As with all teachers, I’m grateful for this week-long winter break--to regroup and to plan lessons. Our final year of middle school, and therefore homeschool, presents a growing challenge for me. I find my daughter’s insatiable quest for knowledge exhausting. According to age, Allegra is in grade 8, but in reality, she is working well beyond grade level in most subjects. She recently “shadowed” a student at a well-regarded local charter high school to see if she might like to attend next year and discovered that she is covering at home the same material as the school’s advanced 9th-grade math class. In English, we are working at a high school Advanced Placement level. In fact, I’ve given Allegra the same material I, in a previous life, assigned to college freshmen and sophomores. She’s not any more “exceptional” than other bright students with whom I’ve worked, just exceptionally motivated. I imagine many serious homeschool students are working ahead of their peers in public school because they can learn at their own pace, rather than in lockstep with an entire classroom of varied ability and motivational levels. For an excellent study on how the nation’s public schools may be holding back bright students, see http://www.nationdeceived.org/. The study suggests that the current egalitarian approach to education, with its fanatical emphasis on mastery of basic skills, is actually being unfair to high-ability students. When students are ready to fly, educators shouldn’t clip their wings, leaving them to wallow in a pool of mediocrity.
