All forced education is bad for kids because it tells them that they're too stupid to pick out what they're interested in, and too dull to depend on their curiosity.

But there's a unique problem with forcing kids to go to gym class.  It ruins kids' self‑esteem in different ways than other types of forced education. Here are four ways:

1. Violent sports terrify a lot of kids.
The National Association for Sport and Physical Education recommends that schools do not have dodgeball as part of the gym curriculum, but a majority of schools continue to have dodgeball because the loudest kids clamor for it, and the American Athletic Association doesn't have any legislative authority.

Stories abound about how kids get hurt in dodgeball, but also how kids hide in the corner because they're so scared of getting hit.

Even though experts know there's no place for such a violent sport in public school, we continue to not only offer it, but force kids to participate in it.

2. Rigorous athletics are too rigorous for overweight kids.
Half the kids in schools are overweight.  We could debate this and I would fall on the side of how sending kids to school creates weight problems because school is largely sedentary, but I'm not going to debate it.  I'm just going to link to a study that shows that kids who sit in school are day are at risk for health issues associated with sedentary behavior.

What I want to talk about now is that many kids need rigorous exercise in order to focus during the rest of the day, but since other kids are overweight, they will be physically ill from that much exercise.  No surprise that the idea of kids needing a customized education is not just intellectual, but also physical.

Schools in Illinois acknowledge this problem by separating the fat kids into fat gym.  I don't need to tell you how insanely detrimental this is for the kids in fat gym, but there is really no difference between separating kids into fat gym or stupid math.

Segmenting kids teaches them to focus on their deficits instead of their strengths, which is pointless when we know from countless workplace studies that people are better off focusing on their strengths and not worrying about their weaknesses, except to steer clear of them in their work.

3. Gym uniforms undermine self-esteem.
As kids get older they sweat in gym, and it's not appropriate for them to take gym class in their street clothes.  The idea that girls going through puberty have to put on shorts that they would never dream of wearing to school is torture.

All the boys see them, and the girls end up spending hours each week picking their clothes for school because it makes them so anxious, but when they get to gym class, they have no control.  This only teaches girls to hate gym and hate exercise and waste time at school worrying about their bodies.

And it takes so long to change into gym clothes and then back into street clothes that most kids get about eight minutes of exercise in gym class.

4. Gym class encourages disdain for exercise.
Forced gym has been shown to make kids dislike exercise more than no gym at all.  Kids who don't have any gym yearn for exercise during the day and they generally know what they like, team sports or individual sports, rigorous or methodical.  There's all kinds of exercise and each of us yearns for a different type.

Kids who are forced to do a certain type of exercise generally dislike exercise in the same way that kids who are forced to learn a certain way that's not appropriate to them start to hate learning.

The biggest culprit of exercise that leads to disdain for exercise are team sports.  Very few people are born with a natural competitive instinct required to be a good member in a team sport.  Forced gym is like all other kinds of forced learning in that you start with somebody who is excited and you kill the excitement in them.

So looking at it from the perspective of gym class, it's clear that appropriate exercise for one kid is inappropriate for another kid.  Sometimes it takes looking at something as obvious and clear as gym class to understand why something more complicated like chemistry also kills the excitement of students forced to learn it.

Some people will say the solution is more sensitive gym teachers, and some people will say the solution is to do away with gym as kids get older.  All these discussions of course will just be stand in for the real discussion which is that gym class is another reason why you should take kids out of school.

The conventional wisdom about the homeschooling community is that it's all crazy right‑wing Christian fundamentalists. The truth is that lots of homeschool parents are just like you.  They're smart, curious, concerned about their kids, but also concerned that they don't want their life to go to hell while they're focusing on their kids.

Here are five trends among homeschooling parents that tell me I'm in the right place.

1.  Homeschool parents are doctors and lawyers.
Here's an incredible post by Kathleen Berchelmann, a full‑time doctor, explaining why doctors and lawyers homeschool.  There are 18 reasons, and the reasons apply to almost anyone who has a big job that they care about a lot. But the bottom line for why this particular doctor is homeschooling is because homeschooling enables a family to accommodate so many other things besides the kids' education.

School requires everything in the house to revolve around school, which makes it very difficult to be a parent with a big career and a parent who is taking care of school needs.  Once you're homeschooling, the family can accommodate lots of different interests.  For example, the parents need to be engaged and the children need to be engaged.

