1 October 2014

How we homeschooled our kids Pt 6

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool; Homeschooler Profile.

THERE’S NO EASY WAY TO DESCRIBE HOW A HOMESCHOOLING CHILD LEARNS, OR HOW HIS PARENTS TEACH. More than methods and techniques – and certainly more than a set curriculum – it is a mindset, driven by an inner conviction that children are natural learners, that they will learn if you let them. Continuing Part 6 of our homeschooling story, our oldest son Ethan offers a backward glance at a journey that ended when he graduated (and got married) last December, 2013.

The Importance of Doing What You Don’t Love

Homeschooling allowed me the freedom to pursue my interests. It taught me that learning was done best when there was passion. Passion, or interest, became the guiding light in my life. And that made me an awful student.

Consider the two wasted years my parents sent my brother and me to Mandarin classes. We spoke English at home, at church, with our friends, and all our learning was in English. I suspect we went anyway because society expected Chinese to speak Chinese, and homeschoolers are prone to peer pressure too.

I remember our beleaguered Mandarin tutor, a college student making some extra money, who tried to motivate clearly unmotivated students with every trick in the book: affirmation, scolding, little treats and little breaks (my brother and I shattered one of his lamps during one of our little breaks). However, what impressed me the most by far were his earnest attempts to convince us that we needed to learn Mandarin because it would help us do business with China, a growing economic powerhouse. The ten year-old me had no intention of doing business with China.

When I was eleven, there was a ballet school in town that began offering free ballet lessons to boys for the first year – due to a complete lack of male enrollment. It seemed like good fun at the time. My brother and I began our lessons along with three other boys: two homeschoolers and one non-homeschooler, united in the understanding that the best things in life were free. When we strapped on our form-fitting dance pants, ballet shoes, white t-shirts, and pranced about the dance studio for the first time, and all the girls stood by and giggled, blushed, pointed at us, something glowed within our tiny chests.

The ballet instructors greeted our prancing about with joy, and all that positive reinforcement worked. We were hooked. So once a week, our mothers shuttled us to the ballet school. As the weeks became months, it became evident our benevolent ballet instructors were not content to allow us to have much more fun. When my brother and I revealed we weren’t interested in doing the exam, much less continuing ballet the next year, our ballet instructor’s face was one of unsurprised disappointment.

Another soul unfortunate enough to have me as a student was my piano teacher, who drilled into my head the importance of playing three pieces every year to pass a music exam. I didn’t start learning the piano with such curiosity and enthusiasm because I wanted to pass music exams. Why continue learning the piano if that was all there was to it, then? Waning interest made my fingers stiff, cold, and the thin, stern line that was her mouth sometimes parted to announce I was lazy. The lessons became this inexplicable hole in the space-time continuum where time took forever to pass. I’m sure my piano teacher felt the same way. I quit after barely passing the grade five exam. To this day I have an irrational dislike for classical music.

I had imbibed, perhaps too much, the philosophy of pursuing my interests. I didn’t learn anything I didn’t want to learn. What was worthwhile was what I was interested in. Discipline as it was known to my peers – schedules, homework, tuition – didn’t work for me. The time tables we drew up never stuck because, for one, I never knew when I’d wake up in the morning. And because our days were largely unpredictable. I did what schoolwork we had whenever I would. People used to tell my parents, or me if they felt like being honest, that I’d have a hard time in college (at least the nice ones assumed I was going to go to college).

When I think now about what I learned, and how I learned what I learned, I feel amazingly lucky that I learned anything at all. When my brother and I were really young, seems like six or seven, my dad imposed a year-long ban on computer games and television because we hadn’t finished our dinner one night. We were young enough to not know to be outraged. And we were young enough to not know to cheat. So, being homeschoolers, we were stuck at home every day without the privilege of computer games or television.

In a desperate attempt to get through the day, we picked up the books about the house. We read. And read and read. We read so much that by the end of the year, we didn’t feel like we’d been deprived of anything. That was when I began reading, and nothing has been the same since. Over the years, what was important wasn’t just that my parents bought books. It was that they read those books with us. It was that we read widely, voraciously. We could talk about books, the ideas within the books, the characters within the books, and often without meaning to, we were learning.

