Will wonders never cease

The more my daughter grows the more amazed I am at how much society takes it for granted that there are things kids will never learn on their own if they aren’t forced into it. I recently heard a program on the radio responding to the fact that 1/3 of Grade 3 students recently failed a Math comprehension test, which of course prompted a whole bunch of “back to basics” comments by people who felt kids needed to be drilled in their times tables and “too bad” if it’s boring because that’s Life, don’t you know, and sometimes in Life you just have to do stuff that is hard work and sucks. Apparently the best way to brace yourself for that is to make sure that the hard, sucky stuff is forced upon you as early as possible. Not, instead, that you grow to be so confident and secure in yourself and your abilities that tackling hard tasks isn’t sucky after all…but I digress.

When trying to explain to MIL and SIL what unschooling is, and how DD’s program works, MIL expressed concern that children who were allowed to learn “only what they want to learn” will miss out on all those “Basics”. Sad, sad, sad isn’t it? How we just assume that kids have no curiosity, no drive, no work ethic…The one example that MIL brought up was writing. She asked what child was going to willingly sit down and write out worksheets full of letters all on her own accord. MIL felt that drilling kids in handwriting was one of those “not fun” tasks that just “had to be done”.

Well, isn’t the point of those worksheets merely to provide repitition? It’s not something magic in the sheets themselves, it’s the fact that the kids get practice. Well then why, I ask, does the practice have to be on the teacher’s terms and in the form of something with no inherent interest to the child? I give you Exhibit A:

DD whipped this up one day while I was working on my computer. Nobody told her to do it; I have never once suggested that she practice her writing. She worked at it because she felt like it, and because she enjoyed it. She’s been writing alot lately. As kids tend to do, she gets focussed on a task for a while and right now, writing is it. She writes cards for me and other family members. She makes lists of things, or signs to put around the house. She’s constantly calling out to me “Mama! How do you spell…?”. She spends a few minutes at a time, not every day, but often enough that I’ve noticed an improvement in her penmanship.

In fact I can’t imagine a child who wouldn’t ever write of their own accord, unless of course someone has made an issue out of it, subjecting the child to the suggestion that writing should be done on someone else’s schedule, when they think it should be done, and to the degree to which they think it should be done. I believe it was John Holt who said that as soon as it becomes someone else’s agenda the child is robbed of an opportunity to learn naturally. Now I realize that not all five year olds are as interested in writing as DD is right now, but I’d be willing to bet that children who grow up with total freedom in their learning will all, at some point, develop enough of an interest in it to want to learn. Emotionally healthy children want to be a part of society, and society writes! We’ll see what DS does as he grows – at age 3 he is still struggling to control the pen in his hand – and they say that boys tend to struggle with writing. I’ll be interested to see how it develops with him, but fortunately for my little guy I could care less at what age he starts developing that interest.

Sometimes it feels like unschooling is this wonderful experiment where the results just continually delight me, and make me want to shout out to the rest of the world “Wake Up! Education should be like *this*! Look at what these kids can do!”

Why I love my DL program

We are very fortunate to be homeschooling in a rather liberal part of the world. We’re in a wonderful program called Self Design, which is classified by the Ministry of Education as a “Distributed Learning Program”, albeit an Independent one (all the others are Public). Technically, my daughter and all the other kids in the program are enrolled in school. But it is unlike any school out there.

As a novel, innovative, and ground-breaking program we are subject to excessive scrutiny by the Ministry. The founder of the Self Design movement is Brent Cameron and he has been working tirelessly for the last 25 years to change government attitudes towards “free learning”. The SD program is in its sixth year, having grown from just 100 families in the first couple of years to almost 700 families this year.

Every now and then the Ministry dumps these Notices on our executive team, rules and regulations that we are expected to comply with in order to continue to receive funding and recognition (learners in the SD program receive $500 per child for K and $1000 per grade-school level child each year). I’m new to the SD program this year, and am only just beginning to appreciate the amount of effort and negotiating that the SD exec team has undergone to bring us this wonderful program. Recently, the Ministry has added a new expectation – that of quantifying learner achievements in a way that generates data that can then be processed by the Minstry to demonstrate….something. It’s hard to apply our program to such requirements given we don’t have courses and we don’t assign grades. Still, the exec team has managed to figure out a way to keep the Ministry happy while sticking to the goals and philosophies of the SD program.

