Thursday, April 24, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Einstein's views on education
Our library sells donated books and paperbacks to raise funds. I recently found a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain: reflections on the romance of science for $2. I have several of Sagan's books and was happy to add this to my collection. There's a chapter about Albert Einstein with a brief biography, describing Einstein's poor experiences with schooling, his teachers declaring him a failure who would never amount to anything. Einstein had this to say about school:It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, because what this delicate little plant needs most, apart from initial stimulation, is freedom; without that it is surely destroyed...Sagan agrees, at least when it comes to scientific education, which was a cause dear to his heart. He writes:
I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through competitive examinations and the forced feeding of curricula.
So the next time someone wonders how your child is going to succeed without formal schooling, consider that Einstein published four seminal papers in the leading Physics journal of his day while working as a patent clerk, and with no post-secondary degrees to his name.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Does reading have to be taught?
As part of the online conversation I referred to earlier, one of the commenters said that "not teaching a child to read and write does them a great disservice".
Besides her obvious misunderstanding of what unschooling is all about, there is a subtle assumption in the statement which I find very interesting.
What does it mean to "teach a child to read"? I think most people imagine a teacher or parent sitting down and "explaining" reading to a child. We all remember the Hooked on Phonics craze, and products like LeapFrog perpetuate the idea that reading is something children need to be taught how to do.
But nobody thinks of learning to speak in the same way. You would not tell someone they need to send their infant to school in order to learn the spoken language. Children learn how to speak simply by being around other people who speak. Nobody has to "teach" them. So why is it that society assumes children have to be taught how to read and write, but we don't believe infants need to be taught language in the same way?
Can you imagine someone suggesting you should send your 1 year old to a school to learn how to speak English? Your reaction might be something like "He doesn't have to go to school to learn that. He'll just learn it, all babies do. They just need to hear people speaking about anything, just daily life, and they will learn."
And yet when it comes to reading and writing we don't believe the above. Well, I do. I would give the same reply above to someone who said I needed to send my daughter to school to learn reading. In fact, I will go so far as to suggest that all children, barring a learning disability, can learn to read all on their own provided they are exposed to people reading books out loud. Has this experiment been done? It would be difficult given that most children are sent to school right around the age at which many of them will start learning to read on their own. We'd need to look at a random sampling of totally unschooled children, and we all know that study ain't going to be funded any time soon! The statistics on this page are almost certainly gathered from school children, so saying that "20% - 30% of children learn to read relatively easily after exposure to formal education" does not prove that the formal education is what got them reading. I'd be very curious to know where they got their control group.
Another thing that bothers me is this idea of children being "behind" if they can't read at a certain age. Most parents seem to equate reading with intelligence and a successful life (we could argue about their definition of successful, but that's for another post). In fact, if you were to suggest to a group of school parents that it's okay for an unschooled child to not be reading by age 8 they would likely think you a terribly neglectful parent who is putting your child's future at risk. Just because early reading is correlated with various "successful outcomes" in life does not prove a causative relationship. I believe this misunderstanding of the difference between correlation and causation lies behind the near-hysterical obsession our society has with children's learning in general, and with reading in particular.
As a biostatistics geek I find this attitude to be nonsensical. Let's assume that the distribution of ages where reading begins is Gaussian, or Normal (i.e. your standard bell-shaped curve). The peak of the curve is the Average Age, and the bell forms mirror images on either side of that average. Thus, a child who reads 2 years earlier than the average is at the same Standard Deviation from the Mean as a child who reads two years LATER than the average (standard deviations, represented by the greek letter sigma, are a measure of distance from the mean and, in normal distributions, are equal on either side of the mean). But in our society we treat the child on the left side of the distribution as a genius while the child on the right side of the distribution is "behind" and needs help. It just doesn't make sense since both children represent the same deviation from average. I believe schools expect kids to be doing some reading by grade one, so let's assume the average age to be 6. So a child who reads at age 3 (like I did, and like my daughter did) is three points away from average. Well, so is a child who doesn't read until they are 9. We celebrate the 3 year old and send the 9 year old off to Sylvan or some other tutoring service.
I think we've become so used to the whole concept of School that most folks in society just don't even question their assumptions anymore: kids need to be taught reading and writing because that is what happens at school. We've lost our faith in the innate ability of children to learn, and in their innate, instinctual drive to learn.
