Back to high school and college topics for a minute: I wanted to expand on something I mentioned in a previous post. I said that being an English major isn’t the best preparation for a would-be writer, and had a few emails asking me to elaborate.

I was an English major as an undergraduate. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought to myself: well, what better preparation than to study literature? It seems a natural choice for someone who loves to read and loves to write.

The problem? When you’re an English major, you learn how to criticize. I don’t use that in its colloquial sense, which means something like “point out all the flaws and problems.” Literary criticism is a particular way of approaching and analyzing a book.

That sounds vague, but if you do a search on JSTOR or some other repository of academic wisdom, you’ll find that no one agrees on a definition of literary criticism, and when discussions erupt they wind themselves into an unintelligible tangle very quickly and only cut free by announcing that literature and criticism are both social constructs. So, for example, Phillip Smallwood in New Literary History:

Criticism…has whatever meaning users of English acquiesce in when they deploy ‘criticism’ as part of the language. There is no meaning (or definition) separate from the occcasions within the language when the word is used. This removes the imperative to consider what essential attributes criticism might have, or any individual might arbitrarily choose, and instead focuses attention on the relationship between the word and its context of use.

It’s never a good sign when scholars of a particular field can’t define the field itself.

I should qualify that statement. Smallwood’s paragraph encapsulates my biggest objection to formal literary criticism: it has become parasitic and self-focused; it spends more time examining itself than examining literature; it only exists by feeding on the creativity of others.

That’s a writer’s perspective. There are many people who are naturally gifted in literary criticism, but they aren’t creative writers. In my opinion, the impulse to create and the impulse to do formal literary criticism almost never co-exist within the same psyche.

When you study English literature–which I’ve done on both the undergraduate and graduate level–you don’t learn how stories work, how to produce clear effective prose, or how to write book reviews. You submerge yourself in self-referential arguments about what literature is and how it can exist within a certain cultural context.

In my experience, that sort of study is death to the creative impulse. I can do it, but it drives out the urge to write.

This is not an observation that’s unique to me. Just to cite a couple of examples that pop immediately to mind: James Michener (and whatever you think of his work, he was a storyteller) says exactly the same thing in The Novel. Harriet Vane, Dorothy Sayers’s heroine, remarks to a friend, “Have you ever noticed that writers don’t ever study English literature? They all study history or philosophy or something else.” (That’s not a direct quote–I think it’s in Gaudy Night but I can’t put my hands on the book at the moment.)

But probably the most succinct argument against literary criticism for the would-be novelist comes from the front page of North Carolina State’s English department web page. The page is trying to promote the English major, of course, so it provides quotes from satisfied English-major customers. And here’s what it says.

Engage in an education that will excite your senses to many possibilities in the Department of English at North Carolina State University.

“As an English major at NC State, I learned to engage fully the object–to circle it and consider it from all angles, from all levels, with all my senses excited to the possibilities.”

Pam Gabriel (‘95 English major and researcher/writer)

Er, yep. That’s what you learn to do, all right.

Would-be creative writers can always major in creative writing, of course, and that major is often located in the English department. I’m not sure I can speak to the wisdom of that. I have never taken a writing course in my entire life; I’m not quite sure how that happened. I teach writing, and I think that my classes help my students, but I have no personal experience with the benefits of a creative writing major.

I wish I’d majored in history, actually: a field that would have given me something to write about. But there are a score of other majors that can serve the same purpose–populating the young writer’s mind with characters, ideas, insights, places, events. American studies, art history, classics, music, theology, theatre, psychology, physics….

That’s not an exhaustive list, of course. But it doesn’t contain “English.”

I’d love to host some guest posts on this blog.

I can pontificate away endlessly about education, but (as we discussed here) there are a lot of you out there with experience and expertise in different areas, and it would be valuable to have some different points of view here. Like the Experts’ Exchange, this blog could be a place for shared wisdom.

So if you’d be interested in contributing a guest post, email us at webmaster at welltrainedmind.com.

I just got back from my first speaking engagement of 2010 (which is why I haven’t posted for a week or so–the first engagement of the year always requires me to pull out all of my notes, organize them, update them, redo my PowerPoint or Keynote slides, make sure I have all my frequent flyer codes, get my clothes from the dry cleaner…you get the idea).