2.  Homeschool parents are the top one percent.
Let's be honest: the One Percenters are not sending their kids to public school, so they're not struggling over how to teach algebra.

The One Percenters do know that antiquated tropes for well‑rounded knowledge are not serving their kids well in their futures as One Percenters. (I think it's true that "trope" is an antiquated word, so that if you say "antiquated tropes" it's almost redundant.)

So they homeschool in one of two ways.  They're either hiring a company like My Learning Springboard to manage their child's customized education, or they're sending their kid to a school like The Avenues, which is basically a homeschool co‑op that costs $60,000 a year.

3. Homeschool parents are self-confident.
We know that most homeschool families have a parent at home, and it's usually the mom. And women who choose to stay home with kids are more educated and emotionally stable. This makes sense to me, because you don't get any gold stars for staying home with kids. So if you have a great job, and you're willing to give it up for kids, then you have a lot of internal validation that dampens your need for the external validation people get from work.

Schools systematically tell parents they are incapable of raising their own kids. So it takes a confident parent to see our whole society organized around school and decide to trust themselves instead.

Also, unschoolers fundamentally trust that their kids are smart and their kids will succeed, so they don't need to give their kids any academic boost or test their kids to prove the kids are smart.

4.  Homeschool parents are the highly creative types.
The people who are the most creative are not people who think outside the box.  They're the people who don't know where the box is.  They're so far outside of where everyone else is that they are constantly unable to fit in and sometimes don't even know why they're not fitting in.

Research on personality type shows that this is reliably the population of ENFP's who can make a living.

The highly creative parents who have made their way in the world have little understanding of the value of school.  It was not valuable to them, and they're unlikely to put their kids through the same thing.  So it makes sense that a large percentage of parents who take their kids out of school are also extremely creative.

You can splice and dice the homeschooling population a bazillion different ways to show how smart, educated and innovative the parents are, but a simple way to see this is that doctors, lawyers, accountants, professors, and entrepreneurs make up less than five percent of the population, but 25 percent of the homeschooling population.

So next time you think that you don't fit in with the homeschooling community, understand how that's just a way for you to tell yourself that you don't have to consider something that seems difficult on the face of it.

In the meantime, statistics like this make me feel like I finally found a place where I belong.

There are sixteen personality types. The type that thinks most out of the box is ENFP. They are very very open to new things, so new ideas hit them all the time, and ideas hit this type of person in an emotional, visceral kind of way, which makes it hard to fit the idea into another person's mold of how to organize ideas.

You know this type of person in the world as an artist, consultant, teacher – a creative problem solver who inspires other people to do great things by brining them along on the ENFPs wild ride.

We love our kids because they show us the world from a different perspective. The ENFP kid is this times ten. Parents adore their kids who are like this, but then something happens: everything gets impossible for the ENFP. Because school is almost impossible for this kind of kid. (Here's a test to find out if your kid is an ENFP.)

You can look through the list of typical professions for an ENFP – writer, engineer, musician, counselor, public speaker — it's the list of people most likely to earn a ton of money but tell everyone they were terrible in school.

A good example of ENFP way of thinking is captured in the book The Art of Cleanup: Life Made Neat and Tidy. The book is full of reorganized food.

You start to see the pattern  - innovative and charming. Here's what the authors did with alphabet soup:

The gap between performance in the real world and performance in school for the ENFP is important because for many kids, poor performance in school makes them believe they are unable to perform anywhere else.

I recently received a copy of a unpublished dissertation from the  Debra Sanborn at the School of Education at University of Iowa called Myers Briggs Type Indicator Relationship with Academic Success in the First College Semester. The paper shows that ENFP's are unlikely to graduate from college. The paper describes the independent thinker tendencies of an ENFP.

This type of person is unlikely to be interested in ideas with only one correct answer or in getting good grades. They are motivated by more meaningful things like ideas they care about and people they have a connection to. This is true of everyone, to some extent, but an ENFP is so fundamentally different when it comes to learning that they are simply unsuited for the school environment where people tell them what to learn and how to express what they have learned.

There are lots of implications for this research. The dissertation I read focuses on how to use mentors to ensure that these ENFP kids graduate college.