My daughter walked up to me the other day and handed me this:
I have never asked her to write: she does it the same way she draws and colours, which is to say spontaneously and with interest. I didn't bother to correct her with red pen marks. She knows how to spell "frog" but she made a mistake by writing and E instead of an R. And you can see her "J" is backwards. Our Learning Consultant said this is totally normal and I suspect there is an explanation for this based on neurological development. If I looked at reading as something I need to teach her, than I might be concerned about her mistakes. Instead I see her backwards "J" the same way I saw her brother when he was trying to walk: they'll get there eventually.
Anyways, I realize that my daughter happens to be particularly skilled in this area and not all children learn to read and write at such an early age, but I don't believe that it makes her any more normal than a child who doesn't start reading until they are 7 or 8. And while it's true that some kids will not find it fun nor interesting to write out words and rhymes, they will get to some point in the pursuit of their own interests where reading and writing are an asset, and at that point I'm convinced that most could learn with little difficulty (in fact, anecdotal stories lead me to believe they would learn in a couple of weeks what the early readers took a year or two to develop). If only we could be more patient with our children and let Nature take its course...what wonderful things would we, as a society, come to learn about them?
Besides her obvious misunderstanding of what unschooling is all about, there is a subtle assumption in the statement which I find very interesting.
What does it mean to "teach a child to read"? I think most people imagine a teacher or parent sitting down and "explaining" reading to a child. We all remember the Hooked on Phonics craze, and products like LeapFrog perpetuate the idea that reading is something children need to be taught how to do.
But nobody thinks of learning to speak in the same way. You would not tell someone they need to send their infant to school in order to learn the spoken language. Children learn how to speak simply by being around other people who speak. Nobody has to "teach" them. So why is it that society assumes children have to be taught how to read and write, but we don't believe infants need to be taught language in the same way?
Can you imagine someone suggesting you should send your 1 year old to a school to learn how to speak English? Your reaction might be something like "He doesn't have to go to school to learn that. He'll just learn it, all babies do. They just need to hear people speaking about anything, just daily life, and they will learn."
And yet when it comes to reading and writing we don't believe the above. Well, I do. I would give the same reply above to someone who said I needed to send my daughter to school to learn reading. In fact, I will go so far as to suggest that all children, barring a learning disability, can learn to read all on their own provided they are exposed to people reading books out loud. Has this experiment been done? It would be difficult given that most children are sent to school right around the age at which many of them will start learning to read on their own. We'd need to look at a random sampling of totally unschooled children, and we all know that study ain't going to be funded any time soon! The statistics on this page are almost certainly gathered from school children, so saying that "20% - 30% of children learn to read relatively easily after exposure to formal education" does not prove that the formal education is what got them reading. I'd be very curious to know where they got their control group.
Another thing that bothers me is this idea of children being "behind" if they can't read at a certain age. Most parents seem to equate reading with intelligence and a successful life (we could argue about their definition of successful, but that's for another post). In fact, if you were to suggest to a group of school parents that it's okay for an unschooled child to not be reading by age 8 they would likely think you a terribly neglectful parent who is putting your child's future at risk. Just because early reading is correlated with various "successful outcomes" in life does not prove a causative relationship. I believe this misunderstanding of the difference between correlation and causation lies behind the near-hysterical obsession our society has with children's learning in general, and with reading in particular.
As a biostatistics geek I find this attitude to be nonsensical. Let's assume that the distribution of ages where reading begins is Gaussian, or Normal (i.e. your standard bell-shaped curve). The peak of the curve is the Average Age, and the bell forms mirror images on either side of that average. Thus, a child who reads 2 years earlier than the average is at the same Standard Deviation from the Mean as a child who reads two years LATER than the average (standard deviations, represented by the greek letter sigma, are a measure of distance from the mean and, in normal distributions, are equal on either side of the mean). But in our society we treat the child on the left side of the distribution as a genius while the child on the right side of the distribution is "behind" and needs help. It just doesn't make sense since both children represent the same deviation from average. I believe schools expect kids to be doing some reading by grade one, so let's assume the average age to be 6. So a child who reads at age 3 (like I did, and like my daughter did) is three points away from average. Well, so is a child who doesn't read until they are 9. We celebrate the 3 year old and send the 9 year old off to Sylvan or some other tutoring service.I think we've become so used to the whole concept of School that most folks in society just don't even question their assumptions anymore: kids need to be taught reading and writing because that is what happens at school. We've lost our faith in the innate ability of children to learn, and in their innate, instinctual drive to learn.
