jettisoned
Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 11:43AM When I mentioned our mad foray into unschooling, there was some question about what we "used" to do. I tried to reply in the comments section, I really did, but somehow the subject got away from me and grew out of its pants faster than I could buy it new ones. So I'll try to handle this subject here, since it's running around with its ankles hanging out and I'm feeling like a bad mother.
Oh wait, that was something else.
I feel a little sorry for first children, sometimes. (I am married to one, and I have one, and at times I feel a little sorry for both of them. Jealous also sometimes. But that's hardly the point here.) I feel sorry for them because they get parents who have no clue what they're doing. When my first son was born, I naturally wanted to do everything I could to help him along in life. I thought that intensive early childhood education was the thing to do, so I spent hours making flash cards of states, frog species, and presidents' portraits, pursuant to the program in How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence. I made word cards, like Teach your Baby to Read told me to. Dots on cards? Just like in Teach your Baby Math.
And I came after the poor child with them as soon as he could focus his little cloudy-gray eyes. All he wanted to do with my beautiful flash cards was chew and drool on them. And not in a metaphorical sense. After several months, he was no more interested than he ever was as a foggy infant, and I was frustrated and giving up.
Next came Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-Fives. I read every precisely-scripted lesson and tried very hard to remember them by heart. Deviation from the script would ruin the whole presentation, according to the author. I worked very hard, hand making the otherwise-expensive toys, meticulously giving my speeches to two little children who never seemed to get what it was they were supposed to do with these funny wooden things.
One day I bought a can of tinker toys. I was fed up with meticulous presentations so I threw away the instructions, dumped the whole can in the middle of the floor, and went away to make lunch. When I came back, the children were happily building some crazy thing which, because there had been no "right" way to do it, was perfect. I didn't have a nagging feeling that they weren't building exactly what was in the instructions, because I hadn't even looked at them before chucking them.
When it was time for kindergarten, we tried Sonlight. Sonlight's curriculum was very conducive to peace of mind for a homeschooler with a now-school-aged child, and allowed me to put an "x" in the attendance box every school day with satisfaction. Every subject was outlined, the number of pages to read each day was specified, and we were set. But before long two problems cropped up. First, what happened when we loved some books we were reading but weren't enjoying others? Many days we'd have read the prescribed number of pages and the children would beg for another chapter. Can a parent really say, "No, baby, we've read up to page 17, and that's all we can read today?" I couldn't, and before long we were miserably off the schedule.
The other problem we encountered was with the Usborne books used by Sonlight. I know that lots of people swear by Usborne books, but when I found myself putting an Usborne book down and reaching for a Dorling Kindersly Eyewitness Book for clarification more often than not, I finally decided to cut out the middleman. The drawings in the Usborne books weren't clear enough to feed the children's interest, and the Eyewitness photos were. The final straw was the image of "how your brain works", a cross-section of a child's head with rooms inside where telephone operators and such were working. No matter how hard I tried to explain "metaphor" to my concrete-thinking 6-year-old, he could not understand why all those people were inside his head.
After that we used Time4Learning for language arts and math. The children loved it at first because each lesson is an online computer game, fast paced and colorful, but after a year or so, the charm wore off and it was Mom making kids do school after all. I hated that, because somehow that smacked of the same thing I disliked about school, only, instead of a teacher making the children learn things they had no interest in, it was the children's own mother. This wasn't as bad as school, it was worse.
Something had to change, because this didn't feel right, but I didn't know what. If my children didn't learn the right things at the right time, they'd be unhappy, incapable adults, and it would be my fault, right?
At this low point in my homeschooling career, I stumbled on this quote:
"We did not sit around the kitchen table and do schoolwork ever. They sat down at the kitchen table and did schoolwork when they were fifteen or seventeen in order to prepare to go to college - once they decided they wanted to go to college. But there was never this notion of the fluttering mother hanging around and saying you have to finish that page before you go out!"
I hunted up the crazy woman who had this laissez-faire attitude toward homeschooling, which I took to be such a serious undertaking, and I discovered her to be Micki Colfax, the mother of four sons, three of whom ended up going to Harvard for college.
And it clicked. I read her book, Homeschooling for Excellence, and I read a whole lot of people's experiences with "unschooling" (a concept that I admit I have mocked in the past as being "those people who give homeschoolers a bad name"), and the more I read the more I realized that, crazy as these people sound, they're right. We learn best, and, really, we learn only when we are interested in what we're learning. The rest is lost, is (here's the kicker) wasted time.
So we were back at square one. We had to build a whole educational philosophy from scratch again. After hashing the subject over and over, Father Bird and I finally decided that no matter what our children become in life, entrepreneur or employee, author, full-time mom, professor...anything, the best skill that we could give them would be the ability to assess what they need and decide how to get it. To that end, we sit down with our children about once a week and ask them their goals. They each make a list of things they'd like to learn, things they need to get done, projects they're working on, and so on. This is where they get their goals for the week. Then, at the end of each day we discuss, informally, what progress we've made on our goals, and shore up the lists again. Once a week or so we have a more in-depth analysis of our lists. The conference with us gives them the opportunity to ask for help, request materials, and express concerns, and it gives us the chance to make suggestions, offer new ideas or help, and plan activities to fit current interests.
And then we go. If there isn't enough to keep us busy on the lists, we fill in the space with general sources of information, like museums or non-specific science books, library visits and so on, places with lots of "hooks" sticking out, one (or many) of which is sure to catch someone's interest and lead to digging.
And this leaves space for things like our informal math class to happen. I feel completely differently about being with my children when life is our classroom. I feel the need to sieze teaching moments instead of brushing them off because we've "already done school today". Suddenly I'm a lot more like the parent I want to be, reading to my little crew in a corner of the quiet library, holding a shell at the beach and wondering what lived in it, stopping housework to answer (or ask) a burning question, dancing with their little hands in mine.
This is it, finally. This feels right.
~MB~
Reader Comments (4)
I can understand what you're saying about Sonlight. I have an ambivalent relationship with them myself. I'm overwhelmed by the scope of their "suggestions," yet at a certain point it doesn't seem worth paying all of that money for the guide if you're not going to use it. I do like looking at their book lists...
And I understand what you mean about being a rebel. which is why I don't do Saxon math (because everyone acted like there were no other alternatives when we started) and why I change things up sometimes.
i think you are going to have some smart cookies! i wish i could have had that kind of schooling.
I have to run before I can fully digest, but I did want to say THANK YOU!
I'll be back to memorize the rest soon :)
Slowly, we're getting there - much different path though. I'm not quite there yet, for sure... maybe 50%.
I'll be back as soon as I can!
OK, this is just uncanny! I was raised by unschooling parents. I remember my mom reading "Homeschooling for Excellence" when I was a teen, and then I read it after her. Then I grew up and had my own family and thought I'd try "doing school" with my children, and found that it fell flat, just as you've described, and I've finally just totally embraced unschooling and we're so much happier!