Writing Strands: A Homeschool Curriculum

Running head: WRITING STRANDS: A HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM

Writing Strands: A Homeschool Curriculum Charles B. Lawing Argosy University December 6, 2010

CITE THIS WORK: Lawing, C. (2010, December 6). Writing Strands: A Homeschool Curriculum. Unpublished manuscript.

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Writing Strands: A Homeschool Curriculum Cultural Influences Marlene E. Bumgarner, Ed.D., was a homeschooling mother when at her home in 1980 she interviewed John Holt—recognized by many as the father of the modern homeschool movement—for Mothering magazine.

“I don’t believe in formal fixed curriculums,” Holt told Bumgarner, as he played in the garden with her two children. “My advice,” for homeschooling parents, said Holt, is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine what happens and to give children access to as much of the parents’ lives and the world around them as possible [ . . . ], so that children have the widest possible range of things to look at and think about. [ . . . ]How that’s done depends very much on the family’s circumstances and their interests, and the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to build things, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever. The mix is never going to be exactly the same. (Bumgarner, 1980, para. 7) Eleven years prior to his conversation with Bumgarner, Holt had written Underachieving Schools (1969), his third book advocating free schools, students rights, and education reform.

Reprinted in 2005, Holt had remarked in 1969 how “astonishingly hard” it was for his fifth-grade students—who “usually of high IQ, came from literate backgrounds, and were generally felt to be succeeding in school”—”to express themselves in speech or in writing” (p. 855).

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Asked to speak, my fifth graders were covered with embarrassment; many refused altogether. Asked to write, they would sit for minutes on end, staring at the paper. It was hard for most of them to get down a half page of writing, even on what seemed to be interesting topics or topics they chose themselves. (ibid.)

As Gaither (2008) observes, “Holt’s fame, rhetorical skill, and tireless activism quickly make him the de facto leader of the homeschooling movement” (p. 126). But it was also his experiences as a student and teacher in traditional school settings that shaped Holt into an outspoken and influential leader.

As a child, Holt studied with private tutors and “at some of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country” (ibid., p. 122). For high school, he attended Phillips Exeter, and in 1943 graduated from Yale with a degree in Industrial Engineering. After serving for three years in the Pacific as a lieutenant aboard a submarine, he taught for four years at Colorado Rocky Mountain coeducational free school; in Cambridge, MA at a “select private school” (ibid., 123); and as a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and at the University of California at Berkeley.

Yet despite—or, rather, because of—his formal positions and training, he remained convinced that “school” is better a verb than a noun. “The proper relationship of the schools to home,” Holt concluded, “is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a supplementary resource” (Bumgarner, para. 3).

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The Tipping Point Around 1978, another professional educator came to that which may have been a different conclusion. Dave and Lea Marks’s son Corey was in the fourth grade and his parents “were unhappy with the language arts training [he] was receiving in public school[ . . . ,] so they decided to do some after-school work with him in language arts” (R. Lyons, personal communication, November 24, 2010), focusing particularly on developing Corey’s writing skills.

But rather than looking at the school, as did Holt, as the supplementary resource, the Markses’ supplementary resource was their home.

Dave Marks had graduated from Western Michigan University, earned a Master of Arts from Central Michigan University, and completed 45 additional hours of graduate work in English at Eastern Michigan University and Michigan State University (“About the author,” para. 1); he was altogether qualified to teach Corey how to write. Moreover, unlike Holt, who rejected formal, fixed curricula, Marks developed his son’s curriculum based on “classical education models” (R. Lyons, private communication, November 29, 2010).

That year, 1978, signaled significant change not only for the Marks family, but for the homeschool movement as well. According to Gaither (2008), “[b]y 1918 every state in the union has a compulsory school law” (p. 179). It was not until the late 1970s when, writes Stevens (2003) “the first public advocates of home education in the USA began concentrated efforts to change the rules [ . . . ] about how children could be acceptably educated” (p. 91).

