A purely self-taught curriculum would have no interaction. It would be a student sitting at a desk or carrel, reading printed materials.
The next step up would be a student not with printed materials, but with a computer connected to the Web.
The third step up is the “The Good Curriculum”: a student sitting at a desk or carrel with a computer connected to www.TheGoodCurriculum.com. Here, the student sees videos, reads a daily assignment onscreen, and clicks links to original sources. The print button is used daily.
If the student gets stuck, he figures out the answer on his own. If he cannot get unstuck after a half an hour, he posts a question on a course forum. Maybe he gets an answer. Maybe not.
One of the worst mistakes a parent can make is to intervene in the instruction of a teenager. The teenager learns in context. If this context is based on parental help, the teenager is less likely to learn how to learn on his own. Then comes calculus. Parents cannot help. The student must then learn on his own.
To understand this curriculum, think “calculus.” You will not teach calculus. The online course will. What applies to calculus applies to the entire curriculum after grade 5. A parent does nothing after grade 5, and maybe not after grade 4 There is nothing to grade. If a parent wants to read the papers, fine.
This curriculum trains students heading either to college or into business. In college, there are no parents to help. In business, there usually are no parents to help.
Parents know this, but they have not previously used a curriculum that is based 100% on self-teaching, including tutorials by peers who have struggled with the same problems recently — maybe last week. Parents must learn to turn loose earlier than they may have planned: before the student goes off to college.
This is why we have created “The Good Curriculum”, not “The Good Curriculum Academy”. Above 5th grade, students are in charge of their personal approaches to learning. We supply the content. We recommend learning strategies. But the students are in charge. They learn earlier than their peers do what needs to be done in college.
About half of students who enroll in college fail to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. They do not learn how to learn in high school. Students who use this curriculum do.