For me, home schooling meant getting to read all day and then read all the next day. It meant being able to apprentice myself to the adults whose work I admired, spend a lot of time playing in the nearby brook, write the books I couldn’t find but wanted to read, try directing Shakespeare plays and competing in classical piano and learning some Greek, all without having to worry about what might happen if I failed. Home schooling was about making mistakes that didn’t have bigger consequences than momentary embarrassment. Because I didn’t have grades. I worked hard to get better, because I cared about being better, because, I think, maybe people just care about that.
I thought college would be interesting, but it didn’t sound particularly necessary, and I only applied to one school, the state university, which I chose for its proximity to my job and its relatively low cost. Home-schoolers often already have jobs, and I’d gotten mine at 15. I led services and tutored bar and bat mitzvah students at my synagogue. I was the one who sang the prayers in Hebrew on the bima, at the podium across from the rabbi’s. Adults sometimes asked for my advice. I was a community leader. I was making more money than all of my friends (a lot of them went to school and didn’t have time to work as much as me). College was going to be a piece of cake compared to this. But I had no idea what that particular piece of cake would be like.College, it turned out, was an ugly place with mismatching architecture, surrounded by a sagging, distracted-looking little city. I got a big scholarship, for my SAT score and my “class rank.” My SAT score was good, but then, it’s kind of a dumb test. I’d made up the class rank. I didn’t have a class, so I said first. Technically, I was last as well.
“We shouldn’t lie,” my mom said.
“Why not?” my dad said. “Look how stupid this is.”
For the rest of the smugness.
Why are we hating on this, exactly?
ReplyDeleteI think it's a well-written and interesting piece.
It sounds like a student with some of the same complaints that we have about college. Sure, she brags about what she did but she sounds pretty exceptional.
ReplyDeleteMeh, I think she paints things with broad strokes, just as she seems to bristle about having done to her. I'm sure she's a bright young woman, but she perpetuates stereotypes about college students and professors.
ReplyDelete@Joe: And we don't?
ReplyDeleteI think that she is a typical college student. She thinks she's great and everyone else is somehow beneath her. She's probably not the kind of student I'd want in my class with all that pent up self-importance but then again she might actually pay attention occassionally in class.
Her first mistake was majoring in Music Ed. There are, uh, smarter majors.
ReplyDeleteexceptional students are beyond the scope of what any of you could understand. I develop many every semester in my classes, but that's because I work hard and don't spend every minute worried about my Google ads.
ReplyDeleteIt read like an interesting piece to me - the compelling part was her having no idea how a classroom would function, and buying into the ideal of how a classroom in college should function. Oh, how much more enjoyable the job would be if the classroom did function as she'd hoped it would.
ReplyDeleteBut then there would be no Misery.
football fan, what's your drama? For frick's sake, I taught homeschooled, so-called exceptional students for several years, and I don't even know how to begin worrying about "my" Google ads, whatever they are. Some of the students at the super-progressive, build-your-own-courses liberal arts college where I taught really were exceptional; some were just insufferable. This girl doesn't seem all that wrong to me -- big state Unis are the antithesis of self-driven intellectual life -- but what is the point of insulting everyone here? Or maybe you suffered traumatic brain injury playing football and that explains the random hostility?
ReplyDeleteF&T, don't feed it.
ReplyDeleteI've had a few home schooled students; they were in the main excellent students, though occasionally with cavalier attitudes to showing up for class. But when they did show up at least they'd done the reading and had something thoughtful to say. They should only all be like that.
Two things:
ReplyDeleteThis person wasn't really "homeschooled" in Fundy Christian mode; she was "unschooled", which is just a buzzword for "learning this on my own time with Mom and Dad." Which is fine, when you have parents who are inqusitive, well-rounded, and intellectual - otherwise, forget it. Maybe she could have dropped some of the snowflakey self-absorption if she had spent a few years in a progressive high school or "magnet school" or whatever they call the schools for geniuses (if she really is that brilliant) nowadays. Maybe it would be worse. I know that Noam Chomsky went from a Deweyite progressive school to a regular high school, and he hated the hell out of that high school; describing it as a "black period" in his life -and this was a high school during World War II.
Point 2: Alternate universes. She was living in one, a world where she didn't have to deal with the morning rush to the school bus, sitting in a room or series of rooms 7 hours a day with a 30-45 minute break for lunch, dealing with other kids, gym, teachers, that weird old custodian, and all the gunk in the textbooks. We consider these banal things normal, but we've only had this sort of education for two centuries or so; she was living the 16th century dream there: no farm labor, a paid and semi-important job in her community, and oodles of free time. Whether we know it or not, this is an elite person taking, like the daughter of a rich Amsterdam merchant, or some Central or Eastern European noblewoman. It's like she wandered out of the old "Safety Dance" video or an alternate history novel where the 20th century never happened; we see her as a douchebag, but really she is a creature out of joint with the norms of college.
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Addendum: the Fundy hoomschoolers are usually taught by their mothers using textbooks/workbooks printed by the same small Christian publishing houses which sell books to the Baptist-Foursquare-Fundamentalist private schools. Parents who want to do this sort of education can order trial packages from outfits like Bob Jones University Press, A Beka Books (Pensacola Christian School), and others. It has now gotten to a point where everything printed or audio-visual in a person's house can have something to do with Fundamentalist Christianity; they can seal themselves from the outside world if they so wish.
I read the original yesterday and wondered whether it would wind up here on the Miz. The comments in Salon also seemed to hate on her a little more than seemed necessary. She seems articulate and thoughtful, even if I don't agree with everything she said.
