“Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the dark side. You have paid the price for your lack of vision.” – The Emperor, Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi
Poor Padawan Learner. All these years he’s never had to learn to take proper notes from a book, but all that has changed.
With his move into high school classes and his interest in taking a whopper of a class next year (with Biology and/or Chemistry AND Algebra II as pre-requisites), I’m weaning him off the mom-directed manner that used to define how we homeschooled – you know, back before we were unschoolers. (Cue the maniacal laughter for the strangeness of the path PL has taken over the years.)
In past years, I drew up a daily to-do list with everything broken up into little bite-sized morsels of reading, math, and etc. In addition, we previously only used conversational assessment since I find test-taking so limited in its scope. It was easy for PL since he didn’t have to put any thought into how things were going to get completed, and it was lovely for me because I’m an uber planner. Different times require different methods though. As he becomes independent as a student – even making his own lunch the night before school without being reminded – I’m scheduling weekly- and chapter-based readings for the science, history and health-related books that he’s using. That means I’ll still be breaking his math and formal writing topics into 2-3 day chunks, since they require so much participation on my part ahead of time, but he’ll be setting the pace (to an extent) for his independent reading.
What about the note-taking though? Well, part of his independent reading task is taking good, detailed notes from the chapters read. I want to emphasize that: good, detailed notes. Yes, I’m being a stickler on these notes because this skill will be the foundation for any out-of-the house classes he’s bound to take in the future. PL is not enjoying this at present, but I didn’t expect that he would. He hates writing, mostly from lack of practice I do believe. The conversational manner of his education up to this point has been fantastic for comprehension and rationalization skills, but it has done so at the expense of his writing skills. I wrote up some good, quality notes from the introduction of his Art History book to show him an example of what to aim for, and explained that I knew it would take some time for him to get to that point.
I’ve also included section review sheets for his Biology and Physical Science books and will include chapter quizzes, a mid-term test, and a final exam. This is a completely new arena for both of us, but is the reality for the educational setting that he has chosen for the sciences. It would be a disservice to exclude them this year just because I find them so distasteful and limited in scope. We’ll also use the corrected section review sheets as a study guide for chapter quizzes and the larger tests to come. Ah, the skills one learns while taking traditional classes. They will serve him well.
