Tales from Cat's House of Homeschooled Kits!

I was going to wait until Monday to write this but I found myself getting obsessed with it. This is something that I think about often but never say out loud. Curriculum is often purchaed by parents who love it, without thinking about how their kids need to learn. I am totally guilty of this myself, way guilty.

I see posts off all the time from parents who are enchanted with this or that curriculum. It’s so enticing too. It comes in a great box with everything you need. Calvert is an excellent program but the more I read about the more I thought “There is no way my kids will use this.” My next thrall was Oak Meadow. I still have a mental hard on for this. It’s such gentle in it’s approach. I almost wish I could go back and do K through 6 myself just to use it. Again, it just wasn’t something that matched who my kids are.

I must confess to being a major proponent of student directed learning. Having schooled my own at home and taught in a public school classroom it works. I can tell you from expereince, when students do what they are interested in they learn the skills needed to succeed faster and with better retention. They can apply it to more situations because they have better mastery of it.

This get’s back to all the trust I’m always on about. Students, young people, have to be trusted to learn otherwise they will always be looking outside themselves for direction and approval. Those who love learning do so because the are allowed to explore the topice, idea, or concept to thier hearts content, wihtout fear of limits placed on them external schedules, standards, and age restrictions.

My son was interested in ancient Greece and Rome when he was 10 years old. This was not on the content standards for the grade he was in. He’d have to wait until the following year to learn that if we used a boxed standards based curriculum. He would have missed out on so much reading, book after book. By striking while the iron is hot, so much more get’s done.

It makes sense that we all love to do what we are interested in. If I had gone with something fixed we might not have arrived where we are today. We certainly would have had more arguments about getting things done. We all the others things involved in learning and growing, unnecessary conflict is something I can do without. If you are having trouble with your schooling, ask “Am I doing this for me or for them?” This is a question I ask everyday. It saves time, feelings, and sanity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about education, and learning. We, the royal we, say we want to children to have a good education. That isn’t the same as wanting children to be life long learners. It seems to me that education is about content, while learning is about skill and ability. This fits into the whole idea of content standards. This isn’t learning, this is what a student should know by a certain grade. Learning is a whole other deal. 

Learning is the process by which we education ourselves, it is the bridge. To learn is to know how to read, write, and calculate. If I acquire these three foundation skills, I can learn any content I find interesting. On a deeper level, learning is access. If a student, has these basic skills they have access to knowledge. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.

If I can read even at the 5th grade level, I have access to the news around me in newspapers. If I can write, I can respond, file a complaint, make a plan, or leave a note. Calculating allows me understanding and control of my own money, and time. That is a tremendous amount of power both personally and community wide.

When students have trouble learning, we blame the skills but maybe the content is the issue. When I wanted a pony I read everything about horses. It didn’t matter that reading was time consuming and difficult for me. I wanted to know it all, how else can a young girl persuade her parents if she can’t answer every question. That’s loads of motivation. My reading improved for sure but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. Some people need that consuming motivation to get them really moving with a new skill.

There has to be enough skill to have basic access. Then practice takes over and the skill improves. The idea is to get struggling students to want to cross the bridge. For my own kids the topic was video games. For my sister it was history. For my husband it’s space. Everyone has something. Watch your learners and talk to them. You are sure to find out their hot topics.

It can be diagramed like this:

PERSON __________SKILL_________MOTIVATING CONTENT

Student  _________reading________ Harry Potter

Grandparent ______writing________family stories

Father________calculating_________allowance 

When your learner or you, for that matter, are having difficulties with something new, diagram your bridge and see if you are putting the right skill to the right content. You may need to shift things around for a specific content to be accessed. This is where learning types, knowing how you or your student learns, is important. A student my write well but must first hear information before using it in writing. That’s another topic. 

A side benefit of this process is learning connectedness. Students often ask “Why do I need to know that?” or “When am I going to use this?” When individuals see how skills and content are connected, they are less resistant undertaking new assignments. They also make connections between new and prior knowledge much faster. This goes a long way to making learning enjoyable and life long.

When you sit down with your student, learner, whoever, ask “Is my goal to acquire new content?” If the answer is yes, then choose the skill that best bridges the gap. If your goal is to practice a skill, find the most entertaining content to get the student over the skills bridge. Then have at it. Either way, students will be more motivated and gain a deeper understanding of how and why they learn.

In talking with my mother this week, I had a thought about how we learn. My mother teaches art at a state university. We were talking about how learning is such a natural process. One of use had talked with someone who was concerned that they couldn’t get all the information thought to be essential into the students brains. Like they had to be force-fed or something.

I blurted out, as I often do. “They already know how to learn it.”

Then I considered why I thought and said that. 

Major thought number 2. It’s just like walking. No one has to tell a baby how to walk. They figure it out for themselves, like talking, eating, and everything else. Parents are there to help them when they fall, to cook dinner, read them books, and more. In short, parents are facilitators. 

People come fully loaded at birth. They are programmed to study their environment, try new things, and gain new insights. Being in a “learning environment” shouldn’t be any different. Teachers “best practice” is as the bridge to what the students need or want to learn. Oh and don’t get me started on all the eduspeak. 