ReplyDeleteMainly, I find it surprising that she should have walked into such a fully rendered stereotype. The 'Miss Thistletwat' music teacher seems too much of a caricature to be plausible, but she sure fits a popular preconception of the supercilious pedant looking down on students. The tweedy bearded guy fits another stereotype.
What I found interesting was her comment about learning 'what she needed to get by'. Most kids in classrooms probably learn the same (how much do I need to whine to get an extension? How little do I need to study to pass?). But if she's really as inquisitive as she says she is, she'll discover what a university offers.
Now we're supporting the flakes? Oh, she's extraordinary all right, extraordinarily precious.
ReplyDeleteShe's too good for college, too smart, too special. It drips off her well written and smug text.
I have students just like her, and they come from private schools mostly.
Ah, but well-written. Well-written! It might be worth a bit of smug.
ReplyDeleteWell-written flakery is still flakery. I recognize the smugness - when my students self-identify the first day as homeschooled/unschooled/auto-didacts, they fling the smug around just like this.
ReplyDeleteAnd really, I don't have much of a problem with homeschoolers/unschoolers/auto-didacts beyond the fact that they inevitably aren't nearly as intelligent or well-read or ready for college as they think they are.
A weakness of the home/un/auto approach, I feel, is that there's little motivation to study something that you disagree with or that doesn't interest you. We've all heard the argument that students shouldn't have to study things that don't interest them, but I think a lot of us still buy into the idea of a well-rounded education. In my opinion, well-rounded includes the hard, icky stuff that isn't as fun as days by the brook.
I know students who think this even though they were never home schooled.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with the Homeschooler's story is the painting of the prof as the wicked witch. What's with calling her "Mrs Grimini" (Grim-meany, OMG what an awesome literary device)? The prof she respects is called "Professor", the one she doesn't is "Mrs Grim-Meany".
ReplyDeleteMrs Grim-Meany acts like an asshole in a way that everyone who is not a professor assumes professors can act, but how many of us, especially adjuncts (which we have to assume Mrs Grim-Meany is, since she doesn't have a PhD or merit the title of Professor, unless that's deliberate disrespect on the part of St Homeschooled), can afford to be that obviously capricious?
If I said "you can't answer questions because you were homeschooled" to one of my students, they'd be in the Chair's office bitching about me before I could turn around. You know, the way they are in the Chair's office bitching about me for doing totally "unfair" things like applying policies that are clearly outlined in my syllabus. I call bullshit on the whole story.
WhatLadder - and now that you mention it, let's not forget gender. Mrs. Grim-Meany may actually have a PhD; even if she doesn't she's teaching at a university; but she's a chick so she doesn't get "Prof", she gets "Mrs." I think our homeschooler could have got a few more lessons in questioning her assumptions, and checking her privilege for that matter.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I doubt she's learned that much Greek.
Well-written, though, certainly.
My parents decided not to send me to school because they liked hanging out with me. So did mine, but they had to work to support themselves and their two kids, so that cut into the available time for "hanging out."
ReplyDeleteI don't understand why this home-schooled college student doesn't take responsibility for her own education, after going on and on about how her parents did that for her, but when it comes down to her choosing a college, she picks one because it's close to her job and cheap, then complains that it isn't to her liking. Why not transfer to another school? Maybe do some research, visit campuses, learn about degree programs and curriculum, make some effort to be thoughtful and intentional about her choosing where to be educated. She writes: I worked hard to get better, because I cared about being better, because, I think, maybe people just care about that. But then when she got to college, she passively accepted whatever education was inflicted upon her, at a school whose only redeeming value was its cheap tuition and promixity to her job, without any effort whatsoever to take responsibility for her own choices. Was her home-schooling so inadequate that she's incapable of making an intentional choice?
Bravo, Patty!
ReplyDeleteWhile I was reading this, I wondered the exact same thing!
I also wondered how she could get such obtuse professors! I cannot imagine telling a student they could not respond. I cannot imagine not telling a student to share about their father's piano playing when they were small ----I'd tell her if she was home schooled to just share anything she thought was close to the same time frame as the kindergarten or 1st grade experience. I don't know anyone who would do anything else.
I wonder if she was making some of this up---exaggerating to prove the point she wanted to make. And that makes me wonder if she came to college with prejudices she was determined to make real, and so maybe she was determined to interpret what she found in the worst possible way.
The exam question, for example. Just because she thought she answered the same way as another student does not mean she DID answer the same way. I have had students bring up exams like that many a time, and it turns out that the student who got the points taken off was making a whole lot of assumptions about what she felt was implied in what she wrote. If this student was home schooled, perhaps she never learned that she has to be completely clear, and that not everyone has the same built in associations that she does.
I get a good number of home schooled students at my CC. Some of them are uber smug like this one. Most of them are my best students (even the smug ones turn in excellent work and make great contributions in class). I'm always glad to have them around.
I don't think this author is typical of home-schooled kids. I don't know any home-schooled kids who are so ill-prepared for life: Since I was so naive, I didn't think a music major sounded different from another major. Or a state university sounded different from a private one. College was college. As a home-schooler, I hadn't learned to separate everything into its own categories and rank it according to some perceived value. I got better at doing that in college, but it made life less interesting. So, in other words, she's incapable of making an informed decision. One choice is as good as another, because it's less interesting to consider her personal aspirations or needs and decide which option best suits her goals. Music or biology, community college or Ivy League, it's all the same to her, so it's hardly surprising that she's unhappy with her "choice," if you can even call it that.
ReplyDelete