Homeschooling high school can be challenging enough to undertake with
normal high school kids, but throw in a student who is significantly
advanced or gifted, and some parents might be tempted to call it quits!
How can you keep up with a kid who's studying statistics, anatomy and
physiology, and Greek, and asking for more?! Both my sons were gifted,
so I know how difficult this can be. Fortunately, there are some
practical things you can do to make the process easier and more
manageable.
The first strategy that I find useful is called
acceleration, which means that you allow your children to work faster.
This strategy requires you to let go of the whole
parent-teach-the-student model, because your job is not just to teach
your children; your job is to help your children learn how to teach
themselves. Fortunately, there will be times when you realize your child
already knows a subject, perhaps because they have learned it by
osmosis, so you can spend less time on that subject.
At high
school level, it's important to remember that when your child finishes a
standard curriculum, you can give them high school credit for it. You
don't have to make them sit in front of you, as the teacher, for 150
hours before you give them credit for a course. As soon as they're done
with a curriculum and know the material, go ahead and give them the high
school credit. There's no rule that requires them to spend 150 hours
studying something in order to earn a credit.
You can also skip
unnecessary activities in a curriculum. If your child doesn't need the
activities in order to learn the information, it's okay to skip those,
as long as they're learning. It's also okay to administer a pretest for a
subject, and simply skip the information they already know, or you can
work fast through a curriculum and find out what they know first, and
then move ahead.
When you don't use acceleration, and you work at
the usual standard pace that children are used to, it can induce
boredom. When people tell me they're struggling with a lack of
motivation in their teenagers, or their kids hate school or they're
bored, often it's because their student is moving at too slow a pace.
Make
sure to assess your child's level first, and begin a curriculum at the
point where they will actually learn new information. In this way, you
allow them to learn at their own level, and remove those artificial
barriers to how much they're allowed to learn. The result will be a
student who's more interested in what they're learning, and more
motivated to pursue their studies.
