Take a look at Melissa’s Idea Garden for some great posts on homeschooling and a little encouragement for Mother’s Day.
I think the educational bureaucracy in Tennessee has gone just a little over the edge recently. It apparently does not like church related schools very much, even if these represent one of the ways to homeschool a child outlined in Tennessee law. From the Tennessee Home Education Association (emphasis mine):
Cindy Benefield with the Department of Education told a graduate from a church related school, “Your diploma is not worth the paper it is written on.” He has to have a high school diploma to be able to work in his current profession. (You won’t believe the courage and heartbreak I must tell you about below.)
Later the department did offer that he could take the GED and they would accept that. What that means is this The DOE will accept making a 70 on a 6th grade level test, but they flatly reject a high school diploma given by a church related school. (They also rejected a Police Officer who after receiving his diploma, graduated from the Police academy with a 4.0 and are setting suspects free, because the arresting officer, a CRS graduate, had to be administratively demoted and cannot appear in court to be a witness in his cases.) TNHomeEd.com
Apparently, this goes back to a rule passed back in 1992 invalidating diplomas issued by church related schools designated as Category IV who neither have nor desire state accreditation. And it does not matter what you have accomplished after this diploma…ACT, SAT, Police Academy or college degree…if your high school diploma is not from an accredited institution, it is worthless. In a meeting with the state commissioner on April 29, the only remedy he saw was for the legislature to pass a law specifically allowing these diplomas to be recognized.
So it was drafted. And the Department of Education slipped in an amendment of its own, making it clear that they are not merely doing what the law requires but are actively seeking to gain more control of church related schools (emphasis mine):
Notwithstanding any provision of law to the contrary, a student who has a diploma awarded by § 49-50-801 or §49-6-3050 shall be considered by all departments, agencies or entities of state government as possessing a valid high school diploma as long as all entities issuing diplomas pursuant to the above statutes require and document that all teachers conducting classes in kindergarten through grade either (K-8) hold a valid high school diploma or GED and all teachers conducting classes in grades nine through twelve (9-12) hold at least a baccalaureate degree awarded by a college or university accredited by an accrediting agency or association recognized by the state board of education. This section shall not apply to state lottery proceeds as provided title 49, chapter 4, part 9…
And compare that to the way the law currently reads:
The state board of education and local boards of education are prohibited from regulating the selection of faculty or textbooks or the establishment of a curriculum in church-related schools. Tennesse.gov
But they just can’t leave it alone. They asked for a law allowing them to accept these diplomas and used it as another means of obtaining control.
Fortunately, Tennessee homeschoolers seem to have a couple of friends in the legislature.
5/5/08: The legislation passed in the House Education Committee with the amendment proposed by Rep. Mike Bell (R-Riceville) and Rep. Dennis Ferguson (D-Midtown). The DOE Amendment never came into play. It now goes to the full House for a vote. It must also pass through the Senate. Stay tuned for information of when it will be heard next. More details on the days events to follow. I highly recommend Rob Shearer’s overview in the meantime. TNHomeEd.com
(The amendment which passed requires the state to recognize Category IV diplomas.)
Legislation is messy business, and you have to watch that Board of Education like a hawk.
More detailed information at Contending With the Culture.
Update: Just found this. That is some mighty fine English, Mr. Legislator. I think it might not sound as bad with a thick Tennessee accent, though.
The Thirst for Freedom posted a nice entry regarding my post about researching homeschooling which received an interesting comment from Casper about homeschoolers and testing. With the accountability craze in the public schools right now, it is unlikely this is a concern that is going to go away any time soon and with the resolution put forth by one of our state senators to look into ways to bring more oversight to Nebraska homeschoolers, it is very likely to be quite relevant to us here in the near future.