“The tipping point came,” writes Gaither (2008), “in December 1978” (p. 126), when Bob and Linda Sessions won a legal battle in Iowa, “and their right to educate their child at home”

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(ibid.). Time Magazine published an article about the nascent homeschool movement, and days thereafter “John Holt appeared on The Phil Donahue Show with the Sessions family for a rousing Donahue-style discussion of homeschooling” (ibid.). The so-called “modern” homeschool movement took flight. Yet it was only after long—sometimes bitter and oftentimes protracted— battles in the 1980s and 1990s that the legalization of homeschooling was realized for every state in the country (Gaither, 2008).

Writing Strands Ironically, though when the Markses decided to teach Corey in their home they did so amid the cultural influences of the times, their purpose then was but to supplement his publicschool education, and certainly not to launch a thriving homeschool enterprise; but the series of exercises they created for Corey in 1978 now make up Writing Strands, the Marks family’s popular homeschool curriculum, with “several thousand copies” of their books printed every year (R. Lyons, personal communication, December 1, 2010), administered through their parent company, the National Writing Institute (NWI).

Renée Lyons, who came to work at NWI in 2005, is “responsible for reprinting the books and making any necessary changes. Often,” said Lyons, “this means I go sentence by sentence to check for errors, clarity, or dated references” (R. Lyons, personal communication, November 24, 2010). With a personal and professional interest in homeschool curriculum models, in November 2010 I posed (via email correspondence) a series of questions to Mr. Marks, who, I subsequently learned, “passed away some years ago” (ibid.). However, while Ms. Lyons, who responded to my query, “was not involved in the original creation of the series,” (ibid.), she had acquired

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“multiple years of teaching and publication experience” (ibid.), and graciously agreed to answer that which, due to her generosity and passion about teaching and NWI’s curriculum, evolved into a growing list of questions (presented hereinafter in two parts).

Questions & Answers (Part I) Charlie Lawing (CL): When you got into designing curricula, what could you say necessitated such a project?

Renée Lyons (RL): My understanding is that Dave Marks and his wife, Lea, were unhappy with the language arts training their son, Corey, was receiving in public school (he was in fourth grade at the time). They decided to do some after-school work with him in language arts, so they created the series of exercises that now make up our curriculum [Figure 1]. Their son worked through the exercises over the next three or four years, at which point it seemed he had mastered the fundamentals of writing. So, when Corey was at the age of 12, they enrolled him in a college English course, and he aced it. Since the exercises worked so well, they realized they could turn the materials into a curriculum for homeschoolers.

Dave and Lea were passionate about learning and teaching, so it makes sense that they wanted to share these successful exercises with other students.

CL: What is your goal with the curricula you design, and who will use the final product(s)?

RL: Writing Strands is designed for students of all ages. While most of our users are homeschoolers, we do have several school districts that use our books as well.

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Figure 1. Curriculum: Writing Strands. Retrieved December 6, 2010 from http://www.writing-strands.com/curriculum.asp

The overall goal is to prepare students for a lifetime of writing—in college, in the workforce, and in everyday life; but we also hope to teach kids that writing can (and should be) a fun experience, not a tortuous one. We do this by breaking our assignments into small, non-threatening, manageable steps that help students master concepts incrementally day by day.

CL: Who is involved in curriculum design projects? What role does each person have?

RL: In the beginning, Dave and Lea worked together to come up with the exercises, but I believe Dave was responsible for writing them up and putting them in book form.

CL: Regarding curriculum design (or re�design) who reports to whom? Is there a flowchart or organizational structure? What feedback systems are in place?

RL: In our current setup, I am responsible for reprinting the books and making any

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necessary changes. Often, this means I go sentence by sentence to check for errors, clarity, or dated references. Since we’re trying to maintain Dave’s legacy, there haven’t been new exercises, but I do generate resources for parents. When I do want to make a somewhat radical change to the material, such as adding a new resource for parents, I check with my boss, Amy (Corey’s wife, director of the company), who otherwise is no longer involved in day-to-day operations.