I remember writing in my journal, putting down my thoughts about the day, for years thinking I could be as great a journalist as Anne Frank, simply because mom and dad had given me the book when I was six and told me I ought to write something every day. I loved writing, recording, thinking, forming sentences, playing with words. I needed no prompting to continue. I blogged furiously, ridiculously so in retrospect, when I was a teenager. I wrote about books, movies, music, politics, theology – it became a digital journal that other people could read. Writing became a way of processing my own thoughts in the presence of others. And so I learned to write.

With the drums, my parents gave me an incredible amount of support to pursue that earsplitting passion. I took lessons. I practiced on pillows, the floor, my knees. My mom diligently drove me to church at least twice a week: once or twice for practice, and once for the lesson. She did that for a couple of years until my parents made the ultimate sacrifice and brought the harbinger of noise – a drum set – to my room. My family loved me. And so did our neighbors. We didn’t get a single complaint.

One day several years later, my drum teacher told me I was the first student, in all his years teaching, to have made it this far, to have learned everything he could impart. He wanted to prepare me for the final drum exam. I prepared for it, but not for long, not before I thought I didn’t need an exam to tell me I was a drummer. I pulled out of the final exam, and with that, with a warm, final handshake, my drum lessons came to an end. Now, I wish I had taken that exam. The exam might not have told me I was a drummer, but it might have told me what I was made of. The teenage me didn’t want to find out.

So how did that teenager cope when he got to college? This being a liberal arts college, there were a bunch of classes I had to take whether I cared to or not, classes like Life Science, Wellness for Life, and College Algebra. In that sense, yes, I did have a hard time in college. I struggled every night to do simple algebra homework. I pulled all-nighters to get research done. I got busy with busywork (this is not to say I didn’t enjoy plenty of other classes, especially the English and Political Science ones). I was motivated by a powerful fear of failure, responsibility, knowing my parents had forked over a small fortune to get me through college. In short, college taught me to do what I didn’t love.

Now that I have graduated from college, it all feels like much ado about nothing. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA from Hardin-Simmons University, with degrees in English and Political Science. I was never late to class, and the only time I missed a class was when I was stranded in Washington, D.C., during a Model U.N. conference when Hurricane Sandy struck. I wasn’t merely a goody-two-shoes within the classroom, though. I was also an editor for the school paper, the vice president of the International Student Fellowship, had a student worker job in the university’s Media Relations office, and played percussion with the Cowboy Band.

 My senior year, I dropped by a theology professor’s office to pick up my final paper, and he asked me to sit down and talk for a bit. He wanted to know more about who I was, where I came from, and what I thought it was that had prepared me to do well in college. I said, with little hesitation, without irony, that I felt it was homeschooling that had prepared me the best – it had prepared me to learn on my own, to not trust anyone else with anything as important as my education. He smiled thoughtfully and remarked: yes, it’s usually the homeschoolers. It’s just as well he didn’t press me for more specifics like “what did you do to prepare yourself?” or “but how did you learn that?” because I wouldn’t have known how to answer.

I still don’t.

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25-year old Ethan’s parents are founders of HOMEFRONTIER David and Sook Ching Tan. Ethan graduated with degrees in Political Science and English at Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene, Texas, last December 14, and married Katie on the same day.

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22 July 2014

How we started homeschooling Pt 5

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool; Math.

Part 4 was a peek at how language arts featured in our literacy lessons. In this 5th installment, our son Elliot writes about learning numbers and math. If you have just popped in, you can catch up on our family’s homeschooling journey by checking out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

LEARNING THE 3RS: Elliot discovers numeracy

It is one of those hot, muggy Malaysian nights when Dad asks how we learnt our numbers. I shrug, and say that Mom taught us, of course. This is something painfully obvious, but he persists in asking. But how did we learn numbers? How did ones and twos and threes suddenly become something beyond scratches on a piece of paper? Mom looks at me and I look back at her. Math books? I hazard. Mom mutters something about looking at price tags while shopping. Multiplication tables? I mean, numbers don’t have a significance in our family. Words do. Words are king. I remember what the formative books of my childhood were. Formative number things? Hah.

Maybe numbers are something that just happens to you, like catching a cough or a cold. If you hang around too long with twos and fours they might start multiplying and then you are suddenly burdened with the knowledge that with the addition of a certain symbol, they equal eight. I know that at some point we became aware that numbers could interact with each other and behave in fascinating ways but as to when that point actually happened, who knows?