At this conference, a high percentage of the parents had their children in classical schools, and I found myself having the same conversation multiple times–a conversation that follows, in a way, on the gap-year posts of the last few weeks. The conversation had multiple beginnings:

“My second grader is in Saxon 3. So he’s doing OK, right?”

“My third-grade student is really struggling with the five-page book reports he has to write. What kind of remedial work should I do with him?”

“My thirteen-year-old is failing algebra. Should I talk to the principal about the teacher?”

“My daughter’s not reading chapter books yet and she’s seven. What should I do?”

After this, it usually went the same way: I said, “You know, kids develop at different rates…”

It distresses me when classical schools achieve an appearance of rigor by pushing skills into lower and lower grades. Yes, home schooling parents do this too, but when a school does it, there’s an appearance of authority that’s very difficult for parents to challenge. In most cases they’ve got the kids in the school because they think the teachers will do a better job (in some way) than they can, and when those same teachers tell them that the second grader should be able to do third grade math, they believe it.

This pushing skills backwards (Saxon 3 for second graders, the Aeneid for all seventh grade students, algebra at age thirteen without fail) is nothing new. Back in the 1970s, the private Christian schools associated with A Beka in Pensacola, Florida, started teaching cursive writing in kindergarten. There’s one pedagogical advantage to this–it’s harder to reverse letters. But that’s balanced off by a disadvantage: many children need to print because they need the visual likeness between what they’re doing and what’s in the books they read. The A Beka approach to cursive was governed by a more general concern: it appeared more advanced to teach cursive in kindergarten than to wait for the traditional second/third grade window. Private Christian education was relatively new; now, Christian schools could boast that their students, trained in these untested, unfamiliar classrooms, were ahead of their counterparts elsewhere.

The push backwards was for boasting privileges.

Excuse me for quoting myself: you can read the interview (a few years old now) here.

One thing classical homeschoolers really need to guard against is a devastating level of elitism: “We are doing the best homeschooling because our young children are doing such advanced work.” This kind of elitism is non-Christian, it is unloving, and it is unproductive. I was recently asked, “What do you think of third-graders doing Saxon 5/4?” I said, “I can’t think of a single thing you would gain by that. Some of them will be able to do it, but a lot of them aren’t developmentally ready for it. You are going to finish advanced mathematics by the end of high school if you keep them on the normal schedule. What’s the rush?” What do you gain by asking a seventh-grader to read the Iliad if that seventh-grader hasn’t developed the maturity to understand and appreciate what he’s reading? Nothing at all. You gain nothing in the way of emotional and mental development by pushing difficult tasks down to earlier grades.

I am not talking about the lowering of academic standards. I don’t want them lowered; I am just talking about extending the time needed for children to meet those standards. Children move from grammar to logic stage thinking, and from logic to rhetoric stage thinking, at different times in different subjects. We should focus on this, rather than focusing on age or grade level. And I hope that classical schools will also begin to think seriously about what is being gained in the classroom if immature students are being asked to do work that continually frustrates them. Is our goal to educate as many students as possible, or to identify a small, advanced, elite core of classical scholars? I hope it’s the first, and not the second. I think there is a very high level of achievement that all children can reach, given the appropriate amount of time. Keep the standards high, but give each child the appropriate amount of time for those achievements.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend reassuring parents that taking a little extra time to reach a goal is not the same as lowering standards. It may make you feel better if your kid is a year ahead of his cousins in math; it’s pointless if the child is not developmentally ready to do the work.

I should clarify that I’m not here addressing those kids who are ready to do more advanced work. Of course they should be allowed to progress forward as quickly as they want. But that’s much more easily done in a homeschool setting than in a classroom; classroom teachers in particular (and their principals) need to be very, very wary of announcing that all second graders should be doing third grade math.

And yet…too many schools do. And too many parents believe it, rather than carefully and thoughtfully assessing the developmental rate of their own child.

Visit my other blog for pics!

Here are a few of the useful resources we discovered while researching gap year options. If you know of others–or have an opinion about any of these–please post!

BOOKS

The Gap-Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College, by Karl Haigler and Rae Nelson

The Complete Guide to the Gap Year: The Best Things to Do Between High School and College, by Kristin White

Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures That Will Benefit You and Others, by Bill McMillon et al. (make sure you find the latest edition)

Volunteer Vacations Across America: Immersion Travel USA, by Sheryl Kane

How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas, by Joseph Collins et al.

