SCHOOL-PROOF--By Mary Pride--How to Help Your Family Beat the System & Learn to Love Learning the Easy, Natural Way
Introduction
We all know all about 17-year-olds who can't read or write or tell Florida from Mainland China. We are up-to-date with the latest facts about the school-kid drug problem & the teen suicide epidemic. We aren't even as surprised as we should be to hear on the radio that the schools superintendent in Detroit has announced a "tough new policy" of ejecting gun-toting students from his schools (You mean to say that until now they have been allowed to stay, & that there are a lot of kids with guns in school?) & that the ACLU wants forbid school officials to search lockers for those guns. The point is, "Why should your children...or my children...be among the casualties? Why should we take the chance?"
We need to take control, now, of our own children's education.
What Is Schoolproofing?
Schoolproofing means making sure your children get a great education, no matter what political or educational theory happens to be in vogue. It means having children who learn to read in an age of illiteracy; who learn to obey legitimate authority in an age of sullen rebellion; who learn to stand against injustice in an age of craven conformity. It means that your children will be smarter, more affectionate, less dependent on external rewards & punishments. Schoolproofing means learning how to educate, so you can recognise good & bad education. Schoolproofing means you are in control. You will have more respect for good teachers & less awe of the bad. No longer will your children have to stand in line at the educational cafeteria & take whatever is dished out. You will have learned how to cook up your own educational feasts.
It is wonderful to be able to teach your own children yourself & I would like to encourage all parents of young children to do this. Public schools are peer-group dominated, one-size-fits-all, a tedious secular mess.
Simple Is Beautiful
Simple is beautiful. Make teaching simple too. Teaching is not so very mysterious, after all. It may be miraculous, but it is not mysterious. Man plants--that is not mysterious. Man waters--again, no mystery. But God giveth the increase--by a miracle.
Smiley Faces & Uncorrected Papers--Are Students Human?
Today education has gone to the dogs...& the rats, & the pigeons...& to the machines. Children are considered animals for teachers to train. When your Jennifer trots home carrying papers covered with smiley-face stickers & workbooks filled with dozens of dull little drills about tiny little facts, be sure the behaviourists are trying to program Jennifer. If Sammy's teacher refuses to correct his spelling, grammar & punctuation because Sammy is "learning to express himself creatively," then know that humanists are hoping Sammy will experience some kind of grammar-transcending evolutionary breakthrough. It should be clear that behaviourists & humanists given free rein have crippled Western education. The results speak for themselves.
Motivation & Manipulation--Are Students Human?
Our belief, or lack of belief, in the child's human heart will completely determine the way we teach that child. Let's look at the possible ways students can be motivated to learn:
The Child as Cog: The teacher is God. The child is a "human resource." Everything is meditated to the student through a controlled source; the teacher, the computer, the textbook. Teachers are controlled by rules that allow administrators to fire them for not following "curriculum guidelines" (but not for homosexual solicitation). Computers are controlled by choice of software. Textbooks are controlled by feminist & one-world-government censorship committees.
The ultimate, desired Student Outcome is a crop of good little robot workers & good little robot welfarites who have learned to support The System.
The Child as Dog: "Want a lollipop, Judy? Then do ten more arithmetic problems." This is called the Pleasure Principle, & you are role playing an animal trainer. Instead of doggie biscuits, you are offering your little learners smiley-face stickers, candy & trips to amusement parks. "Do it for the reward, not for the joy of a task well done."
The Child as Snob: Glory Principle. Press for Success. Do It Because It Will Make You Rich & Famous (or at least get you a part-time job at Burger King). The motivation we coyly hold out before the student is a long-term result appealing only to his selfishness, pride & greed.
Perhaps the most widely used method of motivation is to play upon the natural desires of power & ambition....Appeals to pride make children proud. Appeals to greed make them greedy.
The Child as God: "What do you want to do today, Johnny?" "Watch TV all day." "That's lovely, Dear. But you've watched TV all day for months. Are you sure that's all you want to do?" "Yep." "OK, it's your life."
Your child's word has become law. His freedom is absolute, & no adult may guide, discipline or instruct him in any way except upon his (the child's) own specific request.
Since his inbuilt desires are presumed to be always good, & since you as parents or "teacher" have the job of serving the child's needs, guess who tells who what to do?
