annegables
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Posts posted by annegables
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On 12/22/2019 at 6:02 PM, Jackie said:
This feels like a lighthearted discussion being dragged into “you should have known what you were getting into” territory. Of course everything has its language. But there are definitely words I don’t run into outside of this board, even when I read about education or talk to homeschoolers in person or on other homeschooling boards.
”Unschooling” vs “child-led” vs everything else. Yikes. These terms are fraught, and treated extremely differently in different parts of the homeschooling community.
I dont think I actually know what "child-led" means anymore. It seems like a word (phrase?) that should be straightforward, but isnt.
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I was nerding out with another homeschooler IRL and we were discussing how if we hear someone say "scope and sequence" it makes us want to talk to them. Boy, anyone with informed opinions on scope and sequence is someone I want to talk to, and I dont even care if we remotely agree or not!
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2 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:
This is where I cannot relate to homeschooling, or really even parenting, without a philosophy guiding deliberate choices among the whirlwind of daily decisions.
From birth, a goal is self-actualization, not the secularized vision, but being fully who God created them as unique individuals to be.
That means time alone to discover who they are. For a child that means playing using their imagination, and self-guided entertainment that really makes them learn to know themselves. Unstructured hours without adult controlled choices made for them, without adults deciding what they should do, be, like, master.
In terms of education, it simply means helping them achieve what they are capable of achieving. It isnt at 10 they should be able to do this, so do this. It is nurturing them along their unique path. If you know them, you know what they can do easily and what they struggle with. You nurture the one and gently encourage the other. You clear the paths ahead so they can get glimpses of where they can go. It isnt a roadmap. It is a journey, but a journey made one day at a time, one incremental step in mastering whatever skill at a time.
Nothing glamorous about it. It is just working/nurturing the innate abilities they possess. No path looks the same.
I love just about everything you write. Thank you for all of your contributions to this board.
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2 hours ago, square_25 said:
When I pulled my daughter out of school, it was because I realized no school did I wanted. What I wanted was rigor for a few hours a day, and then a ton of playing time. I didn't want busywork. I wanted her to work to demand a lot of her, at the level she was at, and then I wanted it to be done and I wanted her to read/play/build.
Accordingly, every day, we do an hour of math (we're starting algebra at 7.5! I'm very proud of her), and we're spending about an hour on writing projects she has picked and I insist that she holds her pencil correctly, write neatly, and spell well, and generally stretch herself, and we've started speaking Russian for about half an hour, and she practices piano for 45 minutes... and the rest of the day is mostly up to her. What she chooses to do with that is to read books, and to build, and to attend homeschooling classes at our local homeschooling center (this involves a fair amount of travel time, but she absolutely loves them), and to take swimming and gymnastics classes, and to hang upside down on the playground, and to play with friends. We're mostly unschooling science and history and most other subjects for now.
This works really well for us. I think it's very rigorous, and yet it's age-appropriate and doesn't involve any busywork. And it also means that she's grateful for our homeschooling. We may be stern with her day-to-day, but she feels like she's progressing in a way that's meaningful for her, and school doesn't feel arbitrary to her.
The bolded represents my approach as well. Go hard for a few hours and then read/play/build.
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1 hour ago, HeighHo said:
As I noted, what's being offered in high schools today are exercises. No problems. They are intellectually challenging....for the student who has many foundational holes and needs whole numbers only. For the student going on to university who completed the actual K-8 foundation...well that's what afterschooling is for.
I think we might be talking past each other. I do not know what the difference between a math exercise and a math problem is. I dont think I have ever encountered a semantic difference between the two, or at least I didnt realize it:).
I was just pointing out that for my advanced math classes, we were not allowed to use calculators so the numbers had to be relatively straightforward to work with. The math concept was not in the arithmetic but in the getting from point A to point B over many steps.
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4 minutes ago, Corraleno said:
Every spring College Confidential is flooded with posts from kids who worked so hard in HS, did all the APs, all the ECs, hours of test prep, and didn't get the elite college admissions they thought they'd earned, and they complain bitterly that their hard work and sacrifice "was all for nothing." Of course there are some kids who take all APs because that is the level they naturally work at and they would be bored with anything less, but IMO the vast majority of kids are just doing it so their GC will check the "most rigorous course load" box on the Common App. For those kids it has nothing to do with wanting a deep meaningful education (which is not what you're going to get in most AP classes anyway), it's more like playing a game of Survivor — if you can endure 4 years of torture you win a prize. And then when they read the admissions threads and see that kids with lower stats, and less rigorous coursework, got accepted to schools that waitlisted or outright rejected them, they are so angry and bitter and disoriented — like they just discovered that the rules of the game they've been playing for the last 4 (or 6 or 12) years were not what they thought, and no one told them. For some kids it really destroys their whole sense of identity, because there was never any internal motivation or love of learning, just a drive for external validation and prizes.
