The very idea that classrooms full of students are told that grades will be given on the basis of a curve or a class average is an insult to the idea of teaching. This means that on the first day the children are told that some of them have to fail. What an awful start for any project.

I have always found the whole idea of grading to be offensive to me and to my students. As much as I was able to do so, I kept the idea of grades from getting between my students and my teaching. This caused much trouble for the administrations under which I worked, but it was very beneficial for the kids.

How different it was to teach my son, Corey, at home. The only pressure I felt was the responsibility of teaching him to love and to use wisely his language. It never occurred to me that he might fail. I never once thought that he was not learning. I never had the idea that he was doing only an average job. I never gave him time limits to learn anything with the threat that if he didn't finish on time his grade would suffer or that I would think less of his ability.

You can have the same type of experience with your child. I think that the best advice I could give another homeschooling parent about this very difficult job is to ask you to think of your child's training and your evaluations as you would think about those two things when teaching your older children how to drive a car. You would not say to your children, "I am going to grade you kids on your driving on a bell curve, so, one of you has to fail and never drive at all." And, you wouldn't think that all of your children would have to learn each driving skill at the same rate or fail. You would say to each child, "I love you and want you to be a good driver so you'll not be hurt and won't hurt anyone else.

I don't know how long this will take, but we'll work together with it until we both agree that you're an excellent driver."

You wouldn't give your children a C- on driving and then let them take the car. Assume the same attitude about grading writing. Help until they are excellent writers, or at least as good as they can be. It won't happen this year or maybe next year, but there will be improvement each year, and you'll have years together. One thing that makes it hard to think of teaching this way is that in writing there is no absolutely right way to say anything, just as there is no totally wrong way. There are just degrees of smoothness and economy and precision.

There are some things that children do need that I am sure you can give them. They need to feel good about what they do. This is just like you and me. We need this, too, and we're adults. This is one of the very good reasons that so many parents are homeschooling. Their kids weren't feeling good about what they were learning (or not learning) in school.

Making your children feel good about learning to write is not hard to do. It has a lot to do with your attitude as each child watches you react to what has been written. I think of it this way: if my wife made a list every night of all the things I did wrong during the day and told me how much I needed to learn, I would run away from home.

What kills children's desire to write is, when they put their hearts on a page—and this is exactly what they do when they write—and mom looks at it and says, "This is nice, but look at that spelling. You didn't learn anything about spelling all year. And the punctuation! We've got to get back to the basics of commas. Let me find my red pen and point out all of these errors for you." These children will want to run away from writing, and so would I.

An important thing to keep in mind is that children want to learn and want to please their parents. As a teacher, what a great position you're in. Find something absolutely wonderful about what has been written and ask your child to read that aloud. Then ask your child to read it to you. Then ask your husband or wife to read it. And then ask your child to read it to you both because you both think it's so beautiful. Now your child will feel good about what's been written. At this point, rather than point out all the things that are wrong with the paper, you can show one or two ways to make it even better. Say that the writing is almost perfect, and to make it perfect, you have one rule that you'd like to explain. Read that one rule and explain how it works. Help your child apply that rule to the writing. This will demonstrate what that application has done to that almost perfect sentence. Now, read it again and call it perfect! Your children will break their hearts trying to write perfect sentences for you.

If you take this approach, you can accomplish a number of things: your children will look forward to writing; they will not be afraid of making mistakes—and be white knuckle writers—they will learn the rules as they apply to their writing; and, they will feel good about what they are learning. The most important benefit of all is, they will learn to love their language.

I tried to do this in the public school and met with lots of resistance from the office and the other teachers, but with my son it worked just this way, and it can work this way for you, too. How wonderful it is to help people we love and who love us.

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