It crops up more often in "free" or "alternative" schools, & in home schooling circles among New Agers. Child-as-god doctrine always sounds really wonderful. Let the children alone & they will come home, wagging their tails behind them. With no interference, they will learn just what they need to learn. If they want to watch TV all day, or dig holes in the backyard, or play video games, no need to worry. We don't have to work at teaching them at all. No conflicts, no problems.
The Child with a Human Heart: We may not rely solely on their inbuilt motivations. Christian education is not to produce slavish robots, materialistic consumers, selfish glory hounds, or clever Hitlers. The goal of Christian education is love--a heart submitted to God & the heartfelt desire & ability to serve others.
The Learning Game
"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."--Old English proverb
"Maybe you can't make a horse drink, but you sure can salt his oats!"--Anonymous American farmer
The game of learning is not adding on silly activities to serious subjects. It is making learning itself a game. The game of learning is not taking a perfectly serious, simple subject & attempting to disguise it with hand puppets, playlets, jingles, blackboard activities & all the hundred & one ways teachers have been taught to waste our & our students' time. Children really do want to grow up & do important, big, adult things.
Kids hate studying boring stuff. Teachers hate teaching it. Parents hate reading it aloud. "`Ha, ha, ha, laughed the kitties. Ha, ha, ha, ha.' Good heavens, Janie, do you really want me to read this to you to the end?"
The adult has to be able to enjoy & understand what he or she is reading with the children. Kids need protection from the fallout of educational "twaddle."
Learning to Obey--Getting Up to Speed
In the first input stage, your little one needs to learn to obey. "The fear of the Lord" is the beginning of both wisdom & knowledge. Concentrating your efforts on 1) making sure your child understands & is capable of following your instructions & 2) not giving commands unless you intend to back them up, will save years of grief later on.
Learning to obey is the foundation of all real learning that comes later. If your student refuses to obey your reasonable instructions, no amount of gimmicks & bribes will help you move him one inch.
Of course, you should limit your commands to what your children can reasonably be responsible for. "Please go sit on the couch, Marty, & look quietly at a book while I make this telephone call." "Please put away your pencils, Sam, before you get out another toy to play with." The more specific the command, the better.
Learning to Follow Oral Instructions--Getting Up to Speed
Learning to follow oral instructions is a different thing altogether from learning to obey. Now you are trying to teach your little one how to concentrate, remember & perform particular skills.
At first, a child will be able to remember only one simple instruction, like "Please pick up that paper." At this stage, he can easily be distracted on the way to performing even that simple task. This is not disobedience, but immaturity. As time goes on he will learn to remember more complicated instructions. "Go into the living room & bring me the purple book on the couch." Finally, he will be able to perform quite complicated tasks. "Go into the living room & find the purple book that Suzy put somewhere--I don't know exactly where. Inside it is a piece of paper I'd like to show you. Bring it back here, & if you can remember, please pick up a pencil & bring that too."
Learning to follow oral instructions like these is essential practice for learning. You are still giving the instructions, of course, & you still have to supervise the results. This means you have to be right on hand.
Learning to Follow Written Instructions--Getting Up to Speed
Learning to follow written instructions requires not only good reading but a certain amount of self-motivation. Little children tend to get discouraged when nobody checks on their progress, & they like to ask questions.
A Place for Everything
Teacher: "Why haven't you started your math, Johnny?"
Johnny: "My book is lost."
A journey of a thousand miles really does start with a single step. Travellers miss their journey entirely by forgetting to pack some essentials. So let's begin at the beginning: The materials we use to teach with. Once we get these under control, we will have more energy for the creative matter of teaching.
More lessons are derailed due to lost pencils, missing chalk, vanishing maps & books that are "around here somewhere--but where?" than all other causes. The pencil breaks, the missing lesson book that the whole family spends half an hour looking for; these are the killjoys of education.
So, to make all our lives easier, "A place for everything & everything in its place."
Playing Store
Every week for years & years I spent several hours of precious time looking for things because I thought that storage places & shelves to put things were wasters of money. Time is worth more than junk, & the less junk you have the less you have to organise. You should organise your things if you hope to ever use them, & if you don't expect to ever use them you should pitch them out! My Home Organisation Theory: If it's not worth finding a special place for, throw it out. You'll never find it anyway.