When I first started at the company, I ran all my changes by Amy, and she ran major changes by Lea. At this point, I have a great deal of discretion when it comes to editing.

My coworker, Cathy, whose main job is to attend homeschooling conventions as a vendor, will sometimes send suggestions as to how to make exercises more modern or easier to follow. She is responsible for generating the content for most of our newsletters, which offer tips and strategies for teaching language arts. Since I revise the newsletters, Cathy and I generally spend about a week or two on each newsletter sending drafts back and forth.

CL: Whenever you introduce a new curriculum, is there a timeline for turning around a curriculum project?

RL: I generally spend about a month revising a book before reprinting, depending on how extensive the revisions were on the previous reprint. Newsletters, as I said above, take about two weeks.

CL: How can homeschoolers use your curricula? Is there flexibility in the design?

RL: Our books are directed to homeschoolers. In most of the levels (Writing Strands 3

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and up), we speak directly to the student, and they work independently through our materials, only getting feedback from their parents at the end of each day. Though we offer a breakdown of what to do on each day, older students who are reviewing lower levels can work more quickly. If a student needs to repeat a lesson to master the skills, is working in a “younger” book, or works best with more creativity, he or she can change the topic of the given lesson.

Our books can also be adapted to the classroom setting. Students will still work independently, and the teacher can either visit each student during their work or just provide individualized feedback in writing. (ibid.)

Questions & Answers (Part II) CL: Are you able to describe the reason(s) for Mr. & Mrs. Marks’s unhappiness [in 1978]? Was the public-school training too “advanced” or too “slow” (I put those words in [scare-quotes] because I recognize those are wholly subjective values)? Did Corey (and his parents) dislike the competitive atmosphere? What was/were the problem(s)?

RL: I believe they felt Corey wasn’t being challenged and wasn’t learning the fundamentals of good writing. Based on what I know of Lea and Dave (and Corey), I know it was too “slow” but was also perhaps too focused on abstract grammar drills and the like, which have been shown to be unhelpful to learning to write. I don’t think the problem was that public school was competitive, but rather that they thought Corey could accomplish much more with individualized help.

CL: Can you describe some of those first exercises? What did Corey actually do?

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RL: The Writing Strands exercises start off simple. I’m not sure exactly which exercises Corey started with, but our early books start with building complicated sentences and paragraphs from simple ones by adding little pieces of information step by step.

CL: What can you say can be attributed to Corey’s mastery of those fundamentals? What did the Markses do different?

RL: One of the fundamentals of our program and of Dave/Lea’s approach to teaching writing is that mechanics/surface features (grammar, spelling, syntax) can and should be taught on a need-to-know basis. Public schools have a hard time doing this since they have so many kids to handle. By focusing on a student’s writing as the source of surfacefeature lessons, the lessons become more relevant and more concrete. Also, the program advocates focusing on one problem at a time until the student has mastered it (can selfcorrect; can teach it to others). Another element that helps build mastery (and that probably contributed to Corey’s mastery) is that the lessons build on each other and, while no two exercises are the same, return to the same concepts multiple times. For example, we have students work on describing fictional characters’ movements and thoughts in a few exercises each book. Over the course of the series, that adds up to a lot of experience for the students.

CL: Why are most users homeschoolers? Why and how have school districts started using your books?

RL: I think that most of the users are homeschoolers for two main reasons: 1) Dave and Lea saw it as a market where their materials would be relevant; the public school market

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is heavily dominated by big name publishers (e.g., Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins), and many states have boards that determine what textbooks may be used in public schools. 2) The Writing Strands program depends a lot on individualized instruction—responding to rough drafts and teaching surface features on a need-to-know basis. That makes it easier for homeschoolers to use the program since it can be difficult to offer that kind of tailored teaching in a classroom (I try, but it’s tough). That said, we do have some schools that use our materials. They are mostly schools in California and Alaska; some of them are charter schools, some entire school districts. I believe the regulations in those states make it easier for schools to adopt materials outside the state-mandated curriculum. I can only assume they chose our program because of the way we teach students how to write (as opposed to just saying, “Write in your journal for 20 minutes” or, “Write an essay about a butterfly.”).

