Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

It's not exactly a revelation of stunning originality to point out that if you're the parent of a child who basically doesn't fit the school system's age-grade lockstep plan, it can be challenging to fit an education to your child. There's no sense in trying to fit your child to the education that's available.

On that note, really, thank God for distance education. BYU, the University of Indiana, Stanford University's EPGY program, and a host of others provide distance education options for university classes, of course, but what some folks might not know is that they also have classes at the high school and middle school levels as well -- and best of all, they're accredited, which means that if you're a homeschooling parent whose child may (at some point) want to attend high school in the future, she or he won't have to sit through Freshman English again if they've passed their distance ed. coursework in that area.

Best of all, for parents of gifted or profoundly gifted children, none of these programs gives a rat's caboose about the child's age.

This is really a miracle when you think about it, given the fact that basically no school system would even consider the kind of radical acceleration some gifted kids genuinely require. I'm not talking about one or two grades: that's relatively easy and it happens (usually with politely pitched battles between parents and administrators) from time to time. Instead, I'm talking about six or seven grades, and that ain't gonna happen in public school, no how, no way. Pleasantly enough by contrast, when we registered at Distance Ed for freshman English and gave the date of birth, the person registering didn't so much as blink (or appear to blink; this was on the phone). It was no longer the Dreaded Birthdate of Doom.

Interestingly, the Distance Ed. course uses the same textbook as I'm supposed to be using for a class I'm teaching at Techno High School in the fall, I was amused to see. The teacher assigns a boatload more writing than I assign...I'm thinking of doing the same and seeing if I can get away with it. Anyway.

I find myself wondering what people did before the invention of the Internet and the popularity of homeschooling. I have a feeling that most of them probably did nothing -- not because they didn't want to do nothing, but because there was a dearth of options. I'm fairly sure that a parent whose kid needed radical acceleration -- especially in a "fuzzy logic" area like English -- was probably given the usual host of excuses: "Well, Billy can read very well, and yes, he's read Romeo and Juliet before, but he's never read it with me. I'm sure he's going to get a lot out of the class," or "Elizabeth seems to have a good grasp of the material, but her organizational skills and handwriting really need work, so I think we'll keep her where she is right now."

And, though some parents fought the system, most probably figured out it was a losing battle and told their kid, in whatever way they told them, that they'd basically have to put up with it, that this was the fate of being an academically able kid in a system that essentially doesn't want or care about the academically able: sitting in class, making no waves, and just enduring it until it passes, like labor pains.

Thank God those aren't the only options now.

Yeah, there are some down sides to distance ed for gifted kids, to be sure. One of the most unanticipated (okay, unanticipated by me...) issues was one of worldly experience. For instance, one Distance Ed prompt for an English journal assignment asked the student to explain about a time when they'd felt betrayed by a friend. Depending on the child's age, that simply may never have happened. As a result, the child will basically have to a) draw upon vicarious experience gleaned from reading, or b) use her or his imagination. The other down side is that, like most distance education, the parent has to do the bulk of the actual teaching. The distance ed. people provide you the "bones"; that is, the textbook, the assignments, the course goals, and some skeletal explanations, but for the most part, the discussion of the actual material, that give-and-take of initial understanding, clarification, examples, elaboration -- that job is left up to the parent. That's not much different from homeschooling itself (and it's actually less work than homeschooling overall), but the parent needs to know about the subject matter in decent enough depth so that they can work with the material.

Overall, it's a good deal.