Like many pieces of research we've discussed on this blog (this Ted talk, for instance) the natural conclusion of the research is that kids should not be in school. But most people who do research are too scared to draw that conclusion even if all their research supports it.

The idea that ENFPs should get mentors in college makes the wild assumption that ENFPs belong in college. If an ENFP were allowed to engage in self-directed learning as a child, the adult ENFPs would know how to channel their energy productively, instead of struggling to allow professors to direct their energy.

The other implication here is that we can isolate types of children who definitely should not be in school.  We understand the personality traits of this type of child and why they will not succeed in school, and we understand through a wide range of research that these are the type of people who enter the workforce least prepared to succeed at work because school is the least useful to them.

The problem with universal education is that we can't single out these kids to give them a different type of education, because we'd have to customize school for all different types of students, which we have no funding to do, at all, in this country.

What this tells us is that parents have enough information to know that some children absolutely should not be in school.  We have the research to support this.  We just have no mechanism for putting this research out into the public because the only thing it will do is show that our schools are inadequate, that some kids won't succeed, and some parents are making systematically poor decisions for their kids.

A recent survey conducted by IBM shows that today's CEOs think the most important trait for leadership in the future is creativity.  It is so not surprising that the trait most necessary for success in the workplace is the one most squashed by school. ENFPs are notoriously creative – more than anyone else.  And we are teaching them to think of it as a liability. It's the kids who have the luck of being removed from this environment who will grow up to be the world's leaders.

Parents can sit around and wait for all this research to become public in the same way that we waited 40 years for the hazards of cigarette smoking to become public, but it's irresponsible.

We know enough to know that school is bad just like in 1980 we knew enough to know that cigarettes are bad.  We also know that people squash research that doesn't support what they want.  The fact that kids who are ENFP's are unable to succeed in a school environment should be enough for all parents to worry. We have evidence that boys are squashed in school. Girls are squashed in school. Gay kids are squashed. Kinesthetic learners are squashed. Gifted kids are squashed.

The list reads like the list of evidence that we let accumulate before the lawsuits started beating the cigarette companies. It was incredible how strong the evidence was against them. It was incredible that we were not convinced earlier.

How long does the list of research have to get before you believe that every kid is squashed in school?

The mental and emotional developmental rates of teens in high school is the equivalent of the developmental rate of somebody who is put in jail, according to Joseph Allen, professor of psychology, in his book Escaping the Endless Adolescence.  Teen brains are developing at a very fast rate at that point in life, but they develop at a slower rate when the limitations of their exploration is so severe as in school.

It's the structure of school–the limitations of the format–that makes the homeschooling choice so superior for your kids. We rarely think about what the structure limits, but here's what's clear to me.

1.  Quitting is a fundamental human right.
Peter Gray, who is professor of education at Boston College, is one of my very favorite homeschool bloggers, and he has a phenomenal post about how quitting is a fundamental right.  It's not just quitting school.  It's quitting learning something that's uninteresting to you.  It's quitting recess if you don't want to be outside playing.  It's quitting group activities if you don't feel like being part of a group.

The idea that quitting is a fundamental human right is something that I never thought about until I thought about how, in adult life, we have all kinds of laws to enable people to quit whenever they want.

For example, all employment is at‑will in the United States because we consider non‑at‑will employment to be slavery.  So in employment law we equate the inability to quit with slavery and we do, actually, as a society acknowledge that quitting is a fundamental human right.

2.  Exploration is a fundamental human right.
There's a fascinating study about suicide rates in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway by Columbia College professor Herbert Hendin.  Here's a summary of the research from the Guardian.

In 1960, Denmark (with Japan) had the world's highest suicide rate. Sweden's rate was almost as high, but what of Norway? Right at the bottom. Hendin was intrigued, particularly since the received wisdom was that Denmark, Sweden and Norway shared a similar culture. What could possibly account for such a dramatic difference? After years of research, he concluded that reasons were established in childhood. In Denmark and Sweden, children were brought up with regimentation, while in Norway they were free to roam. In Denmark and Sweden, children were pressured to achieve career goals until many felt they were failures, while in Norway they were left alone more, not so much instructed but rather simply allowed to watch and participate in their own time. Instead of a sense of failure, Norwegian children grew up with a sense of self-reliance.

