Engaging a high schooler

Hi Joanne! 🙂

When my kids reach this age, I give them a bit more autonomy concerning their education. We sit down, discuss their future plans and the necessary classes they will need to reach those goals.

I haven’t forced my older kids to listen to me read a loud. My son enjoyed read a louds through graduation. My daughter asked if we could skip them when she was about 13 or 14. We still did some tag team reading but no official read a loud time. She is now 15 and has asked to resume read a louds. I think she felt like they were babyish for a while but has grown to appreciate them again and this momma is glad because I missed reading a loud to her!

You mentioned that your son doesn’t want to read books on chemistry but is he using a science curriculum? If he is already using a science text, I would allow him to drop the extra science readings, but that’s just me. In my opinion, working through a high school level science textbook takes enough time without adding in living science books. My daughter loves astronomy and learning what she can about astrophysics in her free time and she reads lots of books on those topics as a result. However, I don’t require any science other than her Apologia textbook for school.

My son really didn’t like narration either at this age. It made him feel babyish. I required written narrations and had informal discussions with him about his readings but I no longer required formal narrations for every reading as I had when he was younger.

My daughter is 15 and still narrates every reading. Since we have discussed the value of narration, she is more than glad to narrate, knowing that it is helping her to process and retain the information she reads. Being a girl, she also just enjoys discussion more than my son did. While this is not true of all boys or girls, it has been true in much of my experience.

It sounds like your son is a lovely young man who enjoys learning and growing! How wonderful that he loves math and Dickens and history! That is not something that could be said for very many young men-especially the Dickens part!

I would sit down with him and discuss his goals and the things that he will need to do to reach those goals. Then you can discuss the various ways he can go about completing those requirements and give him some options so that he will feel that he has more say so in his education and how he spends his school days.

Blessings,

Melanie

I think kids can be so different in this! We set in front of our children the law requirements for our state. We have to fulfill the requirements of the law (and we don’t look at taking the GED early as an option. They aren’t mature enough to be on their own at 16 even if they could pass it, so we just don’t. They can choose to dual enroll in college in 11th/12th if they do the work – but again, look at what the requirements are and they quickly see that they’ll need to do more than just their favorite subject or two. 😉 We also look at schools they might want to attend based on their career ideas. My oldest, for example, refused all foreign language. However when she truly looked at all the colleges for the requirements because she plans to major in veterinary medicine she chose to do a foreign language. Every college had it listed as an expectation.

With that said – find where you can compromise. My current 16 year old loves reading literature but would rather have a straightforward science without extra reading – with hands on work. She’s volunteering at a vet office weekly. She’s doing math because she knows she needs to, not because she loves it.