Thinking like a teacher

Now that we're "officially" homeschoolers, I find my brain works differently.

Take last weekend, for example. It was Father's Day, but it was also summer solstice.

K-S and I made Dad some gingerbread with whipped cream (for breakfast, because we are wild women) after which K-S presented Dad with a homemade pop-up card and some cork coasters she'd cut out and stuck tape on and then painted. (Who can't use a nice set of coasters?)

The old me would have left it at that.

But now that we're homeschooling, I'm thinking differently. I'm thinking like a teacher. Summer solstice, I'm thinking, is a great time for introducing concepts related to the sun and the earth and the seasons.

I googled and found some nice, basic explanations of the solstice on the BBC web site. I found a few more relaxed "lesson plans" on this Waldorf-inspired blog.

We ended up somewhere between YouTube videos and naked bonfire dancing. (Honestly, if I had room in the backyard for a bonfire....)

Here's what we did. I told K-S to come up with a sun. (She settled on yellow construction paper and yellow chalk.) I had her blow up a blue balloon, and then used a magic marker to draw an equator, a couple of poles, and the continents--with a big fat X over the little patch of ground we call home.

Then we took turns being the sun, who stood in the middle of the living room; and the earth, who revolved around the sun, spinning to make the days and bellowing out the year each time she whipped past the stereo.

After we were both dizzy, I got out a flashlight and showed her what summer solstice, equinox, and winter solstice look like from outer space. (Well, you know. Reasonable facsimile.)

It was fun. It cost maybe 8 cents and took maybe ten minutes. And while I'm pretty sure K-S wouldn't be able to explain in great detail today the concepts we covered last weekend, I do know she'll recognize the concepts when she hears them again in about three months.

That confidence is part of my newly-wired teacher's brain, too.

Nature is disgusting!

One of the things that's struck me over the last couple of years is the reaction so many parents have to their children interacting with the natural world.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard moms at parks and in backyards yelling at their kids for picking up sticks (you could put your eye out!), touching plants (it could be poisonous!), inspecting bugs (it could bite!), and playing in dirt (you'll get filthy!).

Perhaps the saddest--and the weirdest---was the playground mom who brayed like a drill sergeant at her skittish 4-year-old son for daring to stamp in a shallow rain puddle. You should have seen the poor little thing flinch.

Sanitized for Your Protection

Ironically, afterschool (and in-school) programs in our area seem to be packed to the rafters with "nature" classes.

Feed the fish, one such class description read. Hands-on activities. Learn what makes fish different from other animals.

The zoo that offered this particular Saturday morning class has a decent fish/amphibian exhibit, and K-S (for some reason) was obsessed at the time with what kinds of diseases fish get, so I signed her up--and was more than a little cheesed when I picked her up and discovered the students swilling kool-aid and watching an animal show on TV. (The "hands-on activities" turned out to painting handprints on white paper and touching an old snakeskin.)

Reason #103 why we homeschool.

Yeah, I know it's cheaper and easier and less lawsuit-provoking to show kids pictures of fish than actually let them see and smell and touch fish.

But it's also teaching them on a deep, intrisic level that nature is something apart, something to be kept at a remove. A kid who grows up differentiating between the bugs in his backyard and the bugs on the Nature Channel will never resolve that schism, nor--if you want to be dramatic about it--be able to integrate the part of himself rooted in the natural world.

Up Close and Personal (and Smelly As All Get-Out)

Reason #14 why we homeschool is that most adults (including the elementary-school teachers we run into from time to time) don't listen to kids.

When I dropped K-S off for her zoo class, for example, the first thing she did was make a beeline for the instructor and ask him what kind of diseases fish get. Instead of answering her, he told her that zoo fish were all healthy and walked away.

I understand that no teacher can take time to answer every question a roomful of hyper 4-year-olds asks. God knows I can barely keep up with the questions K-S asks some days. But the fact is, it doesn't take a lot of being ignored before a kid will quit asking.

Bugs or Bust

I place few restrictions on K-S when it comes to nature stuff. She happily soaks herself with the hose, covers herself with mud, and picks up lizards, cockroaches, grubs, and worms. (I draw the line at spiders, some of which are bad news where we live--and taught her at age 3 how to tell a spider from everything else.)

She found several tomato hornworms recently and we decided to keep them in a terrarium until they did their pupa thing.

