Category: Education

Humans need meaningful work

Posted on by Suki

…and if you don’t have any, you have to make it up for yourself!

I was reading an article in from a March New Yorker (yeah, I’m a little behind) about the opioid epidemic, and something really struck me as relevant to all of us, especially during this pandemic:

What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/why-americans-are-dying-from-despair

The people they are referring to as “jobless” here are not people who are actively seeking employment. They are people who have given up. It turns out that the opioid epidemic is worst in places with higher rates of people who have simply given up on work.

Humans are built for meaningful work. We thrive on it. And it’s clear that “meaningful” doesn’t have to mean important, exciting, or high-status. A fellow school-mom told me that she found her job as a garbage truck driver extremely fulfilling, and I could go on and on about people I’ve met in all walks of life who found satisfaction in a job well-done—no matter what the job.

I think that this leads to an extremely important parenting issue during this pandemic:

Our kids need meaningful work

Any good teacher will tell you that their job isn’t to teach, it’s to inspire. All kids will learn if they feel that it’s the meaningful work that they are doing in their lives. Anyone can transmit information. Good teachers create an environment where learning is the job that kids are inspired to do.

But in a time of pandemic, lots of our kids are “stuck at home.” Their teachers are pixels on a screen, and now we parents are on the front line of helping them find meaning in what they are doing.

It’s a hard job! The other day I had a discussion about college during the time of Covid with my teen students, and it’s clear that this carrot that they were dangling in front of themselves is looking less like a carrot and more like an illusion, a whoopee cushion, or a relic from the past. Looking forward to college was the way they made the work they were doing feel meaningful.

Come fall, it’s going to be harder for them to find meaning in their studies. They and our younger children will all need a new way of finding pleasure in a job well done.

We ALL need meaningful work

So we parents are going to have to help inspire our kids to find meaning. But that means we have to look at our own lives and find it, too. A lot of adults out there are out of work, semi-permanently furloughed, part-time… Many of us have lost the rhythm of life that inspired us and made us feel pride in a job well done.

I’ve always felt that the number one thing parents can do for kids is to model the behavior they want to see. That means that we have to figure out a way to find meaning in what we are doing—whatever that may be.

Let’s avoid a new epidemic of despair

The New Yorker article points out that any person can become physically addicted to opioids. But the epidemic happened in places where a large amount of the people didn’t have work that gave their lives meaning.

As this pandemic runs its course, one of our jobs is to continue to be productive members of the society we live in, even if we’re stuck at home. Watching fear-mongering videos and going down Internet rabbit holes with other scared people is not going to give us what we need.

Humans need meaningful work. What does that mean to you?

How do I make sure there are no gaps in my child’s learning?

Posted on by Suki

Give up. There will be gaps.

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What, you want me to explain?

The world is too big to learn it all

This is a given. Maybe in the distant past some men of letters believed that they knew all of humanity’s learning. They were wrong. Even then, it was impossible to know and understand it all.

Now, it’s even harder because we know how much we don’t know. It’s easy to feel unlettered if your metric of being educated is “knowing everything.”

Kids today have enormous amounts of knowledge that you didn’t have. Adults watch in awe as a child navigates a new electronic device, finds what they’re looking for in their first web search, and explains the limitless, arcane knowledge they have about a fandom.

Yet adults are worried that their children will graduate from school with these ill-defined “gaps in learning.” Recently the newspapers have teemed with articles about how children who distance-schooled this past semester will be “behind.”

We have the world of knowledge in our pocket

The reality is that what we need to know has changed. We used to commit a certain amount of information to memory because it was simply too arduous to go find that information when we’d need it. That’s no longer true. Kids see no purpose in learning in a 19th century mode when they live in the 21st century world.

It’s true that memorization is a good skill to have, and exercising our memory is like exercising a muscle—it’s good for us. But it’s no longer true that there is one specific body of knowledge that must be memorized. If kids choose to memorize arcane fandom knowledge instead of a 19th century poem, it really doesn’t matter. In either case, when they need information that they didn’t commit to memory they can access it immediately.

“Important” is a cultural designation

Maybe you think that there is a body of information that is important for every person to master. That body of information used to be chosen by certain men in power throughout the ages.

But how would you go about deciding it now? One person’s important knowledge is another person’s irrelevant information.

I actually do think that there is a body of knowledge that every educated person should be familiar with, but frankly, I think that it’s an ever-changing body of knowledge, and it’s too large for any one person to master.

Create lifelong learners

If we take what I’ve written as true:

  • There’s too much information
  • We have immediate access to information
  • There is no set body of knowledge that we can agree on

…what do we do?

I like this quote: “A brain is a river, not a rock!”

