[Note: Ryan & Teri Schwab, Anna's parents, have said that some of the reports I read before writing this post are erroneous. I have no reason to dispute their statements. Please read the comments to read their full position.]
Anna Schwab, a girl from Orcutt, California, aced the SAT in December, with a 12 on her SAT essay.
Not bad. Did I mention, she is 13 years old?
Overall, she got 2190 out of 2400.
Not bad. Did I mention, she is 13 years old?
Let's not ignore her older sister who also got a perfect score on the essay last year. Did I mention, she was 13 years old?
How did these homeschoolers accomplish it? Well, honestly, by not acting much like regular homeschoolers. (Is that a contradiction in terms?)
The sisters (who were likely pretty bright to start with (read that “profoundly-gifted-but-not-as-great-as-Alison's-kids”)) reportedly took two years off from the regular schooling to study up for the SAT at home. They used AP biology, chemistry, and US history texts, counseling from a “young scholar” program, and online courses for gifted student from Stanford.
I don't know what this proves either about homeschooling or standardized tests but now you have the formula. The Anna Shwab Homeschooling Method. Let us know how it works out for you.
Alison Moore Smith is a 61-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from BYU in 1987. She has been (very happily) married to Samuel M. Smith for 40 years. They are parents of six incredible children and grandparents to two astounding grandsons. She is the author of The 7 Success Habits of Homeschoolers.
Yeah. I guess it all depends on how you want to do school. 🙂
Ack, more pressure for me to look froward to next year!
Well here’s an interesting thing. This blog says that Anna and her sister just took two years off from school to study for the SAT. http://justenough.wordpress.com/2008/02/03/anna-schwab-a-homeschool-success-story/
Personally, it seems to go against my personal homeschooling philosophy, which is that I want my kids to love learning and to learn because they want to, not for a test. BUT… perhaps these girls did love to do it. And I’m not against studying for a test, since that’s so all-important to get into college.
OK Correction – this article (which seems a more authoritative source) says that the girls were homeschooled. http://www.santamariatimes.com/articles/2007/12/28/news/centralcoast/news04.txt
I don’t homeschool, although I’d really like to someday.
This has been on my mind lately, though, for a couple of reasons.
We have some good friends who have homeschooled their children until now. The oldest is 10, and they are just registering them for private school for the first time (they are working overseas with his company and the company owns the school).
The school assigned them to grade level based on their ages, and then our friends petitioned the schools to place the children higher based on their academic abilities. Long story short, they ending up leaving one at his grade level because of some behavior issues, but the others either moved up a grade or two grades.
I’ve also been looking in to the gifted programs here in our local schools, for my children. What I’m finding out is that what the kids do is work on the grade level above where they are at for language arts and math, and then spend the rest of the school day with their class. So for instance, in my daughter’s 1st grade class, there are 3 children in gifted and they go for the morning and do 2nd grade work, and then join with the class in the afternoon for science, social studies, and their enrichment classes.
I’ve been contemplating what the real advantage of this is. Moving children up a grade or several grades, having them enter college early, etc. – does it really enhance their lives all that much in the long run? They might have a year or two more of earning power that way, so I guess in that sense it is worth it. But I guess somehow I really thought the gifted program would be more than just doing work a grade level ahead. When I was in gifted, we did all kinds of fun projects and stuff. We didn’t just go into another room and do work out of the exact same books as the kids a year older than us.
My children don’t really want to go to gifted classes and I really don’t see the need to do it right now. If all they are doing is the same curriculum that the kids would do the next year anyway, I don’t see a whole lot of advantage to it. Instead, I supplement their learning at home until I can hopefully bring them home full time when the finances are better.
I guess all of that is kind of off-topic, but I guess my point is – why the push for kids to do work “ahead of time”? I’m all for them learning at their own pace, but taking the SAT at 13? Is a 13 year old really ready socially to enter college? What do they do at 16-17 when they are a college graduate and yet not emotionally or socially ready to be an adult? Grad school at 18? Fine, but are they missing out on a lot of the true learning that takes place in college that way? For instance, learning to manage their own money, or get along with roommates, or keep their apartment clean?
I don’t know, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea for everyone, but it seems to me like kids who grow up too fast this way are missing out on an important part of their “education”.
I’m just thinking hmm…we take two years off of “school” to study for the SAT/ACT at 11?? Then ace the test at age 13? For what purpose?
At any rate, congrats to these sisters. Quite an accomplishment. I guess I just think that it would be just as much of an accomplishment a few years later.
I don’t like most “gifted” programs for that very reason. They just accelerate. So you have a 15 year old college grad. Then what?
Rather than go fast, we decided to go broad. The kids get the basics done pretty quickly and have lots of time to do other cool stuff, instead of wasting time sitting around in class, lining up, etc.
