Bridging the Home and School: A partnership
between a homeschooler and a Canadian school

Gloria Harrison is a mother of two high school students
in Pennsylvania who have been homeschooled for their entire academic career.

Michael Barbour is a tele-teaching at
Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista, Newfoundland, Canada.

My daughters Anna and Sophia are in 11th grade. They have never gone to public or private school, but always been homeschooled. When they were little, I was happy to follow their lead, and gear their learning to their interests, but as they grew older, their education became more formal. We are very lucky to live in Pennsylvania, which has an excellent homeschooling law. Although we are required to keep a portfolio for each child and meet with an evaluator once a year, we have complete freedom in what we choose to teach and how we teach it. We are even luckier to live in southwestern PA, where extra-curricular activities and support groups for homeschoolers abound. When the girls began high school, they enrolled in the Pennsylvania Homeschoolers Accreditation Agency (PHAA) program, which will provide them with a high school diploma recognized by the state of Pennsylvania and all major colleges.

This diploma has high standards; for example, in order to earn a credit in English, the student must read at least 25 books, of which at least three must be classics; write at least four compositions, of which one must be a 2500 word research paper. For high school credits other than English, a student must have done one of the following: covered over 2/3 of a text-book; logged 120 days or 120 hours of study, completed the 2500 word research paper, taken a college course, or passed an AP exam.

History is one of the girls' favorite subjects. One of mine, as well! Every year, we would pick a general topic, and then research this topic in depth. I might have a text-book, but I would use it just as a frame-work, to get an idea of what sub-topics to explore. Otherwise, we would just borrow mountains of books from our local libraries, and read, read, read! We would discuss what we read, and I would occasionally prepare a test. This approach worked well in elementary and middle school, and it worked well in high school as well. In 9th and 10th grade, since the girls would write their research paper on a history topic, this satisfied the requirement for obtaining the credit, and there was no need to "prove" that we had covered a text-book.

At the beginning of this school year, the girls were looking at the credit requirements, and both of them announced that they would like to study for an AP exam. Sophia chose to take a AP Psychology course on-line. AP European History seemed the natural choice for Anna. Not only does she love history, but we have mostly focused on European history (we covered American history thoroughly in 7th and 8th grades). The reason for that is that I am Portuguese, and was educated in French and British schools. I am therefore quite familiar with Western Europe's history. Our family has also lived in southern Europe for most of the girls' life, and we have been to innumerable museums and historic houses.

Unfortunately, there was no AP European History course being offered on-line. Anna wasn't fazed by this. She said that it would be easy for her to study all by herself, since we had so many books in the house, and she could use a review book such as Barron's to plan a study outline. The idea of teaching the girls one fewer course this year really appealed to me, and specially the thought of not having to prepare any homework or tests for them!

The first few weeks, all went well. Anna read up a storm, and took innumerable notes. But then reality set in. Although she was learning a lot, there was just too much information out there, and her usual way of immersing herself deeply into a topic wasn't going to work. This time, she was not reading just for the sake of learning. She couldn't afford the luxury of staying with a topic she enjoyed for as long as she liked. No, she had to move forward. And from my point of view, the fantasy of not being involved in her learning was just that - a fantasy. I started helping her out by researching Internet sites for her, because she was just spending too much time searching, rather than researching. I also went back to my time-consuming activity of preparing tests for her. The review books we'd bought had tests in them, but they covered the whole time period of the course, so couldn't be used as yet.

Then I struck gold. In my Internet searches, I discovered the Educational Testing Service's AP European History listserver for teachers of the course. I signed up for that, and immediately started getting such a lot of help from fellow educators -- links to great sites, information about tests and essays, etc..

Another stroke of luck for us occurred when we went to a giant book sale and found several European history text-books from different publishers. And I even found a teacher's manual with essays and multiple-choice questions for each specific chapter. This eased my work considerably.

However, Anna was lamenting that it was kind of lonesome studying all on one's own. Her sister was enjoying her Psychology message board. Of course, Anna and I spent plenty of time discussing whatever she'd read that day, but it just wasn't the same as exchanging thought with other students. Lo and behold, a third stroke of luck -- at the end of September, I read an email from an AP teacher, Michael Barbour, who was looking for students to participate in his bulletin board discussion forum. I immediately wrote to Mr. Barbour, and he very kindly allowed Anna to join his class. This has truly been a Godsend to us. Mr. Barbour assigns weekly discussion questions, as well as document-based (DBQ) and free-response (FRQ) essay questions. He does not give homework as such. I am still Anna's primary teacher. But she has greatly benefited from reading other students' postings, as well as taking tests and answering essay questions on-line, which Mr. Barbour eventually returns via e-mail, graded, and with comments. I find that when I know I am not going to have much time to prepare Anna's weekly assignments, I can just tell her: "Go to Mr. Barbour's WWW site, and do something!" Actually, most of the time, I don't have to tell her, she will do it on her own.

In Anna's own words:

I like participating in Mr. Barbour's on-line discussion forum, because it is a wonderful supplement to my own AP course. The weekly discussion questions (such as: "Which form of government was more effective, absolutism or constitutionalism?"; "Why do textbooks often gloss over Central and Eastern Europe?"; "What constitutes a revolution?", etc.) help me to better understand history. We also get the chance to do on-line DBQs and FRQs, which we're graded on. This is great practice for me because they are not my strong point. I've learned a lot about how to approach a DBQ, and I like to think that I'm starting to improve. If I weren't in this discussion forum on-line, I still would be doing fine in my course, but the forum helps information to sink in. Basically every week we answer a discussion question, reply to others' answers, and often take a timed DBQ or FRQ. I am very glad that I have the opportunity to participate, because I think it is really helping me to analyze and think about historical events, and in the case of the DBQs and FRQs, giving me valuable experience.

In conclusion, I would say that any homeschooler taking an AP course on his own would benefit from participating in on-line discussions with other students, and also from having someone else than his teacher/parent correct his work. As both parents and educators, we know how hard it is to be objective. In my own case, I bend over backwards to try to avoid any hint of favoritism and I end up being too strict.

The online AP European History course that Anna participates in is part of a larger progr