Question about latest newsletter

Good questions. For those who might just be reading this post, in our latest e-mailing we talked about the four schooling methods that Charlotte warned against using. One of those methods was grades and competition.

If we don’t assign letter or number grades, how do we evaluate end-of-term exams for depth of mastery? I’m not required to keep portfolios or anything like that, but our anti-homeschooling grandparents would need something to ease their minds.

You’re right, you should evaluate end-of-term exams (and even immediate narrations) for depth of mastery. Now, keep in mind, that when I say evaluate, I don’t mean that you have to necessarily use a letter-grade system. We evaluate things all the time in life without using letter grades.

If, however, letter grades are needed for legal requirements or high school transcripts and such, you can assign a letter grade to a student’s work, but don’t tell the student. Charlotte’s main point was that students start to focus on the grade rather than on the knowledge itself. If they don’t know about their grade, they’ll stay focused on the knowledge.

I would hesitate to give an anti-homeschooling relative that private information, but I would think it would be appropriate to let them read some of the narrations or have a poetry recitation or something where they can see the actual work themselves.

Do any of you with anti-homeschooling relatives have other ideas of what you’ve done to ease their minds?

(By the way, we’ve received several similar questions, so I think we’ll talk more about this in our e-mail next week.)

I realize CM meant not to encourage competition for grades among siblings/peers, but is it OK if the child wants to participate in Bible Bee, Spelling Bee, Geography Bee, etc.?

I don’t recall reading about these things specifically in Charlotte’s writings. (If any of you have, please let us know. I would think that Spelling Bees were in use back then in schools.) So I think you would need to make your decision based on your goals and priorities for your children. A few evaluation questions that come to mind are

• Why does my child want to participate? Is that a good reason?
• What relations would this activity help my child to form? (And are those relations ones that I would desire for him or her?)
• What might this activity cost our family in terms of time, money, etc.?
• What benefits would this activity bring to my child and our family?
• What are the potential disadvantages of participating?
• What does my husband say about my child participating?
• What are the goals of this activity and do they fall in line with our goals for our child? For example, is speed a big factor or just mastery?

This is an awesome post! I love the evaluation questions Sonya wrote for deciding what ‘competitive’ things to allow involvement in. (Looking at the list, it seems so common sensical-I know, that’s probably not even a real word–so why doesn’t it come easy to me?! Oh well….

I struggle with the relative issue as well. And my initial reaction to the skeptics is –“LOOK AROUND YOU! What the previous generations have done has left us a legacy of handicaps that we must overcome. Let’s embrace reform, using God’s word as our guide instead of following the path of destruction that we (Americans) are on. ” But then that isn’t patient and loving, wooing them over the way Christ loved us. Or, is this a righteous anger I’m feeling?