Category: From the Catbird Seat

Alpha Omega Curriculum

by Debra Conley

A visit to the web site of Alpha Omega will immediately tell you that it is a clearing house for other curriculum. Their choices are limited (I have to assume they chose to set these parameters) in publishers but offerings cover all the subjects. In grammar, for instance, you could order a Bob Jones course, a Switched On CD, or LifePac course. However, if you are not familiar with these curriculums, it will be difficult to know if any one is particularly suited to your student. A bigger problem arises if you choose one publisher, say Bob Jones, to cover the first three years and then decide to switch to another publisher. You, as the instructor MUST know if the new course will pick up exactly where the last ended, or at the least be able to identify that necessary lessons have been omitted. You are left with the responsibility to know the material your student may have skipped (the unfortunate gap in curriculums I have covered previously).

I checked math and history curriculum offerings as well and found the same dilemma. It is possible to choose one and stick with it through all grades. This is fine unless you discover after two years that your student and this curriculum are not the best match. The best advice I can give for those of you who may not know the scope and sequence for every subject is to make every effort to stick to one publisher for primary learning. Branching out from the basics, the rudimentary elements of any subject, is much easier than trying to recoup all those pesky rudiments.

Do you need specific help with getting your student into college from a home school program? Go to www.homeschooltoday.com. Then choose the college resource section.

Abeka Curriculum

by Debra Conley

I start my home school curriculum reviews with A Beka because it is one of the original programs.  Original is not always good, but in this case, I give credit to A Beka for keeping current with the needs, times, and plethora of materials.  Just read a current issue of Homeschooling Today and you will be bogged down with materials available to homeschoolers.  Much of it is good; much of it is a “Buyer Beware” catch-all.

The positives of A Beka include a solid, phonetics-based elementary program proven by years of successful students.  A Beka also has a tremendous web site, complete with interactives.  They are current on legal issues, state regulations, and college admissions.  Anything you might need, they can link.  They even offer free samples!  A Beka’s curriculum relies on Classic and Canon works of science, history, and literature.  No re-written history, bogus science, or postmodern philosophy infused as fact.

The negatives in A Beka are ones I see, but which may not be negatives for you.  There is an excess of repetition in homework assignments.  Repetition is a tried and true method of learning, but is also unnecessary once the task is learned and often creates boredom if the student is truly ready to move on.  A Beka also works so hard to incorporate Bible verses into every sentence of its curriculum that meanings are sometimes stretched in order to find a verse that fits.  Lastly, critical thinking skills (CTS) take a second seat to the dogma of Christian doctrine.  The texts do too little work in CTS and the work given is shallow.  It seems to me that they shy from those skills for fear of losing ground, and they don’t need to.  My approach is, if you have taught your student well, critical thinking will not undo but will enforce the doctrines as well as to give credence to them.

Homeschooling

by Debra Conley

I start my home school curriculum reviews with A Beka because it is one of the original programs.  Original is not always good, but in this case, I give credit to A Beka for keeping current with the needs, times, and plethora of materials.  Just read a current issue of Homeschooling Today and you will be bogged down with materials available to homeschoolers.  Much of it is good; much of it is a “Buyer Beware” catch-all.

The positives of A Beka include a solid, phonetics-based elementary program proven by years of successful students.  A Beka also has a tremendous web site, complete with interactives.  They are current on legal issues, state regulations, and college admissions.  Anything you might need, they can link.  They even offer free samples!  A Beka’s curriculum relies on Classic and Canon works of science, history, and literature.  No re-written history, bogus science, or postmodern philosophy infused as fact.

The negatives in A Beka are ones I see, but which may not be negatives for you.  There is an excess of repetition in homework assignments.  Repetition is a tried and true method of learning, but is also unnecessary once the task is learned and often creates boredom if the student is truly ready to move on.  A Beka also works so hard to incorporate Bible verses into every sentence of its curriculum that meanings are sometimes stretched in order to find a verse that fits.  Lastly, critical thinking skills (CTS) take a second seat to the dogma of Christian doctrine.  The texts do too little work in CTS and the work given is shallow.  It seems to me that they shy from those skills for fear of losing ground, and they don’t need to.  My approach is, if you have taught your student well, critical thinking will not undo but will enforce the doctrines as well as to give credence to them.