When researchers looked more closely at what was the difference between the two systems, what they found was that kids need to have the ability to explore in order to develop into their true selves

Since that study, Sweden changed how they managed children in society and put all children in universal schooling and made school a 24‑hour service that parents could bring their kids to at any point. And the suicide rate in Sweden climbed dramatically.

When we look at the fundamental rights that we protect in citizens as adults, the right to travel freely is something we protect carefully.  Figuring out where we want to go and what we want to do is something we consider to be an inalienable right.  It's unclear why that inalienable right starts at the end of school.

Sure you can't let a two‑year‑old go wherever they want to go because they'll walk off a cliff, but at some point, well before age 18, people need to be able to exercise their inalienable right to go explore where they want.

3.  Rest is fundamental to humanity.
Humans sleep more than almost any other animal, and we know that if humans don't sleep, they become raving mad lunatics.

What we also know from personality type research is that even when we're not sleeping we're recharging ourselves throughout the day.  So we don't have a constant level of energy.  We have up‑and‑down energy, which helps us to stay engaged in the work that we do, whatever our work is.

The key to understanding rest is to understand whether you're an introvert or an extrovert.  The personality test at Type‑Coach gives a great explanation of how to understand extroverts versus introverts.  The basic difference is how these two people recharge their energy.  Extroverts recharge their energy by talking to other people.  Introverts recharge themselves by being alone and thinking.  School completely controls how kids recharge and when kids recharge.

In an earlier post I suggested that school favors introverts, and the comment section is loaded up with introverts who said they hated school because it was geared toward extroverts, yet, as an extrovert, I perceive school as a time when I have to stop talking.

So what I realized is that we each have a fundamental need to be able to recharge when we feel the need to recharge.  Otherwise, we feel exhausted and drained because school forces everybody to recharge at the same time.  Since there are 30 kids and one teacher, school undermines our fundamental human need to rest and recharge on our own terms.

When we look at how to reform school, it's really disheartening that we look at things so ridiculous as how to get kids to read earlier, how to get kids to improve their test scores, how to get poor kids to have test scores like rich kids, and how to get bad teachers out and good teachers in.

These problems are distractions that keep us from focusing on the real problem, which is that the modern version of school undermines the humanity of a child.

A big barrier to homeschooling is that it's very easy to envision a major downside: no more free babysitting. But it's harder to imagine the upside. We have more examples in media of gay couples raising kids as a normal setting than we do of homeschoolers raising kids in normal settings. So it's hard to imagine the upsides, but there are plenty.

Here are eight ways my life got a lot easier when I started homeschooling:

1.  No more grouchy mornings
It used to be that I would force myself to wake up before the kids because I had to get dressed and get breakfast ready before they woke up because they were so impossible to deal with to get up and to school.

And then they would wake up and say they didn't get enough sleep, and I shouldn't wake them up, and they want to play before school, and they want to eat something different than I made them.  So every morning I would wake up really unhappy, and the kids would wake up unhappy, and then it would be harder and harder to wake up because we all knew we were waking up to unhappiness.

If you homeschool, everyone just gets up when they want to get up.  So everybody gets up happy.  If they don't want to get up, they lay in bed.  One kid gets up, lays in bed and reads for an hour.  I get up, check my email, and my other son dresses himself, or his Build-a-Bear, or both, and everyone is happy.

2.  No more rushed meals
School takes up so much time and dictates so much of the schedule that meals have to be squashed into the perfectly allotted time for meals if you eat together as a family.  If you homeschool, there are no rushed meals because you can move the meal time around to accommodate everybody's schedule.

This also means that the kids are home, so they can look in the refrigerator and eat what they want, but if you're rushed and have to make meals before the kids get home or if you have to make meals that you're going to send to school, there's no telling what the kid is going to want to eat at that given moment because kids are picky eaters and control freaks.  So meals go much easier when everybody can eat them calmly and pick what they want to eat.

3.  No more clingy kids
The most scary thing about homeschooling to me was that my youngest son, who is emotionally needy, would hang on me all day and I wouldn't have a life.

Once he knew I was going to be with him all the time, he stopped caring if I was talking to him or if I was playing with him.  He just likes to go and check in and say one thing to me to make sure I'm still there, and then he goes back to do his own thing.