I have gone into the testing issue a few times and my objections really rest on the fact that in a free society, private citizens are not accountable to the state. The state needs probable cause to search my home for evidence of illegal activity and the same should hold true for the mental capacities of my children. It is a philosophical objection based in my understanding of individual rights and of what it means to have a limited government. In the interest of saving a little space, I’ll just point out two past posts which really go into this issue in more depth:
But there are other issues with standardized testing than individual liberties in a free society. First, we need to look at the purpose of standardized testing:
This is the real thrust of the accountability movement and is really an important function of standardized testing. I think this has gone to an unhealthy extreme in American education and I hope the pendulum will soon begin to swing the other direction. But the goal is a good one: provide parents with an independent measure to aid them in making educational decisions for their children. The point is similar to that made in the entries I linked above: in a free society, it is the state that is accountable to the people and it is we that maintain oversight of its functioning. I as a parent and as a taxpayer have a right to know what is being taught in the public schools and whether or not it is effective. I, however, am in no way accountable to the state or to the public for what I teach my children.
This is the real problem with testing homeschoolers. We are not bound to state standards and we do not necessarily purchase curriculum aligned to state standards. On the surface, it may seem that a child that can read should be able to pass a reading test or a child that has been taught math should be able to pass a math test, but this is not necessarily the case. Almost half of my first grade class flunked our first benchmark when I was teaching because the district tested using a test from a different publisher than the math program our school was using. When we threw out the problems that had not yet come up in our program, my kids excelled. Looking over one standardized math assessment, my daughter would struggle with the section on congruent shapes because we haven’t talked about them yet. And there are other issues. The test talks about “fact families” but this concept has another name in her math book. She may or may not be able to figure it out from the question and available answers, but who knows what she will decide a “family” is when applied to numbers. She can, however, add and subtract numbers to three places with regrouping, a skill which is not on the test. So if she did poorly on this test, would it mean we had “done nothing?” Or just that we are doing things differently than the state schools?
And there are other problems which come with high stakes testing in general, whether it is in the public school or the homeschool. This gets a bit technical, but standardized tests, even those which are “criterion referenced” are not designed to make sure that all students have mastered a certain proficiency level. They are designed to discriminate between high achievers and low achievers, meaning that a student could achieve a basic proficiency in the subject matter and still fail the test. A summary of how these standards-based tests are developed which demonstrates that the idea of “some basic quality control testing” is not as easy as it might at first appear:
During the construction of both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests, test makers use a pilot test to determine which items (test questions) will appear on the finished test administered to students on testing day. The survivor items are ones that possess the proper statistical profile: survivor items are those that “discriminate” between high-scoring and low-scoring students. In other words, test makers only want items that are answered correctly by high scoring students and answered incorrectly by low scoring students. Any items that are answered correctly by almost all students will be eliminated from the final test. Items that almost everyone answers correctly are considered “too easy for the target population” (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2005, p. 102). Such “easy” items provide little helpful psychometric information; in selecting test items, test-makers want to choose the items that will be most helpful in distinguishing among students of differing abilities. Validity of high-stakes standardized test requirements for homeschoolers: a psychometric analysis
I am reminded of a situation related in a professional development seminar I attended in Texas back when Bush was governor. Texas students had gotten a little too good at the story problems and were recognizing the “key words” to determine whether a story problem called for addition or subtraction. So the language of the test began to change, resulting in problems that I as an adult had to read twice to figure out what they wanted…for a third grade assessment!
It is not that I think standardized testing is “evil.” It is just that I recognize its limitations. I have no problems with parents testing their own children. Many do…and I have as well. But the scores should be for the parent’s information to guide instruction, not as a comparison to children in other educational settings and certainly not as a requirement to continue to homeschool.
And one more old post for those of you who just love reading about psychometric testing: Standardized Testing: An American Addiction.
Somewhere I missed the memo, but how does someone with such skilled (not!) introductions as this:
Home schooling is probably a really good idea for a lot of people, but only for a certain (unknown) percentage of people who actually do it. And, among those who do manage to home school, I would guess that the effectiveness of home schooling varies from pretty good to dismal because homeschoolers are doing it for the wrong reasons, in some cases for just plain bad reasons, and/or they really don’t know what they are doing. Greg Laden’s Blog
end up with so much attention from homeschool blogs? Since he follows up his rambling and unqualified opinion with an analogy I had to read three times to put all its disjointed parts back together, I shall also offer an analogy.
