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By Alicia Hoppit
I stood in the hallway, just before the door. I steeled myself, closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew what would come.
“Why are you on your iPod?”
“I’m not. I’m listening to music.”
“It’s not good to have headphones in all the time.”
“I need the music to help me concentrate on my work.”
“Were you playing games?” “No.”
It’s a stare off. My face has accusation, hope, resignation. His has guilt, fear, resentment.
I know he’s been playing games – Scratch, Mario, whatever the latest thing is. He struggles to get his work done at the best of times. He can’t concentrate; he needs the music to block out the distractions. The iPod really does help him work, but the easy access to games means the work takes longer, not just because of time wasted, but because the game plays over and over in his mind long after it has left the screen. So brilliant. So much potential. Is it being wasted? Am I letting him down? Do I take it from him? Force him to work? I know how that will go. The meltdown, the screaming, the broken relationship. “Why don’t you trust me?” Do I trust him? Do I leave it in his hands, and trust that he will sort it all out – eventually.
This scenario was a daily (multiple-times-a-day daily) occurrence with my eldest child whom I home educated from 10-14 years of age. Skip forward to him as a 19 year old, and he now admits to me that he spent a lot of time playing games whenever I wasn’t in the room. He knows it was wasted time. He regrets it, and wishes he had done things differently. But that doesn’t seem to translate to our current conversations about his time on Tumblr, Reddit and YouTube. He’s finished school, which he completed at the local select entry highschool — they didn’t fare any better with managing his distractions on technology — and he’s taking a gap year (which has turned into two). He’s working at a local cafe, and he wants to write. He’s still brilliant, and he will be an amazing writer. He is an amazing writer. I’m still tearing my hair out, worrying about wasted potential, wasted time, but also about his mental health. School was not a great experience. I’m surprised we made it through. The gap year is to help him recover. If I can make him eat and go for a walk, it’s a good day. What I really want is to see him fly. To see him soar. To see him experience the joy of doing what he loves and succeeding. But he seems determined to let technology steal that away from him.
In my home education, I have a love-hate relationship with technology. Actually I have a love- hate relationship with it in all areas of my life. My family takes a do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do- approach to dealing with technology and especially social media. My kids tend to point to me as exhibit A of how not to manage your social media time. “It’s okay, Mum’s just having a bit of time-out watching some show on Netflix and scrolling through Facebook at the same time” (that new Chapel Street ad on Facebook is a nasty mirror I refuse to acknowledge). It is so easy for technology to take over our lives, and suck out every moment of our day. I feel like every time I turn around the majority of the family is tucked away in a room somewhere staring at a screen. But apart from being a poor role model with social media, I am complicit in bringing seductive screens into the lives of my children.
Over the last eleven years of educating my five children, technology has been an incredible asset to our education journey. Early on we were introduced to a Charlotte Mason approach to education, and what a gift to find Amblesideonline.org that not only provided a year-by-year, subject-by-subject reading list, but even had links to free ebooks, which saved us a fortune. There were so many treasures I found there, treasures I might never have even dreamed of if not for the miracle of the internet. We also discovered lapbooks; the internet is full of them, free and paid covering all sorts of subjects.
These provided a fun and engaging way to cover subjects, and saved me hours of preparation time because people who had already done the hard work shared it with the world.
Later I found Homeschool Planet, which is an online planning program designed for homeschoolers. Using this program, I could create daily checklists and plans for all of my children, and they just logged into their account to check what needed to be done each day. Some publishers have even created daily checklists for their programs that you can add to your plan with a click of a button and a small fee. This helped me to juggle five different timetables, keep everyone on track and have a record for whenever a pesky review happened to come up.
And curriculum. Who doesn’t love curriculum? Maths has always been a bugbear for me, but I love it and I want my kids to love it too (finally ticking that off with number five). I also have a very high standard for what I think makes a good Maths program. Added to that, each child is different, so it wasn’t long before my shelves became full of different Maths programs we had tried. The beauty of technology is that the internet has brought a number of great programs to our door without the expense of delivery from America, with the added bonus of freeing up some space on my bookshelf (for more books of course). We have used Mathsonline, Khan Academy, Math Without Borders (now online), The Art of Problem Solving and Beast Academy, just to name a few. The other beauty of these programs is that they allow the kids to work independently, when need be, while tracking their progress for me to check on later. Plus, it’s portable. Like most home-ed families, we are always on the road going from one activity to another for different children. Having these programs on the computer has meant we can keep going with school work, without lugging a library with us everywhere we go.
However, the most significant thing that technology has done for our home educating family is to bring experts from around the world and across many fields right into our home. Having begun a Charlotte Mason type education, our journey has ended up taking us down a classicalesque pathway as we ventured into highschool. Somewhere along our travels we discovered Roman Roads Media and their program Old Western Culture. This is a four year study of history through the Great Books of Western Culture. I love books, I love the classics, and I love history. But there was no way that I had all the knowledge necessary to guide my children through all this on my own. Roman Roads took me by the hand and showed me the way, pointing out all the marvelous attractions along the road. People who have spent years studying and teaching these books lend you their expertise and open your eyes to a richness you may not have found on your own. All of this from the comfort of your own couch, streamed online.