In a recent posting on one of the discussion forums at the SD Online Community (a place that parents and learners and all members of the community can gather to discuss all sorts of issues – a major plus to being in this program) our leader Brent Cameron wrote the following. I found his words so inspirational, and it made me feel so proud to be a part of this program, I just had to share:

Learning is a sacred right of every living being. Learning is a very special kind of thinking. Freedom of thought is a fundamental right of everyone and especially children as they are growing into a sense of what it is to be human. We want our children to feel free to discover their full potential. If they are spending all their time meeting the expectations of others they will not discover much about their own abilities and potential. Learning in freedom brings forth the essential nature of individuals – allows for authentic development of human potential….Given the climate of control, demands and expectations in education today – I think our program is astounding…There are hundreds of statements in the Learning Outcomes written by the Ministry for every subject which state – “It is expected that a student will ….” Every 4 to 5 learning outcomes are prefaced with the will of the student controlled by the expectations of authority … Many years ago we changed that line to … “It is an opportunity for a learner to ….”. We are a program that nurtures learning – not demands it. And good for us all.

Don’t you just wanna kiss the guy?

Let’s Get Physical

We spent the last three days at a ski resort a few hours outside of town. It was the first time we’d done this with the children; I myself haven’t been on skis for eight years. It was a learning experience for everybody – my kids learned about some snow sports and I learned a bit about my kids.

DD does not show much interest in sports. She enjoyed gymnastics classes for about 2 years but recently decided to quit because she’d “learned everything there was to know about that”. Over the years she’s seen kids skating, but when I’ve asked her if that’s something she’d like to do she immediately and quite vehemently says No. Same with skiing.

However, on a recent trip up to the top of a local mountain where there is an outdoor rink, she saw kids using those walker-things to balance themselves and with a sigh of resignation she said “okay, mama, I guess I’ll give it a try” (without me asking, I might add). They both took a few steps and decided they didn’t like it and wanted off the ice. I was very proud of DD for trying, but sad that she was so easily discouraged. I blamed myself, thinking if I hadn’t had both kids to care for on the ice I might have done a better job of making them feel secure on their skates.

Well, on our ski trip this past weekend I managed to convince her to try a 2 hour ski lesson. Her two friends, who we were vacationing with, were also in the class and none of them had ever been on skis before. According to the instructor she did very well, and I was able to catch a few glimpses of her while tending to DS in another ski area (he refused to even put them on, insisting that he didn’t like the boots). At the end of the class she said she’d had a good time, but that she didn’t want to ski again. When I asked her later why she said that, she replied “all we did was go up and down the same place all the time”.

But what finally made something “click” in my head was when we went tubing. You get in these large inner-tube like things with a handle attached. A hook rope pulls you up in your tube and then you slide down these very long, rather steep runs. Both of my children had a blast, and went up and down without any hesitation even on their first try. We went tubing again on our last day and DD was going up and down all by herself, even asking the attendants to give her a good spin as she went down. I realized that my children are not afraid of speed, or of steep hills. They may have their issues, but fear of hurtling down a steep hill while cradled in a rubber tube is not one of them. I pondered this as I thought about what DD’s issue might be with skiing or skating.

My theory is that she doesn’t like the latter two activities because you can’t just do them well right away. You have to work at it and practice at it and I’m beginning to wonder if my daughter isn’t a bit of a perfectionist. Tubing she could do right away. But perhaps she felt with skiing and skating that if she couldn’t do it right away it wasn’t worth doing. I am still not 100% sure this is the case. Perhaps she just preferred tubing because she felt steady and secure lying in that tube, compared to the wobbly-ness of skates, or the unusual feel of wearing skis for the first time. I wish I could figure it out, if for no other reason than to understand what makes her tick.