I am so frustrated and angered by the Education Tribes need to create more ways to “teach children to learn”. They know how to do it. They don’t need another test that they are taught to pass. When students are left to interact all these things come up on their own. My kids have been homeschooled since the beginning using this bridge to learning method and they always score in the above average or advanced sections on STAR tests, when they take them. 

It is my growing opinion that educators need to feel important. If a student does so  much on their own, what is the teacher doing? How are they important? Facilitated learning requires a lot embeded curriculum in the learning environment. It is hidden and teased out as students access it. Teachers are important because they can create that environment. However, they don’t. Like a person yelling at a someone who doesn’t speak their language, thinking if I’m louder, they will understand, school systems stick to this false structure of testing, lingoism, and classes grouped by age.

My own elementary experience was in an open education classroom. It was multi grades and abilities all in one room. Everyone talking to everyone else. It was stimulating and spectacular. Everyone worked at their own pace and guess what, we all felt good about who we were. Most of those I still keep in touch with have gone to college and surprisingly many are homeschooling their own. 

As a public school teacher, the pain of seeing kids going from bright eyed to glazed over is like a punch in the stomach. I see my kids going on and doing more and more and more. Their eyes are bright. They want to learn more. They do learn more and they always will. Their software is already loaded.

In her blog Just Enough and Nothing More, Tammy Takahashi discusses the question “Is homeschooling better than school?” You can read her post here. This is such a vital and topical issue and I think it is at the root of such red herrings as socialization and “real world” integration. I call these red herrings because there is sufficient evidence to show that a person who attends park and recreation classes, goes to conferences, is in 4-H, Scouts (boy and girl), garage bands, website development, church groups, teen clubs, and kitchen sink development* are clearly getting along and in the real world. It follows if a person is doing this in the “real world” then they must be integrated into society.

The root to all of this is the “grass is greener” fear. What if what they have is better? If I send my kids to public school, are they missing out? and if they are, what are they missing? What do homeschooler’s do or have that my kids don’t? These are all great questions and there are no easy answers. The fear is real. I totally understand that. When we chose to homeschool I was plenty afraid. I feared what public school would do to my sensitive 5 year old son more. I wanted to fit in but not at the cost of that beautiful boys creative mind and silly sense of humor. In short, I wanted him to be himself and fit in.

It’s no wonder I felt confused. Think about America itself. Mainstream society has a real bipolar reaction to homeschooling. On the one hand they fear what is not the norm. By norm I mean the thing that most Americans are doing. If you or I are doing something on the periphery of society we must be duplicitous in our actions. That’s a pretty heavy assumption. How many Shakers are there, and do people see the worst in them? If I follow and don’t succeed, it’s my own fault for not creating my own out of the box solution. Talk about U turns!

That 180 degree turn of thought is pervasive. Mainstream America showers accolades on homeschoolers they feel are “amazing” and truly accomplished. 1997 Scripps  Spelling Bee winner Rebecca Sealfon and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelp come to mind. These individuals and many others, are true Americans because they have taken the reins of their lives, showing the hard work, grit, and perseverance lead to success. Blazing a new trail is as American as panning for Gold, taming the West, and going against King George III by creating a Declaration of Independence.

As with so many things, when it’s something most people want it’s good and if most people don’t want it, it’s bad. Be original, be an individual, don’t follow what others tell you to do, question authority. We say these things but we don’t mean them, at least not for all Americans. We back that up and even ensure it by keeping some schools back by underfunding, poor management, and institutionalized class warfare/racism. 

I am harsh. I mean to be. As a teacher in a public school for adults, I have seen how insidious these factors are. They are so embedded in the system most people aren’t even aware that they are recreating them. A look, a glance, ridiculous watered down texts, moving at the speed of the slowest student, teaching to middle, teaching to the test, lack of multicultural administrators, are just some ways kids are shut down in poor areas. Poor areas are often where new immigrants are because it’s cheaper there.  The system turns round and round and round. 

Those who break out and choose to make informed choices about their children’s education are instigators. We follow Forst’s path less taken and we are judged for it. Follow, follow the others, so I the mainstream parent, don’t have to question what I’ve chosen for my kids. Did I even choose? Well that’s what every family does. Those issues are not my issues. 

The main element missing here is choice. My husband and I made the choices we made to meet the needs of our family. We considered our issues. If a person is worried if one is better than the other, that is an issue they need to address. They need to see that they can make a choice and if they choose to stay where they are, excellent. Self determination means that, determine for yourself. Do your own souls searching, research, discussing, whatever. Take a good look at your grass. Do you like how green it is?  Ours is green enough for us.

Thank you Tammy for getting me thinking.

* kitchen sink development has yet to be proven but I had to get “kitchen sink” in there somewhere.

This is the presentation that I gave at the 2008 HomeSchool Association of California (HSC) conference at the Radisson in Sacramento. There was an audio recording made of this but I don’t have a copy. I think the recordings for all the recorded speakers are available from HSC. You can check them out at www.hsc.org.

This is pretty fast. You can hit the pause button, it looks like this ll, to stop it. Then you can take your time to read the slides that have more information on them.

Click here: 4 steps to keeping your learner’s interest