GENERAL INFORMATION ONLINE

The Center for Interim Programs

The Lonely Planet Gap Year Travel Forum

Planet Gap Year

Gap Year 365

ORGANIZATIONS OFFERING GAP-YEAR PROGRAMS.
(This is not an endorsement–just sharing my research)

Council on International Educational Exchange

Greenforce

National Outdoor Leadership School

Projects Abroad

Real Gap (this is the organization we ended up choosing, since the trips offered were closest to what my son was searching for)

Thinking Beyond Borders

My oldest son is currently in the middle of his gap year. He finished his high school work in May, spent the summer and fall working at a variety of jobs to save up money for his trip, and left in mid-January.

Over the course of seven months, he’s working with three different volunteer organizations (a wildlife rescue program in South Africa, a poverty relief organization working with Indian families in the Rajasthan Desert, and a rainforest conservation project in Australia) as well as spending some time at a martial arts academy in China. He’ll be back in mid-August to get ready for his freshman year of college.

I didn’t encourage him to take the gap year because he was was unmotivated or immature. In fact, he’s an over-achieving oldest child: responsible, conscientious, a reader and a thinker. He was academically capable of going straight into college. But there were several other considerations.

First: he didn’t feel passionately about a field of study. He’s not directionless–he wants to write, and he’s talented–but what to major in? He’s sat in on my college classes, which was enough to convince him that being an English major was not the best choice for a would-be writer. (I couldn’t agree more–material for another post.) He’s taken a couple of journalism courses, but that didn’t really thrill him. History, maybe? Psychology? Theatre? Arguments to be made for all of them, and ultimately he’s going to have to enroll in survey courses to feel his way towards a major, but a year of simply writing first will go a long ways towards helping him get some perspective on this.

Second: it was time for him to have an adventure. On his own. He’s eighteen and he’s been home educated on a farm in Virginia. Time for him to figure out how to get un-stranded in an international airport; how to decide out whether or not he’s getting cheated by a street vendor; time for him to miss his siblings; time to make decisions about where to spend money when it’s running short. (OK, he has my credit card for emergencies, but “on his own” doesn’t mean “without emergency money.”)

Third, he didn’t feel strongly about any particular college. He’d done a bunch of investigating, but nothing really struck him. Well…I’m not going to start paying tuition if he’s not thrilled to be there.

For this reason, we ended up waiting a year to apply. Many admissions counselors will tell you to go ahead and apply during the senior year, and then ask for admission to be deferred after you get in. That was my original plan. But he was still hemming and hawing in December of his senior year.

Looking back, I think he felt insecure about the appearance of his high school transcript; he felt like there wasn’t quite enough on there, and that it would be stronger if he actually finished out the spring. Now that we’ve done the transcript and the applications, I actually agree. It looked much stronger in December 2009 than in December 2008.

(Side note: I’ll post more on the college applications process later in the spring–I’ve had to be much more careful about my kids’ privacy as they’ve gotten older, and I don’t want to share information until he’s settled on a school and told me how much he wants me to broadcast about his application itself. I will say that he’s been admitted to two schools with scholarships and hasn’t gotten any turn-downs yet–we’re still waiting on the rest. But obviously delaying the year to apply didn’t torpedo his chances.)

Anyway: once we’d decided to wait on his college applications, his gap year itinerary evolved over five or six months of planning. At first, he just wanted to go work in Australia. I told him he couldn’t simply go rent an apartment in Sydney and start looking for jobs–not unless he took his mother, who would be guaranteeing the rent, along with him to apartment-hunt. That didn’t seem attractive to him, for some reason.

So he started searching around for international trips that would give him a little more structure. (My advice to him: Look for opportunities that provide room and board–that way, even if you run out of spending money, you won’t end up on a gutter without any food.)

In the end, he decided to book his volunteer trips through RealGap, a U.K.-based company that specializes in planning gap and post-graduation years for students. RealGap wasn’t the cheapest way to go, but it guaranteed him transportation to and from airports, help with visas, a local contact in each city where he’d be, emergency assistance, and other support. He had several good job opportunities over the summer and fall, so he was fairly sure he could pay for the entire trip. (In the end, I had to loan him some of the airfare; obviously our plans would have been different if I hadn’t been able to do that.)

