Blogging Progress...Blogress?

I've been asked how, as a homeschooler, I track my child's progress.

This is an interesting question because it means that the person asking it thinks that progress needs to be tracked. Learning needs to be quantified. If it's not quantifiable, it must not be happening. It's the conventional way of looking at education.

I do track my public school students' progress. Now that we've reached the end of the year, I can look back at each student's beginning of the year reading assessment, middle of the year assessment, and end of year assessment, and see that, yes, each of my students did make progress in reading.

But, with my own child, I know she's progressing. I know she's choosing more difficult books than the books she chose a year ago. I don't need a computerized test (an expensive computerized test) to tell me that. What I do need is time with my child. Because I spend time with my child, I know she's progressing.

Time is something that public school children don't get from their teachers, those people who are supposed to be very knowledgeable about their students' academic progress. And, because we teachers, we trackers, don't spend time - real time, not fake time, not time managing them, or time "facilitating" their "learning" - with our students, we have to rely on measurable data to prove that what we were doing all year was indeed moving our students forward.

I spend a lot of time with my child. I listen to her read daily. I ask her about what she's reading, and I ask her if I can get her more books like the books she's reading. I get her more books. I reserve books at the library. I order books on Amazon. I track my Amazon shipment, but I don't track the progress of my child.

I cozy up with her in bed on a Sunday afternoon, and do math for an hour and a half. Very un-Charlotte Mason, doing math for an hour and a half with a seven year old. (Very un-Charlotte Mason; shouldn't we be outside nature journaling?) But I assess my child's attitude - not using a scale of 1 to 5 - and determine that cozy math, for her, is leisure. It's scholé. It's school we get to do.

So, to answer how I track my child's progress: I observe that we've turned to the next page, we've started the next chapter, we're nearing the end of the book. We. Because all of us in this house are being educated in ways that can't be quantified. 

And I'm just blogging our way forward.