My daughter walked up to me the other day and handed me this:
I have never asked her to write: she does it the same way she draws and colours, which is to say spontaneously and with interest. I didn't bother to correct her with red pen marks. She knows how to spell "frog" but she made a mistake by writing and E instead of an R. And you can see her "J" is backwards. Our Learning Consultant said this is totally normal and I suspect there is an explanation for this based on neurological development. If I looked at reading as something I need to teach her, than I might be concerned about her mistakes. Instead I see her backwards "J" the same way I saw her brother when he was trying to walk: they'll get there eventually.
Anyways, I realize that my daughter happens to be particularly skilled in this area and not all children learn to read and write at such an early age, but I don't believe that it makes her any more normal than a child who doesn't start reading until they are 7 or 8. And while it's true that some kids will not find it fun nor interesting to write out words and rhymes, they will get to some point in the pursuit of their own interests where reading and writing are an asset, and at that point I'm convinced that most could learn with little difficulty (in fact, anecdotal stories lead me to believe they would learn in a couple of weeks what the early readers took a year or two to develop). If only we could be more patient with our children and let Nature take its course...what wonderful things would we, as a society, come to learn about them?
Thursday, April 03, 2008
The outside world is a depressing place sometimes
Warning: this is a rant. If your kids are in school, or going there, and you tend to take things personally, skip this post. I'm not anti-school. But I am anti-ignorant-sheep who do things just because "that's the way we do it", who spew rhetoric without thinking about what they are saying, and then judge anybody who dares to question why we do things the way we do...
I've created a wonderful community of like minded mamas around me. Whether through attachment parenting, La Leche League, or the local homelearner groups in my area the people around me are very much living the way I live, and get what I'm doing.
Every now and then I venture out into the mainstream world of parenting. It's a frightening place. It's a cold-water-in-the-face reminder that the way I live my life is totally foreign to most people. I wouldn't mind so much if people weren't so damn judgemental and ignorant. Recently I stumbled upon a thread written by a mainstream parent about Unschooling. Apparently she had just "discovered" unschooling by reading about it on wikipedia. Of course she thought it was bizarre, and many people who wrote comments passed some pretty harsh judgements about how bad it was for the kids, and how permissive and neglectful it was on behalf of the parents while at the same time admitting they'd never heard about it until now.
I tried to give as brief a synopsis as possible about what unschooling really is. And I wrote back one more time to address a few questions, and many comments that were just so Wrong in their assumptions that it was all I could do not to lose my temper and write something harsh. I ended up having to literally fight myself not to go back. Having been active on Internet discussion boards for well over 10 years now I recognize the signs: I get drawn into situations that make me so upset that I get anxious and irritated and literally fret about it for days. I'm fairly proud of myself for making the decision to leave the discussion where I did and let the rest of them pronounce their judgements and basically act like a bunch of ignorant bigots.
It did make me think, however, about how...brainwashed our society is about school. I have to wonder how many parents actually stop and think...no...*question*...whether or not school is all the things they think it is.
For example, we've all heard the tired old "socialization" argument and it came up in more detail in this discussion. Many people made statements suggesting that school is where kids go to learn how to "fit in to society" and to learn social behaviour. Many, many comments referred to children having to learn what life is like in the "real world" such as not being able to do "only what interests and stimulates you". Apparently school is the only place to do this.
It amazes me that nobody stops to ask themselves how school actually models the Real World. Where in the real world do you find people segregated by birth year? Do you have to wait for a bell to ring at work before you switch from your economic analysis spreadsheet to the coding project you're doing for the engineering team? Where in real life do you find children outnumbering adults 30 to 1?
Real life is what happens outside the school grounds. It's the mailman doing his route. It's the marketing people working in the grocery store aisles, checking product placement and competitive pricing. It's the old folks taking walking tours of the neighbourhood. It's mothers out with their babies and toddlers. It's the guys building a highrise, or fixing a storm sewer pipe. It's the delivery trucks bringing fresh produce to the corner market. What it is NOT is lining up in orderly fashion whenever you have to move from one location to the next. It is not having to ask permission to go to the bathroom. It is not being separated from anybody born in a year that wasn't your own, save for the one or two adults in charge.