Some things are not meant to be questioned…
I know that numbers were never alive for me in the study room where I would sit hunched over on my chair, idly doodling on the margins of math books. They weren’t alive cross-legged in my grandparents’ house, where the stillness and quiet of the hour and the gentle creaking of the electric fan would carry my attention far from fractions and decimals.

But we memorized our tables and dutifully repeated them anyway. We did our math-work, from yellowing Lifepac materials and hardcover Saxon math books to Singaporean syllabi. These are just things that are done to children, and questioning these traditions is like asking if one can change the colour of the sky.

The verdant rainforest is something that many can only appreciate through the safety of a thick plastic shield.Small children especially, are kept away for fear of sharp objects and things that crawl into ears and do not crawl out again.Instead children are taken to zoos and museums, where each plant and animal is labelled and classified and sterilised, with ice-cream after. It’s only now, after many years without opening a math book that I’ve begun to see the forest and not the trees. It’s only now that I wish my education in numbers began a little dirtier, and a little wormier. That might have spared me hours of discontent.

Numbers come alive in unlikely places
Numbers came to life in games and books, in the practical experiences we had (like grabbing the measuring tape and checking out the dimensions of all the furniture in the house). Games like Monopoly and Risk and Scrabble all require a fundamental knowledge of addition, subtraction and multiplication, and they taught me to recognize the patterns of basic math. Books like Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth introduced mathematical concepts such as fractions and infinity with charming aplomb.

Numbers were alive to me in the counting down of the hours until Dad came home from work. Or in the hurt that PINKIES was definitely not a word and that the seventy-six points my Aunt made was distinctly unfair, never mind what the dictionary said. I remember choosing, when my brother and I were dividing our chores, to throw the garbage on even numbered dates, knowing that there were a full seven days more of odd numbered dates for him to do work on. It was glorious in its smallness.

So, my numbers were learnt in relation to things that were not numbers. But If you really want to know where I got my numbers, I found them lying around the house. Someone had left them there, I think. How very terribly careless.

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22-year old Elliot Tan’s parents are founders of HOMEFRONTIER David and Sook Ching Tan. Elliot plays the piano in church and occasionally leads worship. When not sleeping too much for his parents’ liking, he reads and does things on the computer and occasionally writes weird things. Surprisingly and in spite of his upbringing, he scored an A for Math in his IGCSE O Levels. He was in university studying Communications for a while, but took a break and is now in the process of what people call ‘finding themselves’. He also teaches English in Frontier Learning Centre and have an affinity for potatoes.

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16 May 2014

How we started homeschooling Pt 4

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool.

In Part 3 of our homeschooling journey, I shared how we learned to focus on things that mattered. Part 4 is a look at how we taught our children, and this installment will touch on Literacy. If you missed the previous installments, do join our family’s homeschooling journey by checking out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

LEARNING THE 3Rs: Literacy
Homeschooling or unschooling? Imperfect labels as they are, both share a common attribute: we are our children’s main educators. While a homeschooler prefers a more structured approach with emphasis on subject mastery, an unschooler is inclined towards non-formal and naturally spontaneous learning.

There’s really no need to get hung up on terminology as there will be significant overlap whichever side of the fence you belong. Either way, there’s structure and spontaneity in varying degrees. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, what passed off as ‘education’ in our home? What about the 3Rs?

Here’s a peek at what we did when our own boys were under twelve.

Start with reading
Educators tell us a learning environment or a reading culture is vital to children becoming learners. Fortunately we were readers ourselves – books lined the walls of our home, books were our friends, bookstores our favourite hangouts. The big payoff for learning to read comes when your children read to learn. So we were pleased when our boys caught the habit earlier than later.

Initially, the standard language readers were our textbooks, but what got our boys hooked were real age-appropriate books. Picture books soon gave way to those with structurally richer sentences and vocabulary.

Two things were key: We read aloud (ending on a “to-be-continued” note), and we talked a lot (about what we’ve read). It’s hard to beat shared book reading to improve listening and comprehension skills. It’s great for family bonding too. There we were plonked down on a sofa, paying attention and waiting for one another to speak or ask a question after Mom or Dad was done reading. And we had to keep it civil, being considerate to one another while keeping interruptions to a minimum.