CL: I appreciate that your aim is to prepare students whether they’re going off to college or joining the workforce (there’s something egalitarian in the philosophy). I particularly appreciate the philosophy that writing can and should be a fun experience, nor a tortuous one. Where do public-schools miss out? Why is it so often so tortuous? It’s ironic that the Markses program prepared Corey for college, but the same program can make learning fun for those who won’t go to college. Do our public (and, perhaps) private institutions tend to prepare students only for college, and thus those who will be entering the workforce get ignored and become frustrated with learning? If your small non-threatening, manageable steps help facilitate mastery, are the public schools

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delivering too much for students to manage? Is it just too much for students to master?

RL: Public schools struggle to make writing fun for a few reasons. First, I think there’s a lot of pressure to have students perform well on standardized tests—that pressure gets transferred to the students. It also restricts the creativity of the students and teachers when it comes to the many possibilities that writing can offer. Second, the fact that individualized instruction is so difficult in a classroom often means that teachers feel they have to cover everything for every student, the result being that students don’t get a chance to master a concept before the next is presented. Then, to make matters worse, teachers mark everything wrong on each paper, which is discouraging [and] not particularly helpful. I think this problem is more to blame for students getting frustrated with school than the focus on college-prep is. Along the same lines, public schools have a tendency to demand big projects from students without really showing the students how to accomplish them. For example, schools make fourth graders write full-blown “research papers” before the kids even know how to write a good paragraph. Does this stem from a desire to combine lessons (e.g., English and history) or a canon of what we are “supposed” to teach? Perhaps both; but the result is overwhelming for both students and teachers.

CL: Is there something else I should know [about Dave Marks’s background]?

RL: Dave and Lea both taught for 30+ years. Dave also suffered from dyslexia and wrote the books with the idea that any student should be able to work in them, even if they have a learning disability.

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CL: Can you describe what some of [the] more radical changes [that you would like to see in the Writing Strands curriculum] have been? That is, resources sound simple enough; are there some [changes] that you would want to avoid?

RL: Here’s an example of a “radical” change I haven’t proposed yet but would like to. In Writing Strands 5 or 6, we give a lesson to students on how to write a good business letter in response to a bad product or service. I’d like to add a section that teaches kids how to write a professional email and why that skill is important. This would be mostly all-new content, so I’m not sure it will happen, but it could be helpful in modernizing the books.

CL: Is Amy mostly retired now? What have her contributions been over the years?

RL: Amy has a second job outside the company that takes up most of her time. She used to run the company, from editing to growing the business to deciding on printers/distribution.

CL: Are Lea and Corey involved?

RL: Lea used to oversee the book revisions and would attend a few conventions a year.

She’s now retired. Corey is not involved.

CL: Can you tell me how you got involved [in the company]?

RL: I got involved [five years ago] when Amy needed a new assistant; Corey was my thesis director and [he] recommended me to her.1

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“I studied under Corey at the University of North Texas [UNT] in the creative writing program, and he was my director for my undergraduate poetry thesis. My master’s degree is also in creative writing, and I now teach in the UNT English Department” (R. Lyons, personal communication, December 1, 2010).

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CL: What is Cathy’s background? Do her suggestions come from those conventions? Do homeschoolers make suggestions that find their way into your curricula?

RL: Cathy’s experience comes from the fact that she homeschooled both of her children and continues to tutor kids in her community using Writing Strands. She also gives workshops to homeschooling groups about our materials. Since she’s still involved with students who are using the materials, she often has suggestions that are based on where kids thrived or struggled. Occasionally, customers will call us with a question about an exercise they don’t understand, and I then mark that exercise for revision.

CL: Can you tell me the size of the staff? How may full- and part-time?

RL: Cathy and I are the only employees actively involved; we’re both part time.

CL: Can you tell me some more about the newsletters? Their content and who receives them?