Bookcases are the home schooler's Number One investment in worldly happiness. Make up some simple scheme for what books go where. A good rule to make: No taking out a new book until you've put the one you were reading back.
Reference books you want to see used should be accessible. Don't lock up encyclopedias or put the dictionary on a five-foot-high shelf unless you really don't want anyone to use them.
Schoolbooks do not go well inside desks, piled on top of each other in dark spaces.
Items which belong stored in cases include video & audio tapes & records.
Some educational materials do belong out of sight. Gooey stuff. Messy stuff. Breakable stuff. If you would panic when told that your toddler is getting into it, put it up high where he can't.
Art supplies, crayons, paints, gooey pastes, glitter, coloured sand & anything else you don't really want to see in your rug belong where you can control them.
Science supplies often do best up, up & away. Test tubes & anything yukky that the baby might eat.
Pens, pencils, paper & such ought to be where anyone can find them, except the baby. You can manage this two ways:
1. Buy so many writing implements that everyone has a few, & a dozen remain for the central drawer.
2. Rigorously demand that each of these go back into the central drawer as soon as it is no longer needed.
We keep our paper supplies in a low cabinet, & our scissors & glue sticks in a desk drawer.
Ways to Present a Lesson
Teachers use only a few basic methods to present all their lessons. Know these methods & you can get a handle on teaching.
Read Me: Simple. Open the book & read. No stress for you or the student. Works for all ages & all subjects. You can even discuss what you're reading as you read it.
The Lecture: Teacher stands up in front of class or student. When the teacher knows a lot more than is found in the books, it would be a shame to pass up the chance to share that knowledge. When the teacher is only trying to teach out of the book, lectures become inexcusably boring.
The Demonstration: "Ya wanna see how we put a wheel back on a car?" A method that works well with knitting, painting, handwriting & cooking.
Visual: Drawing is truly an excellent method for showing how things work, or what they look like. You point to the colourful picture held in your hand or pinned to the wall. Any picture to which you add pieces as you talk--as in the classic flannelgraph lesson--holds attention better than a picture with all pieces originally in place.
Turn off the lights. Turn on the TV or film projector or video player.
The Experience: "Put a seashell up to your ear & `listen to the sea.' What you really hear is your own blood rushing by your inner ear!" Experiences are necessary to the study of science.
The Experiment: Such as: "Collect some glass jars of the same size. Pour different amounts of water into each. Now, tap each jar with a spoon. Note which jar makes the highest tone & which the lowest."
Walk Me Through It: "May I hold your hand, Blake? Good. Let's trace the letter A in the air." "Tuck down your head, Fran. Now I flip your seat & legs over...like so...& you've done your first somersault!" Sometimes kids just don't get it until you physically put them through the steps. This is called "kinesthetic teaching" for physical activities like handwriting & athletics. You can put information in through the learner's muscles & skin. Clap their hands together to teach them to clap. Move their legs in crawling motions to teach them to crawl.
Look It Up: Ask the student to discover his own information instead of feeding it to him. If you have already taught him how to research, you could simply ask him to find out about a subject without telling him where to look.
Challenge Me: "Adam, you just said you think cats make better pets than dogs. Can you give us some reasons why cats are better pets?" The teacher questions the student, trying to help him see when his ideas are really logical & realistic & when they are simply emotional opinions. Warning: A child may believe something true, yet not be able to logically defend it against attack.
Act It Out: Voice dramatisation, bodily dramatisation, costumes, props, puppets, ventriloquism & so on. Dolls, puppets & so on are easy for teachers to use.
Field Trips: The more natural the trip site, the more really useful the data you bring back on that subject. Historical simulations & museum slide shows are not as authentic as the widget factory, where you actually see real widgets manufactured.
Repeat After Me: "Repeat after me: Je suis franais." Parroting is a perfectly legitimate way to teach memory work. Repeating aloud cements data in a way that simply reading it or hearing it does not.
Songs, Chants & Poems: "Down & over, down some more: That's the way we make a 4!" Better than just parroting.