Writing and copywork
Once our kids graduated from their ABCs, we introduced them to writing full sentences as well as copywork. They filled up exercise books with text from storybooks, and poems. We also had them copy Bible verses such as these:

Proverbs 12:15 – The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man is he who listens to counsel.

Proverbs 3:5-8 – Trust in the LORD with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones.

The point was not merely writing, but understanding the ideas that words communicated. Again, that led to all kinds of conversations.

Journaling
After learning from a fellow homeschooler about journaling, I gave each boy a hardcover A5 journal. Write an entry a day, anything, any length, I said. Sometimes we offered suggestions.

When my Dad was alive, I asked them to interview their Gung-Gung. I told them he was a young man during the Japanese Occupation and oh boy, wouldn’t they love to hear about war and severed heads, how he was almost arrested at a checkpoint while smuggling cigarettes.

Once on a trip to Penang, I made a special vacation scrapbook. We looked up the internet and identified places we were visiting, and then had them write and sketch all through the trip.

In time their language blossomed. We were gratified that their daily entries were becoming more thoughtful and more varied in subject and length. What tales they recorded – their curious perspective on life, their observations on happenings in the neighbourhood, what they did with friends, how our maid Rosalie saved Elliot from choking(!), what they looked forward to.

Detours on the journey
I must confess we did not do much about grammar (not that we didn’t care), and phonics was not on our to-do list either (growing up in school, phonics wasn’t part of our syllabus then). Instead we learned when the occasion called for it, picking up verbs, tenses, parts of a sentence, letter sounds and even some Latin, like found items on a language trail.

It wasn’t all work and no play. Breaks were frequent in the Tan Homeschool and there were many detours requiring a temporary shift in priorities. That’s okay; we are allowed to be flexible. After all, it is the tree that bends in the wind that will not snap.

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Founders of HOMEFRONTIER David and Sook Ching Tan have two adult sons who were homeschooled all the way until college. Ethan (24) recently graduated and got married to a wonderful girl Katie. Elliot (22) is thinking through his options and will be down under to do creative writing before the year is up.

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24 March 2014

How we started homeschooling Pt 3

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool.

Continuing the story of our homeschooling journey and what we learned along the way. If you missed the previous installments, Part 1 looks back at how we arrived at our decision. Part 2 tells about early days when we started out. Here’s Part 3.

Learn, unlearn, relearn
SOMEONE SAID THAT TEACHING HAS A LEARNING CURVE that’s steeper than most other professions.  Now, you only have to take responsibility for your own children’s education to know how true that is.  This is probably the reason homeschooling in our first years was very much about getting into stride, or as they say, “finding your groove.”

It’s not hard to understand why.  We had barely begun – not unlike first-time travellers, hearts thumping with a mix of excitement and apprehension as they arrive in a place they have never been before.

To top it all, we had to deconstruct a deeply flawed mindset that mistook schooling for education, teacher-directed instruction for learning, and examination grades for intelligence.  That’s the sticky part.  But if we wanted to homeschool and facilitate our children’s education, we too would have to take care to learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Lessons from a misstep
Shortly after we began homeschooling, Sook Ching bought into a pricey home-based accelerated learning programme.  There were flash cards of the human body, musical instruments, vegetables, and math problems.  Pretty soon our sons were effortlessly impressing friends and family with their “encyclopedic knowledge.”

It didn’t take long to discover that (a) kids really have a natural appetite for learning, and (b) I could make my own flash cards cheaply – which I eventually did.

While I have no doubt that thousands of parents are grateful for these expensive learning kits, I found out that words quickly learnt were just as easily forgotten in a matter of weeks.  Our infatuation with that big box of flash cards and stuff lasted less than 6 months.  Were we half-hearted about “bringing out the genius” in our boys, perhaps?

Nevertheless, having a lot of information in one’s head is obviously not the same as having knowledge.  Knowledge is understanding concepts, not spewing out random data.  It’s the ability to connect bits of information in a meaningful way, and then apply them effectively.  Like so many parents we too mistook precociousness in a child for advanced intelligence.

Deciding on things that matter
Yep, we fell for the “multiplying baby’s intelligence” sales pitch.  Are you anxious for your kids to have “encyclopedic knowledge” or “Mozart music to enhance spatial reasoning”?  Do they really need all those enrichment classes to make them brilliant before they turn 7?  Think twice before you dig into your pocket.  Don’t buy tickets for guilt trips your kids can do without.