And as for social development, I really think there are parents out there who believe that classroom structure is designed specifically to provide an optimal environment for social development. Like a bunch of school execs sat around and said "how best can we teach kids social skills?" and then came up with age-segregation and ultra-low adult:child ratios.
Uh, no. The reason kids are segregated by age is it makes it easier to manage them and it makes public education run more efficiently. When you have hundreds or even thousands of kids that you have to move through the system combined with a shoestring budget you cannot afford to vary the pace or style of learning to suit an individual child's needs. You can't afford to have many paid adults around so you group as many kids as can be reasonably managed into a class and head it up with one overworked and underpaid teacher.
The true optimal environment for social development is the evolutionary context in which humans evolved, which is to say small tribes of about 150 or so individuals. Children left their constant vigil at the parents' side when they weaned, joined in playing with all the other children, and by the time they hit puberty they were adults. You would never find a situation where a child had 20 agemates to play with. Instead there was one group of kids ranging from about 3 to about 12-14. And they weren't isolated from all the adults and elders in their community by being placed in an institution all day long.
The simple truth is that kids learn social behaviour from those who've already mastered it, not from kids who are the same age and therefore equally ignorant. And we wonder why we have such bizarre situations as cliques, bullying, peer orientation and peer culture.
Okay, I'm going to end my rant now. I'm going to stay away from that outside world for a while and allow myself to wallow comfortably in a world where I'm not a freak out to ruin my children, and the people I know - whether they send their kids to school or not - question everything and make their decisions accordingly. God bless 'em.
I've created a wonderful community of like minded mamas around me. Whether through attachment parenting, La Leche League, or the local homelearner groups in my area the people around me are very much living the way I live, and get what I'm doing.
Every now and then I venture out into the mainstream world of parenting. It's a frightening place. It's a cold-water-in-the-face reminder that the way I live my life is totally foreign to most people. I wouldn't mind so much if people weren't so damn judgemental and ignorant. Recently I stumbled upon a thread written by a mainstream parent about Unschooling. Apparently she had just "discovered" unschooling by reading about it on wikipedia. Of course she thought it was bizarre, and many people who wrote comments passed some pretty harsh judgements about how bad it was for the kids, and how permissive and neglectful it was on behalf of the parents while at the same time admitting they'd never heard about it until now.
I tried to give as brief a synopsis as possible about what unschooling really is. And I wrote back one more time to address a few questions, and many comments that were just so Wrong in their assumptions that it was all I could do not to lose my temper and write something harsh. I ended up having to literally fight myself not to go back. Having been active on Internet discussion boards for well over 10 years now I recognize the signs: I get drawn into situations that make me so upset that I get anxious and irritated and literally fret about it for days. I'm fairly proud of myself for making the decision to leave the discussion where I did and let the rest of them pronounce their judgements and basically act like a bunch of ignorant bigots.
It did make me think, however, about how...brainwashed our society is about school. I have to wonder how many parents actually stop and think...no...*question*...whether or not school is all the things they think it is.
For example, we've all heard the tired old "socialization" argument and it came up in more detail in this discussion. Many people made statements suggesting that school is where kids go to learn how to "fit in to society" and to learn social behaviour. Many, many comments referred to children having to learn what life is like in the "real world" such as not being able to do "only what interests and stimulates you". Apparently school is the only place to do this.
It amazes me that nobody stops to ask themselves how school actually models the Real World. Where in the real world do you find people segregated by birth year? Do you have to wait for a bell to ring at work before you switch from your economic analysis spreadsheet to the coding project you're doing for the engineering team? Where in real life do you find children outnumbering adults 30 to 1?
Real life is what happens outside the school grounds. It's the mailman doing his route. It's the marketing people working in the grocery store aisles, checking product placement and competitive pricing. It's the old folks taking walking tours of the neighbourhood. It's mothers out with their babies and toddlers. It's the guys building a highrise, or fixing a storm sewer pipe. It's the delivery trucks bringing fresh produce to the corner market. What it is NOT is lining up in orderly fashion whenever you have to move from one location to the next. It is not having to ask permission to go to the bathroom. It is not being separated from anybody born in a year that wasn't your own, save for the one or two adults in charge.
