Voices of Virtual Schooling

This is an ongoing series of personal essays from virtual schooling families who have chosen the brave new frontier of virtual learning and have lived to tell the story and to pass on their pearls of wisdom and experience to you.  These stories will represent families who have chosen public, private, independent and blended choices. First up are two essays from virtual schooling teens (yes, the daughters of two authors of Virtual Schooling. We live what we wrote about in the book!)

Senators and Hitler – A Real Life Education

Rebekah Gillis, age 16

While many kids were practicing their daily routine studying biology or taking a math test at their local high school, I was on a plane with my mom. Where was I going? Well, it was different every time. I had the opportunities of a lifetime. I got to travel to Minnesota, Louisiana, South Carolina, New York, Washington, Oregon, Georgia, and even Washington D.C. I’ll never forget that trip last December.  Instead of my mom rushing to get me to school on time; she was rushing me out the door to the airport. During the winter in California, you wouldn’t be considered totally crazy if you wore shorts and a shirt to school. The weather is still decent in December; jackets aren’t a necessity. Normally, in the morning, I would usually get up and throw on my summer clothes, but I knew that day was going to be different. I was going to experience Washington DC during a snow storm. I strapped myself up in some ridiculously warm snow clothes and took a 5-hour plane ride to my next destination or what my mom likes to call “our next adventure.” When we landed in D.C. we went to our hotel and swan in the pool, which was oddly indoors. Now this sounds like all fun and games, and I’m making it sound like there was no schoolwork for me to do.  That was to come later in an even more interesting way.

I learned so much on my trip to D.C.  I received a hands-on education opportunity that no kid could experience in a normal public school. I accepted an invitation to sit in on an Education Committee meeting watching, listening and learning how a bill is introduced and discussed by the legislators.  I was part of the process – sitting between my mom and a Senator from Colorado!  I began to understand what it takes to get a bill ready to be presented in Congress.   After the meeting, I was invited to have lunch with 6 other legislators and sat next to the Senator from Nevada.  It was interesting to listen to their conversations.   Just having the break to ask these Senators any questions I always wanted to know was an incredible opportunity. Not only did I get to sit in on government meetings and talk to politicians; I got to sight see many different aspects of our nation’s capital.  My online lessons at Insight School focused on the history of the United States, world events and the roots of democracy.  Instead of just reading about it, I visited the Holocaust museum and was reminded of Hitler’s rise to power and, how that power unchecked, had devastating results. Instead of just reading about the wars and our history, I visited all the memorials for the wars and saw names of our brave soldiers etched into our collective memory.  I looked up and saw monuments forever honoring some of our great leaders.  These monuments helped me think about all of the times our nation has been challenged and more importantly all the times we overcame those obstacles. My winter clothes didn’t go to waste – my mom and I got to experience the cold first hand as we stood through a snowstorm and took part in the Christmas tree lighting ceremony on the front lawn of the Capital.  Flying across the country – learning about our heritage – developing a strong relationship with my mom that will last forever…what an education!  That trip was unforgettable and definitely an adventure.  But that trip wouldn’t have been possible if I wasn’t in a virtual school.

Being in a virtual school gave me the flexibility and freedom to reach beyond a textbook and see history in the making.  So while many kids were jetting off to high school to learn about World War II and research the world’s greatest poet; I was jetting off to Washington D.C. to see it all first hand. None of this would have been possible without the power of virtual schools. It’s an experience I’m glad I never passed up; it’s a new way to learn.

My own Jane Austen Book Club

Madison Kanna, age 16

Having long since finished reading Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings and other fantasy novels my family has enjoyed together over the last fourteen years, I hoped to venture into new unknown worlds and so I went to my elder sister’s bookshelf.

It was there that I stumbled across a book entitled  Pride & Prejudice. Not only had I heard of this infamous book and it’s eighteenth century author, Jane Austen, I also knew

I’d never read a romance novel.

I like to play soccer, surf, and read and write about fantasy, a genre that I believe to be more exciting and a lot less fictitious than a novel that enticed its readers on the subject of love. I had heard so much about the novel that if I did not read it, I would consider myself impaired as a reader. I begrudgingly sat down and started reading

Pride & Prejudice. I had yet to know a two-hundred year old book would affect my fourteen-year old life so much.