Better to use a natural or more organic approach to teaching and learning instead of over-engineering for quick results.  Besides, what’s all the acceleration for – the child, or her parents?

What did this episode teach us about what really matters?  Get knowledge, not information; nurture wisdom, not just intelligence.  Enlarge the heart, not the head.  These are values you need to work on day by day, one day at a time.  It’s not how fast you’re going, but where you’re heading.  It’s setting ablaze the intrinsic desire in all children to learn, and helping them to keep the fires burning.  Then, you get out of their way.

Next:  What we did in our homeschool

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Founders of HOMEFRONTIER David and Sook Ching Tan have two adult sons who were homeschooled all the way until college. Ethan (24) recently graduated and got married to a wonderful girl Katie. Elliot (22) is thinking through his options and will be down under to do creative writing before the year is up.

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18 March 2014

How we started homeschooling Pt 2

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool.

So we’re sold on the idea of educating our own children at home. The fun begins! Here’s Part 2 of how we started out as new homeschoolers.

IT’S THE STANDARD PARENTING SCRIPT – if your child is 4 years old you put her in a kindergarten. Not knowing better, that was where Ethan was at 4 years. Now that we had decided to homeschool, we would have to pull him out.

Dropping out of kindergarten
I spoke to the kindergarten Principal on the phone and told her that we had decided to stop. She expressed regrets saying Ethan would miss out developing “motor skills” as there would be contraptions and learning toys for his class  in the coming weeks.  Erm, yes,  but he’ll be fine, I said, thanking her and her teachers.

One weekend after a miserable month in kindy, we told Ethan he didn’t have to go back there when Monday came around. We, his mom and dad, would be teaching him and his brother Elliot at home. Every day was going to be like a holiday and we were going to have fun learning and doing all sorts of things together! We said he was going to learn more at home anyway. The boys were nonplussed. There were shy smiles but no audible cry of relief. Ethan’s wide-eyed expression said it all: Yay!

It amazes me every time I see how trusting young children are of their parents. We offered no further explanation for our conviction except to say that we were in it together. Certainly, the boys were simply too young to appreciate their parents’ crazy notions or the significant turn their life was taking then. Double yay!

Starting out by slowing down
Cutting the umbilical cords of institutionalised learning set us free to take it easy. What joy to spend unstructured time with our children, being there for them, watching them grow! Not having a pile of expensive toys at home, the boys displayed an inventive streak stretching their imagination and making do with what they could lay their hands on. Ethan was like a bird let out of a cage while Elliot was content to play along and do what his older brother did.

Meanwhile, there would be a lot of exploring, figuring out our next steps: we dug into a mountain of information and resources available to homeschoolers online and in bookstores in the city. Like most homeschooling newbies, we were anxious about curriculum and were initially flustered. Sonlight? Alpha & Omega? Bob Jones? Thankfully we were advised by a friend to slow down and put all that aside for awhile. Where’s the fire? It’s okay to try stuff, she said. We made the best of what we could afford and took advantage of public amenities such as the Science Centre and the community library.

New routines for mom and dad
What changed most for us when we started was a deliberate ordering of our lives. We agreed on lines of authority, decided on boundaries (i.e, no TV or computer games on week days, etc), worked on values that meant most to us as a Christian family and as homeschoolers.

Parenting became an intentional discipline. We clarified our roles as mom and dad – Sook Ching would be the primary tutor, while I would do my part to provide leadership, read aloud to the kids on certain nights and tucked them in bed. We were quickly learning that homeschooling works, but parental involvement was key.

Next: Homeschooling one day at a time

[If you haven’t read the first part, click here: How We Started Homeschooling ]
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Founders of HOMEFRONTIER David and Sook Ching Tan have two adult sons who were homeschooled all the way until college. Ethan (24) recently graduated and got married to a wonderful girl Katie. Elliot (22) is thinking through his options and will be down under to do creative writing before the year is up.

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14 March 2014

How we started homeschooling

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool.

I received an email asking how to start homeschooling now that they’re close to a decision. Instead of a point-by-point reply, I thought it best to share how our family started to homeschool.