We’re obviously still near the beginning of the experience, but his emails and phone calls have been ecstatic. By the time he gets back, a freshman dorm is going to be entirely unchallenging for him. I don’t know whether he’ll have come any closer to deciding on a field of study (stay tuned), but certainly he’ll be a more experienced writer–which means he’ll have a better idea of what he still needs to learn.

Later this week, my last post in this series: other resources for gap-year trips that we discovered during our research.

I’m a fan of the gap year from personal experience.

First: my own experience as a college freshman. I was educated at home, and by the time I’d gotten to be fifteen or sixteen I’d finished most of my high school work and had taken college courses for credit. There didn’t seem to be much point in delaying, so the year I turned sixteen, I went to college. I graduated college at nineteen and had a master’s degree at twenty-one.

Looking back, I don’t see this as a raging success. I was perfectly capable of doing the college work, but I was emotionally immature. (Hey, everyone’s emotionally immature at sixteen.) University is more than a process of mastering material. It’s an introduction to a community of learning. Fitting into a community takes time, and it takes emotional maturity. And it doesn’t matter how hard you study, or how gifted you are–emotional maturity only arrives after the earth has gone around the sun a certain number of times.

Emotional immaturity can take two forms–lack of purpose, or over-focus on a narrow goal. I went through school too fast, too focused, unwilling to slow down and explore the experience. I regret that. I wish I could do it again.

This isn’t so much an argument for a gap year as it is an argument against going to school early. But watching my college freshmen has convinced me that, for many students, seventeen or eighteen is too early.

Excuse me for a moment while I digress. Sending your kid to college early has become, in too many home school circles, a sort of proof of achievement. “My fifteen-year-old just didn’t have anything left to do!” Now that I’m forty-one, when I hear that, I want to say, “Really? Anything? She’s read all the Great Books, learned a foreign language, travelled, worked a job, volunteered? Amazing!” You have to have a certain amount of courage to say, “We’ve decided to wait for an additional year.” Someone’s bound to raise an eyebrow: What? Not ready yet?

Fifteen-year-olds are not ready for college. Many seventeen-year-olds are not ready for college. Quite a few eighteen-year-olds are not ready for college.

Which leads me to the second kind of experience: fifteen years of teaching college classes.

Most of our classes at William & Mary are small; thirty to thirty-five students. Out of an average freshman literature class, five or six are ready to be in college. The others aren’t. They don’t know why they’re there (except that everyone else was going, so they did do). They don’t know why it’s important to learn what I’m teaching them. They don’t know what they want to study, and they’re simultaneously exasperated by the university requirement to take a wide variety of classes (that’s supposed to help them identify what they want to study; it doesn’t work all that well).

Students who’ve taken a gap year are, hands down, easier to teach. They’ve made a decision to go to college after doing something else–which means that they’ve also thought about why they’re in the classroom. They’ve had a year away from formal learning; they missed it. And that extra year gives a maturity in responding to authority that just can’t be matched. I can usually tell you without looking at my class records which students are nineteen or older. They sit up, waiting to hear what you have to say, and ready to take advantage of it.

The seventeen-year-olds slouch.

I talk to a lot of college juniors who still haven’t figured out what they want to study. They’re directionless and planless. They’re going through the motions, waiting for enlightenment to strike them. But enlightenment’s more likely to strike, in my opinion, when you’re doing something meaningful–whether that’s travel, or volunteerism, or working to save money.

It’s also way cheaper to wait for enlightenment while not shelling out thirty thousand a year in tuition and fees.

Stay tuned for Part III of this series: our own experience (so far) with the gap year.

Many of you probably know that my oldest son, who finished his high school work in May ‘09 and turned eighteen in August, is taking a gap year. I’m often asked about gap years and why they’re a good idea, so I thought I’d post a few thoughts over the next week.

A “gap year,” for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, is a year taken off studies between high school and college. It’s more common in Europe than in the U.S., but it’s a recognized and valid option here as well (although many parents aren’t aware of this). The gap year can involve work, travel, volunteerism, or a combination of those things. (Check out this list of ten things to do during a gap year.)