Our job as educators has changed. We won’t succeed just by implanting a body of knowledge into our students’ brains. As soon as we do, there will certainly be changes to that body of knowledge and our students will be out of date again.

Our job as educators and parents is to nurture lifelong learners. How do we do that?

Click here to read some thoughts on how to raise a lifelong learner.

Related:

How can I teach my young child without curriculum?

Posted on by Suki

The other day I explained that curriculum is the vehicle, not the destination. New homeschoolers often work themselves into exhaustion trying to find the perfect curriculum, and often end up disappointed.

Today I want to address the idea that curriculum isn’t even always necessary, especially in the early years.

Kids live to learn

Until someone tells them that learning is hard (remember Barbie’s message about math?), kids love learning. They love the search, the discovery, and the ownership. Watch a baby trying to figure out a new toy. Learning is play; play is joy.

You don’t have to be a “radical”

Without any intervention, we see joy in exploration and learning throughout the elementary years. So-called “radical” unschoolers, who never use curriculum, believe that children will learn if you put them in the right environment.

Most homeschoolers don’t have the commitment and focus to be truly successful “radical” unschoolers. At some point, we might need a math book or a Crash Course video to help us along. But all the homeschoolers I’ve known do have the ability to make it through many years without much in the way of formal curriculum.

Meet the reluctant unschooler

Suki and book
I wrote my first book while in the thick of homeschooling two kids.

As I’ve explained in many past posts, I didn’t set out to be a homeschooler, and I certainly didn’t mean to be an unschooler. In fact, when I first started homeschooling, I remember asking another homeschooling mom to explain it to me. It just seemed preposterous!

But all of us have to teach the child we are given, and I was given a child who had a rough relationship with pencil and paper in the early years. Give him a math worksheet and there would be scribbling, paper ripping, and all-out tantruming. But “swing math“? He learned his multiplication tables in a week.

Until he started school in sixth grade, my son did very little seatwork. Each month, if we didn’t have “samples” from our daily lives to serve as documentation of learning for our public school homeschool program, we would produce some. But otherwise, life was our textbook; the world was our curriculum.

Repetition is built into the system

Think you can’t possibly cover everything the elementary school standard curriculum covers? Think again. Public school curriculum works the way a painter does. It’s not just one brush stroke over one section of wall. Each year builds on the last, often moving over the same material multiple times.

In public school, this makes sense. They are educating millions. But you’re educating a limited number of kids, and you simply don’t have to work that hard.

Don’t worry about learning “gaps”

I will write about this in more depth later. However, the fear that your child will have gaps in their learning is unfounded. All adults have gaps in their learning. For example, my husband switched schools and missed out on learning cursive. He’s a successful, well-employed adult. I grew up in the Midwest and missed out on curriculum on California missions. I filled in this gap as an adult with no problem.

When your kids are young, the world really is your classroom

  • Go for walks
  • Make friends with interesting people
  • Ask questions at stores
  • Visit the world on Google Earth
  • Visit the world around you on your bike or in your car
  • Go to museums
  • Ask people to explain their jobs
  • Get kits to build gadgets
  • Invest in open-ended toys like Snap Circuits
  • Take part in your science fair
  • Volunteer in your community
  • Take advantage of the knowledge available in your faith community
  • Find relatives or neighbors to show your children how to do things
  • Explore
  • Ask questions
  • Find answers
  • Learn
  • Learn
  • Learn

Related:

Curriculum is the vehicle; learning is the destination

Posted on by Suki

The #1 most common question I get from new homeschoolers is, “What curriculum should I use?” This is an understandable question: there’s a lot of focus on curriculum in schools, and an implication that good curriculum is the end-goal.

In homeschooling, however, it is clear that a well-educated child is the end-goal. And it occurred to me that if learning is the goal, then curriculum is a vehicle. Just like we can get to the store by driving, walking, biking, or perhaps taking public transit, there are many ways to get to learning.

Life is like walking toward learning

Right from the beginning, our children are learning. Babies show through eye movement that they are learning every second that they are awake. The world is their curriculum.

As children grow, play becomes their curriculum. We give them blocks and they learn about geometry, gravity, and cause and effect. They climb a tree and learn about the importance of secure footing, fear, and exhilaration. They play with friends and learn social-emotional skills, bartering skills, and the strength of community.

Learning vehicles can take us to new places

If we constrained our lives to only visiting places we could walk to, that would be like learning in the world directly surrounding us. It works well for hunter-gatherer societies, but not so great when you need to attain certain skills to succeed in our society and in a career.