And as for social development, I really think there are parents out there who believe that classroom structure is designed specifically to provide an optimal environment for social development. Like a bunch of school execs sat around and said "how best can we teach kids social skills?" and then came up with age-segregation and ultra-low adult:child ratios.
Uh, no. The reason kids are segregated by age is it makes it easier to manage them and it makes public education run more efficiently. When you have hundreds or even thousands of kids that you have to move through the system combined with a shoestring budget you cannot afford to vary the pace or style of learning to suit an individual child's needs. You can't afford to have many paid adults around so you group as many kids as can be reasonably managed into a class and head it up with one overworked and underpaid teacher.
The true optimal environment for social development is the evolutionary context in which humans evolved, which is to say small tribes of about 150 or so individuals. Children left their constant vigil at the parents' side when they weaned, joined in playing with all the other children, and by the time they hit puberty they were adults. You would never find a situation where a child had 20 agemates to play with. Instead there was one group of kids ranging from about 3 to about 12-14. And they weren't isolated from all the adults and elders in their community by being placed in an institution all day long.
The simple truth is that kids learn social behaviour from those who've already mastered it, not from kids who are the same age and therefore equally ignorant. And we wonder why we have such bizarre situations as cliques, bullying, peer orientation and peer culture.
Okay, I'm going to end my rant now. I'm going to stay away from that outside world for a while and allow myself to wallow comfortably in a world where I'm not a freak out to ruin my children, and the people I know - whether they send their kids to school or not - question everything and make their decisions accordingly. God bless 'em.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Getting involved in the Community
A couple of weeks ago our local news channel did a two-part bit on homeschooling. Overall I was quite disappointed; the editors made sure to reinforce every stereotype out there for homeschoolers while paying lip service to research that dispels these myths.
They also had a school principal (or head of the teacher's union, can't remember now) to give "the other side" (like it isn't represented in every facet of daily life)...and one comment she said just made me want to tear my hair out. She noted that schools have diverse backgrounds of kids, from poor to wealthy, of all abilities and races, etc...she suggested that, in this way, school provides kids with a taste of what society is like. She implied that, because of this, schooled children are somehow "involved" with society.
Besides the obvious criticisms one can level at this claim, such as where in society one finds adults segregated by age, there is also the fact that school kids simply don't have the time to truly involve themselves in the real world. Oh sure, they'll take a field trip to an old folks' home. But such involvements really seem artificial to me. Going on a field trip, with a group of 30 kids all your age and only a handful of adults, is nothing like being involved as an individual.
Then Miranda over at Nurtured By Love posted this story about her family's involvement at the local community garden. She points out that all the kids attending were homeschoolers, and that this was the case for many community events they attended.
My kids haven't yet reached a level of maturity where they can be taken to such places, but you can bet that when they can we'll be getting involved with our community. Volunteering in park cleanups, invasive plant removal programs, food banks, etc are all open to us. I think Miranda was right that the school kids really don't have the time. But I also think that school kids are removed and isolated from the real world, and so perhaps can't feel their place within it as homeschooled kids do. It's hard to participate in something when you don't feel any ownership of it.
It just seems strange to me that we consider school kids part of society, and yet we remove them from it for most of their lives. Add in homework and busy commuting parents and it's no wonder that few of us have a true sense of community involvement. As a homeschooling family, we look forward to building a connection to our community as part of our daily life experiences.
They also had a school principal (or head of the teacher's union, can't remember now) to give "the other side" (like it isn't represented in every facet of daily life)...and one comment she said just made me want to tear my hair out. She noted that schools have diverse backgrounds of kids, from poor to wealthy, of all abilities and races, etc...she suggested that, in this way, school provides kids with a taste of what society is like. She implied that, because of this, schooled children are somehow "involved" with society.
Besides the obvious criticisms one can level at this claim, such as where in society one finds adults segregated by age, there is also the fact that school kids simply don't have the time to truly involve themselves in the real world. Oh sure, they'll take a field trip to an old folks' home. But such involvements really seem artificial to me. Going on a field trip, with a group of 30 kids all your age and only a handful of adults, is nothing like being involved as an individual.
Then Miranda over at Nurtured By Love posted this story about her family's involvement at the local community garden. She points out that all the kids attending were homeschoolers, and that this was the case for many community events they attended.