RL: The newsletters are generally tips from Cathy about teaching language arts. For example, we’ve had newsletters about teaching apostrophes and commas, teaching kids to love reading for a lifetime, and giving gentle, focused feedback on student work. We send it to people who have signed up or who have bought books online and not opted out.

We also include a coupon for our materials.

CL: What sorts of [book] revisions are typically made?

RL: Most of the revisions have to do with clarity and concision. I try to maintain Dave’s style as much as possible, but often there are sentences that are imprecise or overlywordy. I also try to fix formatting (previous editions often used individual spaces to align,

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rather than setting up tabs and indentation styles). A few years back, I revised our section of helpful terms so that it would be clear for each term whether it was something to aim for or to avoid; in each reprint, this gets changed.

CL: You [previously discussed] “lower levels” of learning. Do you follow any of the standard “educational” schools of thought, such as Bloom’s Taxonomy for example, which breaks student-learning into a hierarchy? Also, what “measures” of success are recommended or implemented? Do you suggest levels of success leading toward mastery, or is it less structured than that?

RL: Absolutely! Dave based a lot of his theory on Bloom’s Taxonomy and on classical education models. Our literature program is heavily based in Socratic dialogue. In terms of “measures of success,” we have a few ways that parents and students measure that. In each book, we provide sheets for parents to keep track of recurring surface-feature problems. At the front of each book is a list of each exercise’s objectives with a place for the parents to mark whether the students met the objectives or need to continue working on them. It’s up to the parents to decide how well the students meet the objectives.

Students are also responsible for keeping track of their progress. At the end of each exercise, students fill out a “Record of Progress,” in which they write their best sentence and one sentence that had an error in it that they fixed. (R. Lyons, personal communication, November 30, 2010) Summary Even though, as Yuracko (2008) observes, John Holt “believed that children had a natural

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proclivity for learning and learned best when encouraged to pursue their own interests rather than being forced to follow an established curriculum as in traditional schools” (p. 126), and in the 1950s had, according to Stevens (2003) “created his distinctive homeschool pedagogy—one he called ‘unschooling’” (p. 92), prior to the late ’70s homeschool advocates were considered part of the radical fringe. Putting it mildly, home-schooling, writes Stevens, “was unconventional” (ibid.).

Today, however, Gaither (2009) paints a wholly different portrait of homeschooling’s future, one with “blurred boundaries” (para. 21). Not only has homeschooling gone “mainstream,” but many public school districts, he writes, having lost the fight to criminalize home schooling, now openly court home schoolers. School districts around the country are experimenting with programs that allow students to home school for part of the day but take certain classes at the local public school. (ibid.)

These and other experiments have led to “public-private hybrids” (ibid., para. 25), such as the Florida Virtual School, “founded in 1997 and operated by the Florida Department of Education [ . . . which] partners with all 67 Florida school districts to bring a complete high-school curriculum moderated by certified teachers to the homes of residents across the state” (ibid.).

In some states, such as California, private companies “have taken advantage of charter school laws [ . . . ] to make their services available for free to home schoolers” (ibid., para. 26).

And by 2006, there was a total of 147 virtual charter schools educating more than 65, 000 students in 18 states (Gaither, 2009). Gaither (2009) is thus optimistic about prevailing and

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future homeschooling trends: Trends toward accommodation, adaptation, and hybridization will likely increase as U.S. education policy seeks to catch up to the sweeping demographic, technological, and economic changes taking place. A movement born in opposition to public schools ironically might offer public education its most promising reform paradigm for the 21st century. (para. 33) Homeschooling today reflects the ever-changing face of America. In an article as recent as December 6, 2010, Ingersoll observes: “The incoming class of congressional freshmen includes, Jaime Herrera (R-WA), the first homeschooled member ever, and Daniel Webster (R-FL) a homeschooling activist” (para. 1). Ingersoll does not address the fact that it was not until the end of the First World War when the country fully established compulsory school laws to ensure that children would be inculcated with “middle-class Protestant notions of family life” (Gaither, 2008, p. 63), and thus most of our early-American political leaders were homeschooled—indeed, Abraham Lincoln “never went to school more than six months” in his life (Gulliver, 1864, para.