To be honest, I'm not exactly nuts about caterpillars, and even less enthused about having pupae hanging around the house. But K-S is enthused, and after I did a little research on these caterpillars I decided to go for it--and was amazed to find myself fascinated with the way they transform from green squishy-looking things into brown, leathery, segmented-looking things before they burrow into the dirt for their final stage.

Best of all, K-S gets to ask as many questions as she likes. And get answers.

Gearing Up: We're Five!

In Texas, kids don't have to be "in school" until they're aged 6; but most parents opt to put their kiddo-schmiddos into kindergarten at 5.

Five is Big Time. It's official. Five isn't daycare anymore; it's Almost Mandatory. It's getting there.

And K-S turned five last week.

Here in extreme South Texas, "birthday party" is synonymous with "pinata." What kid doesn't love a pinata? The whacking, the gleeful destruction, the sweet treats! And the cool thing about homeschooling--at least, at this age--is that just about everything a kid wants, you can teach the kid how to make. Instant curriculum.

Take pinatas, for instance.

We got a ton of mileage out of making a pinata: blowing up a balloon, covering it with two layers of newspaper strips dipped in flour-and-water paste (add just a spoonful or so of salt to discourage molding), and then decorating it... Much more satisfying than buying one off the shelf, and more educational, too. (I had to dip waaaay back into my science background to remember why flour-and-water turns into concrete, while adding a bit of yeast to the mixture results in soft, chewy bread.)

We had serious fun making cupcakes, too: measuring and stirring and baking and decorating. Stuff that used to be ho-hum everyday, but that nowadays is apparently "curriculum." (I've read accounts recently of a couple of local alternative schools that make cooking part of their official studies.)

Sure, kids are learning math and science and art by pursuing everyday arts-and-crafts--but the more important lesson they're learning is that they can act on the world by realizing their own visions. K-S doesn't have to content herself with choosing one of the TV-inspired pinatas or grocery-store cakes on offer; instead, she's free to imagine whatever she likes--and know that there's a step-by-step way to bring her imagined treats into being.

Home arts won't make up the bulk of our homeschool activities as K-S grows older, but they'll always have a place in our day-to-day instruction.

Mom, will you please stop singing?

My husband is a professional musician, so perhaps I have a different outlook that other folks on the importance of music instruction to a well-rounded education.

When the public-school budget cuts began a couple of decades ago, researchers began trying to establish a connection between music and math in a desperate attempt to keep music in the curricula. Many succeeded: Studying music does, in fact, appear to help kids grasp mathematical concepts (although proving this connection doesn’t appear to have helped keep music instruction in public schools).

But I’m just wild enough to believe, as did medieval European scholars, that the study of music is useful in its own right.

English, Spanish, Latin, music

To me, teaching kiddo-schmiddo to sing in tune and keep a beat is right up there with teaching her how to speak English or Spanish. She probably won’t grow up to be a professional musician, just as she probably won’t grow up to be a professional writer or translator. (I’m extremely okay with that.)

But if I don’t teach her how to “speak the language” of music, I’ll effectively be cutting her off from the accumulated knowledge and beauty of thousands of years—and every known culture—as expressed in rhythm and melody.

And that just ain't gonna happen.

Participation vs. instruction

When K-S was just a few months old, I carted her to baby music class once a week. Not for anything resembling formal music instruction, but to listen to other kids and moms make music together and to participate. Our instructor, Clarice, was fabulous. At this age, kids can’t possibly do music “wrong,” and unlike other pre-K music instructors I’ve encountered elsewhere, Clarice knew this.

Instead of working at music, we played! With drums, and shakers, and rainbow-colored scarves, and animal antics. And though up until that point I’d never done more than mutter the words to “Happy Birthday” in public, you’d better believe I was belting out the tunes in baby music class (and in the car, and while I was giving her a bath, and while I was fixing dinner, and…) because, as Clarice pointed out, kids are more likely to make music if they see their moms make music.

Even if what their moms are making is barely recognizable as music. (Hey, I can hit a pitch, but that’s about all I can say for my voice.)

These days, K-S is getting a bit more formal musical education from her dad. And we’re planning to start her on the piano this fall—perhaps with an instructor who follows the Suzuki method, perhaps with an instructor from our local university.

But I’m still gonna belt out tunes every chance I get.