It is just like those little sores that develop in your mouth. No matter how annoying they are, and no matter how useless the endeavor, you just cannot leave them alone. And according to technorati, I am number eight to rub this little irritation. I stopped intentionally paying attention to him when he quoted Katie Criss. That was the point at which it was obvious that his filter for determining the quality of a source was pretty basic.
Anti-homeschooling = credible
Pro-homeschooling = not credible
There isn’t much I can contribute but an occasional jab in a conversation like that so I moved on. Although I will admit that I rather enjoyed taking on Criss’ “essay” in my eulogy to homeschooling. In fact, I think I’ll read it again because Greg’s post is having the same “how else can you respond” effect on me. Hey! I’m not alone in that reaction. Check out Alasandra’s parody. Nice. Now back to this post…the one I’m writing.
I originally picked this up from Marcy’s Musings’ entry which homes in on the irony of homeschoolers’ supposed lack of college preparation in light of just how well public school students are performing on this front. But mostly I got stuck on this part of her comment because I noticed that poor irritated tongue rubbing away at the inflammation.
(and in fact I believe that shows you’re making progress - I remember some months ago your being against almost all homeschooling) Marcy’s Musings
Why on earth do we know what Greg Laden thought about homeschooling some months ago? How do we know he is making positive progress in his developing opinion of homeschooling? He neither presents any new insights into the discussion nor presents any old insights in a particularly powerful way. It is more like finally getting an opportunity to let out everything you have ever wished you could say to strangers who confront you in the check out aisle. Except their questions are generally based in ignorance they have an excuse for. They only started thinking about homeschooling about fifteen seconds before they asked the question. The moment you revealed your family’s educational status was the dawn of a new thought.
It seems She’s Right recognizes this well.
I usually ignore them; I have more important things to do with my time than try to reason with a bunch of ignorant bigots with impenetrable prejudices.
This time, though, I would like to get a few things off my chest. She’s Right
Indeed we do have more important things to do. But like those annoying sores, we just keep going back. We even read the comments. And she covers the main points pretty well while getting those few things off her chest.
I really only wanted to cover one point. Because it made me smile. Greg concludes his post with something which is supposed to be self-explanatory. Which is good since he seems to have such a limited ability to explain things very well.
I’ve culled from about 20 sources to produce a set of commentaries … one could call it quote mining, or one could call it selective editing … to provide a sense of what part of the homeschoolers [sic] discourse looks like. I think this proves my point.
Ah…a sense of what the homeschoolers’ discourse looks like. I do think it proves a point rather well, but perhaps not his point. After all, if I were to seriously take up addressing this post, I would have to conclude with a smattering of quotes from homeschool critics to further illustrate the point. And Greg’s postings would take top honors.
His writing may not be quite as polished as Coombs and Shaffer, two professors emeriti at Cal Poly Pomona, but he obviously uses the same source material (random postings on the internet and his own imagination). He also does not speak with the same sense of misplaced authority as Robert Schiavone, a homeschooling coordinator in Florida, but seems to have the same trust that government knows better than parents how to educate a child. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think his writing is on par with the Daily Titan, being about as well researched and as intentionally inflammatory.
So what was your point again, Greg? That I’m not “doing my job” educating my children because you disagree with my motives? Or my flight plan? Or the way I discuss things on my blog? Or simply because you “would guess that the effectiveness of home schooling varies from pretty good to dismal…?” I’m not sure because you have not actually demonstrated the ability to construct an argument based on anything but your own assumptions and poorly executed analogies.