Yep. That is rigor run amok in my mind.
We have opposite kids!
14 minutes ago, Expat_Mama_Shelli said:It’s funny how individual this is, too.
I was just chatting with DS about the semester that has concluded & the upcoming one. We have done an exceptionally high amount of writing this semester (a play script + a nearly-1000 word narrative) & yet when I asked what he felt was most “worth it” - that was his immediate response! He has loved it!
For my DS, rigorous and stifling would be assigning copious reading. He has convergence insufficiency, so while he can decode & comprehend at a high level, the physical act is exhausting. It’s far more valuable for him to read a little bit each day, but have the vast majority of things being read to him rather than by him.
Attempting too many topics at once is another rigorous and stifling pitfall for us. We do best focusing on 4-5 subjects at a time for a month or longer. As much as I see super-short lessons recommended for kids his age, he finds constant switching draining.
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2 hours ago, HeighHo said:
to me, academic rigor means including details/nuances....and that does challenge many K12 teachers ime. For example, the disregard of proof and cases in high school geometry these days. The concept is discussed, but the actual knowing and doing is ultra 'lite' compared to what was demanded and learned in my day. Another example is high school Algebra -- in my day geometrical and symbolic representation were used in the discussion and knowing; today one hardly sees a problem, and its all exercises with friendly numbers, no decimals allowed.
If one rejects rigor but wants to go deep, one might expand complexity or continue one's introductory survey.
I just wanted to highlight this for a sec because sometimes the thought behind this is to allow for more difficult math, not easier. At least in AoPS (and in my math growing up), the problems were designed to be intellectually challenging, but not require use of a calculator.
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Talking. Lots and lots of talking. Or, as I recently learned, dialectic conversation:). What is rigorous and stifling for my kids (6th grade and under) is producing written work for their ideas. So a super rigorous homeschool would be to force loads of writing. Instead, I require writing (6th grader is going through WWS1), but not too much. For instance, I did informal logic with all the kids last year just by taking a walk every day and talking about logical fallacies. And then I posted a list of the fallacies in our living room. And we talk about them.
We walk and discuss books. Themes, "should" questions, plot, character development. My kids are able to handle the learning requirement, but often the writing output is too much. So we are doing Argument Builder (6th grader) by half-writing/half-talking.
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1 hour ago, Jean in Newcastle said:
It seems appropriate to learn new vocabulary on a forum the celebrates learning and education. I hope that is never dumbed down.
I fully agree. My point in starting this thread was that dialectic seems like a word I should have encountered long before now. It is not exclusive to homeschooling or classical education. It also seems much more intimidating than it really is. Sort of like Socratic dialogue. After reading The Republic, I finally realized what Socratic dialogue really is and was like, got that box checked.
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Preferably education-ish words
Dialectic. I have seen it here and maybe in some CAP or Circe stuff, but never anywhere else. I had to look it up. I thought it was more esoteric, like quadrivium. But then I was reading a John Taylor Gatto book (Weapons of Mass Instruction) and he used it regularly. I finally looked it up and wondered where it had been all my life. Oh. It is "just" a conversation with two or more points of view where people are trying to get at the truth through reasoned argument?! Slap a sticker on me and call me a banana. Now I can smugly say that my homeschool centers around dialectic conversation and it just sounds so amazingly intellectual.
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My one kid is getting a raccoon skeleton because he loves looking at bones and trying to assemble them.
My brother got the kids a rhino beetle without asking me first.
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I am pretty solid on math and science through high school, thank goodness. Although I had to educate myself on scope and sequence for math. But a lot of teaching math comes very naturally to me. Plus, I adore reading non-fiction math and science books, like Innumeracy, How I killed Pluto, etc.