My kids haven't yet reached a level of maturity where they can be taken to such places, but you can bet that when they can we'll be getting involved with our community. Volunteering in park cleanups, invasive plant removal programs, food banks, etc are all open to us. I think Miranda was right that the school kids really don't have the time. But I also think that school kids are removed and isolated from the real world, and so perhaps can't feel their place within it as homeschooled kids do. It's hard to participate in something when you don't feel any ownership of it.
It just seems strange to me that we consider school kids part of society, and yet we remove them from it for most of their lives. Add in homework and busy commuting parents and it's no wonder that few of us have a true sense of community involvement. As a homeschooling family, we look forward to building a connection to our community as part of our daily life experiences.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Reading Level Tools
DD's learning consultant told me about some neat links you can go to in order to determine at what level your child is reading. DD has been reading with increasing confidence lately; some of the things she can read surprises me. I was curious to know how her reading skills compared with grade level expectations.
Last week she read several pages of The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit (I can't stand this book, but that's another story). The LC showed me that Amazon now has a new feature whereby you can find out the reading level of a particular book. If you click on the link for the book, scroll down the page to the "Inside this Book" section and look for "Concordance". Click on that, scroll down to "text stats" and under "readability" you'll see the Flesch-Kincaid Index Score. This tries to relate the book to US Grade Levels. Apparently, this book reads at about a Grade 4 - 5 level. I dunno, seems a bit high to me.
There's another cool feature over at the Literacy Trust called the SMOG test (Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook). It allows you to type in a minimum of 30 words from any text and it will calculate the reading level. The scores are a bit confusing to me, however. I think they are based on adult literacy. Everything from 0-6 is considered "low literate" and apparently an example of this level is Soap Opera Weekly (!). Level 7 is "junior high" and 9 is "some high school".
Neat idea, but I'm not sure how useful it is. For example, I typed in this back page synopsis from one of DD's books called A Sticker Book of Dinosaurs. She read it to me the other day, for the first time (we picked it up at a swap recently):
I even left out the words "complete" and "scenes" because DD stumbled over them. Still it came back as Level 9.7, somewhere between Readers Digest and Newsweek.
Whatever grade level DD is reading I honestly don't care. She's enjoying herself, all her reading is spontaneous and self-driven, and she's improving every week. To me, that is all the progress I need to hear. But I confess, I'm only human. I tend to get defensive about homeschooling with some members of my family and it's nice to have that little tidbit in my back pocket "Oh well, DD is already reading at a grade school level". It keeps them happy and off my back.
In a related note: DS will be 3.5 next month and he just read his first two words to me "Yes" and "No". They were printed on the side of our recycling box and he read them while waiting to get into the car in our garage. I know how it is he came to know these words: he plays a lot of Wii games (specifically Super Mario Galaxy) and you often have to select between Yes and No. Who says video games can't be educational?
Last week she read several pages of The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit (I can't stand this book, but that's another story). The LC showed me that Amazon now has a new feature whereby you can find out the reading level of a particular book. If you click on the link for the book, scroll down the page to the "Inside this Book" section and look for "Concordance". Click on that, scroll down to "text stats" and under "readability" you'll see the Flesch-Kincaid Index Score. This tries to relate the book to US Grade Levels. Apparently, this book reads at about a Grade 4 - 5 level. I dunno, seems a bit high to me.
There's another cool feature over at the Literacy Trust called the SMOG test (Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook). It allows you to type in a minimum of 30 words from any text and it will calculate the reading level. The scores are a bit confusing to me, however. I think they are based on adult literacy. Everything from 0-6 is considered "low literate" and apparently an example of this level is Soap Opera Weekly (!). Level 7 is "junior high" and 9 is "some high school".
Neat idea, but I'm not sure how useful it is. For example, I typed in this back page synopsis from one of DD's books called A Sticker Book of Dinosaurs. She read it to me the other day, for the first time (we picked it up at a swap recently):
"Do you like Dinosaurs? Then get set for ages of fun as you answer the riddles, find the stickers, and complete the colourful scenes in this sticker book all about dinosaurs."
I even left out the words "complete" and "scenes" because DD stumbled over them. Still it came back as Level 9.7, somewhere between Readers Digest and Newsweek.
