Hm. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm finding this little blog function kind of uncongenial: can't make links, looks like a big unreadable flow of text in which comments get buried . . . .

So although I'll leave this up for a while (especially since I've just been asking people to follow on Facebook), and maybe post "teasers" from forum posts here, I'm going to move the action over to the forums, which you can access via the navigation bar at the top of the page.

In order to post in the forums, you can sign in using either your Facebook, Google, or Yahoo account. At this writing, with traffic volume so low, I don't have any kind of approval system in place, and may not be able to effect one with the tools available to me. I have, however, posted some discussion guidelines at the top of each forum, which everyone should read before posting.

I'm going to copy my posts here to the forums forthwith, so if you want to respond to anything that's currently up, please come to the forums and post your response there. I'm not sure I can move the current comments as replies, since I can't sign commenters in, but I think I'll include them at the bottom of each post, to preserve conversations which are already happening.

Thanks for your visit, and see you in the forums!

The Grade 9 course is coming along -- click the "Curriculum" button in the navigation bar at the top of the page, then "Grade 9" in the lefthand sidebar to access new links to world myths and all kinds of great Iliad-related resources. If you know of any websites or other resources I don't have, please feel free to leave me a comment here, and I'll add them.

Soon to come: Odyssey links plus the rest of ancient Greece, with timelines, background information, literary and historical "Who's Who," videos, and more, to help you plan your comprehensive ancient-history humanities study.

Catholic Heritage Curricula (see Hot Links page) bills its High School of Your Dreams resource guide as a good fit for families who *do not* want a fully prepared curriculum with ready-made lesson plans. Indeed, in reading reviews of this program both before buying it -- we've now owned it for four years, I think; maybe five? -- and after starting to implement it, the one consistent negative theme I heard was that HSOYD was too open-ended, not directive enough.

In general this suits us, though I will admit that it took me some time to figure out how best to use HSOYD, so that it didn't gather dust on the shelf -- at nearly $60, it's too pricey an item to sit unused.

I have used HSOYD more with some subjects than with others. It's been most helpful to me in putting together courses about which I really had no clue: economics, for example. What do I know from economics, except to drop names like "Keynes" and "Hayek" in dinner conversation? So I'll use that as an example of how I used HSOYD to put together my half-credit course.

I was already using a weekly lesson plan form from the Donna Young printables site (again, see the Hot Links; I can't make links here for some reason), because especially with older, self-directed students, I find it easier just to assign them a week's work in each subject, with all written assignments due on Friday, and let them sort out how and when they get it done. I sat down last summer with all of my high-schooler's books and scheduled readings and writing assignments week by week for the whole year (underplanning a bit -- I pile on a lot of work, but only for about a 30-32-week academic year, whereas most prepared curricula give you 36 weeks). All of this is easy for courses like English/Humanities, where I know already what we need to cover, or math, for which we use a detailed curriculum that teaches itself.

For a subject like Econ, however, I turned to HSOYD. The page for that subject provides a list of book choices plus an additional listing of online resources, plus a list of possible essay or research topics related to that subject (and because it's a Catholic curriculum, they mostly have to do with Catholic concerns related to the subject; in the case of econ, there's a lot about putting Catholic social-justice priniciples to work in your own business practices). I chose a central text from the list of books, plus a couple of small supplementary books, and I scheduled in readings. I picked a couple of essay topics; actually, I think I might simply have plugged essay assignments into given weeks and directed my student to look up the options in the HSOYD manual and choose a writing topic. I would have had a hard time coming up with prompts for writing in that subject, so it was helpful to have some provided.

The Donna Young lesson-plan forms, honestly, were the key to my using HSOYD: I've never been much of a formal lesson-planner, but wanted to be sure my student got through what I wanted her to do, without having to come to me to ask what her assignments were. Being able to rough out a weekly plan from suggestions in the HSOYD book onto a handy form made the program workable for us, and the actual planning wasn't that onerous, since I was saved the trouble of having to hunt down books and come up with assignment ideas for subjects not naturally at my mind's fingertips.

