School Doesn’t Have to Suck When You Teach Your Own Kids

One of the problems my son ran
into when he still attended a brick-and-mortar school is the
current mania for turning every damned
arithmetic problem into the equivalent of a New York cabbie
taking a rube tourist to Rockefeller Center via Staten Island. Why
go the direct route when you can run up the meter?

There’s widespread agreement in the U.S. that
math is being taught badly, though experts disagree over
whether it’s Common Core’s fault or whether the education
establishment is blowing the teaching of math without assistance
from the controversial new standards. Either way, it’s
easy to find
recent examples of math problems seemingly designed to turn
numbers into an
incomprehensible mystery (see one
delightful example pictured).

Fortunately, my son is now homeschooled—or,
technically, attends a private online school. He uses online
lessons and offline texts and workbooks to learn, coached by his
mother and me. The lessons are means to an end; he takes them as
needed, and can take as much or little time as necessary, until he
demonstrates his mastery of a topic in a unit assessment test. Then
he moves on. Find your vocabulary set a breeze? Then skip the
review lessons. Stumped by long division? Then spend a few hours
working it out.

And when the approach recommended by the book comes from
education-establishment bizarro land, we can explain (not ask
permission) in a conversation with his homeroom teacher (really, an
advisor/contact at the school) that we won’t be taking the scenic
route across a mathematical Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Instead, my
wife taught Anthony basic long division as she learned the subject.
He has my mind for math which is, admittedly, missing a few
circuits, so that was challenging enough. So she spread the lesson
over two days. And she had him work at it repeatedly.

And he passed his unit assessment with 100 percent. Even better,
he said he liked math. Last year he cried over his
homework.

School doesn’t have to suck, when the lessons are tailored for
kids’ learning style, and the pace matches their ability to absorb
any given skill or bit of information. It’s easiest to do that when
you
don’t have somebody else’s education philosophy of the moment
forced on you.