A Shocking Proposal
“Mom. Dad. I just want more time to chill and play Xbox.”
This was my 15-year-old son’s argument for why he wanted to homeschool in his second semester of 10th grade. Those who have heard me give a rant about the dangers of screen-time for teenagers will be shocked to hear that we wholeheartedly agreed with him. Why? Let me give you the whole context.
You see, my son has devoted his teenage years to his obsession with baseball — watching, umpiring, and playing at the highest level possible in our city, which requires a huge time commitment. His typical routine is:
- Get up
- Go to school
- Rush home so he can gear up
- Have a first dinner
- Go to practice
- Come home
- Have second dinner
- Shower
- Hit the pillow exhausted so he can do it all the next day.
All of those weekdays spent preparing are in order to be ready for playing a double-header on both Saturday and Sunday, likely in Vancouver which is a four-hour drive away. Off-days are often spent umpiring, mentoring younger umpires, and throwing batting-practice for his younger brother who is trying to follow in his footsteps as a AAA ball player in his own right. And oh yeah, we are supposed to do homework somewhere in all that too. I’m exhausted just writing that.
So this is the context within which my son proposed to us that he homeschool this semester. “If I homeschool, I’m pretty sure that I can get all my schoolwork done in the morning, have a few hours to myself to chill and play some Xbox or go for a bike ride, and then do all my baseball practices and workouts in the evenings.” He made a pretty compelling case! Given that, first of all, we had homeschooled all five of our children during the pandemic so he knew what he was getting into, and given that my wife, Chelsea, and I have both worked in online education supporting homeschoolers for the past two decades, we weren’t going to argue much with him on this one. So we helped him register with Chelsea’s school and he was off to the races.
A Surprising Result
Now given that intro, you might think that this is an article about the benefits of homeschooling for athletes, and while I think that’s a great take, that’s already been written about here or there, and about way more successful athletes. So while my son’s more flexible schedule has been of great benefit, this article is not about that. Rather, it is about a surprising by-product that this switch to homeschooling has resulted in — something none of us, including my son, expected: His grades are better. He’s actually doing more rigorous and difficult work than he would have done at school and doing better at it. That’s right, not only does he have a better balanced routine and more downtime, his grades have gone (as his favorite artist might say) up.
So why is he doing better? In order to answer that, I need to talk about his older sister. I have previously shared some of the ups and downs of her story, but this semester has been particularly hard. She is currently taking a course called “Pre-Calculus 12” which is quite difficult (though not as difficult as the usual Pre-Calculus course in the United States). She, like her brother, has the very busy schedule of a high-performance athlete. She dances competitively and some weekends has to travel for competitions. However, unlike her brother, she had no desire to homeschool and wants to remain at her local public high school. Both students have high expectations for themselves, and both have similar aptitudes for math. In fact, it probably comes more naturally to my daughter.
So now let me tell you two completely accurate stories about each of their experiences in math class that both occurred in the last few months. While these are stories about my children, I think you will find value in them, because I believe they are both representative of typical students in each scenario.
The Tyranny of “Staying on Schedule”
My daughter had her biggest dance competition of the year, and it’s a big affair: chartered bus, fancy hotel, giant trophies, the whole works. She left with her team on a Thursday and got back on a Monday afternoon. That’s three days of school missed. I was going to drive to the coast a day later to meet her there and watch her, and she had some hopes of doing some math practice in between shows. However, due to an unfortunate shattered sunroof glass shower at 60 mph, I didn’t make it for the whole weekend, and she lost that free tutoring session from dad on the weekend. Now the plot thickens, due to the fact that the lost practice was really crucial, as there was a trigonometry test scheduled on the Wednesday that she got back. Because my daughter is in a traditional campus school, the test day is the test day, and though she did her best to prepare, she wasn’t happy with her mark on that unit.