There are two ways to approach a gap year: either apply to colleges straight out of high school and then ask for a one-year deferral from the college of your choice, or else finish the senior year of high school and apply late in the following fall. Either way, the student should plan on taking the SAT and any other standardized tests during the fall of the senior year, just as if the gap year weren’t going to happen.

The first plan seems to be recommended by many admissions counselor; the fear is that the student will end up with an empty year during which nothing in particular happens (and that doesn’t look good on college applications). However, if the student has an intriguing gap year planned, the second option is a perfectly good one; particularly for home educated students, the application can actually look stronger if it explains that the student is undertaking a challenging, maturity-producing project during the year after high school.

Here are a couple of recent news articles on the topic, should you wish to investigate further.

MSNBC’s Today news site:

Princeton encourages it. Harvard’s a big fan. From Tufts to MIT, some of the most prestigious universities in the nation are urging students to consider something that would make most parents cringe: The idea of putting off college for a year in favor of some much-needed downtime.

It’s called a “gap year.” And while it’s been a common and popular rite of passage in Australia and the U.K. for decades, the concept is now starting to gain significant steam here in America.

Why? A growing number of high school seniors are balking at riding the academic conveyer belt from preschool all the way to university. They’re burnt out. Or not quite ready. Or they want to explore a few interests before deciding what to study in college. So instead of packing their bags in anticipation of freshman year, they’re volunteering in New Orleans or teaching in Thailand. They’re starting the great American novel, or interning to help figure out what they want to do with their lives….

Taking a gap year can actually make kids more focused and ready for the rigors of academic life. In fact, Harvard, arguably the most competitive university in the country, believes so much in the gap year that they encourage every student they admit to consider a year off before matriculation. And Princeton has just announced a new program called the “bridge year” that will allow newly admitted students to spend a year performing public service abroad before beginning their freshman year.

The reason behind higher education’s support of the gap year is clear: Better-prepared students mean higher completion rates. And it’s completion that matters. Parents should remember that getting a kid into college is only half the battle. According to the College Board, three out of five students who enter a public four-year college don’t manage to snag a degree within five years. And nearly 30 percent of all students who enter college don’t return for their sophomore year. Considering the fact that this year’s average price at a four-year private college is a whopping $23,712 per year, it’s a pretty expensive place to dabble. Sending a kid who’s not ready to college is like sending a kid who’s not feeling hungry to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

From USAToday.com:

Though the concept may be new to many in the USA, it’s an established tradition elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, for instance, about 11% of the 300,000 college-bound seniors take a gap year before enrolling. Australia puts up similar aggregate numbers in what’s known Down Under as “going walkabout.”

Reliable data for gap-year activity aren’t available for the USA, but guidance counselors and college admissions officers say they’re seeing a surge of interest….[C]ounselors are coming to bless the gap-year option, and colleges increasingly are offering a deferred enrollment option as more and more “gappers” arrive on campus with enhanced focus, motivation and maturity — all of which bodes well for their undergraduate years in college….

U.S. gappers sing the praises of structured programs, but they also say they grew most when they had to live by their wits.

Jacob Feinstein of Brookville, N.Y., has spent the past year doing an internship with a software start-up in New Zealand, taking cooking classes and studying filmmaking in New York City before he enrolls at Harvard University in September. He points to flying alone internationally and living in a house in New Zealand with 11 peers as key experiences that boosted his confidence and life skills.

“Before the gap year, I would have had a lot of hesitancy about flying on my own from New Zealand through Japan and China, two countries that don’t speak English,” Feinstein says. But he did it.

During the gap year, “I became a much more self-sufficient person. Now I’m not stressing at all about living on my own in college.”

Owen Henry of Waterford, Va., opted in 2007 to take a gap year when he received a pile of college rejection letters. His goals for the year: to be challenged, gain work experience and clarify academic goals. He participated in a program for American gap-year students last fall at Oxford University, where he says he spent less than $10,000, and he decided on a career as an Arabic translator.

Since March, he has been handling two tons of sail as a deckhand on the Lady Maryland, a 104-foot-long tall ship and floating classroom in Baltimore. He gets room, board and $6.54 an hour. He has saved $1,600 of this for college, and he plans to enroll this fall at Oberlin College, to which he applied and was accepted during the gap year….