Integrated Curriculum Ideas

by Debra Conley

Several homeschool parents have asked me for an example of integrated curriculum ideas for them to use.  While teaching high school English, I felt obligated to expose my students to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.  My own high school teacher made it the most boring book I had ever read.  He would read aloud in different tones each day, then ask us to write what we thought.  That was the extent of his “teaching.”  When it was my turn to teach this novel, I took this approach: The students followed world maps of the global journey of the whaling ship, Pequod.  They researched cultural differences between the Puritans of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the South Islands natives of Queequeg’s type.  There were numerous examples of new vocabulary for them to look up.  There are also terms linked to cultural practices such as St. Elmo’s Fire that the student’s were asked to study.  Many had fun learning the math and practical applications associated with the art of sailing a large vessel.  There is still an extensive museum about the whaling industry located in New Bedford and they are thrilled to send information, pictures, and answer questions.  Of course, we studied the transcendental philosophy to which Melville subscribed, a fascinating cult in itself.  Melville brought moral values to the novel in spite of his involvement with transcendentalism, probably because of his New England background, even using scriptural allusions and analogies.

This integrated curriculum was the common kind of learning in all grades of 50 years ago.  “New” programs of the same are labeled “whole” curriculums, or “balanced,” even “infused.”  I’m just glad to see some school returning to it!

Learning Gaps

by Debra Conley

 I would like to address a commonly overlooked curriculum gap that usually occurs during the upper elementary to junior high years.  This is an integrated, meshed (through lesson plans) cohesion of all core subjects.  Look at it this way:  Is your student learning the connection between literature, sociology, and history?  Does he learn that most literature is written reflection of the politics, the philosophies, and the practices of that era?  Language and cultures are inseparably intertwined.  Does he see no purpose in studying history, but likes reading the literature of the same period?  History must also be linked with geography.  My son-in-law recently asked several of his employees what they knew about the Civil War.  He was shocked that they had no understanding that even the term “civil” can imply geographical and sociological boundaries.  Modern physics is the integrally explained relationship between math and science.  Is some connection being made early enough?  Hands on experiments are the best!

As a student matures in his schooling, he should be acutely aware of the importance of English skills, especially reading, to all other skills.  Does he know how much skilled reading is involved in almost any business practice, or law, or sales?  Even the highly trained technical fields of math and science come with thick instruction and procedural manuals.  Many companies complain to schools that students graduate not being able to read instructions, comprehend procedures, or make connections between the written job description and their tasks at hand.  Nearly every job involves written evaluation at some point.  Is that skill being taught as a part of math, science, and history as well as English?  And don’t neglect foreign language.  Ask any scientist, especially a chemist, biologist, and of course, all kinds of doctors how much Latin they had to learn.

The curriculum sequence I covered in my February, 2001 column is good insurance against this kind of learning gap.

Charter Schools

by Debra Conley

The Charter School craze has nearly come and gone within one decade.  Why?  The idea that knowledge and future work go hand in hand is certainly a practical one.  When Charter Schools began, the idea was reasonable.  Corporations would get involved with local schools, signing a pact with parents and administrators to give guidance as to what they wanted to see from future employees: mostly more math, science, and language skills.  These corporations would also contribute funds as well as input, or guest speakers.  Some even tried teaching these advanced classes.  What followed in many cases was an old problem.  Businesses giving large amounts of money pressured the schools for classes and results they wanted, often pulling out their funds in the middle of the year when the Corporate Board saw no immediate value for their money.

Much of the failure came from an old thorn: government and the NEA.  Charter Schools are still public schools receiving money from government funds and are therefore expected to meet certain curriculums and social program goals.  The NEA, in its Charter Schools Initiative Sites Descriptions Internet Site (1997), states as a goal “to integrate core subjects with life skills; provide students with social and emotional support; promote and participate in urban renewal; organize students into family units; replace traditional report cards with narrative reports and use alternative assessments such as student portfolios and peer assessments.”  Most of these ideas are mandated curriculums which leave little scheduling space for advanced studies.

Assessing Your Child’s Education

by Debra Conley

Do you know what questions you should be asking your child’s teacher?  What is the level of subject proficiency that should be gained in each grade?  Are you able to ask specific questions regarding the core knowledge in each of the primary subjects for your child’s grade?  Are you aware of professional requirements your school, its teachers, and its administration should meet?  Can you confidently select additional resource/learning materials for your child, such as enriching outside reading?  Will you know if your child has successfully completed each grade’s necessary academics?

