Thoughts On Education And Child Development: Some Of My Homeschool Whys
Filed in: parenting
Ok- interestingly enough, most questions have been coming to me by way of my e-mail contact forum. So I will respond to a few things quickly with as much honesty as I can give.
#1: Any comments about how I’m an awesome mom should be edited to add that I am also completely freaked out, worried, overwhelmed, and prone to moments of overpowering self doubt. I’m human. I get tired. I get fed up. I get hormonal and cranky and feel the stress life pretty acutely. And I doubt myself when I’m feeling these things. I doubt myself a lot.
I try to remind myself that me at my worst, although pretty awful, isn’t me entirely. Me at my best is me, and me at my worst is still trying to do better, so me averaged out is actually pretty good. If out of an average month I give my kids me at my best two weeks, me mediocre one and me awful one week- I’d say I’m still on top. I’m not awesome, I’m average. I’m just trying to do what I can for my children, flying by the seat of my pants most days notwithstanding.
#2: Am I still going to put Jonas back in 1st grade at the end of the summer?
That is a good question, and really only time will answer that. I’m sure Jonas will let us know what he needs, and we will go with that. While the fundamental principles of teaching your own children make a lot of sense to me, I recognize that situations change and that there is much value to school as we know it. Oh, there is a lot wrong with it too, and a good teacher can make or break the entire year, but ultimately, Jonas will learn basic skills from elementary schools. Will he become educated? That’s debatable.
At the end of his extended summer (since we will be taking him out of K early), we’ll see where he is and what we want to try. At worst, this foray into summer homeschooling will be a great supplement to what he has already learned. At best, it will be the stepping stone he needs to a lot of success and growth- so aside from losing my mind, I can’t lose, right? (That’s supposed to be funny. . .)
#3 Curriculum, curriculum, curriculum!
What curriculum will I be using to teach Jonas? I have spent hours looking into several curriculums that can be purchased, and I have found a lot of very valuable resources. I have also found some that go against some of my reasons for homeschooling (flexibility, freedom, and a belief that children should lead their own education and not be expected to perform at levels that their bodies are not developed enough to handle). There are curriculums that are completely free, but require you to follow them to the letter, and there are curriculums on which you can spend almost a grand, which, to me is a little nuts (and impossible financially).
My educational philosophy guides me to believe that people learn best from real life scenarios, and that most basic factoids and skills required for life are things that can be learned along the way. You don’t need a month of math worksheets to teach simple fractions when baking a few meals and splitting a candy bar two ways is going to let you know very quickly that you’d prefer 2/3rds over 1/3rd of that hunk of chocolate. You need someone to verbally and visually guide you through the process so you can understand not only what you are learning, but how it benefits you. Don’t get me wrong, practice is good, but I believe in real life application.
I have found a variety of resources to teach Jonas with, many are games that reenforce skills and activities like letter writing and reading together that encourage real time practice. I did order one book of math worksheets and ideas-but those are more to give Chris and I ideas of how to teach Jonas certain topics. As far as reading goes, Jonas and I already spend about an hour a day reading, so my resource there is a library full of books that he will love.
I really feel that younger children mostly need to solidify the basics of reading writing and arithmetic. Science, art, and other pursuits are things that will occur naturally as all children are artists and scientist, experiencing and experimenting in the world around them, while also engaging in activities that display their emotional and artistic reactions to those things. Very few subjects are mutually exclusive of each other; as we have read we have touched on many bits of history and science, with a little extra thinking on the parent’s part, you can easily take what you have read one step farther. A simple example from yesterday, we read a book about Abraham Lincoln. It was an easy reader, one that Jonas could help read. It was his first introduction to this great man and period of history, and when we were finished reading we had a small discussion about it. I then showed him a penny and told him that he has seen Lincoln many times before. Jonas was incredibly impressed with this.
I don’t think that little children need to be drowned in a vat of information- they already are, and they are already skilled at processing this information. In areas of academia, it is best to provide opportunities to use and learn skills, and allow then time to really know the stepping stone skills rather than drag them through and hope they’re catching on. This is one reason why I’m pulling Jonas out right now. While he has caught on to a lot, there are steps in both math and reading that he would benefit from having more time to master. A perfunctory knowledge of algebra does not prepare a person for calculus. You have to really understand, and you can’t be rushed to the next step, particularly if your body and brain have not matured to the developmental level that allows you to masterfully process certain types of information.