Even if she does interrupt me with, “Mom, would you please stop singing now?”

Questioning assumptions

Before I knew anything about homeschooling, I imagined there were only two kinds of homeschoolers:

1. People who got a copy of their local school’s curriculum and followed it to the letter.
2. People who let their kids do whatever they wanted and called it “homeschooling.”

Ahem.

Now that I’ve done a ton of research and am homeschooling myself, I’m embarrassed. Because the truth is, there are more distinct approaches to homeschooling than you can shake a stick at, and parents are free to pick one approach and then change it from year to year—or even mix-and-match strategies based on what works best for their kids at different times and in different situations.

In this month’s issue (April/May 2009) of Home Education Magazine, for example, professional violinist and “unschooler” Rachel Barton Pine says wonderful, positive things about her unschooling experience growing up, but then notes that “…if you are serious about studying a musical instrument, you will need to receive intense, traditional training…self-taught instrumental skills aren’t going to take you very far.” Mix and match. The pragmatist in me rejoices.

What is “education” anyway?

Before you can choose an approach, though, you first need to decide why you’re educating your kid in the first place.

Is it because the law in this country says you have to? So your kid can get a job and move out when she hits 18? So she can become a responsible citizen? So she can explore her own interests?

To me, education is all that and a bag of chips. It’s about preparing K-S to make a living, yes, but in a larger sense: her education should equip her with the tools to be self-sufficient. It should prepare her to take her place in society (that is, to take an active part in the political process, get along with folks who don’t share her views, speak at least a couple of languages, and use the correct fork at a fancy dinner).

In addition, her education should give K-S the tools to make sense of the world. I want her to develop at least a passing familiarity with the “greatest hits” of the last few thousand years of human endeavor so that she can take pleasure in art, get righteously cheesed off at injustice, and in general spot Shinola when she sees it. To live a good life, in other words.

When you assume...

Beyond the purpose of an education, the single biggest difference I’ve noticed among homeschooling approaches is the underlying assumptions each one makes about how human beings learn.

Some assume that children are born with an innate drive to learn that should be honored and nurtured above all else; others, that children are blank slates that need to be filled up by adults. Some believe students should be introduced to formal learning as early as possible; others, that the appropriate (and most effective) approach is to hold off on the formal sit-down-and-study stuff until seven, eight, nine, or even older. Some say you should teach kids to read before you teach them to write; others, that the first text they read should be their own writing.

Here’s my personal shortlist of educational theories:

1. Kids need to be with their mothers the first five years of their lives, which is when they’re laying down their concept of the world (hostile? loving?) and their place in it (is it okay to be here? can I get what I need?). You can talk about daycare all you want; nobody’s got your back like your Mom—and that matters at a cellular level. To me, this is a no-brainer, but researchers like John Bowlby have come to the same conclusion.
2. Kids need as much one-on-one as they can get with competent, encouraging teachers. Another no-brainer backed up by research (my favorite go-to guy in this field is Lev Vygotsky).
3. Until somewhere around age 6, kids learn best through play. Piaget and other luminaries in the field of early childhood education all came up with the same rough age, which just happens to coincide with when we westerners traditionally plunked our kids down in first grade. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t introduce the under-five set to art, literature, or math; just means you probably want to do so in the context of play (rather than sitting 'em down with a workbook).
4. Becoming competent at anything takes hard work (and this is A Good Thing). The trend these days is to present learning in bite-sized, easily digestible chunks. And that’s fine in some contexts—for very young kids, for example, or when you're introducing material for the first time. But “fun and easy” is hardly a prescription for deep learning. At some point, you’ve got to look a task or concept in the eye, stare it down, and master it—and that takes hard work. And time. And grit. The upside is that once a kid understands this, the whole world opens up. She understands that anything is achievable if she puts in enough effort.
   

Articulating and working through this list led my husband and I first to homeschooling, and, second, to the classical approach.

But I reserve the right to change my mind if I discover something next week I think will work better.

We don’t own a TV. Does that make us weird?

If you want a conversation stopper, try telling people you don’t own a TV.

I don’t exactly walk around with a sign hanging around my neck. But the reality is, it takes about twenty minutes in most social situations to get to “Can you believe what happened on the last episode of X?”

The first couple of times, I say, “No, I missed that. What happened?”

After awhile, though, people catch on.

“Well, if you’ve never seen X, Y, or Z, what the heck do you watch?”