Games: Drill & practice time! Boring, boring, boring. Make the drill into a game. The children practice new reading techniques with a set of Bingo cards, associating the spoken word with the printed word.
Here It Is, You Figure It Out: You walk up to your learner with an armload or workbooks, "Here's everything you need to learn about this subject. You figure it out." If he has the gumption to tackle it & try to learn on his own, he will really understand & remember what he learns.
Ways to Show & Tell
Excitement just leaks out of teaching & learning when the student already understands what you are trying to teach. Find out what your learner knows. Showing what you know tends to reinforce your knowledge. Explaining or demonstrating knowledge to another cements it in your own mind.
Wait!: Wait until the student voluntarily asks you a question or otherwise shows his new knowledge. You then answer his questions, ooh & ahh over his drawing or story, listen to his lecture (kids love to teach the teacher!).
The Open-Ended Question: "Well, Frank, what do you think?" That is about as open-ended as a question can get.
Verbal Testing: Approach verbal quizzing with the attitude of finding out what students know, not catching them in wrongdoing.
Paper Testing: This is best used in large classes, where it takes too long to verbally quiz each student, & for difficult questions that require time to answer.
Repeat It: "Maggie, please wipe your feet on the mat before coming in. What did I just say?"
Summarise It: Summarising is a step beyond straight repetition. To summarise an involved explanation requires that the student 1) understand the original teaching & 2) separate the essential from the extras.
Write It Out: Write an essay, book report or other summary of what was learned. The teacher reads a literature selection slowly & the children write it quickly & neatly in copy books.
An alternative is to simply copy material you are trying to learn. Many of us write out Bible verses for this reason. A written copy of the student's work gives teachers a marvelous sense of security, & is useful for waving in the face of state education personnel, if you happen to be a home schooler. If your student never produces any written work, most people find it hard to believe he knows anything. Keep this in mind.
Discuss It: Try entering as an equal (not a moderator or Foundation of Wisdom) into discussions of material learned. Don't be afraid to give your mature, adult opinion even to a two-year-old, or to listen seriously to what she says. Students will never improve their thinking & reasoning if they are condemned to discussions lowered to an "age-appropriate level." Give them a chance.
Analyse It: "You know what a kayak is. Now can you tell me why a kayak is well-suited for use in icy rivers?"
Compare It: Our job is not to conceal the choices the World offers, but to show our students why certain choices are good or evil & how to discern for themselves the good & the bad.
Model It: Your student can show what he knows. Try asking him to model it. The human eye. Parts of a flower. The letter A. Anything that has a shape. You can use any medium you like: Paper mach, cloth, wet sand, dough, popsicle sticks, plasticine, beeswax...
Draw It: Often children can show you wonders when asked to draw their answers.
Act It Out: Voice dramatisation, bodily dramatisation, costumes, props, puppets, ventriloquism & so on. Costumes, props & puppets are naturals for dramatising history or literature.
Practice It: Practice with nobody observing is worthless as a feedback technique. The student ends up drilling himself in bad habits. You want him to improve, not just to practice!
Use It: We all love projects. Many projects involve simply drawing or modeling (making) something already studied. Examples: Making kites as part of your study of aerodynamics, or developing your own recipe for a new kind of bread, based on the most nutritious ingredients you can find. Projects are time-consuming. It is important to make sure the effort is worthwhile.
Teach It: "I'm go glad you are reading so well, Wintergreen. Now let's see you teach your little sister to read." Keep an eye on Little Sister during this process to make sure she is enjoying it.
Present It: Presenting is just teaching a group. It requires more formal teaching skill on the presenter's part than merely teaching one other person.
Multiply & Conquer
You are only one person. Now, how can you be in more than one place at the same time? Several solutions have been proposed. For home schoolers, integrated curriculum is becoming popular. This is curriculum designed so that the whole family studies the same subject at the same time, but on different levels.
You can obtain general knowledge in this way--each family member grasping what he is able to understand--but basic skills cannot be taught like this. That is why you always need separate phonics, math & language arts curriculum to go with your integrated curriculum.
The one-room-schoolhouse method, where the teacher rotates her attention through the classes, each coming forward one at a time to recite & get instruction while the others study & do seatwork, has worked well in America's past. Essential ingredients are 1) a really good teacher & 2) well-behaved students.