By page two I no longer considered this book to be an annoyance to get through but instead a gift given to me by fate. My interest in the novel became an obsession which led to absolute admiration, which was only increased when, two days later, my head full of the Bennetts, I finished Pride & Prejudice and rushed with my mother to the bookstore to pick up Austen’s five other novels that waited for me. Thus began my attachment to Jane Austen’s writing.

Now at the age of sixteen I’m still enthralled with Jane Austen, as I will be for the rest of my life. I am always discussing one Austen book or another to my family and friends. When I go to the bookstore, my best friend Claire jokes “I don’t think there are  any new Jane Austen books out.” How well she knows me and the fact that I am frequently in the Jane Austen section even though I own numerous copies of all her books.

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Meet us at several Apple stores!

We are heading out on our book tour starting August 10, 2009, and we be making several stops at Apple stores in New York City, San Francisco and Santa Monica (Los Angeles area).
Exciting to see our book featured on the homepage of several of Apple’s largest stores.

We look forward to parents exploring the amazing resources available for their child. Imagine your child or teen becoming fluent in Chinese quickly, without a tutor or a full year in a classroom; or getting a leg up in science from the scientist who found the Titanic; or “attending,” for free, a Yale University class on history, literature, or any other subject about which a teen is passionate.

Join us!

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Bill Gates had them both

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Gladwell points out how access and parent advocacy were catalysts for Gates’s founding Microsoft and igniting the PC revolution, which he would go on to dominate. It is well known that Gates dropped out of Harvard, but few know that Gates’s parents withdrew him from public school because he was bored and enrolled him in Lakeside, an elite private school in Seattle. That same year the Lakeside Mother’s Club put together a rummage sale and spent the proceeds on a computer terminal for the school. This would be standard for today, not in 1968. The Lakeside computer terminal was a new type of computer that shared processing power with a much larger computer in downtown Seattle. Gates would learn programming without being slowed by the laborious punch-card process used by the majority of computer terminals in existence at the time. Gates’s access to the computer terminal had allowed him to get thousands of programming-hours under his belt when he and fellow student and future business partner, Paul Allen, saw the cover of the January 1974 Popular Electronics magazine featuring the first do-it-yourself computer kit—the Altair 8800. That time spent programming and gaining knowledge about that rare thing in 1968—a computer— positioned him to seize the opportunity with the Altair 8800 and go on to make history. Writes Gladwell, “Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.”

What if millions of eighth graders across the United States were given access to burgeoning industries, innovative technologies, and subjects they found exciting? What if their parents advocated for and supported that access? Gates had parents who fought for their son’s needs and access to a new field that few knew about at the time.

We should all do the same for our children.

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Bold Move: We Defined the Future of Education.

Technology alone won’t transform education. Taking our current model of one-size-fits-all education and delivering it from an onlinelearning school platform or other cutting-edge digital delivery method is like taking a Model T, adding new tires, and hoping it will fulfill the needs of car drivers today. This is a short-sighted attempt at leveraging the benefits of technology for education. Any virtual school program or curriculum must respect how each of its students learns best. We believe this new model of education, virtual schooling, represents the nexus of engaged human involvement and the new delivery method for curriculum and programs.

Accordingly, we define virtual schooling by the potential it holds: We see it as a personalized learning approach accomplished by leveraging the best of virtual and classroom-based schools and programs tailored to a child’s needs and interests.

Virtual schooling holds the potential to be the twenty-first century educational approach that can best address every child as an individual with a dominant learning style, myriad
intelligences, a unique learning pace, and unique aspirations. A child that is nurtured to respect how he or she learns best, the pace at which he or she likes to learn, along with his or her intelligences, unique talents, and passions, will learn to respect that elegant mix for the rest of his or her life. Christopher Paolini, author of the best-selling Eragon book series, graduated from high school at the age of 15 after having participated in an accredited correspondence
program. That program allowed him to work at his own pace and afforded him the freedom to explore his love for nature and literature. Now, all children can have that same opportunity.

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