The High School Years

  The high school years are the years that most homeschooling parents dread.  Many just give up and put their teens into school, even if it is just an online school, because they feel very intimidated.  There really is no reason for this.  

Ages 14-16 are what I would call the rhetoric stage of learning.  These are the years when students take the material they have previously learned and begin to form their own worldview, thoughts, and opinions.  These are the years in which parents must be careful to prepare their students for adulthood, possibly including college.  The difficulty we have in our culture is that we don’t really know what that means.  I’m not sure I do, but I’ll give you a few thoughts anyway.

First, students need to own their own faith.  They cannot ride your coattails into heaven.  Help them to articulate what they believe and why they believe it.  You can help this by making sure they are studying the Word each day and studying well, making sure they understand prayer and have a rich prayer life, and making sure they are tithing and are active in the church.  You can also help them by assigning books to encourage their faith and broaden their understanding and also giving writing assignments that help them think through the questions of faith.

Second, students must learn that they are not the center of the universe and that, yes, they must grow up.  Many teens today have been told so often that they should enjoy their childhood that they enjoy that childhood for the rest of their lives.  Teens need to be given more and more responsibility over their own lives.  Unfortunately, we focus too much on allowing them the privileges of adulthood before the responsibilities, which is totally backwards.  Having a job, paying their own way, cleaning up after themselves, preparing meals for the family, doing laundry, etc. are all great ways to help them learn this responsibility.  For academics, taking responsibility for their own learning is also important.  They need to no longer be spoon fed information and then just expected to regurgitate it back to you.  That is elementary school thinking.  Teens need to be writing and thinking and exploring the consequences of ideas and actions.  If you, as a parent/teacher, are still spending the whole day teaching your teen each lesson and making sure they are covering everything, may I ask you why?  Does someone still teach you every lesson you need to learn without you having to look for the information?  No.  As adults (and even college students to a large extent), we have to hunt down the information we need and work through it.  Our teens need to learn how to do this and the high school years are a great time for this training.  We need to be weaning them off needing us.  That is sad for us, but it is how they will learn to be adults.  Will they still need us and come to us for the rest of their lives?  Hopefully.  But they need to be able to function without us before they leave home

Third, students need to learn life skills like time management, budgeting, and how to take care of their own home, etc.  These lessons can be built into your academics.  For example, I give my high schoolers longer and longer assignment sheets until their senior year when they get one for the whole year.  (Right now, my 10th grader gets 6 weeks of assignments at a time.)  They then have to break the assignment sheet down to weeks and days to decide what to do when.  This is a valuable  lesson and one not learned in a typical high school.  When a bell tells you where to be when and what you are going to do for the next hour, you aren’t making any decisions.  When a students starts out in the work force, there are plenty of jobs that won’t tell you what to do each hour of the day, so they need to be able to plan their days and break large projects down into bite sized pieces.  Budgeting is something that should be part of a personal finance class as well as being reviewed each time your teen gets a pay check.  If you pay for everything for them, they most likely have too much disposable income and that can get them into bad habits.  Keep in mind that they will not be able to live at the economic level you live when they first start out and help them to budget and live within their means from the beginning.  

For high school curriculum, make sure you are tailoring things to your students’ needs while encouraging them to have a broad education.  You can look at prospective jobs and colleges to see what is needed and go from there.  Remember that, at this age, you really don’t need a lot of curriculum, just continue with good living books in all subjects (either purchased or from the library).  Just because your student needs an American History credit, for example, doesn’t mean he/she needs an American History textbook.  There are a lot of great books about history, including wonderful biographies, that can be part of working toward that credit.  Also, have your students check their own work and then correct it, especially in subjects like math and science where they are doing calculations that are easily checked.  If your student wants to learn something that you don’t know anything about, then encourage him/her to find a way to learn about it without you or, after they have done that, join them and learn something new, yourself.  This year, I have learned a lot simply by reading the books I want to assign my daughter next school year.  Remember, you are slowly moving the responsibility for their learning onto their shoulders.  Learn together.  Facilitate.  But move away from spoon feeding.

A word about college and transcripts.  There are lots of resources online to help you make a transcript.  Make sure you include enough detail that the college can understand what has been covered.  Also, remember that you don’t have to assign grades.  You can have a transcript that says something like, “All courses taught to mastery, which is a grade of A” to show that you have your student continue working until he/she has gotten it.  More and more colleges are taking homeschoolers, so don’t sweat it.  Also, if you can work it so that your student can dual enroll for at least his/her senior year, that will help college entrance as well.  I’ve seen several schools that tell you that you are a transfer student (rather than a traditional high school student) if you come to their school with more than 15 hours of dual credit.  Dual enrollment is also a lot cheaper than full tuition.  Be patient and work with your student as he/she makes all these decisions for his/her future.  

The biggest thing I will tell you about high school is to pray, not to worry.  Remember, if God has called you to homeschool, then He will make you able to do it.  There is so much more I could say, especially since I am in this season right now with my youngest, but I’ll leave more to other posts.