Both these solutions to the problem of one teacher with a group of students with mixed abilities leave all the teaching work on the teacher. Thanks to the Electronic Age, you can enlist dozens of no-cost (or low-cost) tutors to help you out.
Artificial Intelligence (Teaching Aids)
The electronic family, of which the computer is the most glamorous relative, can take a lot of the repetition, drill & practice of your teaching load off your shoulders.
Cassettes & Records: I like to read to my children. Mom & Dad are not always available to read just when they are wanted. Story cassettes! Forget the kind that come with an "educational" read-along book. Kids won't learn to read any quicker from this kind of gimmick. The simple story on cassette is good enough.
You can read a story onto cassette (for your personal family use only).
Music is another natural for your cassette curriculum.
Memory work can often be helped along by jingles & songs now commercially available. Phonics, math & even grammar can be learned painlessly by listening to a cassette.
Foreign language instruction is well-suited to this medium.
Videos & Television: Video & television are overrated as educational media. You have to give the visual presentation your entire attention, unlike sound recordings that allow you to knit or eat breakfast while you listen. Visual material too dangerous or too inaccessible to approach directly--such as tours of foreign countries or hazardous science experiments--can come across well in these media. Talking heads giving long, boring lectures are a different story.
You can, it is true, import hundreds of teachers into your home or classroom on video. You can even buy an entire video curriculum, almost totally eliminating yourself as a teacher. But the visual media will not make limp presentations more exciting. If anything, the opposite is true. The talking heads from your state university are not likely to hold students' rapt attention.
Showing takes longer than telling, & more money. If the same information is readily available in a book, you are probably wasting your money to invest in a video.
Computers: Computers are great at drill & practice. Your computer will ask Johnny to add 3+1 for the hundredth time without a hint of impatience. Furthermore, the drill & practice is likelier more glitzy than what you are able to dish out with homemade flash cards.
What the computer can't provide is human attention & time for reflection. Kids who spend too long sitting in front of computers are living in a world they can totally control, & shut out of the real human world. Thus, some of them grow up to become strange people who can't bear the humanness of other people.
Who can interject one ray of light into the minds of the poor kids locked in front of those computer screens for hours & hours? As the kids are kept busy reacting to the lessons, they won't even have time to think.
Human Intelligence
Every kid should learn how to teach. Older children should be involved with the education of the younger children. Teaching others has been shown to help schoolkids remember & understand the lesson they teach. At home kids are great imitators of the parents.
A well-rounded education should include self-study from course books. The student who has learned how to study on his own has really learned how to learn.
Educational Clutter (Curriculum & Classroom)
Brilliant ideas for doing silly things are flooding the educational market.
I wonder if it ever occurs to the people who write the bulging Teacher's Manuals & the clever curriculum enhancers, that they are just creating busywork for teachers & students. This raging ocean of cleverness is threatening to completely flood out true education.
Clever ideas exhaust us. Teach phonics with macaroni chains? Bake a real pie & let the class cut it up for fraction practice? We can't do it all. Meanwhile our pie-fed & macaroni-draped students are awfully far behind in arithmetic.
Let's quietly slip out of our chains while nobody is watching & dump that lovely educational clutter into the nearest river. You'll feel at least fifty pounds lighter.
Curriculum Clutter
The better teacher you get to be, the less you will need expensive curriculum & supplies. A real teacher knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Curriculum clutter. Let's take phonics as our example. I am continually amazed at the new, imaginative ways people dream up to make this simple process complicated.
Some phonics programs get cute. They dress up the letters like little animals or little people. You're not trying to teach your students about aardvarks. You're trying to teach the letter A.
Fifty nifty activities at the end of each & every lesson are designed to help classroom teachers fill up those dreaded empty hours. Smart teachers ignore most of this stuff. Home schoolers believe that children in school are actually doing all these marvelous activities.
Red Herrings: What does a child learn from doing hundreds of pages of workbook exercises on a few phonograms? He gets so involved in learning how to do these strange exercises that he forgets he is studying phonics. "Phony phonics" courses keep you so busy that you never notice nobody is learning to read.
