transcript

I see a lot of questions about transcripts, so I thought I'd put this out here. I decided to register with The Farm School as our umbrella program in TN for the "high school" years, in part so that I could do exactly this, and generate a transcript as we went. At the end, if we want, The Farm will create a diploma for us. The transcript is generated via a simple online program - I'm sure there are tons of the darned things, but the one they use is homeschoolreporting.com in case you're looking for one. One of the handy features is that when you go to type in a "class" it gives you a long list of suggested high school classes so you can use something that sounds nice and normal. You can also assign grades and credits if you want.

So this is what the transcript looks like for Morgan's "freshman year of high school":

English 1
Math- logic
Computing - graphic design
Health
Biology
Physical education
Ancient history//World Geography

But we're unschoolers, right? So how the heck did she manage that? Do we do online classes or something? Nope. Not a bit of it. I keep an eye on the sorts of things she's doing - what she's reading, writing about, drawing, watching, playing - and I take notes on that when I think about it. Then around the turn of the "semester" I look through my notes and see what would be a good fit. I compare what high school say students learn to what colleges assume high school graduates retain, and I take that pretty heavily into account. I'm not interested in holding my kid to a superior standard, just providing a reasonable "translation" of natural learning into a simple, lowest-common-denominator sort of format.

Mostly, it's pretty easy. Natural learning really does lead kids in all sorts of wonderful directions! It even leads to a fair amount of intellectual rigor in terms of questioning sources, analyzing information, expressing ideas clearly, even examining the ethics of decision making. It does because natural learning isn't about doing just enough to pass a test, it's about following the rabbit trails of curiosity and discovering where they lead. So that even when the "subject matter" derives from fan fiction and video games rather than textbooks and approved reading lists, curiosity itself leads kids to develop the kinds of mental skills that schools work so hard (and often with such futility) to impart.

If you're looking for more information about creating transcripts, portfolios or other kinds of reporting for unschoolers, here's a really good collection of resources
http://www.unschoolingmom2mom.com/getting-a-diploma.html


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December 2016 update!

Well, it's the end of another reporting period, time to cobble my notes into something that sounds reasonable. Last year, things changed a little between the "mid year report" and the final version, and I expect that will happen again this year. Remember, this is an interpretation of real life, natural learning, which twists and turns and doesn't follow a plan. And I'm trying to cram all of that into some fairly narrow categories provided by my reporting program. This is how it looks so far - with commentary, because I'm in that kind of mood.

English 2. By which I mean, she reads stuff, encounters literature and literary references, talks about stuff, compares and contrasts, and is generally articulate and aware. I'm debating changing this to "contemporary literature" but maybe next year.

English, writing - creative writing. I'm irritated to discover that the reporting program doesn't actually have a "creative writing" category, so I'll figure out how to tweak it later on. There's also a "composition" category, and I might use that. She writes A Lot, and not all of it fiction. And communicates about writing A Lot on various websites. So I'll see where I want to go with this.

Computer programming. This is something she's dabbled in, on and off, and needs to end up on the transcript somewhere. I've done some casual research into high school programming courses, and she's dabbled all over that stuff. Apparently school programming classes aren't all that impressive. See my complete lack of surprise.

Drawing - intro to animation. She does a lot of drawing and some animation, so once again this needs to end up on the transcript somehow, somewhere. And yet again I'm having a hard time fitting it into a category. Don't they have "basics of animation" classes in high schools? They should. It's the 21st century for crissakes.

 History - modern. Lots of stuff going on in her world connecting to the world wars these days. I'll keep this for this "semester" but it's possible I'll list something else next "semester." That's what I did above for world history/ geography - each was a half credit, "single semester class." As it were. In real life, of course, there's lots of swirling around, overlapping ideas.

Math - applied 1. What a delightfully uninformative category! Perfect for unschoolers. Realistically, her math is coming from computer stuff - programming, animation, and video games. So you can see, it's sometimes hard to know where to "record" things. At this point, I'm thinking of keeping programming separate from math because it can be used as a "foreign language" for some universities, and that might be handy.

Psychology - gender studies. Not that "gender studies" is a category, but I'm going to make it fit somewhere. This has been a Big Topic of Conversation in our house, and for a kid who doesn't really "make conversation" by nature, that's significant.

Physiology. Hmm. Might be a stretch, but maybe I'll dig out the old "physiology coloring book" to add to what's happening around this topic. Or maybe I'll find a better category by June. We'll see.

Physical education - because all those hours on the trampoline might as well count for something, right?

So as you can see, the "mid semester" point is more of a rough draft than a finished product. A lot of what she's doing is ongoing. A lot of it can be categorized in multiple ways. And she's going in a bunch of directions at once. Also, the program I'm set up with, via the Farm, isn't very oriented toward tech-savvy kids. I will contrive!