Update: More tests. An upper GI where she gets to do a barium swallow and have her small intestine X-rayed along with a DEXA (bone density scan) and another blood draw to determine whether or not she has an enzyme to process one of the medications the doctor is looking at prescribing that is effective with smaller children. The original treatment plan may be altered if this will work for her. The doctor is taking a closer look to rule out the possibility of Crohn’s Disease, a related but much worse disease. For those of you who missed it, I did discuss at more length what this all means on my other blog.
Well, I had intended on posting yesterday. I did not slink away into a cyber-hermitage after receiving my daughter’s diagnosis and actually had a post planned for last night. But not being able to log in to my account put a bit of a damper on my ability to post. For those who have not seen it and are curious, we do have a tentative diagnosis of ulcerative colitis.
I had planned on switching gears today and leaving behind our whaling unit to begin a bit of a study of the diagnosis, whatever it ended up being, to begin to help my daughter learn about the disease and begin to learn to manage it.
We got as far as the definition of “chronic” and it began to dawn on her that this was not going to just go away. That was about all she was emotionally able to handle today, so I read to her a little about how most people are healthy more often than they are sick and that a lot of the time she will not even have to think about the disease. And then we stopped for today.
This study isn’t going to be able to take place like other studies. It will be “here a little, there a little” as she works through her own anxiety of what the future holds.
And now hopefully I really will resume normal posting, barring the technical difficulties which seem to have overtaken this blog over the last couple of days.
Update: my brave little girl is currently drinking that disgusting stuff. Her facial expressions say enough, but she is willing herself through it. What a girl. Also, comments are working again! And my site is updated and working! Yeah!
The “Big Day” is finally almost here. And today is the day my daughter has been looking forward to, enough that she has not thought too much about her colonoscopy tomorrow. Because this is what her menu plan for today includes:
Nevermind that stuff she is going to have to start drinking soon. One whole liter of stuff I have been told feels like you are drinking oil, eight ounces at a time, spaced ten minutes apart.
I really hope she likes the orange flavoring. At least she enjoyed mixing it.
At any rate, I had intended on posting but I hadn’t intended on getting sick myself. I appear to be all better, but my time and energy and spare neurons are being used up thinking about tomorrow. She checks in at 11 and her procedure is at one. I should be able to post about what happened sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.
And then it kind of depends on what is discovered as to how with it I will be to post on much else.
I have been trying to contemplate this entry since I read it Thursday night: I’m so over homeschooling.
But may I ask why you feel the need to take the overachiever angle? Don’t you think you might be raising expectations a bit high as you step on our heads to reach the summit? Do you really think people like to hear about how brilliant you are? Don’t you know they snicker about you behind your back? ‘Oh, homeschooling is soooo superior. Homeschooling is in the gifted program. Homeschooling can spell onomatopoeia backwards!’ What about that time you told me it was okay if we didn’t have the times tables sealed up this year? You said everyone can go at their own pace, that was what was so great about you, you said. Reaching your own potential and all that bs. Were you mentally scratching us off of your go-to list for your Washington Post interview even as you soothed? You can’t have it both ways, Homeschool. You can’t be a friend of the working man and scratch the backs of the CEO’s all in one swoop. You are not Bill Clinton.
Kim’s thoughts are well-written and she makes an excellent point. But I am still trying to figure out whether or not I actually agree with what she has to say. Now, I have only been homeschooling for (almost) four years. I do not know what homeschooling was like in the days when people looked at you suspiciously for having your children out during school hours. I only know it personally in its current form…its current state of “popularity.”
What Kim describes reminds me of the little bit of Hegel I remember from college. I know Hegel’s dialectic did not actually use these terms, but this is how the philosophy was summarized in my philosophy class. So I’m sticking with it for the purposes of this post.
The thesis, for those of you who might be fuzzy on college philosophy, represents the main ideas of the time. Say the Educational Establishment. Its fundamental opposition is represented by the antithesis. Say a bunch of anti-institutional hippies. (I think Marx talked about the bourgeois and the proletariat or something, but they aren’t as interesting.) Out of the unavoidable conflict comes the synthesis, a sort of wedding of the two ideas. Like the corporations going green in Kim’s post. Or like the influence that the same philosophies directing the first wave of modern homeschoolers had on the public education system.