Spotting Curriculum Clutter
You can identify curriculum clutter by asking a few simple questions:
1. What am I trying to teach?
2. Is it worth it?
3. Does what I am doing match the goal?
4. Is what I am doing worth the time it takes?
If I am trying to teach fractions, why am I baking a pie?
The honest truth is that much of the stuff taught in the schools is not worth teaching; much of what remains misses the goal; & much of the rest takes far more time than it's worth.
In modern education, 20 percent of valuable teaching is being overwhelmed by the 80 percent of useless curriculum clutter.
Rube Goldberg Curriculum
Rube Goldberg, an American cartoonist, became famous for his cartoons of zany "inventions." Some teaching ideas & curriculums look an awful lot like Rube Goldberg's inventions. I'll give you an only slightly exaggerated case:
"Start a stuffed elephant collection. This teaches zoology...taxidermy...household storage methods...& camping." "Camping?" "Yes! When your elephant collection begins to fill your whole bedroom, you will have to camp out on the living room sofa, thus learning valuable survival skills."
Just as Rube Goldberg's inventions showed us how to make everyday activities complicated, so this type of project approach shows us how to make everyday activities into mystical educational processes.
Eliminate the clutter of trying to teach a hundred phony skills & subjects & concentrate on the real skills the project teaches. Cross out superfluous or silly projects.
Figuring Out the Area
Some areas just need to be taught systematically. Math, for example. We can play with pies as an introduction to fractions, but when it comes to serious multiplying, dividing, adding & subtracting, pie math is time-consuming, messy & basically unsuited to getting across these concepts. Nobody needs to visit a carpet showroom to practice calculating area. This is curriculum clutter.
Teacher Clutter
One problem with knowing how to teach is that you can always think of ten different ways to complicate a perfectly simple lesson. Pick the simplest way to present a given lesson & stick to it. After the kids get the lesson down, go outside & swing on the swing set. Never let clutter crowd out actual learning.
Square Pegs & Pigeonholes
Children are forced to fit in the school. Kids who don't fit in are forced in. Square pegs in round holes. Could it be that highly critical people, aggressive people, slow methodical people & humourous people at least have a right to their own personalities?
People are different. You can be:
* Quiet or outgoing
* Sensitive or unflappable
* Methodical or given to spurts of energy
* Serious or humorous
* Moody or optimistic
* Idealistic or practical
* Full of energy or sedentary
The purpose of education is not "to train children to fit into society." This is Robot Education. Our education is not supposed to violate the personalities God gave us! We must try to quench those little twinges of wishing Johnny were more like Suzy, who sits so nicely & quietly.
Learning that Fits
What can we give each child that is special?
* Recognise children's different learning styles.
* Adjust the content of teaching to their roles & talents, &, to a lesser extent, their interests.
* Adjust the speed of teaching.
* Not penalise children for their legitimate difference--e.g., by grades & labeling.
God gave us four main ways to take in data:
1. Through your eyes (visual learning)
2. Through your ears (auditory learning)
3. Through your sense of touch (tactile learning)
4. Through movement (kinesthetic learning)
Visual Learners--Learning that Fits
Are you easily distracted by new sights? Do you remember where you put things? Are you good at catching typos & doing puzzles? Are you very aware of visual details in drawings? Do you remember names better when you see them on a name tag? If you answered "yes" to these questions, you are a visual learner.
Visual learners need to see what they are supposed to do. Some materials that are good for visual learners are:
* flash cards
* matching games
* puzzles
* instruction books
* charts
* pictures, posters, wall strips
Auditory Learners--Learning that Fits
Do you like to talk a lot? Do you talk to yourself? As a child, were you a "babbler"? Do you remember names easily. Can you carry a tune? Do you like to "keep the beat" along with the music? Do you read out loud or subvocalise during reading? Can you follow oral directions more easily than written directions? When taking tests, do you frequently know the answer, but have trouble expressing it on paper? Then you are an auditory learner.
Auditory learners learn best by hearing. They need to be told what to do. Good materials for auditory learners are:
* cassette tapes
* educational songs & rhymes (like the ABC song)
* rhythm instruments
Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners--Learning that Fits
Were you always grabbing for things? Did you always run your finger across the boards when walking past a fence? Do you move around a lot & use animated gestures & facial expressions when talking? Can you walk along the curb without losing your balance? Do you prefer hugs from your spouse rather than verbal praise? Do you like to take things apart? Are you always fooling with paper or something on your desk when you're on the phone? If so, then you're a kinesthetic learner.
