Tag: Why not skip high school

Why not skip high school? (Addendum 1) Starting college by age 12 (not us)

On Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Day 611 of 1000

This is an addendum in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Shortly after I finished writing this series of posts, articles started to show up in print media and on the internet about the Hardings, a family of 12 (10 children) that homeschooled and graduated their kids into college at age 12. You can see an example of one of these articles here. It is an awesome success story. You can see the family’s website here. They have a homeschool framework they follow that allows them to succeed early at their own pace, go really fast, and own the material well enough to succeed at higher levels.

One of the things I really like about the mother of the family, Mona Lisa Harding, is that she clearly states her kids are not geniuses. Sometimes when we say things like that about our kids, people think we are fishing for compliments. We are not. We want to think the best of our children, but we have no illusions about their level of intelligence. After all, we taught them. I understand exactly what Mrs. Harding is saying. Normal, non-genius kids can handle school at this pace. But they have to work hard. The good part is they learn to love to work hard after they have had some success. Younger kids raise their expectation when they see their older siblings benefit from performing at a high level.

One of the great strengths of homeschooling is that just about everyone within the community acknowledges there is more than one way to do it well. The way the Hardings do it is very successful. I am sure we would learn a lot from their methods. I doubt whether we would have made wholesale changes from the way we did it ourselves. It seems like the Hardings were able to provide good worldview education along with the academics. Our kids might have been able to handle the move to community college by age 12, but even if we would have thought to put them there at the time, I do not think we would have done it.

The two years before they started college helped them academically with CLEP testing and the like, but the benefit that was derived from two additional years of hard work on worldview issues was invaluable. They knew what we believed all along, but they acquired a much deeper understanding of why we believe it in those last two years before college. That is just the way our family worked. The Hardings did some things differently. It surely looks like they have served their family well.

Mona Lisa Harding has written an eBook about the way they do things. I have not read it. I encourage others who are interested in this topic to read a few of the articles on line (Google: Harding College by 12). If you like what you find, her book might be worth a read.

Why not skip high school? (Part 9) Christian takes Chemistry at Big State U.

By Dad

On Thursday, April 4, 2013

In Education, Homeschool

Day 591 of 1000

This is the ninth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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Christian’s first class at NCSU was Chemistry. We really wanted Christian to get started the same way as Kelly. We described in the previous post in this series how we put her in a single summer class to get her started at Big State U. (NCSU) when she started there. We helped her choose a hard class called Foundations of Advanced Mathematics because we wanted her to get a feel for the difficulty of STEM classes at national research university and because it was the first class she needed for some future sequences.

The reasons to put Christian in the same class were the same as for Kelly, but we ran into a snag. When we evaluated his whole program, we realized that he was going to have a pretty tough go at getting all his classes done in time to graduate in four years both because of the sequences he needed and because he did not have nearly as many credits as Kelly. We described all the reasons for that in this post. We got a little bit frantic, but figured out a way he could graduate on time. The problem was that he would have to take a Chemistry class in the summer rather than the Foundations of Advanced Mathematics class.

That was all good and well, but there were two problems. First, because the Foundations class would have to be put off until fall semester, Christian would have to take a very heavy load during spring semester (he is in that right now) so he will have the prerequisites for the classes he needs to take during his senior year to be able to graduate. Second, he had to pass a test that showed that he had enough skills from previous Chemistry studies to perform well in this college level Chemistry class. The problem was he had not had a Chemistry class since fourth grade. He had only two weeks to study before he had to take the test. To complicate things a little more, he used that same time period to study the material need to test out of the computer literacy class all incoming students are required to take. It was a little bit of a grind, but he passed both tests without too much trouble.

We did something by accident that turned out to be important later on. Christian and Kelly took most of their hard STEM classes together at the Community College. They helped one another and worked together a lot. What we did not think about when we split the kids up for this summer semester is that we really did not know how they would do in one of these hard STEM classes if they did not have each other. It turned out OK, but if we had to do it over, we might have split them up for at least a few classes earlier in the process.

The Chemistry class was a joy to Christian. He feels that if he had had more time to focus on that earlier, he might have even tried to get a degree in Chemistry. He had to work hard, but got an A. That he got an A was a confidence builder for his next semester.

Why not skip high school? (Part 6) That supposedly thorny socialization question

By Dad

On Monday, March 25, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Socialization

Day 581 of 1000

This is the sixth in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

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This post is not about socialization in a homeschool. The move from homeschool to college after the eighth grade at age fourteen is a somewhat more thorny issue. I have explained why we believe the socialization that occurs in typical homeschool settings is profoundly better than what currently happens in traditional government and private school settings here. There are links to reasearch and additional articles on socialization in that post. This post describes some of the things we considered with respect to socialization when we chose to move our kids from homeschool directly into college.