#4- This brings me to my next thought, which is on labeling children.
To label a young child, barely past toddlerhood as gifted or learning disabled borders on the absurd, particularly with the scientific evidence we have that tell us that all human beings develop at different rates. We are neurologically wired to grasp, walk, talk and function on different levels of comprehension at different times. You can practice walking with your three month old for hours a day, but because he is not physically and mentally ready to walk, he will not walk. These levels of readiness can vary by a number of months for an infant, and vary by years for the young school aged child. Some children will be ready to read at three and others will be ready at seven. Eventually, most children hit the norm. Because of these vast differences in maturity, your average kindergarten class is anything but average. One teacher for twenty or more children will have no choice but to gear her lessons toward either the lowest common denominator in the class, alienating anyone functioning above average, or she will teach to the average which will frustrate both the top and bottom spectrums of her students. Even the very best of teachers is going to find it impossible to gear every lesson to every child.
Additionally, children are people, and people tend toward unique natural gifts, likes and interests. There are things that every child will be better at whether through pure talent or from interest led motivation to excel. On the flip side, there are areas that individuals will not enjoy, and therefore will not spend as much interest led time perfecting. Does my dislike of math mean that I am stupid or delayed? Not at all. It means I don’t like it, and I would rather spend my time doing something I find pleasurable, like reading. Now, I do excel at reading, but this may be more from my drive to inhale books, thereby practicing reading every day of my life. I have the math skills that I need to get by in my day. I practice them through their application to my daily life.
Now, the real question here should be, “Why don’t I like math.” Math started out as a fairly ok thing, and then soured in the second grade when I had a teacher who could not explain a subtraction concept to me (and who, frankly, didn’t try very hard). She then labeled me as “bad at math,” “stubborn” (because I literally couldn’t understand), sloppy (because I was a doodler- she could have acknowledged the talent behind the doodling), and bratty (because I was tenacious enough to be upset with her for obviously not liking me and saddling me with these unkind labels). After that year of school, I have been afraid of most math problems, and honestly surprised when something mathematical would come easy to me- and many concepts did. Because of my belief of that label and the fear it caused, I never tried at math, feeling that I was doomed to failure.
So, aside from my own experience, why can we learn? We see that a child who enters school and lacks the developmental readiness to master a concept, whether it be academic or behavioral, is going to be labeled negatively. Even some children who enter school overly ready will be labeled because they skew the norm so far that people find them irritating! Either way, they become attached to labels that can be very damaging and very inaccurate. Every child is smart. It is the job of the teacher to learn how that child learns and take them higher.
If you think that small children do not respond to these labels, let me tell you about what happened last week. We were running errands after Jonas had had a difficult day at school. His substitute teacher had spent quite some time lecturing me on his various misdemeanors when I picked him up. I knew that he had tried his hardest, but he just wasn’t at his best that day, which became increasingly obvious to me as we tried to navigate several errands. Each time he would misbehave, I would point it out, and he was quick to apologized and try harder. This was repeated many times throughout our trip, and I tried to keep pretty cool about it because I knew he was trying. As we were driving home, Jonas suddenly burst into tears and said, “Mom. I think I’m a bad kid! I keep trying but I keep messing up. The teacher says I’m bad, and I got in trouble at the store, and I can’t help it. I must just be bad.”
He felt terrible. He honestly thought that maybe he was just a bad kid, and trying wasn’t going to help, that was just who he was and there was nothing he could do to fix it. We talked about how hard he had been trying, and about how we are here to learn, not to be perfect, but to grow. We discussed the concept of repentance and forgiveness, and I assured him that he was a very good boy because he had tried very hard, and he had very honestly apologized when he had misbehaved. It stopped his tears, but I could still see the worry in his face. It crushed my heart.
How can I, in good conscience, leave him in a situation where because of his developmental readiness and intense temperament, he will be labeled negatively? He is not a bad child, but I can see how some bad children are made. Children need positive labels. Save negative labels for true acts of delinquency by people who are old enough to have actual accountability for those acts, and allow children to be children and learn from their mistakes.
That’s all for tonight. I must go soak in the tub. It has been a very long day.