With gifted children, you do need to challenge them! They get so bored if left where they are in regular public school, that’s the problem.
When I first started homeschooling, that’s how I envisioned it – look at the great advantage your kids could have! They could graduate from college early, and then life! When I heard Susan Wise Bauer speak, however, she made it clear that that really wasn’t an advantage. The advantage is that you can do all the “requirements’ and then you can do whatever you want educationally. Your kids could:
get college credit at home (many can get an associate’s degree from home)
start a business
Go into “scholar phase” and do in-depth studying of what interests them.
Learn a trade
Do an apprenticeship
Wouldn’t all that prepare them for college and life so much better than hurrying them through school?
Amen to that. Compare this: when I started college, I got a part-time job at Burger King, wearing a brown, orange, and yellow polyester uniform with a dorky cap. When Jessica started, she got a job as a web programmer for Independent Study. In today’s dollars she earned about three times as much AND she got to wear normal clothes AND she didn’t have to be embarrassed about her job.
That was because one of things she became interested in at age nine was web site creation. And she had TIME to do it. (Some of her other interests were ancient Greece, mythology, writing, dog breeding, and English jumping and dressage (horse things).)
This blog is completely false!
I am the father of the girls this article is titled after.
Not only is this blog false, but I’ve repeatedly corrected the blogger, asked her to take this article down, and received no response. I’ve also complained to Google a number of times. It appears that the blogger did not even bother to read the article carefully she is referencing. I also think it’s a shame that this blogger can make false statements on the internet about someone else’s children, and not bother to correct her error.
Our two daughters were home-schooled since Kindergarten. We did not remove them from school to study for the SAT for two years. This is a complete fabrication. Our youngest was home-schooled from Kindergarten through 8th grade. then she began attending boarding school because we could no longer accommodate her academically. She was already burning through curriculum until we had to give her AP books to study out of in 8th grade. My oldest was home-schooled all the way through her senior year of high school. The first time she stepped into a classroom was in her senior year of high school to take a community college class to fulfill her University of Caifornia A-G requirements.
Please take this blogger’s words with a grain of salt.
Ryanone – I am having a hard time understanding your post. Which part is false? just how the schooling is reported or that your daughter took the SAT and scored well? Or are you referring to one of the other blogs that was linked?
ryanone, very interesting post – considering that I am the blogger. You have never contacted me in any way.
So, please feel free to tell me what is false about the post. Are the scores false? The ages false? The resources used false? Or was it that you took off from regular schooling to study for the SAT? If the latter, you’ll note that I didn’t say they were taken out of public school, but that they REPORTEDLY took off two years from regular coursework to study for the SAT. Again, that is what was reported. I have no problem with you correcting the reports, but I simply brought up what was REPORTED. That simply is what the news articles I found said about the issue. If the posts that made those claims as fact are incorrect, start there. I simply pointed out what the reports said about the situation.
Before accusing others, you should probably read more carefully.
Most importantly, you have never contacted me before. You are free to correct the reported stories, but please refrain from false accusations.
Just got a really charming — ahem — email from Ryan. I told him that if he felt that the reports I read incorrectly described his schooling he was welcome to make any corrections here and I’d let them stand if they are civil.
He said he emailed me from the site multiple times. There is no contact link or form here. The old site has some long-defunct emails, but the new one (up for about four years now?) has none. He also seems unaware that Google does not control internet content and seems more than a tad ticked off that Google won’t remove my post. ???
So, Ryan, get the chip off your shoulder and contribute to the conversation. Clarify or correct anything you want.
As an aside, I’d say that if you don’t want people talking about your kids’ test scores/schooling/methods, you might not want to take them public.
amen:devil:
Anna, thank you for writing your thoughts here. I’m so sorry for the pain you endured, but so glad to see you are moving toward the life you want.
I hope you can, one day, forgive your parents. I am old enough — and my kids are old enough — to realize that even the very best prayerful intentions of parents can seem very different to a child. I’m not at all doubting your side of the story, sincerely. But I can envision a scenario where parents really thought they were giving their children the best possible start in life and giving them advantages that would serve them, and the child was actually hurt.
Perhaps what your parents did would hurt any child and were way beyond the pale. (It did seem extreme to me.) But perhaps some children would thrive and be grateful for a similar experience.
There is one homeschool family I read about early in my homeschool adventure. Their last name was Swallow. If memory serves, the kids ALL (and I think there were 10 or so) got their bachelor’s degrees by 15 and their master’s degrees shortly after, while still high school age. They took almost zero days off (Christmas and birthdays, I think?) and had a very rigorous schedule six days per week.
I thought it was nuts, but one of their daughters wrote a book called, I think, No Regrets, where she touted the benefits of her mother’s methods.
Suffice it to say I’m so sorry for your experience, but I know how hard it is to raise kids just right. I’m a dismal failure most of the time.