The curriculum we choose is simply a different learning vehicle. Maybe it can take us places further in our community—that’s “car curriculum.” Maybe it can take us to faraway places very unlike our everyday life—that’s “airplane curriculum” Or maybe it can rocket us to a new plane of existence by giving us insights we never would have discovered on our own.

The destination never changes

But no matter what curriculum you use, the destination is the same. We want our kids to learn. So does it really matter which curriculum you use? It can, but I can assure you that countless homeschoolers have found that a free video they happened upon in the library sparked more learning than the beautifully packaged curriculum they purchased for hundreds of dollars.

Yes, I do appreciate well-written curriculum. I love it when teachers are able to package up their approach in a way that inspires others to try new techniques. I have great respect for the skill it takes to break down concepts and skills into a well-scaffolded structure.

But remember: curriculum is the vehicle. Sure, sometimes it’s nice to get a smooth ride in a limo. But it can be just as fun to go over bumps on a one-speed Schwinn.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.

Dr. Seuss

Further thoughts:

Fall 2020 education: flexibility is key

Posted on by Suki

Longtime readers know that my family has used almost every type of educational approach for our kids. We like to joke that the only type of school that we haven’t tried is Christian Military Academy!

My younger son is currently about to graduate from a mainstream public high school (his choice), and I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised at how well they have handled this crazy situation that was dumped in their laps. I’ve heard lots of complaints from parents in other districts, but I share none of them. It’s not perfect, but my son’s teachers got well-trained, really quickly, and they are trying hard.

Teachers are doing their best to maintain connections with their students.

They’re even making embarrassing videos.

One of the things that our district is doing really well is parent communication. OK, perhaps they are overdoing it: I don’t actually need a text message to tell me to read my email!

This week they asked for parent input through ThoughtExchange, a nifty little tool for exchanging ideas.

I had one thing to say and I hope I said it well: the public school system needs to be more flexible.

Rooted in tradition is not necessarily good

Public schools have not grown organically. They were formed on a specific model of learning, and all changes have taken place as if that model is not worth questioning.

When people have come up with better ideas that built on top of that model, they were tolerated. The charter school system, for example, was built on top of the standard public school model.

When people have come up with ideas that require throwing that model out the window, like the great educational thinker John Holt, for example, public schools would have none of it. They had certain tenets that would not be questioned:

All students must learn in age-homogeneous groups.

All students must be required to be on campus a minimum number of hours.

All students must study state-mandated curriculum.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Enter the quarantine

This pause in school-as-usual can be seen two ways:

It can be seen as an irritating interruption, to be gotten past as soon as possible.

Or it can be seen as an opportunity.

I prefer opportunity.

Integrate home and school

Kids do better emotionally when they feel nurtured, loved, supported—all that stuff they have in a healthy home. We have cut families out of schools by design, and yet principals wail about lack of parent participation. Schools are simply not designed to be emotionally healthy and integrated with home life.

Now that we’ve got parents and home intertwined with school, let’s not give that up.

Stop demonizing alternatives

This is my teen attending an online class while jumping on the trampoline.

When you judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, the fish comes out looking pretty lame. Alternative schools are for kids who need alternatives. That means that the alternative will not reflect the demographic make-up of the surrounding district. When students and families choose schools, they make choices based on themselves, not the society they live in.

Yes, we should make sure that all choices are open and welcoming to all families, but districts need to allow for differences. For example, stop demonizing a program that attracts struggling students for its low test scores.

States have to stop assuming that all cultural groups are the same. Programs that suit the unique needs of a cultural group are not equivalent to racism. Equal education does not mean the same education.

Principals have to stop coming into schools and trying to strip the individualism out of the school in the name of “quality.”

Offer maximum flexibility

In a world where families can choose 20 different types of toothpaste, education is presented as a monolithic single choice.

That doesn’t fit with our culture. Some students, certainly, not only need to be at school for the allotted time but also need aftercare. Some students thrive in standard curriculum with a typical school day schedule.

But many students don’t. Parents around the country are remarking on the positive changes they are seeing in their children:

My kids are learning so much more at home.

My teen is sleeping—finally! And waking up a reasonable human being.

My kid who was bullied has had a huge dip in her anxiety level.

We started following my kids’ interests and suddenly they love education.

Live and LEARN

If public school administrators and teachers don’t learn from this experience, they’re in the wrong profession. Teachers talk about creating lifelong learners—this should be the goal of everyone. We should all look at this situation and see what we can take away from it that is positive and good.

I was happy to see that I wasn’t the lone voice for thoughtful reconsidering of what school should be in the ThoughtExchange conversation initiated by my district. Let’s make sure the districts hear our voices, and don’t think that reversion to the status quo is any sort of achievement.

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