3). But her point is relevant and well-taken, which is that currently one member of Congress was homeschooled and another is a homeschooling activist—a significant paradigm shift, indeed.

Such data as those gathered by Ingersoll and Gaither shine light on the diverse movement that homeschooling has become. In the beginning, “homeschooling” was a founding American principle; in the 1970s, composed of left-leaning liberals on the “radical fringe”; and is today dominated by conservative Christians, but comprised also of families who homeschool more for secular reasons than for religious ones. As Lines (2008) argues, that which may be characterized

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as today’s reemergence of home-schooling is an age-old American practice (para. 7). Likewise, notes Gaither (2008), the modern homeschool movement has been recognized as simply a “continuation of a process of education that has existed from time immemorial” (p.1).

In 1978, Dave and Lea Marks—innocently, intelligently enough—made the decision to become a contributing part of that which by the first decade of the twenty-first century has grown into a burgeoning “social movement” (Mitchell, 2005, p. 274). And though a significant arm of that movement in 1978 had moved away from curriculum, the Markses moved instead toward it, building a close-knit and committed family enterprise that today serves a customer base—which includes individual families, charter schools, and entire districts—somewhere in “the six-digits range” (R. Lyons, personal communication, December 1, 2010). Not only does the popularity and growth of the Writing Strands curriculum point to the fact that homeschoolers are as diverse as is our American community at large, but that individuality is that which learning is all about; whether in “school” or at home, with a curriculum or without, we all learn in our own distinctly individual ways.

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References “About the author.” Writing strands: The perfect tool to develop successful writing skills.

Retrieved. November 27, 2010 from http://www.writing-strands.com/about-the-author.asp Bumgarner, M. (1981). “A conversation with John Holt,” adapted from “Mothering interviews John Holt.” Mothering, Issue 19, Spring 1981. The Natural Child Project. Retrieved November 27, 2010 from http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/marlene_bumgarner.html Collom, E. (2005). Home schooling as a social movement” Identifying the determinants of homeschoolers’ perceptions. Sociological Spectrum, 25, pp. 273–305.

Gaither, M. (2008). Homeschooling: An American history. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gaither, M. (2009). Home schooling goes mainstream: Everybody knows somebody who is teaching a child at home. Educationnext. Winter 2009, Vol. 9, No. 1. Retrieved May 19, 2010 from http://educationnext.org/home-schooling-goes-mainstream/ Gulliver, J.P. (1864, September 4). “Mr. Lincoln’s early life: How he educated himself. The New York Times. Retrieved December 6, 2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/1864/09/04/news/ mr-lincoln-s-early-life-how-he-educated-himself.html Holt, J. (2005). “How teachers make children hate reading” from The underachieving school.

Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications. pp. 851-860. Retrieved November 27, 2010 from http://24.248.90.71/file.cfm?resourceid=3517&filename=Hate%20Reading.pdf Ingersoll, J. (2010, December 6). Homeschooling and American exceptionalism. Religious Dispatches Magazine. Retrieved December 6, 2010 from http://www.religiondispatches.org/ dispatches/julieingersoll/3843/homeschooling_and_american_exceptionalism/

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Lines, Patricia M. (2000). Homeschooling comes of age. Public Interest, (140), 74-85. Retrieved June 2, 2010, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 55390286).

Stevens, M. (2003). The normalisation of homeschooling in the USA. Evaluation & Research in Education 17(2/3), 90-100. Retrieved May 24, 2010 from Academic Search Complete Database Yuracko, K. (2002). Education off the grid: Constitutional constraints on home schooling.

California Law Review, 96(1), 123-184. Retrieved May 24, 2010 from Academic Search Complete database

CITE THIS WORK: Lawing, C. (2010, December 6). Writing Strands: A Homeschool Curriculum. Unpublished manuscript.