Technorati Tags: homeschool high school, homeschool your teenager, how to homeschool high school

Technorati Tags: homeschool high school, homeschool your teenager

Technorati Tags: finish high school online, homeschool your teenager

This is how school should be:

It’s okay to learn by playing when we’re little, but not when we get older? Bull-pucky! One-third of our teens drop out of high school today. The kids aren’t broken, the schools are. If we plan to fix education in this country, we’ve got to do some radical rethinking of what schools should be, make changes and implement those changes.

One change that would make the biggest difference in kids lives right now is to split academics from vocational/technical interests starting in 9th grade. Kids know enough about reading, writing and math to stop studying it in school if their interests are aligned with a vocational or technical career that they would learn by being an apprentice. In other words, learning by doing.

Leave the academic high school stuff to the those who want be immersed in academic life. There should be multiple ladders of academics as well: one for math and science types, another for business, another for social and political sciences and the like, and another for liberal arts.

Stop forcing kids to learn physics when they want to teach kindergarten! Allow non-science kids to take science appreciation for what they need to know to get along in the modern world and leave it at that. Don’t make them learn how to work free body diagram kinematics problems or balance chemical equations! They need to know those subjects exist and are useful, but they shouldn’t have to become proficient in them.

I would prefer they were proficient at reading, comprehending and keeping up with their personal finances and staying out of debt. Advanced math does not teach anyone how to balance a checkbook, a far more useful skill than matrices and synthetic division. Unless you need advanced math skills for your career, you shouldn’t have to take advanced math.

Everyone should have to take a life skills class (or classes) where they learn how to manage a household, live within their means, understand credit and know who to ask for help when considering borrowing money, and how to manage intimate relationships (especially listening skills and that movies are the exact opposite of real life; love and peaceful co-existence require compassion, communication, compromise and hard work to maintain). Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, and lawn care would also be good lessons.

What would you suggest to improve our schools? What do you think is wrong with them? Please leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

Technorati Tags: homeschool your teenager, schooled the movie, what's wrong with schools today

Blogging

How can you get your teenager to write? Have them start a blog. Blogging is a great way to practice writing. Having to post an article of 400 or more words 2-3 times a week will make your teen a much better writer. What most kids of all ages lack is the practice of putting words on paper and presenting clear ideas.

There are a couple of very easy ways to get started for free. I recommend Blogger.com or Typepad.com. Should your teen’s blog turn out to be something he or she is really proud of and wants to publish onto the blogosphere, these two platforms are easily portable to a WordPress blog (WordPress.org software, it’s free, too).

You’ll Eventually Want WordPress Software

WordPress is the standard software used by most serious bloggers. It’s easy to install and use, and it is extremely powerful because you can add plugins for functionality, edit the theme files, or design your own themes using PHP and CSS with a little HTML thrown in. They can check out books from the library to learn these programming languages on their own. These languages also count as computer science credits when you’re putting together a high school transcript for college.

Blogger, Typepad and WordPress allow your teen to keep her or his blog private, or let only those you allow to see it. I recommend private or limited access until your teen is 18 or older. There are too many predators on the internet to chance one of them befriending your son or daughter through his or her blog. Those of us who blog publicly know that anyone can make up a persona online for any purpose. You very likely don’t want your teen interacting with people you don’t know in real life.

Here are some recommendations:

• Have them pick a topic, even if it’s going to be a personal diary
• Discuss the topic before signing up for an online account
• You, the parent, should sign up for the account
• Consider making your teen his or her own category on your blog if you don’t want them to have their own blog
• Have your teen guest author posts on your blog
• Encourage creativity with the use of multimedia, such as background themes, photos and videos along with written text
• Discuss the content of the posts, especially as they relate to a specific topic if one was chosen
• Subscribe to your teen’s blog and read the posts if the blog is not private (if it is private, just make sure it stays that way)

If the blog is not so personal as to be private and is shared with a limited list of visitors, be sure to add relatives and family friends to the allowed visitors list so they can see what’s going on in their loved one’s life. The whole family may end up in the stories, pictures and videos, so watch out when they have a camera aimed in your direction.

A Scrapbook Blog

A blog can be a great place to start an online scrapbook. Since teens spend a lot of time online, scrapbooking online can be an excellent way to get them doing something creative with some of that computer time and share it with family and friends. They can write, add photos, design themes and add videos in their posts. These skills are directly portable to the presentation skills they will need later in life. Here is a link to a friend of mine, Karen, who blogs specifically about scrapbooking: Scraps of Mind.

Some other ideas to get your teen writing regularly are:

• the old, handwritten journal; It has a big advantage that if a really good hiding place can be found, it can’t be hacked
• an offline digital journal in a word processor; the file can be password protected for privacy, as long as your teen doesn’t have a sibling computer-savvy enough to break into protected files
• consider file encryption if your teen wants real electronic privacy, but that can be a bit expensive

Whatever method you choose, I hope it will get your teenager writing on a regular basis!

Technorati Tags: blogging, get teens to write, homeschool your teenager, online scrapbooking, Writing