HSOYD also functions as a kind of guidance-counselor-in-a-spiral-binding, with helpful information about how to set up a course of study for high school, with emphasis on discernment for the future. There is advice for helping your student start to visualize, as early as seventh grade, what he or she wants to do after high school and how to get there. Both my current senior and I began this process when she was about twelve, and it did provide her with some motivating vision (and me with a clue!).

I'm starting over with my now-seventh-grader; actually, I'm using HSOYD to plan out his eighth-grade year, as well as to prepare for high school.

In short, this resource is what it says it is: a guide to planning, yourself, a customized high-school program for your unique child. And on those terms, it delivers. For homes educators who like to tweak, change, and customize, and for whom prepared lesson plans never quite fit, High School of Your Dreams is money well spent.


(PS: This is an unsolicited, unremunerated review of a curriculum resource which I already happened to own.)

I've been reading lately about the Robinson Curriculum, a unique approach to home education based on the principle of self-teaching. Dr. Art Robinson, a college professor, developed this method of homeschooling his six children after his wife's unexpected death. As he writes, she had developed what appeared to be the perfect curriculum for their children; the only flaw in her planning was the assumption that she would be there to implement it.

Out of necessity, then, Dr. Robinson adopted, literally, a do-it-yourself approach to his children's education. His wife had amassed an impressive library of classic literature which she had meant to use as teaching tools. Dr. Robinson's strategy was to make the books themselves his children's teachers.

The specifics of his program are available at the Robinson website: http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com. In a nutshell, the curriculum is composed of two major components: 1) a rigorous self-guided reading and mathematics course covering twelve grades and mostly focused on out-of-print literature (not a criticism, by the way, but an explanation of why people would actually be persuaded to buy the 22-CD set which accompanies the curriculum); and 2) a set of behavioral guidelines, including a strict but simple routine and the avoidance of both television and sugar.

Elements of the Robinson Curriculum appeal to me. For years I have been saying, only partially tongue-in-cheek, that my overarching educational objective has been to raise autodidacts who do their own laundry. And it is true, I believe, that one of the greatest gifts inherent in homeschooling is the opportunity to learn without having to be taught. Some students take more naturally to self-teaching than others; I have one child who adamantly refused to be taught by me in the early days of our homeschooling experiment and still strongly prefers to wrestle with things herself, so from the beginning I learned to hunt down materials which did not require me to present lessons. Meanwhile, I have seen, over time, a child who did not come ready-equipped with the same independent streak develop into a self-motivated learner whom I can hand a set of books and a binder full of assignments and then largely leave alone.

I am also on Dr. Robinson's side insofar as he is on Charlotte Mason's side with regard to "living books" and "twaddle." We have largely, though not completely, avoided the use of textbooks in our seven-plus years of homeschooling, relying on literature to supply most of what we needed to know. Robinson's view that text- and workbooks spoon-feed the mind, rather than training it in critical understanding, is right on, it seems to me. I like the fact that the required books in his course of study have literary value and expose the reader to good and complex written English, and that the bar is set high for the reader.

Finally, I also like the simplicity of the Robinson schedule. The Robinson student spends approximately five hours a day at his schoolwork: two to three hours of reading, an hour of mathematics (preferably using the Saxon Math series), and an hour of writing. And I can't argue with the withholding of television. We haven't had a TV since 1999, and I often wonder how self-motivated my children would be to read, learn, and explore the world through play if they had some other, easier way to stave off death by boredom.

Though there's much about the Robinson Curriculum that appeals to me -- maybe because at least in spirit I'm already doing a lot of it -- I do have some reservations. One of the things I enjoy most about homeschooling, after all, is the sense of connectedness to my children, and of learning as something we share. Certainly I do more hands-on things with my younger children, for whom "school" is often a matter of reading aloud on the couch together. For my older children, I am more a resource than an actual teacher, except when it's time to read their writing and provide feedback. At the same time, when they come to me with questions about how to do things, I can't quite imagine myself saying, "Well, you'll just have to study until you find the answer." And I can't imagine saying that to a younger child. It seems to me that there must be some middle ground between spoonfeeding and flatly refusing to help think through an unresolved question, and that being a self-motivated learner also means knowing how and when to seek help. A college professor would expect a student to ask questions and seek him (or her) out for answers; why would I not teach my children how to do that?