Hands-on learning is a must for kinesthetic learners. Kinesthetic learners learn to read best by learning to write. Kinesthetic learners do not like sitting at a desk for hours staring at the blackboard. For kinesthetic learners, try:
* long nature walks
* model kits
* yard work & gardening
* textured puzzles
* typing instead of writing (it's faster & less frustrating)
Manipulative materials & a good phonics program cure reversals in kinesthetic learners, who are the group most frequently labeled "dyslexic."
Thank Heaven for Little Boys--Learning that Fits
Little boys are more physical, more aggressive & less verbal than little girls. Average little boys desperately need schoolproofing. They want to run & make noise. The school wants them to sit & be quiet. They want to do active things. The school wants them to be passive. They are not particularly verbal. The school considers lack of immediate verbal ability a "disability" to be "remediated." No wonder little boys outnumber little girls more than two to one in "learning disabilities"!
Boys are blocked out from fulfilling their natural aggressiveness, & girls are encouraged to become more aggressive. Both are given the same career goals, with this one difference--that the more "manly" a boy is, the less likely he is to be able to reach any of the desired goals. The path to success is feminine: Compliance with the teacher, quiet studiousness, verbal giftedness. Diplomas granted by mostly-female institutions have replaced hands-on ability as the measure of a man.
I propose we stop acting ashamed of little boys. Show your pride at his hands-on accomplishments. Workbook pages are not all there is to life. Any kid who can put together a racing car model or run a lathe has something going for him. So does a kid who will sweat & strain at a physical task without complaining. Encourage that something.
Speed & Timing--Learning that Fits
People tend to learn in spurts. Fit the pace of learning to the individual child & don't worry about comparing him to others.
Let kids alone every now & then. If your learner doesn't get the idea, & doesn't get it, & continues to not get it, try giving it a rest. Do something else. Come back to the sticky area later, in a week or a month.
Little kids don't know enough to know what they don't know. In less mystical terms, they don't know what questions to ask to find the missing pieces. Perhaps a particular child is not even mature enough yet to understand the concept you are trying to teach, or perhaps he lacks some vital background that you have been assuming is there. In either case, it will work better to stop attacking the main subject & try feeling gently around the edges. If that, too, gets you nowhere, then a rest for both of you is in order.
Kids, of course, will try to sucker you into going easy on them. You will need to be able to distinguish between lateblooming, laziness & deficiency.
* Lateblooming is when a child needs more time to learn.
* Laziness is when he won't do what he knows how to do.
* Deficiency is when the poor kid actually has something organic wrong with him.
You'll find that a more mellow attitude towards the pace of learning--including the courage to forego teaching when it is obviously accomplishing nothing at the moment--will actually increase the speed at which your child learns.
Marks-ism vs.the School of the Second Chance--Learning that Fits
Schools today often use grades as a motivation device: A reward...or punishment. I call this "Marks-ism"--using grades to control people rather than to give them meaningful feedback that will help them target their future learning efforts. In some especially vile cases, teachers have even been known to fail children for poor attendance regardless of how they did on their homework tests.
The best you can do to schoolproof your children against the Marks-ists, if you leave your children in such a school (which I don't recommend), is to personally stress that YOU care about effort & progress, whatever the report card might say. Thus, a child who gets an A with no effort has accomplished nothing spiritually more significant than her sister who had to struggle for a C.
I would do my best also to wean children from the idea that a good grade is the ultimate goal of their studies. Sometimes he who studies harder & learns more gets a worse grade.
Those of us who teach our own children, or run our own schools, are in a strong position to make our record-keeping & grading useful rather than destructive. For starters, we can determine to throw away the steps & keep the results. No businessman saves the drafts of his first memos. As adults, we quite rightly want to be judged on our final products, not on our missteps along the way.
Children deserve the same respect. This is not to imply that we should encourage slipshod work. You, as the teacher, will have to determine whether your students are really trying. Knowing human nature, through, children who know they will have to repeat a job until they get it right are unlikely to want to keep repeating it.