Check back for further posts on this topic: Part II (my own thoughts on the gap year), Part III (our personal experience so far), and Part IV (resources for gap year projects).

As my promised follow-up to yesterday’s post, I offer an initial attempt at a checklist that you should use to evaluate online courses before you sign your student up.

1. Find out how much grading the teacher will do, and how much you’ll be expected to do.

(In the words of my friend: is this is a “class” or a “tutorial”? When I enrolled my 16-year-old in K12 chemistry in the fall, the teacher called and asked to speak directly to him. He didn’t want to talk to me; he wanted to talk to Ben. I have to admit that at first, this raised my hackles. “Oh, yeah? What are you going to say to him that you don’t want me to hear?” But, listening to Ben’s end of the conversation, I realized that I had signed up for a class–the teacher was dealing with the student, not with the student’s parent, and that was exactly what I had hoped for. There’s nothing wrong with enrolling for a tutorial instead of a class, but certainly the price of the course should reflect the difference.)

(And any more pointed questions that would help parents focus in on this point would be much appreciated; please comment away.)

2. Ask the teacher what s/he will do if your child suddenly stops participating.

3. Get a written statement telling you what will happen if the teacher becomes ill or for some other reason is unable to finish the class. And make sure that you have a money-back guarantee if the substitute doesn’t fulfill the initial terms of the class.

(This happened to me with K12: the teacher suddenly changed mid-year. So far this hasn’t been a problem, since nothing else has changed and the new teacher is doing EXACTLY what the previous instructor was doing. But it never occurred to me that this was a possibility.)

4. Find out what texts the course will use ahead of time.

(I enrolled my oldest for a shop class through University of Oklahoma when he was a freshman, because he wanted to branch out and try some hands-on work. When the text arrived, I discovered that it had been written in 1979. There have actually been some technological advances since then that change the way we use tools…anyway, we never bothered to finish the course, which was, of course, nonrefundable.)

5. Find out what the testing policies are.

(If the teacher is only going to give multiple choice tests online, you should know this before you sign up for a literature class. My experience was slightly different; one of my sons took a correspondence course where the teaching was fine and the assignments were useful, but all the tests had to be proctored by an approved test facilitator. Which meant we had to drive 50 minutes to a Sylvan test center and shell out $45 bucks every time he had to take a test. Grr.)

6. Ask the teacher ahead of time if s/he would be willing to write an academic recommendation for your student once the class is over.

(If you’re going to pay hundreds of dollars for a tutorial, you ought to be able to get a recommendation out of it for those college applications.)

That’s my initial checklist. Would much appreciate additions.

Today’s post isn’t completely unrelated to our previous discussions about ways of providing expert instruction.

Before the New Year, I had an exchange of emails and a lengthy phone conversation with a long-time home schooling friend with teenagers. She has dealt with those subjects she feels less qualified to teach by making intelligent use of tutorials and online schools–but this has been an uneven and frustrating process. Let me start with a long quote from her email (which she has given me permission to do–and I’ve changed a number of small details for privacy’s sake).

I truly believed that I could outsource subjects that were difficult for me to teach when my kids reached high school.   But here’s a raw glimpse into how it actually WORKS on a nitty-gritty level.  

I enrolled my high school freshman and my middle-grade student in online English tutorials this year because I wanted someone else to set the pace and offer them writing instruction.  What an absolute mess!  I’m as involved as ever.  And the teachers that I’m paying are NOT!  They are primarily just assignment-generators.  

We are paying $450 for each English class.  Not a ton.  I know.  But it does add up.  Each meets on-line for 32 weeks for 90 minute sessions.  My middle-schooler spends his afternoons stewing because he has to write things like “A 250-500 word story of a dog’s adventure.” My high school student is no better off. For the first nine weeks of her class, she had to circle different parts of speech each week on worksheets.  The parent grades the worksheets and uploads the grades.  Every two weeks there is a grammar quiz that I print and grade and upload the grade to the teacher.

For the first eight weeks of literature she read a single book and did no indepth assignments. One week she had to develop a good question from the reading that her classmates might want to answer.  One week she just had to list three new or interesting words from the reading with the definition; that was all.  One week she was the “artist.”  She found an image online to share with the class.  Copy.  Paste.  Done.  All of these assignments provided class preparation only; the teacher did not collect these or grade these.  Her final “quiz” on the book was all multiple choice with almost no analysis-type questions.  No essay.  Pretty basic stuff.  And yes, I graded it and just reported the grade.  

