Conventional patriarchal wisdom does not necessarily think about young women who are coming of age developing a “thick skin” to help them navigate the slings and arrows of life. Women are supposed instead to be soft, receptive and relational rather than “tough bitches”. But our daughter Emma learned to toughen up to survive a gauntlet of challenging female classmates, and that thicker skin facilitated her overcoming her shyness. Her experience recalled for me the cliques of girls in the movies “Mean Girls” and “Heathers”, and the very tough class of students known as the “Sweathogs” in the “Welcome Back Kotter” situation comedy of the late 1970s. When I discussed it with Emma recently, she said it was definitely the low point in a life that she has generally found blessed and wonderful.

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In 2003, after three years in a humanistic alternative public charter middle school, our daughter Emma decided to experience attending a large conventional public high school, with nearly 4000 students, for her ninth grade year. One day, early in the semester, one of the vice-principals was a “guest lecturer” for a couple hundred of the Ninth graders, including Emma, that were spending their PE period waiting because they had not yet been assigned to a specific physical education class. He welcomed them to the school and reminded them that their teachers deserved the students’ respect, but the students would have to earn their teachers’ respect. Emma was now duly welcomed and warned that she was now a participant in a large public institution for youth, where she would presumably have to behave and perform to gain the conditional respect of the adult staff of the school. (more…)

During my last two years of Junior High (Eighth and ninth grade) I was absent from school as much as a third of the time. Looking back I see it as a coping strategy for a school experience I was not comfortable with. In general I was just not comfortable in my skin at all, lacking self esteem, and my school experience did little to help me with that.

I had been mostly okay with my last couple years of elementary school, though I got through it by being more of a trained seal than a real learner. I particularly remember working my way through the color-coded SRA reading program, reading there level-rated prose pieces and taking the comprehension test after, before moving on the next piece and eventually up to the next color level. What I was reading was not particularly interesting to me, the whole point was to try to “level up” which had some self-esteem boost for me. (more…)

I want to start by acknowledging the first two people to post on and support my blog… Emily and Joan. Emily is a friend through Unitarian-Universalism, who has a son in middle school and reports that her son is having difficulties with that learning environment. Joan is a long–time activist for holistic and humanistic education and one of the people a few years back that inspired me to get more involved in the cause.

So Emily… as Joan indicated in her comment, she can speak with wisdom and experience as a holistic educator, working in profoundly alternative Waldorf schools. I have never been a formal educator, and my experience is all from the perspective of a parent and is in the area of homeschooling, particularly the more self-directed “unschooling” flavor of it.

Emily… your situation with your son recalls for me my own middle school years (we called it junior high back then), plus what I went through with my own kids, particularly my son. But before I say more about that I would like to recommend three resources for more information about homeschooling… (more…)