In finishing my review of Bennett’s The Educated Child, I want to stress how much material is in this resource!  You can deal with each of the above questions using this book.  You will also learn how to assess your child’s progress yourself.

As an added benefit, Bennett tackles the subjects most schools avoid defining for parents: whole language teaching (a proven failure) instead of phonics; authentic assessment (a red flag for inflated grades), and meaningless terms for grades and research and “experts” who back this illegitimacy (see p. 497).  Bennett exposes the socialistic approach of supposed educators like Kohl (see pp. 162-163), and those who would have our schools make all children equal, especially in achievement, which sounds good but caps better students so that they may not excel (making others ‘feel inferior’) and provides little specialized help for those who are underachievers.  “It’s like lowering the basketball hoop to make it look like everyone’s a great player,”  Bennett says regarding lowered standards (p. 494).

Researching Curriculum

by Debra Conley

I have recently been asked by a number of my readers to help them know what kind of curriculum their child needs.  The editor of Aletheia has not indicated that a volume of this size (it would take a thousand pages!) will be available for my column, so allow me to refer you to several good sources:  The Educated Child:  A Parent’s Guide from Pre-school through Eighth by William Bennett is perhaps the best laymen’s source on the market.  The bibliography gained from the works cited is worth the price of the book itself.  It is written from a conservative, canon view.  By canon, here, I mean those traditional model studies which have been recognized by scholars (italics mine) as having true educational merit in the liberal arts education.

Another excellent source of information which is culled from years of research is the Core Knowledge Series by E. D. Hirsch.  The common titles are What Every Kindergartner Ought to Know through What Every Eighth Grader Ought to Know. These books (one for each grade) provide step by step instruction to parents on what to look for, what to ask of the school, its administration, and the child’s teachers.  It too, is a conservative education view.

Homework

by Debra Conley

The next step in evaluating your child’s learning situation is to assess his homework.  Is it “busy work”?  Some teachers assign their subject rather than teach it.  As with most any learned area, practice and repetition are proven methods.  However, there must be procedural learning — i.e., a step by step process followed in the practice (homework) exercises which is designed to reinforce the teaching in the classroom.  For example, if I teach students the simple first steps of how to diagram subjects and verbs and then assign sentences to diagram which deal with too many other frustrating parts, or nothing I taught, I accomplish confusion.  The homework practice should have simple subject and verb sentences with only the variations I taught in class: one word subjects, or compound subjects joined by conjunctions.  My philosophy is to assign several examples as homework, then check those the next day.  If the students grasp the concepts, there is no need to assign multitudes of exercises just to fill a time requirement.  Unfortunately, in schools where 30 or more students share one class and teacher, adjusting to everyone’s learning curve leaves some students bored while others catch up.  When you oversee your child’s homework, compare it with the text lessons it is designed to reinforce.  If you can’t match homework to lessons, ask the teacher for the purpose behind the assignment.  It may be very legitimate; it may not.  In my next column:  What can a parent do to learn what is the right curriculum?

Success in Education

by Debra Conley

Take an assessment of your child’s school situation.  Don’t be fooled by happiness and success.  Of course we do not want to look for problems or create an unhappy environment, but many curriculums provide so little to accomplish that “success” is guaranteed.  Most students will not know that their curriculum is missing vital steps; they will only experience the frustration of not knowing why they can’t grasp the next level of that subject.  Look both ways when assessing your child: is he happy at school because he is virtually free from any work or challenge, or is he the kind that may be frustrated by the boredom?  Does your child love school because his teacher is a sweet and loving person who may not be teaching him but keeps him happy in a “mothering” environment, or is he happy because he is sufficiently challenged and is motivated and praised by that success?  The unaware parent may accept “happy” as successful learning.  A word of caution: teachers may tell parents a student is doing well either because they want to avoid confrontation, because they do not have enough curriculum training to know what is missing, or because they will not admit their own weakness.  Ask to see the curriculum plan for at least three consecutive grades (it is good if the same “brand” is used).  This will require at least two things from the parent: first, that he know what he is looking for, and two, that he understands how it should be taught and how it should be reinforced in homework.