to his mom about how he really adores his teacher.  She mentioned that he had read a long book (120 pages) and written a book report summarizing it, then attributed this largely to the teacher by saying the teacher had "done so much for him."  But Anya has also had a leap in reading ability in the past few months, and all I've done is supply the books.  Possibly, around the age of 6 or 7 or 8, many kids have this reading explosion.  But because this friend goes to school, and this was a school assignment, somehow his teacher is given some of the credit for his reading that 120-page book.  I thought this was kind of sad-- it's his accomplishment, not the teacher's. 

The truth is, you can't actually "teach" a kid to read.  You can give them the very basics, the most common rules of phonics; you can force them to memorize certain common words; you can help them when they get stuck on a word.  But that's really not very much.  English is ridiculously idiomatic and phonetically inconsistent.  Every supposed phonics or spelling rule is broken constantly.  You carefully teach them that when a "g" is followed by "e" or "i" it makes a "j" sound, and the first sentence they come to contains the word "get".  We imagine we are the reason they begin reading, but frankly, most of those rules and explanations make kids frustrated and confused when they turn out to be wrong, which is often.  And yet, in spite of our rather bizarre written language and the enormous English vocabulary, when kids are ready they pick it up like a sponge.  That reading explosion is not due to teaching.  You can't simply install this mixture of motivation, brain development, and epiphany inside a kid's head.  The best you can do is to get their foot in the door (phonics & common sight words), wait (and wait, and wait), and be ready to jump in with books they'll love when the reading explosion begins.

By the way, I have no idea what people mean when they talk about whether a child is reading or not.  Anya could read her name and the words Mom, Dad, and Moo when she was 2.  Was she reading?  She could sound out a few words at 4, and a good number of simple words at 5, but she couldn't string those sounds together (e.g. "hhh-aaa-t" never became "hat").  Was she reading then?  We were at that stage for two solid years.  When she was 7 she began reading the Webkinz site and Frog and Toad, but not fluently.  Was that reading?  I can now definitively say she is reading, but I am not sure how other parents decide this.  I suspect we homeschoolers discuss the ages when our kids started reading, but have many different ideas of what "reading" entails.

California court reverses decision; allows homeschooling

I had put up a post here stating that a California court had banned homeschooling, referring to a September 23 Natural News article.  I knew that we were waiting for another court decision, and I thought that was it.

In fact, the Natural News article referred to the original court decision to ban homeschooling, from way back in March-- but reported on it as if it were breaking news.

Actually, on August 8, the appeals court reversed itself and re-instated the freedom to homeschool which has existed for 30 years in California.  I was camping when this happened, and missed the good news.  As I say, I thought we were still waiting for the next decision.

Many thanks to Hawksbill for pointing this out to me!

In a Washington Times article on the court's reversal, I thought this was interesting:

[T]he Court of Appeal agreed to rehear the case. Interested organizations on both sides of the issue were urged to file friend-of-court briefs. The governor, attorney general, superintendent of public instruction and the California Department of Education all filed briefs supporting the view that parents could home-school under the private school exemption in California [emphasis mine].

According to a friend from California, homeschoolers there can apply for and receive funds from the state, in some cases as much as $1,500 per year.  This is available (at least in some areas) through some sort of school choice or school voucher program, and it represents an economic loss for public schools.  So it's a pleasant surprise that the Dept of Education supported families' rights to homeschool.