Somewhere on Long Island, a 14-year-old boy named Eli is concluding his last day of 9th grade online-school-at-home. He has been successfully resisting doing the assignments he considers meaningless, and the hours in front of the screen have felt like a waste of his life. Alas, he will not be joining North Star because, well, he doesn’t really like online classes. (Don’t fret; right now, North Star is welcoming three other teens as new members.) Eli’s story bears some examination as we work to support families needing an option to online school during the pandemic.
The first call:
Mom: Is North Star still accepting Distance Members? We live on Long Island, and my son hates his online school experience. My husband and I don’t want to fight with him about it anymore.
Ken: Does he want an alternative? Or is he happy resisting?
Mom: Oh, he definitely wants something more interesting. But, we’ve tried several different schools over the years, and he has never really like any of them.
Ken: Well, as I’ve said elsewhere, “Sometimes on standardized tests, ‘E – None of the Above’ is the right answer.” What does your son like to do when he is not resisting school?
Mom: (a bit surprised at this shift in focus) He is very interested in music production. He is quite tech savvy in that area. He also loves skateboarding, snowboarding, and hanging out with his friends. He’s a good kid, but he has ADHD, and he has never liked school.
Ken: (amused at the description of a boy straight out of North Star central casting) Does he have any vision about what he would want to do if somehow he completed high school?
Mom: He’d like to be some sort of sound engineer.
Ken: Hmmm. Would Eli prefer to have a four-year head-start on this plan?
You can imagine the rest of the conversation it, including the fact that we have a Liberated Learners center in the state of New York with templates and documents for all the legal steps a family needs to start homeschooling in that state. In fact, Maria Corse, the Director of Deep Root connected with this mother by email immediately after this phone call.
I suggested the family watch my TED talk, look over my website, and consider whether they might want North Star’s services for this transition. We scheduled a second meeting for me to speak with Eli and both of his parents together. We repeated the conversation above, and Eli began examining the North Star course offerings.
Oops. It turns out that very few of our classes appealed to Eli. He then looked over the very long document listing all of the online classes within the Liberated Learners network that are open to all of our members. Still, no go.
I replied, “If there is nothing that inspires Eli, that is okay. Let’s have one more conversation about options.” We haven’t actually spoken again, but what I would have said is: “How interesting that when given a sincere, open choice about signing up for some classes, Eli says that he really doesn’t like being in classes at all!” He has never been offered this sort of freedom before, and when all classes are optional, Eli is quite wary. It’s like offering a child 31 flavors of ice cream, and finding out they don’t really like ice cream at all, thank you.
My longer speech would have included, “You can still pull Eli out of his school and embark on homeschooling independently. Or you could join North Star specifically for our weekly advisory support for the next few months.”
Instead of another conversation, the mother sent me the following email:
Thank you so much for your time, information and support. I decided to try to homeschool/unschool Eli using as many non-virtual tools as possible. If we lived near North Star it would be a no brainer for us. Thank you for the important work you do. Maybe we will reconnect in the future.
Best, I replied that I fully support the choice of finding Eli local opportunities, resources, and people. He doesn’t “need” North Star, and we have had many local teens like him use North Star only briefly. (See my recent blog about Eliaah, inspiration for the title of this post!)
The serious question is whether Eli can make the transition to finding his own busy life. Will he take himself seriously? His desire to pursue music production might lead him to get a part-time job to fund his projects. I suspect he will obtain a GED long before he would have graduated from high school. Perhaps given some time he will want to pursue some formal classes in his areas of interests at a community college or a training program.
Somewhere on Long Island, Eli is no longer contemplating how to survive four years of high school. Instead, he and his parents are facing the challenge of life without high school at all. I expect they will succeed in getting the help they need, and that his weekly routine will soon be far improved compared to what he doing in September.
Even though these two conversations and ensuing emails did not lead to a new Distance Member for North Star, I very much value having this role. Someday years from now he will look back and see our conversations as a pivotal moment in his life. I’ll be the guy who told him it was okay to stop doing high school in ninth grade. Let’s cheer on Eli, and maybe he’ll send us a postcard sometime.
Meanwhile, back at North Star, we are welcoming the sibling of a current member, the sibling of an alumna whose family is now living the ex-patriate dream in Portugal, and the friend of a current member bogged down by online-sixth-grade.
There is no shortage of work to do.