IT STARTED WITH A LETTER from my sister-in-law who wrote about homeschooling her then 9 year old daughter. My brother was completing his Master’s in the US and his family would be heading home to Penang soon; is education compulsory, she asked, and are there laws in Malaysia that forbid educating one’s own children at home?

Why would anyone want to be their own children’s teacher?
This is so strange, we thought to ourselves. Why would anyone want to keep their child away from school? Who would have imagined that in a few years we would abandon conventional schooling and leap into that happy unknown called homeschool!

By divine circumstance, much of what we wanted to know about being our children’s educators came together in one extended serendipitous period.

Our boys were 4 and 2 years then. My wife Sook Ching attended a workshop on homeschooling conducted by an American couple; I found a book by Gregg Harris that made a compelling case against an education system that had more in common with the military and the factory floor. More damning was his take on the casualties of that broken public institution called school. We were sold!

It didn’t take a lot to convince us of the benefits of homeschooling. After all, the messy  reality of schooling in Malaysia was common knowledge. The effects of an education system suffused with the toxic mix of race and religion was the subject of incessant rants in the media. Besides, every one we knew had a horror story of their own about incompetent teachers and dumbed-down curricula.

You never have all the answers
Did we feel sufficiently confident or equipped to teach our children at home? Would we be able to survive on one spouse’s salary and endure the long haul of homeschooling? Should we be worried about legal implications, if any?

In retrospect, we did not have all our questions answered. We only knew what was at stake: what would our children be like after 12 years of schooling (or as we saw it, indoctrination) under a flawed education system?

Sure, there were initial fears and the usual queries about oh, fractal equations (what if we’re idiots at math?) and science labs (so do we need to get an electron microscope?). But we knew in our hearts that the call to parent and raise our children to be all that God wanted them to be far outweighed our natural instinct to take the easy way out.

At some point a line was crossed. We stopped vacillating.  What now? Putting away the what-ifs and maybes and with a heart full of prayer, the grand experiment known as homeschooling began for our boys.

Next: Starting out, digging in

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David and Sook Ching Tan have two adult sons who were homeschooled all the way until college. Ethan (24) recently graduated and got married to a wonderful girl Katie. Elliot (22) is thinking through his options and will be down under to do creative writing before the year is up.

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11 January 2014

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO HOMESCHOOL

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool; Values.

ALL YOU NEED TO HOMESCHOOL IS LOVE
By David Tan

[I shall be sharing a series of posts on essentials for homeschool. Here’s the first.]

WHEN WE FIRST BEGAN HOMESCHOOLING our two boys, many parents asked my wife Sook Ching if there were  requirements to teaching their own children at home. Did they need certain qualifications? Did they need a college degree to teach or have some teaching experience to begin with? What if a parent was not a good student herself back when she was younger? Is it alright to homeschool despite objections from a spouse (usually the children’s Dad)? Is there a special course to prepare parents to educate their own children at home? Wouldn’t a mother feel bored and trapped at home 24/7 if she homeschooled?

There are any number of concerns, most of which are commonly raised by all level-headed parents – usually the Mom (because she knows she’s going to be the main tutor and facilitator!). I think it’s fine to be asking these questions. I know the feeling: how exciting to break out of the school ‘prison’ paradigm; yet how frightening the thought that my kid’s future is in my hand. What if I threw in the towel midstream when the going got rough?

I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t think there are neat textbook answers for every situation anyway. We are different after all. Nevertheless, I believe the one thing that is essential for every parent is love for their children.

A couple of parents have shared that they “can’t stand children” but they are exploring homeschool anyway as an option to the present education system. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but the truth is, you can’t teach your children if you don’t love them enough to bear with them! Not the kind of love that comes out in treacly sweet endearments every now and then, or spoils them rotten with an abundance of things. The love that I am referring to is the sort that is as deep and as it is wide.

Love is acknowledging a child’s worth and potential. It is believing in them and appreciating their aspirations as well as their fears. Loving a child is embracing her for who she is – including her foibles, weaknesses, and limitations. The loving parent is there to pick a child up when she falls and quick to celebrate when she does well. It is giving them the necessary space to grow as they are nurtured to become the person God intends them to be.

In the course of your homeschooling journey, there will be bumps in the road (I’ve not met a homeschooling family that has it easy!) Sometimes you will feel like tearing your hair out as a hundred voices echo, “I told you so, homeschool is not for you.” Oh, the joys of DIY education! Hopefully those moments will be few and far in between.

