Cruise Question: How do you teach advanced subjects?

This week's question: "How do you teach advanced subjects?" (Click on the ship to see more responses--they will be posted on Tuesday.)

Um...how advanced? I've never tried to teach senior chemistry...or senior hairstyling. (Good luck at the Skills competition tomorrow, Apprentice!)

I guess my overall answer would be: it depends on what it is and how comfortable the parent-teacher is with that subject. And then what resources, including people, you have around or might be able to get hold of; and by people I mean either to teach or to learn with.

For Grade 9 Algebra with The Apprentice, we covered the Beginning Algebra Topics from PurpleMath.com, and also read How to Solve Word Problems in Algebra (very useful) and parts of Algebra Unplugged. (High school math wasn't something I felt very confident teaching, but this combination worked well for us...and I found a lot of things came back to me as we went along.)

For Grade 9 history and literature, we were following Ambleside Online's Year 8--more of the English than the history--which gave The Apprentice a good base for later English courses. In her last year at home, we covered a lot of the "you might need to know this" stuff from Writer's Inc.; later on we spent some time looking at samples of student writing on the Ontario Ministry of Education website.

The Apprentice went to public high school after grade 9, but we did continue to do a few subjects at home. Since we wanted to be given credit for those subjects by the high school, I tried to base each one on the provincial outlines, while still covering the basic requirements in a way that made sense to us and made use of available resources. I set up a grade 11 course for The Apprentice called Philosophy: The Big Questions, which was modelled after the same course in the Ontario curriculum but which made use of our own books (including Mortimer J. Adler's book on Aristotle; Sophie's World; and Know Why You Believe). I gave her a syllabus/workbook with reading references (some we did together, some she read on her own), questions, and term assignments...and even You-tube links. That was probably one of the best-organized courses that we did at home. We also covered two required courses, 20th Century Canadian History, using a combination of DVDs and the Great Canadian Debates website; and Canadian Geography, based on the Ministry of Education goals but drawing mostly from Canadian Geographic. (No way you could get a textbook more current than that!) We covered a half credit in Civics using government publications and videos.

We're not sure yet how long the younger Squirrelings will continue to homeschool; if they follow The Apprentice to high school, I may be off the hook for algebra and graphic design. But if not, I know there are lots of resources out there to draw from...there's always a way.