At that point, I have to come clean and admit it. Our family belongs to the 1-to-2-percent of TV-free Americans that don’t spend an average of 8 hours a day plugged into corporate programming. In other words, we're weird even by homeschool standards.

People’s reactions are pretty predictable. First, they list all the educational programs they watch (apparently there are a lot of people out there hanging onto every word of Animal Planet and How Stuff Works). Next, they ask what we do. (“My God,” one mother commented. “Do you, like, read all the time?”)

Finally, they ask the Big Question: Why? Why are we denying ourselves free entertainment and a window into the “real” world and—worse—why are we choosing to deny K-S all those important educational programs? (Homeschoolers, interestingly, seem the most shocked that we’re not plunking K-S down in front of Disney’s Baby Einstein or Dora the Explorer--the pre-school version, not the newly announced, stylish, shopping-crazy tween Dora.)

Why we pulled the plug

I’m hardly an ascetic. There was a time when I planned my Sunday evening around Desperate Housewives and shouted back at the set when Project Runway was on. (God, how I loved Project Runway.)

But overall, TV just kept getting stupider and stupider, with a bigger and bigger noise-to-signal ratio. There came a day when my husband and I just looked at each other and said, No more. (Okay, how it actually went down was I said, What do you say we get rid of the idiot box, and he said, You mean it's still plugged in? That man never did appreciate Tim Gunn.) We figure that statistically speaking, we only have another two or three decades left on terra firma. That’s best-case scenario. And a third of that time, we plan to sleep. Do we really want to spend the few precious topside hours we have left watching The Osbournes?

All this played out before K-S came along, although I like to think that I would have kicked the TV to the curb as soon as I read the American Academy of Pediatrician’s admonition to ban TV for twos and under. Study after study has shown that putting kiddos in front of a screen leads to everything from relatively mild issues like sleep problems and obesity to biggies like AD/HD and the inability to learn, and frankly, is this a big surprise?

Interestingly, study after study has also shown that parents don’t care.

These days, when we’re at a friend’s house or vacationing in a hotel room and flip on the TV out of curiosity after K-S hits the hay, the things that hit us over the head are the proliferation of senseless-murder-related plots on the dramas; the nasty-spirited, back-talking, low-achieving characters on the comedies; the glut of “reality” shows that appear to have replaced professionally executed narrative; and the endless advertisements for drugs and cars.

None of this is beneficial to K-S who, neurologically speaking, is constructing a picture of the world that will underpin every aspect of her adult life.

Some day—when she’s older—we can talk about Animal Planet. Right now, I’d rather have her get her finger bitten by Nature than watch it on a one-way flickering screen.

What does a homeschool look like?

I'm guessing there are a few homeschools out there with flip-top, carved-up desks and chalkboards and pull-down maps, but I'm also guessing they're the exception to the rule.

Homeschooling isn't about recreating an institutional school experience at home; it's about setting up a learning environment that works for your kiddo-schmiddos.

For us--at this point, anyway--"school" looks a lot like play. (Now, lest anyone think we're unschoolers, let me hasten to add that we're heading down the classical education path. More about which later.)

The thing is, K-S isn't quite five yet, so I'm giving her another few months to focus on the real work of childhood. You know. Catching roaches. Dressing up to host formal "frog meetings." Glitter-gluing the dog.

We do a ton of crafts. We garden. We cook. We read. (Mostly English but Spanish, too, since we're on the U.S.-Mexican border.) We take walks around the neighborhood. We go to the library, the zoo, the beach, the park, the children's museum. We play games and listen to music. We snorkel in the bathtub and work puzzles and go on playdates.

And, yeah, I admit I shoehorn as much "official learning" as I can into most of what we do together. ("Okay, we need three cups of flour, and this is a one-cup measure. How many times do we need to fill it up and dump it?") When we read about dung beetles being introduced from Africa to Australia, we hopped up and found Africa and Australia on the map. When we made paneer, we discussed the curdling process and Little Miss Muffet (and discovered that whey actually tastes pretty good).

But in general, things are still pretty laid back around here. I'm looking forward to getting a little more "official" at some point--she'll be needing a desk and a reading lamp and another bookshelf soon, and it might be worth rearranging our space at some point to carve out a dedicated study area--but until then, school looks a lot like home. And I'm loving it.