For the first eight weeks she also completed three writing assignments. The teacher collected these, but they were returned with only one or two very brief comments and a numeric grade. She is getting good grades but the overly brief comments aren’t going to grow her as a writer.

In addition to providing a 90-minute on-line class, this teacher is primarily just forwarding a TON of paperwork for me to sift through and manage.  I’m doing most of the work here.

My real issue is with on-line courses that have the appearance of being a class and then hide behind the word “tutorial” after we’re signed up and invested. I thought I was getting the accountability that was missing with some of the other classes that we have taken.  

Here’s my second story.

Two years ago I signed one of my students up for a foreign-language tutorial. The class was fine. The child thrived. She enjoyed the class very much and received a medal on a national language exam.

Then the tutor had a baby and another teacher took over the next level of the class; this switch was made after we had signed up for and had paid for the class.  That’s when the problems started on this end.  The new teacher didn’t collect or grade the weekly homework assignments. He was supposed to upload the answers every week after class so that I (again) could check the homework. He didn’t. I emailed him and asked him to please post the answers every week after class.  We waited.  Weeks would go by before the answers would be posted in bunches.  We were losing ground.   I didn’t know what was going on, and I had no idea how the student was doing.  I suspected that she was falling farther and farther behind.   I emailed.  Again we waited for well over a week to get a response.  Finally, the teacher offered to try to locate an advanced student to tutor my child. Huh?  I thought that I was paying him to teach her.  

Fast forward to the spring semester.  The child is hopelessly lost.  So I started checking her homework – remember the homework that the TEACHER was supposed to be checking in class.  She hadn’t done it.  She had quit even attempting the assignments by February because she told me that she had no idea what was going on.

There were less than ten kids in the class.  The teacher had to have noticed.   He never emailed me to tell me that my child had stopped participating in class, despite all of my concerns in the fall and into January about her doing well in this class.  I received nothing from him about her lack of participation.

What do these teachers say, when I ask them why they aren’t collecting and grading work or providing me with feedback? They claim that they are tutors — designed to assist the parents in doing their job of home-educating.   I am still their primary teacher.  Really?  That’s news to me.  Must have missed that somewhere!  Apparently I’ve hired tutors to help me teach subjects when I thought that I had hired teachers to teach subjects for me.  

I wanted a teacher – someone who would teach the material and then hold the student to task for mastering the material – it’s called “feedback,” and YES!  It takes time!  Hence the hiring thing.   My kids are not adults.  They are moving in the direction of being responsible for everything in their lives, but they are not there yet.  That’s what I need in a teacher–not an assignment-generator.  I need someone who will grade their assignment so I can gauge their relative progress, offer concrete input on how to improve, and then hold them to that personal trajectory as they work through the next assignment.  

So that’s the real issue for me.  Not all classes are classes.  Some are tutorials.  And that means that the material is offered.  The child attempts to do the assignments.   Unless the child is very self-directed, the parent is responsible for assessing the bulk of the student’s actual progress based on the materials offered.

A tutorial basically amounts to an on-line audio/video book with a ton of worksheets.  Pricey ($1800) vocabulary lesson on my end.  I don’t know why I assumed that some measure of personalized teacher-student interaction would automatically be handled in a “good” class that is marketed to home-schoolers at the high-school level.  After all, I’m home-schooling because I don’t believe that you teach English by teaching the English I curriculum.  I believe that you teach the child.  Is it really that much of a stretch for me to believe that classes marketed to home-schoolers would have some measure of individuality coupled with an understanding that these are still kids who need accountability to a teacher – not their momma!  

After reading this, I feel like I’ve been very shortsighted. I’ve recommended online courses without offering any sort of guide to evaluating them before you sign up–and I hate to say that some of her bad experiences (and, granted, some of her good ones, which I’ve edited out for the sake of brevity) were with online tutorials that I recommended in TWTM.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting an initial checklist to use when you’re investigating an online school–based partly on the experience of my friend, based partly on experiences I’ve had with online tutorials with my own high schoolers over the last four years. If you’d like to chime in here with a war story, feel free.