I’m at the Homeschool Association of California (HSC) Conference in Sacramento. Today I decided to go to Awakening Inquiry by Jon Young. I saw him yesterday and was intrigued by his ideas, but I didn’t feel like he made a connection between the ideas he was talking about and homeschooling. Today he started his talk by saying that he was developing an idea over three talks, and this was the third. So I missed the second, but I think I picked up the thread pretty well.
Today he talked about how a mentor can “light a spark” in a child and awaken them to learning, and how once you’ve done that, it can be pretty inconvenient in a controlled setting! He mentioned several times the idea that a mentor asks questions but doesn’t *tell* kids things. He and David Albert both mentioned finding non-parent mentors for kids. That’s sort of the idea behind sending them to school, but a teacher with 30 kids can’t be a mentor to any one of them, and then in most schools the kids move on every year and there’s very little integration between the grades.
A lot of what I’m hearing here reminds me of why my son’s school is so great. They really have worked out many of the systemic problems that bigger schools face: they have teachers who don’t have so many students that they can’t get to know them; they offer the kids the ability to follow their inspiration (within the boundaries of what a school can do, which is necessarily more narrow in some ways than homeschool); the kids mix across the grades and do lots of activities together, and the parents are well integrated into the school.
One of the things Jon Young mentioned was that kids are often disciplined when they are “finding their light” — experiencing something that draws on their inner power and excites them. I think he’s right. I know that from my experience with my daughter that I often have to stop myself from stopping her. She gets so excited about doing things that are definitely inconvenient from a mother’s point of view! …
It is also a shopping day. One of the coolest features of this conference is the Recycled Resource Room. It opened at 7 a.m. this morning and there was a line already formed to get in when we got there. All the homeschoolers who come to this conference bring stuff that they’re not using anymore, price it at garage sale prices, and then put it in the RRR. Then we all rush in and buy each other’s stuff. I mostly got large, hardcover reference books that I’d never pay list price for. My friend Heddi from the Educational Resource Center (who is the one who knew that we had to get there before 7) treats it as a professional opportunity. She got 6 bags of stuff for the ERC — so far! The stuff there is now half-price.
As with all conferences, we also have an exhibitor hall to tempt us. Amongst the most interesting stuff I saw was: the Real Science series, which I had read about online. The real thing is as appealing as I’ve heard it is. One of the things I’ve been trying to do is present “hard” subjects – science, math, etc. – in less dumbed-down ways. My daughter has absolutely no interest in learning the building blocks that they usually think you need to teach kids. You can search for “visual spacial” to find my articles about why that probably is. And frankly, isn’t any kid more interested in making a homemade volcano explode than learning about what a chemical reaction is on paper?
I adored the zillio, which is a little hard to describe. Go to their website to see it. (Reminder: I’m back in the 20th century as this hotel only has a wired, very slow connection. So I feel rather lost without my ability to link, borrow, link as I go!) It’s a math pyramid, and I sure hope they have a video demonstration on their site, because words will not really do it. Definitely an interesting possibility for your visual learners out there.
I have become, in two days, a sort of David Albert groupie. Today’s first talk was on intelligence, what we have thought intelligence was through the ages, what people think intelligence is now, and what David Albert thinks intelligence is. He’s a very engaging speaker, and though he dismisses his long tenure in our greater houses of higher learning as unimportant, one of his biggest attributes is his ability to synthesize a lot of information that he has stuffed into his head into new ideas. So they may have tried to stifle his creativity at those institutions, but they sure did give him some pretty building blocks!
I found the combination of his talks and Jon Young’s to be a good one. Young talks about the soul; Albert talks about the brain. The soul talk makes me feel good but sets off blinking read lights in the logical inconsistencies part of my brain. (This is both a strength and a failing of mine, I’m sure.) The brain talk, for me, makes sense of the soul talk and integrates it into my need for logical organization.
Albert’s next talk is about “sixes and sevens”, and since I have a six going on seven, I’m hoping that he illuminates things for me. Or at least gives me some new ways of looking at it. I have to say, if nothing else, coming to this conference is really stoking my fire for the upcoming school year. That poor girl isn’t going to know what hit her. She’s going to think her mommy went to Sacramento and some tree-hugging, inner-light-finding hippie mom came back.
Except her hippie mom still wears black…
Last talk of the day was great. Albert’s copious experience with his own kids and nearly everybody else’s (see his bio) leads him to have a great perspective on things. He talked about a time in a child’s life (usually between 6 and 7) when the child starts to understand time and her place in it, and then really starts to understand death and loss, and so starts to experiment with control and trust. It pretty much defined what a friend’s 6-year-old is going through. In a nice twist on things, though, my six-year-old has apparently passed through relatively unscathed. I guess I was having so much other trouble with her that the control and trust issues seemed part of the noise! But her current need to test her independence marks her in the next period: striking out in the world on her own and finding out who she is separate from the family.
It’ll be another fun stage in the parenting adventure!