This synthesis becomes the new thesis. Perhaps, if we want to try to apply this philosophy to the history of the modern homeschooling movement further, we can then look at the Christian homeschooling movement. The ones who used to think that the hippies were a bunch of nuts and who were supportive of the public schools. Until certain philosophies began creeping into the curriculum. And they started to look like the antithesis.
So where does that leave us now? “Purists” may lament the direction things have gone. Rather than homeschooling being about individual families choosing a lifestyle, we have become a movement. A not-so-easily quantified special interest group with a powerful lobby. We are a force to be reckoned with in local elections where turnout is small.
Is that all bad? What did a small band of anti-institutionalists bring to American education? Popularity certainly comes with a price, but it brings with it something else that I think is important to not overlook. It brought with it choice. A real choice for many Americans. Not only do we have public schools and private schools, but now we have charter schools and magnet schools. We have virtual charters and other means of attaining an accredited education at home in many states. We have cottage schools and homeschool coops. And we have support groups across the nation. Even Ravenna, Nebraska with its 1300 citizens boasts a homeschool group.
When a family is dissatisfied with the education system, they no longer have to think “What else is there?” Nor do they have to break ground to create an option that did not already exist. Even parents who have no real philosophical objections to the public education system can homeschool simply because they like the family togetherness or they have a child who was struggling or just because they want to.
I do not think that is a bad thing.
And now, as we are feeling the pressure of the centralization of our education system, I think it is important to note that the system, too, is feeling the pressure of the success and popularity of homeschooling. How that will pan out, I do not know. Part of it, I suspect, will have to do with the increase in this public school at home option. And the ability to operate under an umbrella school. So long as that does nothing to interfere with the educational choices of those who choose to remain independent, I think those advances are beneficial. The more options, the better.
As we chip away at the establishment, however, I think that we have to keep the true goal in sight. We no longer have to “prove” ourselves. Some information is probably necessary, but the continual appeal to standardized test scores brings with it the inevitable question, “So why do you object to them?” The real goal is to value each child. Regardless of ability, talent, interest, etc. Every morning, my son digs out everything he has done so far for our whaling project and just looks at it. He asks me to read all the things he dictated to me. He tells me more things and asks me to write that, too. Isn’t that more what this whole thing is supposed to be about than a test score?
But then I wonder…can we effect the culture around us without being changed ourselves?
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And a treat for those of you who made it this far: a video. What’s not on the the test? Who cares? It’s not on the test.
Image credit: cropped from graphic available at The Calverton School.
Via Doc’s Sunrise Rants, I found Jack Lessenberry’s essay on Homeschooling. She does a rather good job of refuting just about everything he says, but I couldn’t help but focus on one part of the essay which seemed out of place.
Hillsdale College is about as conservative a liberal arts school as exists on the planet. But Hillsdale’s honors program director recently told the Detroit Free Press that the home schooled children he sees are typically badly deficient in science education. Jack Lessenberry
Indeed. Hillsdale College has opted to refuse all government funding, including students receiving federal aid so that it can maintain its independence from state control. A good deal of their students come from homeschools or private schools. And they even publish the Hillsdale Academy Reference Guide as a resource for teachers, parents and homeschoolers. I hardly think that they or their faculty would approve of greater oversight over homeschoolers for the sake of science.
Searching for more information, all I could turn up was a 2002 article on the Michigan Education Report making essentially the same argument.
Besides the threats and harassment home school families face, they also cope with criticisms of home schooling teaching practices. For example, David Stewart, director of Hillsdale College’s honors program, told the Detroit Free Press that home schooled children are typically deficient in science education. “I can generally count on them for having almost no science and virtually no lab science,” he notes. Michigan Education Report
I don’t call 2002 “recent” and since all I could find in all my searches was the repetition of this one sentence, I became even more suspicious. And did what the Michigan Education Report and Jack Lessenberry seemed unable to do. I contacted David Stewart to see if something has been left out. He responded in less than twelve hours, so I don’t think he is that difficult to get a hold of (emphasis mine).