The most frustrating thing for everyone in this situation is the fact that she totally had the potential to crush this test. She just needed a tiny bit more time. Another day or two of practice and she would have been “cooking up” on that trig unit, as the kids say these days. I know this to be the case because she did much better on the second trig unit, which builds on the concepts learned in the first unit. She got the math! Really, really well in fact!
A Flexible Alternative
Let’s turn back to my homeschooled son. When he received his teacher’s feedback on his mastery assignment in the first unit of his 10th-grade math course, it was clear to him that he just wasn’t “getting it.” Based on the schedule we had worked out together, he was supposed to take the test the next day. He was on the verge of tears as he explained to me that he was really nervous. This was a very similar situation to what his sister found herself in with her trig test. But there was a big difference in this case.
“Don’t do the test yet!” was the advice I gave. “Let’s take a few extra days to study, do way more practice, and then you can lock in and take the test when you are ready.”
“Wait, I can do that?” was his response.
Absolutely. This is the beauty of self-paced learning. Neither of my kids were ready for the test, but one had the option to wait, while the other didn’t. In traditional school, the show must go on, so my daughter couldn’t take the extra day that she needed to study, but my son could.
Beyond that, my son was also able to create the ideal situation for taking his test. By that I mean he can take his tests in the late morning when he feels the most awake and has the best test-taking energy levels. In addition, he works out his schedule so that if he is taking a test, he doesn’t do any other schoolwork in any other classes that day. He will do a bit of last-minute review to boost his confidence, and then he will jump into his test. So, not only can he wait to take the test when he is ready, he can create the ideal circumstances for himself to do it.
So, what was the result? My son scored 100% on that first test. He aced it! He took the time to put in the extra work to ensure he had mastered the concepts, and it paid off. This resulted in momentum for him in the rest of the course, because he now believed he could be successful. He knew what level of effort it took to gain mastery. That confidence created compounding results, because as he has progressed through the course, there are none of those pesky conceptual gaps appearing, and he has gone on to be very successful on subsequent units as well.
Easier… and Harder?
I have had some funny conversations with my son as we have checked in periodically about his virtual school journey. “Are you happy with your choice to leave the classroom and do school at home?” is something I ask regularly.
“Absolutely,” is the usual response. “It’s just… easier.”
This idea of it being easier always intrigues me because when I dig into what he means, he’s not describing that the content is easier. But he is describing that the process is easier. Mainly he is just always amazed that he can actually spend enough time on his math to succeed, slow down and speed up when he wants, but also spend so much less time on his work.
Paradoxically, we discussed that what he is doing is actually academically more difficult than what happens in the classroom. Specifically, the curriculum he does in his online course is the curriculum. It doesn’t change or get easier based on what the class covers. In every experience he has had in school, which is replicated with his older sister’s experience, the teachers find that they have to cut content, drop units, and make things easier to help the class make it through the course. There are no such adaptations in the online course. Every learning standard is covered, and my son has to do it all. Still, because of the advantages of learning online, he is finding more success than he had in the classroom.
Not only is my son doing better in math, he’s doing it in a more academically rigorous environment.
A Tale of Two Siblings
So, if mastery learning in an online school environment is that amazing, why don’t we do it with all of our kids? Wouldn’t our daughter benefit just the same from getting to self-pace and set up ideal situations? Interesting that you ask, because we have brought this up with our daughter specifically, and she agrees! She likely would do better in her math class if she was doing school at home and could have all the benefits of the flexibility that it offers. So why doesn’t she? Well, it turns out there is more to life than math. (I know! I know! Quite the admission coming from a math teacher such as myself!) For my daughter, she has acquaintances at dance, but her best friends are at school, and she loves the opportunity to be in that environment. For my son, his best friends are at baseball, and his acquaintances are at school, so it doesn’t hurt as much to give that up.
Also, for him, it was never about doing better. That has just been a nice little surprising by-product of this decision. For him it was about having some time between school and baseball to play some video games … which of course ended up somehow all coming back to his baseball obsession.
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