How to make a homeschooled high school transcript

A while back I promised to write more on homeschooling high school and creating transcripts, and since I am fresh out of ideas for tonight, this seems as good a time as any. I'll start with the basics of how to think about a transcript and from there I'm quite sure it will veer into non-traditional views of high school. I'm feeling in that kind of mood. 

High school always seems as though it is an enormous hurdle whenever someone is thinking about homeschooling. In the general thinking, high school is this big "thing"... a momentous time of life, a preparation for further studies, the place you meet your best friends and find your first love. It's as though everyone collectively has forgotten what high school was really like and has replaced it with the Disney version. High school wasn't horrible for me, so this isn't sour grapes. There was plenty I enjoyed about it, I had a decent amount of friends, and I did well in my classes.

(Okay, let's back up and talk about that for a moment. Yes, I did do well in my classes. I received good grades. I received good enough grades to earn a regent's (full-ride) scholarship to any Arizona University. But what I really learned was how to game the system. I did the absolute minimum in any and every class in order to receive the grade I needed to keep the GPA I wanted. I can't honestly say I learned all that much and arriving at Northwestern was a bit of a shock, in that I had to up my minimum a bit. So I did. School taught me to be a grade hound, with actually learning anything being a distant second. I come by my educational cynicism first hand, and I would freely admit to being an educational cynic even in high school.)

But it was also four years of my life that I am happy to know I never have to repeat again. Being an adolescent is just not that enjoyable and being in the swamp of school with hundreds of other adolescents with raging hormones and incomplete brains... well, be honest, there's lots about that age that no one enjoys. And this was pre-social media (thank goodness), which just increases the not fun-ness.

So I am always just a little bemused when people see this as a right of passage, that if a child skips it, they will be forever scarred. There is also the assumption that high school classes are suddenly PhD level rocket science work that no mere parent can handle. (If your child is able to do that level of school, then why are you even bothering with high school? Just send them to community college. But more on that later.) Really, while there are some more specialized math and sciences offered at the high school level, those alone should not be the reason you decide not to homeschool. For those, you can find a tutor, take a class, trade skills with a friend, make use of a family member. Just because you cannot teach those subjects does not mean they cannot be done, you just have to be the one to find resources. Homeschooling high school is do-able.

I'm now hundreds of words in and haven't even begun to talk about what I said I was going to begin with. I've found that before anyone can begin to think about transcripts, they first have to change how they view high school a bit. So, moving on.

There are two ways to think about transcripts, by year or by subject. Both are equally valid, but I find that thinking about creating transcripts by subject allows one to more easily fit a rather non-traditional education into a very traditional format. If you are more traditional in your home, then by year might work just fine for you. Our loosy-goosy ways are just very difficult to do that with. This one change of thinking really helped me wrap my mind around the whole transcript business.

The second important piece is that I create the transcript essentially backwards. My children learn about what they want to learn about (with me adding in things such as algebra and economics and biology). Their job is to keep track of what they have been doing and learning. (Some are better at this than others.) Then, when we need a transcript, we go back through all that they have done and collect those things into "classes" with "credits" and "grades". All those things that make traditional school types feel calm and happy. 

For instance, B. loves bees. On his own he read about bees, he took a local class about beekeeping, he bought a kit, made his own beehive, and bought bees to fill it, he dealt with swarms, he harvested honey, and he had to go do a little bee presentation at the condo next door because the residents were very concerned about the bees. None of this did I assign to him; this was his interest and what he was doing for his own enjoyment. (Well, maybe not the condo piece.) On his transcript, he has a one credit lab science class titled 'apiology' (or the study of bees). He gave himself an 'A' in it, by the way.

That's a nice and neat example, but I've done the same thing with other children's self-study and interests. A. had a history of policing credit for her participation in a local Police Explorers group. I added in some reading so that it filled out the credit a bit more. P. has an equine science credit. You get the idea. One of the things I actually enjoy about creating a transcript is giving my children's learning impressively academic sounding names. For B.'s ongoing study of WWII (once again, his thing, not my assigned work), he did so much that it was definitely two classes' worth. So I think I called one "History of  World War II" and the second I titled "History Seminar: World War II and it's Literature" or something like that. I don't remember exactly, but the idea was to convey a more in-depth range of study which was what B. had actually done. None of this is difficult, you just need to keep tabs on what your high schoolers are doing and make a note of it somewhere.

D. made life exceedingly easy by doing his last two years of high school at the community college where J. works. He did his classes for dual enrollment, so they counted as both high school and college credit. He also had his own areas of interest, so those were added in as well. (To a point. Some of my children have definitely inherited my autodidact tendencies and once I get up to between 30 and 32 credits, I leave whatever is left off because it looks a bit unbelievable.) D. also has done private French tutoring for the past two years, so that was two years of a foreign language. (Well, he had three, because he also did Spanish 1 at the community college.) TM ended up with a lot of applied arts credits between the music he has done and the art classes he has taken as well as creating his own art. Each of my children's transcripts look very, very different from each other because they are very different children. Instead of a cookie cutter education, homeschool allowed them the time and ability to pursue in-depth the things they were passionate about. 

Obviously high school does not need to look like what the public schools are doing. Sure, you need math, science, history, language arts, etc., because you want your child to have a well-rounded education. But just because they need science on their transcript does not mean that they have to take biology, chemistry, physics because that is "what you do". History can be what your child is interested in. Language Arts can be a child who participates in NaNoWriMo (hmm... I think I left that off of D.'s transcript... ) Interest-based learning is always deeper and more meaningful than a class that is assigned just because it's what is done.

Now, the $10,000 question. Will colleges and universities accept these rather untraditional transcripts? In my experience, yes. So that would include private universities of varying sizes, a Canadian university, and the US Army. Did everyone get into every school they applied to? Nope, but then how often does that happen for traditionally schooled children? I've only had push-back from one school. It was a vocational school and not an academic institution. To allow them to accept the transcript, I had to write course descriptions for each class. (I did it. I grumbled. I used a lot of multi-syllabic words in a rather passive-aggressive manner.)

Really, there is nothing mystical about high school. It is learning at a slightly deeper level to match the growing intellectual development of your child. One specific course of study does not guarantee life long success. I would posit that there are very few of us who actually remember all that much from what we learned in high school. (Actually my biggest academic take-aways from high school were that I couldn't write and I couldn't understand chemistry. I have since come to terms with these two things, and as an adult realize that it was far more about the teacher than it was about my abilities. When you are 15 or 16, you don't quite realize that.) I have been actually know to say out loud that really, it, high school, just doesn't matter that much. Heresy, I know.