Yes, there was more to my conversation with the Free Press than the single-sentence quotation. I am generally favorably-disposed towards home-schooling (indeed, two of my own children are currently home-schooled), and my 2002 comments to the reporter were positive. He was looking for balance, so I said something to the effect that if homeschoolers have a consistent weakness, it’s laboratory sciences: students are typically better prepared in math, history, English, etc. than in laboratory sciences. I also said that many parents recognize that deficiency and enroll their children in a local community college during the senior year of high school (which would be the short version of my advice to you as your children grow. The same solution also helps some parents with advanced foreign language studies.)
So, I asserted in 2002 that the Free Press reporter mis-quoted me and, more significantly, took my comments out of context. I also believe Lessenberry mis-represented his facts by stating I “recently” commented to the Free Press and failing to note that I have not been the Honors Program Director for several years.
His words sort of speak for themselves, don’t they? But there is more. Chris Bachelor, the Associate Vice President for Hillsdale College also responded, Also in less than twelve hours, to highlight his comment on the site. Edited: the email I received referred to “that blog site” and I thought it referred to Lessenberry’s article. It referred to Doc’s blog, however. Thanks, Rebecca!
It is no great surprise that when Mr. Lessenberry perceives a problem, he calls for increased government regulation as the solution. At Hillsdale College, we refuse all federal and state government support, and annually produce hundreds of high-quality graduates, approximately ten percent of whom were homeschooled prior to matriculating.
The Detroit Free Press article (which Mr. Lessenberry calls “recent”) quoting our honors program director was published over six years ago. It substantively misrepresented his sentiments then, and today, two of this gentleman’s children are being home-schooled. Mr. Lessenberry doesn’t mention that the article also quoted this professor as saying that homeschoolers have “typically done a lot more in English and history than other students come in with. They tend to be better writers.”
Rather than relying on one anecdotal comment taken out of context over six years ago, I asked our admissions office to compare last year’s ACT science scores of homeschooled students with their conventionally-educated counterparts. The homeschoolers averaged in the 85th percentile on the science portion of the test, scoring one point below the average of all admitted students. Their scores in non-science areas were generally superior to the conventionally schooled students, and by a much greater margin than the alleged “deficiency” that Mr. Lessenberry suggests would warrant an enormous intrusion into the lives of homeschooling families.
All in all, our experience is that homeschooling is not only more cost effective but can produce results comparable to or better than private, parochial or public schools. For those interested in academic studies, there is a vast amount of literature available to the public supporting this conclusion.
And Lessenberry’s comment to the objections is:
I sleep with a public school teacher, every night, and have for 31 years. I remain convinced that, if anything, I was too kind to the homeschoolers.
Where did he get his research skills from? As is typical, there is a little more to the story, yet no one seems to want to confront that.
The St. Augustine Record recently published a wonderful article highlighting all that is wrong with the way “authorities” think about homeschooling (all block quotes are from the article).
“Abuse is a huge question in our office. We can’t get a handle on it,” said [home education coordinator Robert Schiavone].
That would be the home education coordinator for the county, obviously. And speaking to the League of Women Voters. I don’t know why he was talking about homeschooling and abuse to the League of Women Voters, but that is another matter.
I’m sorry that he can’t get a handle on the fact that people really should be accused of something before suspicion is aroused, but I guess I should be used to this by now.
Addressing questions about child safety, Schiavone painted a picture of an increasingly popular system that grants enormous parental independence.
Correction: homeschooling is an “increasingly popular system that [recognizes] parental independence [from the state].” I am sorry, but rights are not granted, they are guaranteed. Our Constitution is not set up to give me rights but to be sure that officials in school districts like yours cannot trample on them simply because your office “cannot get a handle” on a problem you cannot even prove exists.