But the liberal arts I have had to educate myself about. I have read books on teaching and evaluating writing. But the most time-consuming thing I have done was start reading all the literature I missed out on. To date, this year, I have read (completely aside from my pleasure reading):
Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Democracy in America, 10 Shakespeare plays, The Republic, Flannery OConner's complete collection of short stories, All Fr Brown mysteries, Orthodoxy, PG Wodehouse, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Canterbury Tales, a bunch of poetry, and a couple other books I am forgetting. I have listened to the Close Reads podcast as they nerd out on great literature and have gotten much better at literary analysis. I have learned that I dont have to enjoy a book for it to be a great book to read. I have finally learned, really learned, why the Iliad and the Odyssey are as revered as they are. I can finally get some of the literary allusions that have thus far evaded me.
Case in point. I am reading the Chronicles of Prydain to my kids. We got to the part of the enchantresses and how they are weaving on a loom. That detail would have passed over me before this summer. Now I know to look for weaving as a part of a greater literary tradition because the Odyssey is filled with weaving as a symbol, particularly with enchantresses.
Like if you have had no exposure to the Bible and read in the Anne of Green Gables books about her having "a Jonah day" and thinking it was a weird phrase and nothing more. And then reading the Old Testament and suddenly getting the nuance.
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I own both as well and I greatly appreciate 8's wisdom both in her books and on these boards.
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@Expat_Mama_Shelli I adore coming up with two-dimensional graphs like that! And I love seeing them! It helps me think non-linearly. I have an idea for another thread topic...
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1 hour ago, Farrar said:
I think this is easy to say... and for some kids it's easy to do. But sometimes... it's just not. I have experienced this with so many students and also with my own kids at times where a lot can go very wrong if you put the kids in charge. Kids can be super flighty. They want to study one thing one day and ditch it the next. Which can be fine. But also can be a problem if your goal is a deep dive into something, which is a totally worthy goal. They can also feel anxiety about that amount of control. I've seen a lot of families try to be super child-led and end up with kids who are too overwhelmed to really do or learn anything and parents who just aren't great guides around that.
There can be something really beautiful about the gift of having something really planned for you. About having a challenge, a path to follow. It's sometimes a lot *more* educational - especially with young kids who have so little experience of what's out there to know what to want to learn in the first place. And it doesn't have to be less educational or real or genuine. It can be more educational with deeper learning.
Another pitfall I've seen with a lot of families who are just super child-led is that they eschew key skills if the kids don't engage in them themselves. So then the learning never has a chance to grow because you've got a kid who is in middle school who is multiple grade levels behind on some key math and reading skills. Those skills start to limit what kids can do. They can't solve a big science PBL if they have limited writing or math skills. And the knowledge that they're behind often makes them self-conscious so then they avoid those skills even more.
I don't mean to say that I'm against child-led learning. Quite the opposite. But when I started in education, I definitely had a vision that said, oh, if kids are left to their own devices, they'll naturally want to dive in and you just have to be their guides. I thought the "little expert" thing was something all kids did if you just let them. I really learned that's simply not true. Some kids will dive deep and want to explore things and you just have to be their guide. But many, many kids need more than that. They need you to draw them a map. And then show them how to read the map. And then walk them down the path. I think of it like, "What do you want for dinner?" vs. "Would you like this, that, or that for dinner?" I'm much more of a fan of a more hybrid approach, especially in the early grades. To alternate between approaches intentionally, to watch them and envision great projects and problems for them instead of putting that burden (and it is a burden for many kids) on them to "pick something," to plan it out with them individually in mind.
I think a lot of the challenge that you seem to be describing in child-led learning is that, at least for my kids, they dont know what is out there, they dont know what they dont know, and they have no means of getting to cool opportunities. For instance, while my one kid is really into all things fossils, he is only in 2nd grade. So I scour the internet for the best bang-for-the-buck fossils for Christmas gifts. I research museums, field sites, etc and I drive everyone there. I interlibrary loan the really good books. I research the documentaries. And I steadily guide the learning towards something greater than its parts. I help them with all those executive functioning skills. On top of that, this is in addition to our actual "school work". I do this in different topics for my three kids.
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2 hours ago, Farrar said:
Some random thoughts.
I'm glad Ruth posted that graphic. I'd not seen it, but I've tried to explain this terminology difference to folks before and not seen a lot of recognition of it.
I think the lines between ALL the things being discussed are actually pretty fuzzy and depend a bit on implementation, goals, etc. but might look very similar on the ground or feel similar to the student, depending.