Also, at least with younger children, I would tend to err far more on the side of Charlotte Mason's short-lesson approach than to require an hour of writing or math. Per Dr. Robinson's recommendations, I do lean heavily on copywork for children under ten, but an hour of copywork?

Ultimately, though I like many things about this approach and am looking for ways to incorporate more of its its core elements, both its simplicity and its emphasis on independence, into what we do, I question whether a curriculum designed around the absence of a mother is ideal for children who do have a mother.

I would welcome feedback from anyone who has used or is currently using the Robinson Curriculum:

*What appeals to you about this curriculum? What makes it a good fit for your family?

*Do you carry out this program in strict accordance to Dr. Robinson's guidelines, or do you fudge it a bit? If the latter, how? Do you use elements of this curriculum in combination with other things?


*The no-sugar thing . . . really? You can make that happen in your house? I mean, I don't doubt that one *can,* but whether eliminating sugar is more effective than simply ensuring that children eat a decent, balanced diet . . . I don't know.

I also realize that I'm dwelling more on practicalities, the carrying-out of things, than on the underlying philosophy, with which I agree at least in part: the value of self-teaching, the disinclination to waste time on twaddly materials, the belief that formal education, at its heart, is a matter of several broad but simple masteries (reading, writing, math).

So, I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately and would welcome conversation. Anyone? Anyone?

Epiphany, age 17: A Month in the Country/J.L. Carr

Amicus, age 13: Some "Boy Mechanic" book -- I don't have it in front of me right now -- with instructions for building a grapevine trellis, converting tomato cans into garden waterers, and more.

Helier, age 8: Redwall/Brian Jaques. The whole series. I have no idea what book he's on now, but he inhales them at a rate of one a day.

Crispina, age 7: On the Banks of Plum Creek. Little House never gets old.

Reviews to come . . . Meanwhile, what's your family reading right now?

Via Joseph Knippenberg at First Thoughts (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firststhoughts):


The New York Times website is currently hosting a debate over whether or not homeschoolers should receive any kind of tax benefit, in light of the fact that they pay for, but do not use, their local public school systems.

Says Knippenberg (and sorry, I don't have a block-quote feature, as far as I can tell, in this basic little blogging platform, but the next two paragraphs are Knippenberg's):

*The case for offering homeschoolers a tax break is the same as that for offering vouchers or tax credits for private school tuition. Â Education is indeed a social good, but it is also, and above all, a parental responsibility. Why not help parents make the best choices they can in fulfilling that responsibility?

Whether or not these tax credits should come from the federal government is a separate question. To the degree that education really isn’t obviously a federal responsibility, as one commentator argues, perhaps it would be better for this to be a state matter . . . *

I don't know who's reading this blog as yet, but if you're out there, feel frree to contribute your thoughts, either here, at FT, or at the NYT (or all three.)

Here you'll find book and curriculum reviews, not only by me -- though I'm not exactly short on opinions -- but by the students, a.k.a. my four children, who actually read said books and use said curriculum. Guest bloggers also warmly welcomed!

You'll see what we've liked and disliked, what's worked for us and what hasn't, what's a keeper from year to year, and what we've tweaked, rearranged, adapted, or discarded. For us, as for most homeschoolers, learning isn't just a process for students; it's a process for parent-educators as well, as we discover what's truly the best fit for each child in every family.

From time to time we'll examine and evaluate the broader philosophies of education which inform our homeschooling, as well as books on homeschooling topics.

Feel free to join the conversation at any time. My family's homeschooling experience is continually enriched by the wisdom of others. We hope that our trials and errors, not to mention our (occasional) triumphs, will be a blessing to you as well.