And the biggest homeschool revelation for me of all is probably that most kids are not naturally clingy.  They're clingy after being sent away eight hours a day.

4.  No more parent guilt
I had huge guilt about how I was parenting when I was making a lot of money.

Now, after people get over the shock of you telling them that you homeschool, invariably their response is, "Oh, that's amazing that you do that.  I could never do that."  Mostly that's because they don't know how easy it is, but it's really nice reinforcement that you're doing a good job as a parent.

But even if I didn't get that, I don't have any parent guilt because I canceled my whole life to make sure that my kids could stay home with me, and I built a new life for myself around the fact that the kids are home.

So I have guilt that I don't go to the gym or I have guilt that I talk on the phone while I'm driving, but I never have guilt that I'm not paying attention to my kids.

5. No more homework trouble
If you stop doing forced learning, then you don't have to do homework, because homework is telling kids to stop their life and do what someone else wants them to learn.  If you let kids learn what they want, then they naturally choose to do their learning and you don't have to sit next to them and check their learning.

Self‑motivated learning is naturally right because they're picking what to do.  Also, self‑directed learning happens all day long.  You don't have to set aside time and have to schedule for self‑directed learning.  As Sugata Mitra says in his Ted Talk about self-driven education: "The human drive and hunger to learn, to create, and to grow is powerful."

6.  No more inability to sit still
This should be a tirade about 11% of grade schoolers in the US are on ADHD medicine so that they can sit still at school, but The Week reports that the medicine doesn't even help change the kid's behavior.  But I'm not going to rant about that.

What I'm going to tell you is that if you homeschool, you don't need to ask kids to sit still because they choose the way that they want to learn.  Some kids will choose to sit still while they learn and some kids will choose to move around while they learn, but everybody is an effective learner when they're doing self‑directed learning.  There's no argument about needing to sit still.

7.  No more difficult bedtimes
Kids naturally want to go to bed at the same time every day and they naturally want to wake up at the same time every day.  We know this about all people.  We all have natural body clocks.

The problem is that we schedule kids' lives so that they can't accommodate their natural body clocks.  They're accommodating a school clock.  Once you take the school clock away, kids will find their natural time to wake up in the morning and they will find their natural time to slow down at night.  So bedtime just becomes part of the family rhythm when the kids slow down.

8.  No more searching for time to have sex
It's no secret that people who have kids have less sex than people who don't have kids, and the reason for this is that the scheduling is so tight.  If two people are working all day outside the home and the kids are going to school all day, then family time has to be squashed into very short periods, and marriage time and family time have to be the same thing, which means you can't have sex during that time.

If you have family time all day because you're homeschooling, then there's a lot more time in the day to accommodate sex time even if one person is leaving the home to work all day.  You don't have a contest between marriage time and sex time if you have homeschooling.

It might seem unbelievable to you that so much of my life has become easier because I'm unschooling. But, in fact, the Journal of Unschooling reports that among families who unschool, their number-one problem is dealing with criticism and doubt from the general population about what they're doing, but the rest of unschooling was actually not that difficult for the family to implement.

I am going to summarize the findings presented in an incredible TED talk by Ali Carr-Chellman professor of education at Penn State. Like much of the education research coming out today, her conclusion makes it completely clear that parents should homeschool boys. But that's too controversial for her to say. So I'm saying it.

Here's the research she presents:

Boys are failing in school.

• Twice as many boys in slow reading class.
• Twice as many boys than girls in special ed.
• Twice as many boys than girls suspended.
• Twice as many boys than girls expelled.
• (Note: these statistics are more extreme in private schools.)

There is zero tolerance for boy behavior at school. 

• Zero tolerance for rough-housing on the playground, but it's what boys like to do for fun and social development.
• Zero tolerance for writing about violence and video games. Instead boys are encouraged to write poems and stories about moments in their lives.

School looks like a place for girls.

Only 7% of elementary teachers are men. Which makes boys think this is not a place for boys. It's a place for girls. Boys don't belong here.

And they are right. Because a teacher's salary depends on getting students through testing. And testing is getting harder because kindergarten goals are what 2nd grade used to be. So the teacher says to sit down, focus, be quiet, pay attention. What she says indirectly is "be a girl."