Whatever grade level DD is reading I honestly don't care. She's enjoying herself, all her reading is spontaneous and self-driven, and she's improving every week. To me, that is all the progress I need to hear. But I confess, I'm only human. I tend to get defensive about homeschooling with some members of my family and it's nice to have that little tidbit in my back pocket "Oh well, DD is already reading at a grade school level". It keeps them happy and off my back.
In a related note: DS will be 3.5 next month and he just read his first two words to me "Yes" and "No". They were printed on the side of our recycling box and he read them while waiting to get into the car in our garage. I know how it is he came to know these words: he plays a lot of Wii games (specifically Super Mario Galaxy) and you often have to select between Yes and No. Who says video games can't be educational?
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Teens skipping school
I heard a report on the radio today about teens in Cape Breton skipping school. The focus of the story, and this article on the same subject, seems to be finding ways to force kids back into their seats.
Articles like this truly leave me stunned at how brainwashed our society is when it comes to schooling. First of all, not a single person has suggested that the reason kids don't want to go to school is because they hate it. Survey any class of grade-schoolers and ask them if they had a choice would they go to school and you'll find most say "no". Ever notice the collective joy on 1) the last day of school, 2) a snow day, and 3) a teachers' strike?
But no, instead of trying to fix our education system so that all kids can feel challenged, stimulated, included, and in some control over their own learning we'd rather come up with punishments and consequences. Have these people never heard the expression "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink."? Apparently forcing somebody's ass into a desk chair = educating them. Are they actually learning if they don't want to be there but are being forced to? I think not.
But nobody asks that. Nobody asks whether counting the number of bums in seats is an accurate indicator of how many are being "educated". The principle of one Cape Breton school calls this "the biggest thorn in his side". Huh, I don't suppose that has to do with the fact that your Ministry of Education funds students (i.e. gives money to the school) based on attendance...?
I feel truly sorry for these teens. They are in the prime of their lives and they are forced to live the sort of 9-5 hell that many working adults get stuck in without realizing it until it's too late. Life is too short to be doing that from cradle to grave.
The rhetoric coming out in this story is just tragic. It's all "this is for your own good, like it or not" and "life is hard and you can't just not show up for work" etc. Nobody cares that the kids hate school. What are we doing to our youth? How many of us, in our middle years, look back on wasted time and regrets. These poor kids are pissing half their lives away in a classroom that provides nothing for them. And our society is forcing them back in there rather than listening to anything they might have to say about why they don't want to go. We don't care. We've already decided it's for their own good and we assume they are too immature and unmotivated to have an opinion.
Thank God my teens will not have to deal with that.
Articles like this truly leave me stunned at how brainwashed our society is when it comes to schooling. First of all, not a single person has suggested that the reason kids don't want to go to school is because they hate it. Survey any class of grade-schoolers and ask them if they had a choice would they go to school and you'll find most say "no". Ever notice the collective joy on 1) the last day of school, 2) a snow day, and 3) a teachers' strike?
But no, instead of trying to fix our education system so that all kids can feel challenged, stimulated, included, and in some control over their own learning we'd rather come up with punishments and consequences. Have these people never heard the expression "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink."? Apparently forcing somebody's ass into a desk chair = educating them. Are they actually learning if they don't want to be there but are being forced to? I think not.
But nobody asks that. Nobody asks whether counting the number of bums in seats is an accurate indicator of how many are being "educated". The principle of one Cape Breton school calls this "the biggest thorn in his side". Huh, I don't suppose that has to do with the fact that your Ministry of Education funds students (i.e. gives money to the school) based on attendance...?
I feel truly sorry for these teens. They are in the prime of their lives and they are forced to live the sort of 9-5 hell that many working adults get stuck in without realizing it until it's too late. Life is too short to be doing that from cradle to grave.
The rhetoric coming out in this story is just tragic. It's all "this is for your own good, like it or not" and "life is hard and you can't just not show up for work" etc. Nobody cares that the kids hate school. What are we doing to our youth? How many of us, in our middle years, look back on wasted time and regrets. These poor kids are pissing half their lives away in a classroom that provides nothing for them. And our society is forcing them back in there rather than listening to anything they might have to say about why they don't want to go. We don't care. We've already decided it's for their own good and we assume they are too immature and unmotivated to have an opinion.
Thank God my teens will not have to deal with that.
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