We can let our children play with knowledge at all levels & tackle, on their own initiative, whatever appeals to them, whether they are supposedly ready or not.
Humans are always capable of more than anyone expects. We must just be careful to not hold our students back as not to push them further than they are ready. Let the little kids try, without labeling their trying with A's or F's, & then go from there.
If You Want a Thing Learned Right, Learn It Yourself--Learning that Fits
I have been trying to figure out why everyone is so in love with homework. Homework is something that the student does (ideally) all on his own. Homework is a chance--the only chance many children get--to learn independent study habits.
Self-paced learning programs, in which children progress at their own rate through a predetermined course of study, provide all the benefits of homework without the homework.
A recent article in "World" magazine quoted a successful one-room-schoolhouse teacher as saying that the reason her students do so well is that they have learned to learn on their own.
Why not allow children who finish early to choose from a variety of quiet indoor activities (reading, painting, crafts) & noisy outdoor activities? To encourage the outdoor types, hire a full-time outdoor monitor. The teacher could then help slower students while the others looked after themselves. Those who finish gain independence. Those who need help gain extra attention.
Making School Beautiful
Education Emporium
Why do so many Christian schools follow the public school model of one-age-one-grade classes? Would the World come to an end if some second-graders were in first-grade math, & some first-graders were in third-grade English?
An Education Emporium is a place where you go to buy just exactly the education you want. You sign up, for example, for Phonics 2 & Math 2 & Guitar 1 & History 3. I would suggest that courses last no more than three months & be broken up into smaller segments, each offered more than once a year, so students won't be forced to repeat an entire year if they fall behind in one segment.
Here are some of the advantages of the Education Emporium approach:
1. No need for endless review in every grade of subjects & skills supposedly already learned. Right now private schools & public schools alike feel compelled to start every semester of every subject practically back in kindergarten. This is a tremendous waste of time & discouraging to the children who have already learned the material. The total learning program could be condensed at least 50 percent by just eliminating this excessive reviewing.
2. Children are treated as individuals, & rewarded according to their progress, with the reward being the privilege of doing more advanced work.
3. Slower students don't need to miss a whole year of progress in all subjects & be labelled as well. Each class would contain a mix of ages based solely on the children's ability to do the work.
4. Educational failure would be virtually nonexistent. You simply go back to the level you haven't mastered & proceed from there.
5. Students would benefit from social interaction with a wider range of people than the age-segregated peer group.
Preschool Liberation
Young children enjoy & need:
* Art & crafts experience (handling small real-world objects & making pretty & useful things with them).
* Stories read or told to them.
* Lots of real-world experiences in the company of their families (visiting the supermarket, library, Post Office, park...)
* Access to interesting material, some of which counts as "educational." (animals, globes, cultural artifacts...)
* Lots of time outdoors.
* Lots of time with their parents.
Christian Training
The difficult task of Christian training is to raise kids who are more obedient to God than they are to us.
Where children are treasured, not measured, they will be able to concentrate more on reaching their goals & less on maintaining an image or impressing others.
Christian Education Today
Christian education too often is a clone of the public school agenda, plus an added-on Bible course. Christian education won't be Christian until we let the Bible, not bureaucrats, determine its content.
The goal of Christian education should be to give people the tools to love & serve God & their neighbour.
The Christian curriculum starts with introducing students to God. Knowing God is more than knowing facts about God. The Bible is the Rock & Foundation of a Christian curriculum. Can anyone explain to me why the goal of first-grade Bible curriculum typically is "developing self-esteem" rather than knowing what the Bible says about anything?
Basic Skills
These are all "closed system" skills: once you have learned the skill you have it. Therefore we should plan to teach these skills & put them into practice, rather than crafting our curriculum to keep on teaching these skills forever.
* Phonics
* Handwriting & Typing
* Grammar: Knowing the right type of word to use & the right type of punctuation.
* Ciphering (Arithmetic)
* Drawing
* Crafts
* Household Skills--Cooking, Cleaning...
* Teaching: The basic principles of how to teach can & should be learned by everyone.
Technical Skills: Higher math, engineering, physics & other advanced sciences, animal husbandry, engine mechanics & so on.
Mothering & fathering: Like basic household skills & social skills, training in mothering & fathering is meant to happen in the home.