In the OP, I'd call the final thing Reggio Emilia. I know that's only applied to little kid stuff, but the whole idea of following what a kid is interested in, compiling stuff, figuring it all out as you go, and then at the end having the curriculum, that's the backwards Reggio thing. I'd say that's distinct from "Unit Studies" simply by direction. In unit studies, the teacher pre-plans all that stuff based on their own idea of what needs to be done. In the backwards way, you do it with the students as you go. Of course, fuzzy lines again. Like, the methods that 8FillstheHeart talks about using in her book and her posts here are really a hybrid - starting with a kid and their needs, designing around them.
On some level... I don't think the terminology matters as much as some of the various seeds of things. Like, the only reason to parse it all is to think intentionally about which aspects of these methods you're actually hoping to emulate and which learning goals you actually want.
Thank you! You put into words what I couldnt. And my fossil example morphs into PBL a bit because there is also a final presentation that we spend several months scheduling what has to be accomplished by when. But it is very much interest-led with me trying to find lots of different ways to support his interests.
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4 minutes ago, smfmommy said:
In the 90's and 2000's #4 would have been simply called a hands on unit study.
I always considered PBL to be #3. #1 was what people did when they wanted to make learning fun or needed a way for their child to express what they learned without writing. #2 is something the teacher does to, well, demonstrate a topic, but isn't PBL since the child is just watching not creating the demonstration themselves. But I am no expert and haven't read the 'official' PBL books/web sites that have been created.
I agree that they all have merit and can be enjoyable. But the level of actual learning is different (and dependent on the child).
Thank you for this! I find it funny, because in my mind, unit studies are slightly different, but this really helps. I always thought of unit studies as an almost artificial way to try to incorporate lots of skills around one idea. So, the unit might be on apples, and in that study is the history of apples, counting apples, apple legends (Johnny Appleseed, etc), baking with apples, etc. Part of it seemed so forced to me (and at some point, not enough math at higher levels). But now I understand.
and with #2, I meant that the student does the work, but as many people here point out, most of these are not experiments in the scientific definition, but merely demonstrations.
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This is a sort of spin-off of the delightfully long thread about getting messy with EsterMaria's ideas. I have not made my way through it all, so I hope this isnt being hashed out on there. Even if it is, I would love a discussion about project-based learning, in part because it seems as though everyone defines it differently. I really want to have this conversation because I dont know if what I am doing is PBL, and if it isnt, what would a good name for it be?
It seems as though there are 4 types of PBL getting conflated (feel free to add more):
1. Crafty projects that might extend over a period of a few days. These may or may not lead to learning of the actual topic at hand. Examples are dioramas, lapbooking, anything with dough or jello, etc. Some kids and families love this stuff, others do not.
2. Science demonstrations.
3. Experience-based. This could be planning a garden, figuring out the best soil for different plants, best conditions for each plant species, invasive species, pests, fertilizer, etc. with this I would include longer-term science investigations, such as building different structures out of recyclables to test certain properties. I would include what @lewelma did with science with her son in this category.
4. ??? what this should be called? I will use an example from my own life. My kid is into fossils. We own a lot of fossils (Christmas gifts from family), a microscope, and a field scope for close inspection. We classified the fossils by type and geological era. We watch a ton of documentaries (how the Earth Was Made, etc). We go to several world-class localish museums and talked to docents for extended periods of time about the fossils there. We went on a long road trip (that we had to go on for a reunion) through fossil country and saw awesome fossils out in "the wild". His writing is based on this learning, so if we are doing hearing the vowels in every word and developing good topic sentences, this happens around the topic of fossils.
I think all of these categories have merit, some moreso than others. I think that each category could be done well or poorly, but I think it is easier to do #s 1 and 2 poorly. I also think that given certain constraints, #s 1 and 2 are what happen most often in conventional schools.
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When my kids take less than 2 minutes to poop, they call it "pooping like a mom."
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9 minutes ago, lewelma said:
I love the book because it is about creating meaningful assignments, graded or no. How do you actually encourage learning? How can you help a kid learn content to a deep level with all the top blooms taxonomy thinking. It is written to college professors, but the ideas are easily relevant to high school, and on down. It opened my eyes to why so much that I see when I tutor is rigorous busywork rather than true learning. The assignments are simply poorly designed.