But you don’t give in or give up in despair precisely because you love your children – in the same way that spouses don’t give up on their relationship. We homeschooled because we believed there was more to life than what the establishment was trying to sell us; we were convinced there was a better way to raise a family and give our boys an education. More importantly, we educated our children ourselves because we loved them enough to spare them the effects of what we thought was a broken education system. You could say love overcame fear. So we kept at it through good and hard times, because we knew nothing good ever came easy.

You’ll agree with me that love is what makes any enterprise worthwhile. Now that we have come to the close of our own homeschooling journey, I believe love is also the one thing that makes homeschooling possible.

Have a great year!

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David & Sook Ching educated their 2 sons all the way at home until they were both 18 years old. Their oldest Ethan recently graduated summa cum laude with degrees in Political Science and English from Hardin Simmons University, Texas. Elliot their second son completed his foundation year in Mass Communications in KDU and is selecting a major (other than mass comm) when he goes back to Australia later this year.

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21 August 2013

Homeschooling in the US: the future is on our side

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Homeschool.

Here’s another interesting infographic on homeschooling in the US. Thanks, Katherine Rose.

As you can see, public schooling is a recent phenomenon. Apparently it was Thomas Jefferson who argued in favour of an educational system after the American Revolution. It also appears that Martin Luther, the German reformer came up with the idea in the sixteenth century. In 1524, Luther  wrote a letter “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools”  to teach reading and writing so common folk could read the Bible in their own language.

Hmm. To think that today, people with religious convictions (among whom are Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist families) are leaving traditional public schools to homeschool in order to nurture faith!

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

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11 July 2013

A vibrant homeschooling explosion in Malaysia

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Alternative education; Homeschool.

LEARNING BEYOND SCHOOLING‘s Chong Wai Leng has an excellent overview of homeschooling in Malaysia published on the HSLDA site. This is just an excerpt. Read the whole article on the site by clicking here. Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) is a US-based nonprofit organization established in 1983 to defend and advance the right of parents to direct their children’s education.
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WHEN PRIMARY SCHOOLING WAS MADE COMPULSORY IN 2001, whereby children aged 7–12 are required to be sent to school, there was a small number of parents who chose to homeschool their children, including our family. Together with one of the pioneering homeschoolers in this country, we went to see the education minister. The Minister was pleasantly surprised that homeschooling was practised in Malaysia. He was very supportive and emphasized only one thing: do not forget Bahasa Malaysia! (The Malay language). There was no mention of having to apply for exemption then. However, with the subsequent changes of ministers in the education ministry came various changes in the requirements of homeschooling. Homeschooling became a privilege, and no longer a right.

However, in spite of the changes, homeschooling is NOT illegal in Malaysia. This has been reiterated by the Ministry of Education every time this question pops up in the media. However, parents who wish to homeschool are required to apply for school exemption from the ministry. Those who received an exemption would invariably be those children with special needs, or children who are medically unfit to attend school. However, parents of these children are finding it increasingly difficult to get an exemption because the education ministry now says that they have schools for special needs children. But the quality and professionalism in handling special needs children in public schools is highly questionable, and parents are less than inclined to put their children in these types of situations.

Some parents decided to embark on homeschooling anyway.

Homeschooling is seen as a viable alternative

So homeschooling is still a viable alternative amongst families who want to opt out of conventional schooling or special schools. Today, there are many young and highly educated parents who are attracted to this way of learning for their children, as they believe in the personalization and customization of education for their children.

Homeschooling in Malaysia today takes a variety of approaches The approaches are as varied as the reasons to homeschool. On one end of the spectrum, there are those who have adopted complete curriculum and syllabi from overseas. On the other end of the spectrum are unschoolers, totally child-led and free. In between, many parents adopt a more flexible or a mix-and-match approach considering that there is so much information available on the internet today—including free and complete curriculum packages.

In recent years, we have seen a rise in the number of learning centers, who call themselves “homeschooling centers.” Many are initiated and run by Christian churches or supported by them. Although they call themselves “homeschooling” centers, in practice, they are run like small “private” schools where children as young as 7 are “sent” there and parental involvement is minimal, if any.

Please go to HSLDA site to read the whole article.