Important note: This was a problem before boys started playing video games. Video games are a symptom of the problem that school is not appropriate for boys, it's not the cause of the problem.

Solution to improve education for boys is to:

1. Give them video games with a strong narrative to engage them.
2. Expose them to more male role models during the day.
3. Engage them on a one-on-one basis to find what games are right for their education.

Problem is that this is not scalable.

That's how the TED talk ends. But here's my addendum, which is this is why parents need to take boys out of school. It's so clear in this talk. We know that school is not good for boys. We know the solution to the problem. And we know that schools cannot implement the solution.

Boys need to be home, playing video games or any activity really that engages them. They need to be outside of the school walls so they are not isolated from the adult male population. This is the research no one wants to read because it's so hard to keep your sons in school when you read stuff like this. The only way to keep your son in school is to be able to say that he's one of those rare boys who functions more like a girl than a boy. It's a hard assumption to make with a very young boy. But that's what you're saying when you keep your son in school.

]]> http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/09/video-games-are-key-to-engaging-boys-in-learning/feed/ 32 http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/09/video-games-are-key-to-engaging-boys-in-learning/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PenelopeTrunkHomeschooling/~3/JTPpLM73O4M/ http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/08/school-is-a-competition-where-winners-get-nothing/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 20:18:54 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/?p=4205

You already know that everyone learns differently.  You already know that each kid has different interests, and you know that kids learn at different rates.  So you know, intuitively, if you set up school to be a competition, it will not be close to a fair fight.

You won't have all the math kids competing against each other in math and all the artists competing against each other in art.  You actually have the math kids competing in art and the art kids competing in math, because the idea of school is not only competitive, but also pushes the idea of well-roundedness.

1.  Testing gives people a way to rank kids.

2.  Report cards give parents a way to rank themselves based on how well their kids learn.

3.  School measures IQ not only with testing, but by setting up discrete subject matter that requires basically one type of IQ.  For example, school does not measure emotional intelligence.  Only the intelligence to memorize facts.

The best way to extract your mind from the hamster wheel of competitive schooling is to look at the chart that the Atlantic published about how parents in different countries describe their children.

Most parents in Australia describe their kids as happy or easygoing.  Parents in Italy describe their kids as well-balanced and even-tempered, and parents in the Netherlands say their kids have a long attention span.  Parents in the United States overwhelmingly describe their kids as intelligent.

Ironically the traits that parents in other countries use to describe their kids are actually the traits that help people succeed as adults. But the traits that American parents obsess over are traits that actually have no correlation to happiness or success in adult life. The American school system effectively translates parent concerns about their kid into a daily routine that focuses on those concerns. Which would be great if the concerns correlated to success or happiness.

United States parents are alone in their need to tout their kids as having a high IQ.  It doesn't take a high IQ to recognize that parents are overly invested in their kids' reflection on themselves.

Telling people about their kids' kindness and happiness will help the kids to see themselves that way.  Telling people about how easy their kid is to deal with, which is what people do in Spain, will reinforce the idea between a parent and child that their relationship is thriving.

You don't need to wait for schools to change their focus to something that actually matters in children's lives.  You can change that focus yourself by taking your kids out of school and emphasizing what parents in other countries emphasize, which is what makes a good person instead of what makes a smart person.

 

]]> http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/08/school-is-a-competition-where-winners-get-nothing/feed/ 19 http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/08/school-is-a-competition-where-winners-get-nothing/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PenelopeTrunkHomeschooling/~3/L5DynEsB5OI/ http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/06/get-your-kids-to-be-their-best-selves/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 12:59:34 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/?p=4168

My husband is experimenting with letting pigs be free range. It's a difficult experiment because he doesn't have a lot of other farms as a model. Most farmers think the pigs need to be confined so they are manageable to the farmer. There are so many pigs and only one farmer, so most of farming is about how to get the pigs grown, and to market, without letting them overrun the farm.

The pigs look mean and stupid in confinement. And depressed. When I first visited my husband's farm, the pigs were the only part I hated. I didn't know much about farming, but I knew it looked bad.

Now we have pigs roaming all over the farm and it's fun to watch the little baby pigs. They run around like dogs, playing with each other and with things they find:  scraps, pieces of wood, other animals. Here they are sneaking into the alpaca barn.