Timing

The timing has somewhat to do with the fact that we were not aware that Kelly could have handled college work at least a couple of years before she went to college. After she passed her third or fourth CLEP exam and got good scores on the ACT college placement exam it became apparent that she could probably handle the academic rigor of college. Still, we do not think we would have put her in college then even if we would have been aware that she could handle it. The reason is that she was very young and she would have been attending college on her own. We think it was good that she waited that extra couple of years during which she took many more CLEP tests for college credit and worked on the understanding the intellectual underpinnigs of our worldview¹.

When the time came to consider college for Kelly when she was sixteen, we still thought she might be a little unsure of herself to handle the social aspects of college on her own. We did not want her to be too far from home and we did not want her to be alone. By that time, we had been through some pretty rigorous worldview education with both the kids. Kelly and Christian have always been very supportive of each other, so we thought that, if they went to the Community College together, they would, at least, give each other some moral support and it might not be so scary. We now knew through testing and for other reasons that Christian could hand college, go we decided to pull the trigger and put them in college together.

The Social Environment at Community College

We were surprised by the high professional and academic standards of the teachers at Wake Tech, but even more surprised and appreciative for the kindness and helpfulness of both the teachers and the administrative staff. Of course there were a few who did not want to do their job or had (being gracious here) bad people skills, but they were definitely the exception and not the rule. Our expectations about the students was quite a pleasant surprise. There was a very interesting mix of students at Wake Tech. There was a good mix of foreign students, vocational and college prep students right out of high school, people in the work force trying to upgrade their skills or get a degree, and maybe a little bit unique to Wake Tech, soldiers recently discharged from military service at Ft. Bragg, going to school on the G.I. bill.

Kelly and Christian befriended a pretty amazing mix of people. They made four special friends with whom they remained in contact. Nestor and Daniela are a brother and sister from Venezuela who come from a close-knit Latin family. They took the same hard math and science classes as Kelly and Christian. What was really great about them is that they also had a Latin mother and understood Kelly and Christian in ways that are sometimes difficult for gringos. Christian still gets to have a class with Nestor and Daniela every now and then at NCSU.

Mike is an Iraq War veteran who pretty much adopted the kids. They took almost all of their math classes together. It is hard to over emphasize what a great thing it was to have Mike as their friend. Make was old enough, mature enough, and sure enough of himself to not care to much what anyone thought about him, including the commie English professor he took one semester before Kelly and Christian got him. He was unfailingly kind to the kids, more conservative (but not by much) than me, and willing to give the kids advice and correction when they needed it. They still love the guy and are grateful that Mike went on to NCSU with them.

Finally, there is Mr. McCarter. He was the kids math professor for Calculus II, Calculus III, and Linear Algebra. He talked and joked with the kids and Mike every day before and after class. They send Mr. McCarter an email every now and then to let him know how they are doing. They owe a lot to him for the encouragement he gave them and the rigor with which he taught his math classes.

The upshot is that Community College was very scary when the kids first started. They got to turn down invitiations to parties that were illegal on their own right, but would have been profoundly illegal if two underage kids would have showed up there. The saw lots of drugs, heard all kinds of immoral jokes and stories, and heard all manner of casually used bad language. They even saw a fist fight our two. They came away from Community College with their Christian worldview intact and with a good mix of wonderful friends.

The Social Environment at Big State University

The social transition to NCSU was interesting. It seemed to be a big advantage to not have been socialized in the artificial world that only exist in traditional government and private schools where self-esteem and political correctness are preached as if they were holy writ. The entire educational experience of most of the kids entering the university was in a highly regulated, institutionalized environment where decisions were made for them about what they studied, when they could talk with a time and place for virtually everything chosen by the school district or state set regulation. The self-esteem thing was particularly apparent when the kids went to new student orientation. Since the kids were both in their Junior years in hard degrees, so they did not have to spend much time with the freshmen. By the time students make it to their Junior year in a hard (STEM) degree, some of the narcissism gets knocked out of them.

Conclusion

All in all, the kids homeschool transition served them very well in their move from Junior high school to college.

1. See this link on worldview considerations.

Why not skip high school? (Part 1) Introduction

By Dad

On Saturday, March 16, 2013

In Education, Homeschool, Socialization

Day 572 of 1000

This is the first in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.

[Next post in series]

People send in questions and I try to answer them here: Answers to homeschool questions

I thought I would write a few posts on why we think skipping high school is a great idea. I will write about the positive reasons for skipping high school, how we did it, and the actually outcomes for our children. The bad of what passes for a traditional high school education these days seems to out weigh the good by a lot. Still, I do not plan to write much about the abject failure of the majority of traditional high schools in America–at least not in this series of posts.

We definitely made some mistakes on the way, but it has been fabulously gratifying. Sometimes we went too slow. Sometimes we tried to go too fast. We serendipitously lucked into activities and opportunities that moved us forward. We missed deadlines and made mistakes through laziness, incompetence, and ignorance that set us back. Most of all, though, we made a plan and then just plugged away at it for about a decade. The plugging got tedious at times, but we can honestly say it was worth it. Joy, gratification, and humility are the words all of us, kids and adults alike, would use to talk about the educational path we chose for our family.

I have written an outline for what I want to write and will keep a list of links on this page.

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