I took all this one step further though. I knew that if we were on our own, we would get distracted and busy, and probably wouldn’t keep up with it all. So we decided to invite some other families to join us on our journey. Every week each student watches the lecture at home in their own time, and they do the reading if they can (some read it all, some just a bit, some not at all; it depends on how much time they have to invest), then we come together once a week to discuss the lecture and the reading. We try to help each other better understand the text, and discuss the ideas presented. We consider whether we agree or disagree, and delve into the impact they have had on our world today, and what it might all mean to us personally.
I have made use of other programs in similar ways. Some from Roman Roads like their Fitting Words on rhetoric, and their economics program. I’ve also used some writing programs from companies like Clear Water Press and their One Year Adventure Novel, Cover Story and Byline. We have also made use of Masterclass and learned about film scoring from Hans Zimmer, Screenwriting from Aaron Sorkin, and comedy from Steve Martin. Innovators Tribe taught two of my kids to Think Like an Engineer. All have brought a plethora of insight and learning to our homeschooling adventure. The world really is our oyster. And all at the touch of a button.
I also enjoy teaching writing classes, and have started my own small business The Berwick Tutor. In the context of these home ed ‘classes’, I would be lost without the use of technology. In my first year of teaching, students emailed through their work to me as Word documents. I edited them using track changes, and emailed them back. They checked the edits, did another draft and emailed that back to me. This continued until we had a final copy. Sometimes we ended up with four or five copies each, and it was often hard to keep track of everything. Then I discovered Google Drive. Now the first few weeks of classes with me can technically be called technology lessons as I help the students, or rather the parents, learn to navigate cloud computing. It can be overwhelming at first, but eventually it all comes together, and we have a system that runs smoothly for everyone throughout the year. Not only does this work nicely for me, but I am helping my children and my students (mostly home ed students) to gain skills that are essential in our digital age. Most schools and universities use online systems such as Moodle, so having worked through this with me helps them to feel confident navigating whatever systems they come across in their future. It is one less thing to come to grips with when they head out on their own.
Technology is a powerful tool that we have available to us as home educators, and it has been a blessing to our family. But it has also been a curse. For every positive use I have outlined above, there has been some negative kickback. Too much time on screens. Not enough time outside. Back problems, neck problems, eye problems. The use of Hangouts to connect with friends from home also means distractions that keep popping up when there is work to be done. Too much time typing, not enough time writing. The list goes on.
Oh, and don’t get me started on when technology lets you down. The WiFi dropping out just as class starts, or the way a certain streaming program always seems to momentarily pause like it has the hiccups for the first five minutes. Not that technology failures are limited to home ed. Ask me about the time the school lost my son on their “city experience”, when the app they were using stopped, and he had no GPS signal due to all the skyscrapers.
I often joke that I have worked hard to create a rigorous academic program for my children… and now they all want to go into the arts. All of my children are very creative in many areas. And they all make use of technology in pursuit of creative outlets. One of my middle sons wants to write musicals, and you will most commonly find him plugged into headphones surrounded by keyboards and midi players of various sorts, and a computer. He’s making magic. My daughter can often be found using Adobe Illustrator to create artworks or cards of encouragement for friends. My youngest is often scouring the internet for a picture of the latest Pokemon or super hero character that he would like to sketch. Another son is accessing new music scores online via a touch screen laptop that rests above the digital piano where the printed sheets would once have been. Tap, click, go. It’s all there.
And my eldest? Flash forward. I’m dropping him home to his share house. He’s moved out. He’s got a job. He’s started uni, doing what he loves, well nearly. He is doing so well, but still spends too much time playing games, mindlessly thumbing through Tumblr and reading Reddit threads.
I tell him about an idea I have for a story I want to write, but it will be set in WWII and involve lots of fight scenes. The rule is to write what you know, and I don’t know anything about this stuff, so what do I do? Sitting in the dark outside his house, my son proceeds to lay it all out for me. He explains how to turn it into a puzzle that needs to be solved, to focus on the emotion of the moment, the people. He unravels it all with brilliance and ease. His depth of knowledge is astounding. And the way he explains it all is engaging, riveting. He finishes with, “Thanks for coming to my TED talk”. We giggle. He gets up and heads inside.
I’m left overcome with emotion. Where did all that come from? How did he know all of that, and how is he able to explain it all so well? He is a great writer, and he is writing, a bit — I don’t know how much, because he won’t show me — but that’s not the whole answer. The answer, I’m afraid to admit, is all that “wasted” time on Tumblr and Reddit, and YouTube. He is surrounded by a community of people who share their knowledge through many mediums. They share their work and offer feedback. They encourage and push each other to new heights. He is getting an education many of us only dream of. He is learning to be a writer. He’s learning to fly. I’m confident he will soar.
I don’t have all the answers to the love-hate relationship we can have with technology, and I am not suggesting to just let it go, trusting that it will all work out. It might not. Every child is different. Every family is different. Some of my children have no problems managing their use of technology. It is a tool to be used. Sometimes they are on their screens a lot, and other times they aren’t anywhere near them. My youngest son, though, is a lot like my eldest. I do things very differently with my youngest having learned some important lessons from his brother. He has the same tendency toward obsessiveness with technology, so I have tried to lay what I hope will be a good foundation for him to navigate the years ahead. The problem is there are no experts to guide us. There just hasn’t been enough time yet. This is a journey we have to forge for ourselves, machetes in hand to hack our way through.
Otherways 162 (2019)