Pigs are curious about everything. They have the IQ of a three-year-old child, and they are just so fun to see exploring and learning on their own. When they want milk, they go back to their moms, who generally stay by the nest they made for the piglets.

I am blown away by how similar this is to my experience with homeschooling. The pleasure I get from leaving my boys to explore on their own is that I get to see who they really are. Here's my son, after he somehow climbed to the loft in our barn, getting ready to fly into a pile of hay.

I see what they choose to play with, what they are curious about, and what they ignore. I see them come back to me when they need something and then run back over to whatever interests them after they've touched base.

The same way the pigs look mean and stupid in confinement is the way the boys look unruly and unfocused in school. My favorite part of my life right now is seeing pigs and boys in ways I've never seen them before. We are all lively and engaged if we get to do what is right for us.

]]> http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/06/get-your-kids-to-be-their-best-selves/feed/ 30 http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/06/get-your-kids-to-be-their-best-selves/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PenelopeTrunkHomeschooling/~3/t8W1L4CrN94/ http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/03/unlimited-video-games-in-the-news/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 19:56:10 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/?p=4154

When I started homeschooling, I used workbooks. I got my kids through a whole grade level in about two months. But I found myself forcing my kids to learn stuff they were not interested in learning. The constant arguing killed me, and the lack of excitement over learning seemed like the opposite of what we were aiming to do.

I read about self-directed learning and every time my kids chose video games, I read more research about the benefits of video games to keep myself calm.

At this point, I see the idea of forcing kids to learn set curriculum as something left over from another era, when the world of information was small enough to be broken into topics. And I see limiting screen time as stupefying, when sitting at a desk listening to a teacher answer another kid's question about material you already know is much less engaging than sitting at a desk playing a video game.

Somehow, through all this, I became the spokesperson for parents who let their kids play video games all day. So I find myself doing interviews with reporters each week. Here are two interviews I've done recently. The first one is in a mainstream newspaper in the UK and the second interview is at one of the largest gaming sites. The most interesting thing to me about the articles is how it shows the ways other people understand the idea of letting kids choose what they want to learn.

Are Video Games Good for You? Can Button Bashing Prepare Children for Adult Life?, by Ross McGuinness

School of Hard Blocks: Educating Kids Through Gaming, by David Owen

 

]]> http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/03/unlimited-video-games-in-the-news/feed/ 12 http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/03/unlimited-video-games-in-the-news/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PenelopeTrunkHomeschooling/~3/ZMsdfT7dMqk/ http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/05/02/3-reasons-to-homeschool-your-gay-child/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 19:23:22 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/?p=4139

It's a big day in the history of gay rights. The majority of the US population believes that gay people should be allowed to get married, which matters because married people get financial benefits and protections that unmarried people do not have. The majority of people in the US think it is illegal discrimination to deny gay people these same protections and benefits.

While the Supreme Court is trying to figure out how to read the Constitution in the face of our current civil rights battle for gay people, Jason Collins is making his own huge impact, just by being him. He's a pro basketball player who came out, in Sports Illustrated, this week.

He is the first professional athlete from a major team sport to come out while he's actively playing. To get a sense of how big a deal this is, read the article at The New Yorker site. Just the fact that the NBA is tweeting with the hashtag #NBAFamily gives me chills. Because the NBA is saying that family protects family, even if that person is gay.

1. Social pressures of school are dangerous to gay kids. 
There is a horrifyingly high level of gay kids committing suicide from the social pressures of school. And we have tomes of evidence that high school is debilitating to a teen's identity and personal growth. The required conformity in high school – which many people call "socialization"  - is like prison to kids who don't fit in.

2. Hiding  sexual identity is mentally and physically debilitating.
If you have a gay child who wants to homeschool, consider it seriously. Here's how Jason Collins describes what life is like trying to keep a gay identity under wraps:  “No one wants to live in fear. I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly.”

3. Homeschool teaches gay kids what the real world is like – school doesn't do that.
Homeschooling is not isolating a gay kid from the realities of the rest of the world. Homeschooling gives gay kids the opportunity to feel the support we can offer to gay people of all ages in the real world. The real world is not like school: the real world supports everyone discovering who they are, being true to themselves, and feeling safe as they do it.

 

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