I wasn’t going to do this. I told myself I didn’t have it in me to go back over my notes and detail what I did. But then people started asking questions and it dawned on me that perhaps a post like this is the most efficient way to communicate these things. So here we are. I’m sharing the ins and outs of the last senior year for my last homeschool student, the year that was two decades in the making.
A Curated Senior Year
Most the high school years I offered my children were not very customized. There are books a student should read and things a student should know and that’s just the way that it is. I mixed things up here and there, but mostly I cut and pasted plans from one student to another over the eleven years I created high school plans. The “customization” usually meant adapting the standard Vencel Family High School Curriculum to the student’s schedule rather than selecting specific books for the student.
But the senior years have always been much more customized. I ask myself questions like, What did we miss along the way? What will I regret if I don’t cover? What does this student need before leaving homeschool? What will prepare him for the world he’s going to face? What has he shown an inclination to study but not been able to make time for? What will help him with his struggles? What will best challenge him and stretch him? What will patch up his weaknesses?
These questions stem from my deeply-held philosophy. I have spent twenty years trying to live this out with my children. Very early in her career, Charlotte Mason told us what our job is if we’re going to take on the task of educating our children:
[The educator’s] business is to guide, and assist in, the production of the latent good in that being, the dissipation of the latent evil, the preparation of the child to take his place in the world at his best, with every capacity for good that is in him developed into a power.
(Home Education, p. 9)
That’s a tall order, and even if we’ve tried to do this all along, there is much to be done in the last year. I can’t say that I have ever pulled off a graduate “with every capacity for good that is in him developed into a power” but I have certainly tried.
Please take my “curriculum” with a grain of salt. I’m trying to develop my student. I’m looking to bring out the good that is in him and dissipate his latent evil. I want him to take his place in the world at his best. This is very personalized. It’s not really AmblesideOnline much at all by the time I’m done with it, though AO always gives shape, structure, and form to our years.
Moreover, this is an extremely light year. My student is working almost full time. I didn’t want to set him up for failure and I wanted to honor the fact that he’ll start studying for his real estate license in his second term this year. Senior years must be realistic. (This means that I have also been known to pile on and make it hard for a student whose needs swung in the other direction.)
The Schedule
I do not schedule things at all for a student this age. They are about to leave home; they better be able to manage these sorts of things themselves. I got everything done without my parents checking on me when I was in high school; I expect my students to do the same.
Technically, I have to check because I’m the teacher. But checking as a teacher and nagging as a mother are two different things. Nagging creates weak offspring. Don’t do it.
The “Curriculum”
I used asterisks to denote which term of our three terms I assigned the book. If there are no asterisks, we’re using the book for the whole year.
Bible/Theology/Christian Living
- Competent to Counsel by Jay Adams*
- Ourselves by Charlotte Mason
- Statistics and Faith by Jason Wilson**
- Live Not By Lies by Rod Dreher**
- Prudence by Fr. Gregory Pine***
History
- A History of the Twentieth Century by Martin Gilbert
- 2000 Years of Christ’s Power, Volume 2 by Nick Needham
- Socrates’ Children, Volume 2 by Peter Kreeft
Geography
- Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall* **
English
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell* **
- Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen*
- Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis***
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde***
- Fitting Words Classical Rhetoric
Economics/Business
- The Communist Manifest by Karl Marx*
- Unhumans by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec
- The Millionaire Mission by Brian Preston** ***
- The Joy of Accounting by Peter Frampton and Mark Robilliard** ***
Science
- For the Love of Physics by Walter Lewin* **
- The Way We Work by David Macaulay** ***
Health
- Limitless by Jim Kwik* **
Math
- Calculus for Everyone by Mitch Stokes (but he has a little bit of trigonometry left to finish first!)
Weekly Work
- 3 entries in Book of Centuries per week
- 3 entries in commonplace book per week
What’s Missing?
There is a notable absence of certain things, such as Latin. My student already took four years of high school level Latin because he did Latin 1 in 8th grade. I looked into Latin 5, but it wasn’t available in a way that would work, and so we must be done. That was a hard cut, but necessary.
Same with choir. I had to cut it because there was no realistic way to make it fit.
With literature, I had to choose the books I thought were most important for him. He’s my first senior to not read Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, but he’s also the most familiar with the history of philosophy, so I think he’ll be fine. I also missed a couple novels I love. They just didn’t fit in the schedule.
He reads his Bible and theology books on his own; I don’t need to assign those, therefore I didn’t.
Looking Forward
These are my plans, such as they are. They are just plans. On more than one occasion, circumstances have changed midway during a high school year. I didn’t ever toss my plans entirely, but I did restructure and make additions or cuts in light of reality.
Reality. I keep saying that word.
We must see clearly when it comes to our students, their lives, and what we must do. Wishful thinking is a terrible foundation for curriculum building. Emotions likewise. If we want to plan a valuable final year of homeschooling, we have to face reality head on and then do our best to build something wonderful.
The curriculum? It’s a gift to your student. In my case, it’s the last gift in the long round of gifts homeschooling has allowed me to give.