While allowing children to progress at rates that sometimes surpass those of regular students, it also cuts them off from the oversight of traditional schools.
It does no such thing. While teachers are rightfully asked to report child abuse if they suspect it, they do not have “oversight” over the parent-child relationship. Since the teacher is the agent of the state, this is a very warped view of the state’s role in the family.
“The family can move and our office doesn’t know where the child has gone,” said Schiavone who works for the St. Johns County School District.
Oh my. The state does not know my every move. And that is a problem? We need those CTA cards Chicago is getting for everyone! Maybe we can make it so you cannot get gas without one. After all, there are two whole days a week and three whole months a year where the publicly educated child is not graced with oversight by the state.
We try to find them, but it’s hard to tell. It has happened. We lose a child and don’t know where they are.
And you want me to entrust the care of my children to you when you are losing children? Oh…you mean you don’t have paperwork on someone else’s child…a child you are not responsible for keeping in your care. If the parent knows where their own child is, then I am not so concerned. I am not particularly impressed by the nanny state’s model of child raising.
Asked why authorities have not pressed legislators for more oversight, Schiavone said home school parents have an exceptionally strong lobby that wants to retain freedom.
Yeah. Those annoying homeschoolers who want freedom. Can’t they just get with the 21st century already? That is such an archaic concept. We hardly even bother to discuss it in school anymore.
Their privacy is protected by federal laws.
Maybe at this point you would think that either Mr. Schiavone (who comes up as Machiavelli on my spell-check suggestion…irrelevant but funny) or the reporter would realize that perhaps it is the school district which is out of line? If federal law and fundamental notions of liberty protect the homeschooler from your inquiries, perhaps it is your inquiry that is problematic.
But hey, on the upside, Schiavone says he has seen more successes than failures. And I know this is a typo, but I find it amusing:
If done well, kids can sour.
Just like they do in the public schools?
Christine, aka The Thinking Mother made a good point on my post looking at how our virtual lives affect our personal lives.
Discussing the affect on children and teens doing role playing games or regular video games is very different than discussing adults who were socialized before the big video game craze and before the Internet entered our lives.
She also made some interesting observations about how people today “socialize” digitally even while together with other people.
But then, I grew up in a somewhat digital household. Some of my earliest memories are of playing Pong with my dad on an old Atari. The first warning put out against video games actually occurred because of that game. After too many hours of play, the white paddles would burn into the television set, causing ghostly white lines to remain forever on the screen. And I loved going with him to his part time job fixing arcade games where he opened up the faces and showed me how to make the machine think I had inserted a quarter. I played for hours while he worked. Sometimes he brought his work home with him and I played more games of Centipede and Galaga than I could possibly count. I owned a copy of Pac-Man Fever and had the whole album memorized.
In fact, the first thing my husband and I had in common was something we received for Christmas long before we met:
And we both played it to death.
But the research initially discussed dealt with having people interacting through a digital avatar and measuring how people behaved based on the kind of avatar they used. And, like I mentioned then, the most disturbing thing to me was not that there were measurable changes in behavior off-line, but that the people did not even recognize the changes nor how they had been manipulated. What they saw was perceived as real.
For me, the difference is not so much in how I was raised as opposed to how the people in the experiment may have been raised. I do not project myself as anything other than what I am online. I am not trying to create an identity, and I am not assuming a previously conceived one, either as part of an experiment or as part of a role playing game.
I am who I am…but then again, I’m not. Thinking about my online identity and who I “really” am has forced me to think through a lot of issues that might not at first seem related, but it has acted as a catalyst for some thoughts on my faith, my political viewpoints and my personality. But mostly on my faith.
When I first discussed this issue with Renae of Life Nurturing Education via the Bible Principles Group’s weekly chat, I mentioned that the biggest thing I noticed was that I am not afraid of controversy online. In person? I am kind of quiet. Reserved. I watch for a long time before I will enter a discussion, even if the people I am listening to obviously agree with me. I am more measured, am more likely to qualify my opinions and couch them in phrases like, “well I believe” and “for me personally.”
