When my kids were little,
preparing for college was just a worry in the back of my mind. They would certainly go after they graduated
from our homeschool, but until it got close I didn’t have to think about it,
right?
Wrong! Now that we're in our twenty-first year of
homeschooling and have sent three kids off to college, I've formed some
definite ideas about what it takes to succeed there. Here are the five things I believe to be
most essential to launching a young adult into the big world of college. They are all things that must be built
gradually, starting from a young age.
First: Spiritual Maturity
Does your child have a strong
testimony of the gospel? Does he have
habits that will maintain his testimony in the absence of parental
oversight? Does he know the joy of
service, in and out of the church? We
set an example for our children in all areas of our lives, and there are things
best taught by deeds. As we do our
visiting teaching, as our children see us reading our scriptures and attending
the temple, and as we share our feelings about these things with them in daily
devotionals, they will have a firm foundation for their own spiritual growth.
Temptations abound on LDS and non-LDS campuses alike. “Testimony: Don’t Leave Home Without It.”
Second: Emotional Maturity
A large challenge when moving
into young adulthood isn’t knowing what to do, but being able to make oneself
do it. Your teen knows she should eat
vegetables, but with you not there to put them on her plate will they end up in
her mouth? She knows she shouldn’t sign
up for a credit card unless she has a job (and probably not even then), but
they were offering those free T-shirts!
She knows she shouldn’t get into a car with someone she doesn’t know,
even if her roommate is, but it was cold and she didn’t want to walk home! Impulsivity and lack of maturity cause
freshmen to sometimes make decisions that they come to regret.
Does your child (especially if
she’s shy) have the guts to go knock on her professor’s office door to seek
help with a concept she doesn’t understand?
Does she have the time-management skills to pace herself with big papers
and assignments? Can she make herself go
sit in the hard chairs in the library to study for an exam while her roommates
are watching a favorite TV show?
College is supposed to be a
training ground for life. Unfortunately,
it’s a very expensive one, and if your child doesn’t have the maturity to do
hard things, sending her off to college will not fix that. “Baby steps” toward self-discipline could
include having her begin to take charge of scarier tasks and more complex
issues while still living at home: making her own appointments, taking classes
from someone other than mom, meeting deadlines and fulfilling assignments. Home education is great, but in the high
school years (if not before) dealing with people outside the home is
essential. Simply getting a job will go
a long way to building the skills and confidence that are so important in
college.
Third: High-Level Reading
I recently led a discussion in
which more than twenty teens each presented a book that they thought everyone
should read for our book club, and yes, homeschoolers love Narnia and Lord of
the Rings. I love these books too, but
if your teen’s reading never goes beyond this, he’ll have trouble in
college. Depending on what he majors in,
he could have hundreds of pages per week of dense college texts to read,
digest, and recall the major points of for class discussion and testing.
To prepare for this, your child
needs both quality and quantity: he needs to challenge himself by exploring new
types of fiction and non-fiction–at times reading for speed and at other times
for contemplation. Study How to Read a Book by Adler and Van
Doren as a primer on this topic. Your
child needs practice in marking up a text and taking notes on what he’s
read. Involving him in outside or online
classes where these types of skills are required is a good way to start–and a
safe place to fail if that is the outcome.
We want to have our failures before
college if necessary, so that educational gaps will be identified and important
lessons learned.
Fourth: Writing--Speed vs. Quality
The twenty-five minute essay
test on the SAT has been the bane of my kids’ existence. We don’t run our homeschool on a strict
schedule (I’m not sure who does!) so my kids are used to taking their time on a
piece of writing that they care about.
Sadly, on the SAT and afterwards in college, you often have to write
about things you don’t care about,
and write quickly because you have three other things also due the next
day. Traditionally-schooled students get
lots of writing practice assigned–lots more than I’ve ever had my kids do–and
start at a young age. I tend to think
that writing is the culmination of so many other skills that it is vulnerable
to over-ambitious writing programs that extinguish the simple joy of self
expression. But there is certainly value
to having kids begin writing essays in middle school, starting with fluffy
topics and gradually becoming more serious, culminating with research
papers. Helping kids distinguish between
a writing-for-quality paper vs. a writing-for-speed paper (an essay for your
English class vs. a report for your geology class) is also a worthy topic of
discussion in the high school years.
Fifth: Confidence in Math
Math is seen as a hurdle by many
high school students–both on college entrance exams and in a college-prep high
school curriculum. The difference
between facing higher math with anxiety or confidence begins much earlier, as
we help our young children develop number sense, followed by operation sense,
followed by function sense. From the
get-go, focus on math using things that can be seen and touched. Leave working with symbols and the artificial
conventions of math “problems” (like regrouping for subtraction) until the
child has a concrete understanding of what is going on with quantities in the
real world. Building a logical brain is
really fun: puzzles, games, pattern-making, etc. My three year-old loves the DragonBox algebra
app, and apart from fussing about the amount of screen time he does, I love
that he’s already figuring out the logic behind balancing and simplifying
equations.
If your child is struggling with
math in the upper grades, it may be that he has learned to memorize the “steps”
without understanding the logic behind them.
Even if a college entrance exam is looming, don’t be afraid to go back
to math levels he is comfortable with, and have him work with manipulatives
(you can buy rods with variables for algebra) or translate complex problems
into simpler versions of the same operation so that he can visualize what is
going on. Using a program that takes a
very different approach to math than what was previously used can also help
those “Ah-hah” moments come along. My
son raised his SAT math score significantly after taking a few months to go
through the Life of Fred program–he had previously studied math with Saxon, but
Life of Fred helped him gain a wider perspective of math.
Good, Better, Best
Conventional wisdom says that
success in college is directly related to academic skills, but I’ve found this
to be off the mark. Though the latter
three points are essential, they are not to be emphasized at the expense of the
former two. Standardized testing
measures what you know but not how motivated and hard-working you are, and in
my opinion, this trumps academic knowledge in predicting college success. And good grades won’t make up for a loss of
spirituality when an immature soul makes bad choices because of the strong peer
pressure, in and out of the classroom, to discard God in favor of worldly
values. As Jessie Wise noted in The Well-Trained Mind, one mom told her,
after sending her daughter off to college, “I just spent forty thousand dollars
to ruin my daughter’s life.” Preparing
our kids academically is good, making sure they are emotionally prepared to
care for themselves while away from home is better, and making sure they face
the world wearing the full armor of God is best.