But is that me really? Am I really that quiet and shy and reserved? My friends in high school and college would laugh to hear me say something like that. After all, I am the one who took on all twenty two of my classmates in a class debate about the whether President Wilson was one of the best or one of the worst presidents in history. I was alone in wanting to put him near the bottom. Someone in my biology class paid me to “just shut up already” and my biology teacher had an odd way of looking at me while passing back tests because I vociferously argued every missed question. I was on the speech team and favored discussion and debate. I actually competed at the state and national levels.
Shyness was not a fault with me. In fact, online I am very much like I was “back then.” Why did I change? Some of it is just maturity. In school, I liked controversy for the sake of controversy. It wasn’t so much about standing up for what I believed in. The only reason I carried a bible was because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t like I actually believed anything that was in it. But it was still conceivable that I would show up to class without a text book, but never would I be without my little bible tucked in my purse. As I noted in my Life Before Homeschooling post for Home Education Week, I loved the nonconformity of being a conservative in a liberal environment and I thrived on the adrenaline.
So yeah. I’ve grown up a little. But there is more to it than that.
When I became a Christian, I did not have very good bible teaching. I attended church sporadically because of my schedule. Fred Phelps was very active on my campus and cast everything remotely Christian in the shadow of his presence. The single most memorable event in college was trying to get to the student union during Gay Pride Week. He staged a protest and I had to walk the gauntlet between the two groups, bombarded with signs saying, “God hates f*gs” and so-called Christians screaming hateful things and trying to shout down the speakers for the event.
I was horrified, but did not know enough to realize that what these people were doing was not Christian. So I did not identify myself publicly as a Christian because to do so meant I was involved with that. Instead, I was silent.
As I grew in Christ, however, I continued to lack for decent teaching. Or I continued to be a poor student. Both are probably accurate. At any rate, I began conforming more to my own stereotypes of what it meant to be a Christian woman. Maybe it was the Mennonite in me. (My great grandmother was raised Amish and the church I came to Christ in was actually Mennonite.) But I looked to home and family and garden and tried to live out this nice little visage of Christianity. It didn’t work very well and I wasn’t feeling very fulfilled. In fact, I was getting rather nasty to be around because I felt like a caged animal continually pacing within the confines of the prison I had constructed for myself.
But the real issue lay a little deeper. I would look at women whose hand-quilted pillows sat perfectly arranged on the sofa they had upholstered themselves and think that is how I should be occupying my time. That is what a good Christian woman does…keeps house. Crochet. Knit. Quilt. Can. Garden. Restore 19th century furniture. She does things. Material things which have value and beauty in this world. I would spend a couple of hours in the evening writing either in a notebook or on some forum and at the end of it think, “What do I have to show for it?” I had simply wasted my time.
I am not sure exactly when it happened…sometime while I was researching the Principle Approach…but at some point, I realized why it was that I was so miserable. It wasn’t Christianity that had caged me, but my own presuppositions. And the fact that at some time I had picked up the idea that material pursuits were superior to intellectual pursuits, at least for a woman.
The problem is, I love reading and writing and discussing and debating. I do not have that kind of passion for material pursuits. I have nothing but respect for those who do. I recognize in some of their zeal the same passion I have for researching and for writing. They have a true gift and it is beautiful to see it find expression in what they create from their hands.
But as my garden limps along and my knitted baby blanket actually turned out to be a trapezoid, I have to recognize that God gave me some talents as well. To bury them and pursue some other endeavor because I so highly respect those who do it well is not what He has planned for me. I hadn’t been wasting my time. I just had not assessed a proper value to the activities I was engaged in.
I may have realized this online, but I still need to work on it a little in person: It is OK to have an opinion.
And for you retro types, have a hand at Ms. Pac Man. Since she brought my husband and I closer together and all.
Photo Credits:
Pong screen shot
Mini Ms. Pac Man game
National Forensic League Pin
Protester
Amish
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