Here in NZ the kids regularly refer to formative vs summative assessment. Formative meaning to informally assess as you go to make sure you are learning appropriately, and summative meaning a performance evaluated for a grade. I think it is virtually impossible to learn if you as the learner are not doing some formative assessment -- checking you are right, getting someone to comment on your papers, correcting your pronunciation based on a model or teacher, etc. It is summative assessment that I think regularly takes over learning in schools and often in homeschools. And in my experience summative assessment effectively drives students based usually on fear of a poor evaluation, but it rarely helps with long term retention and deep insightful thinking. Clearly, there are exceptions (which is why I said rarely), but education has been driven for decades based on judgement and rankings, and I don't think it is generally helpful.
I love it when my brain gets words to ideas I have been thinking over!
I am really excited to read Engaging Ideas. All the Amazon reviews are glowing.
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5 hours ago, 8FillTheHeart said:
I actually think the conversation is more nuanced than assessment vs no assessment. I do not give my kids tests. I don't give them grades based on formal assessments. But, even as discussion-based as our homeschool is, my kids are still "assessed" even if it isn't formally intended. Math problems have right and wrong answers. They know when they get them right and when they get them wrong. When we go over their papers together, either their papers have few revisions to make or they have quite a few. Everything.......handwriting, spelling, reading, etc faces affirmation or need for correction/more time..... Without "formally assessing" our kids, our kids are aware that they are constantly being assessed one way or the other.
I think from my perspective, the conversation is probably more about the learning environment. Our homeschool is not driven by grades but understanding. When things are wrong, we back up. We break things down and rebuild them together in order to find where real understanding was lost and replaced with superficial understanding. We practice things, etc. It isn't emotional. It isn't time-driven b/c learning isn't about progressing to the next lesson (since very few things we even do are based on any type of distinguishable lesson----math probably being the exception.) We progress naturally according to their pace of mastery vs. by some exterior motivation.
In high school, my kids do start to experience more formal type assessments. That approach still isn't the majority of their classes, but enough of them so that when they step onto a college campus, the difference between our non-testing environment and the traditional book/quiz/test classroom environment is nothing more than a shrug of their shoulders.
I fully agree with this. I am assessing in a meaningful, life-giving way. My kids know my standards. That is the beauty of what you described. That when you are assessing work, your children have a chance to re-do it to mastery. When I was in school, if I got a low grade on a paper, that was it. There was no chance to re-do and therefore a lot of the meaningful learning was missed. What is the point of grading a paper if there is no chance to correct the problems???
@lewelma, that is probably the fourth time in as many threads about a variety of topics that you mentioned Engaging Ideas. I finally just broke down and bought it. What is Christmas break for, anyways? Well , this book and another writing book you mentioned a while back.
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I just used mine today for the first time and it is what all my cleaning fantasies are made of! My oven is at least 50 years old and there are parts I thought were brown. I decided to point the steam at it and nope, turns out it is stainless steel!
As a bonus, my kids fought over who could clean the walls first with it.
my old house has so many random nooks and crannies and this thing is blasting them all. I feel like we are finally making real progress in deep cleaning.
I am excited to use this on my blinds. I hate removing them and washing them. Now I am just going to steam them!
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On 12/2/2019 at 9:11 PM, katilac said:
1. I'm not sure what you're asking? Your safeties are the schools that are almost guaranteed to admit you, and those are going to be different schools for high stats vs above average vs average.
2. I don't think it's that easy. Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper and look at common datas sets, which will give you a better breakdown of scores and how many students in each category. A student's 31 on the ACT might be 5 points higher than the 75th percentile at two schools. Looking at the common data sets, you can see what percentage of students at each school scored 30 or above. If School 1's top 25% cluster in the 26-29 range, whereas School 2 has a higher number that score 30 and above, what does that tell you? Your 31 is a bigger deal at School 1.
3. A school below your stats does not have to equal sailing through the first two years. Honors programs and colleges can help. A willingness to meet students where they are can help - when my kids did DE at the local uni, they both had professors that put them through the wringer for one of the freshman composition courses. These profs worked hard at getting some students to master the basics of college writing, and equally hard at getting other students to surpass the basics. Schools that have an overall culture of low expectations and apathy exist, but that's easy to discover with some research and visits.
I do think it's preferable to have a decent number of fellow students in your general range. Maybe only 5% of students at each school meet or exceed your stats, but that might equal 60 students at a small school but 600 students at a mid-sized school.
I'm trying to think of a third 'A' word that means you are happy to go there. Admission, affordability, and . . . affection? 😄
appeal? I didnt finish the thread, so forgive me if this has been said.
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@Arctic Mama, I have an absurd amount of bookshelf envy.
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What makes the classical approach to LA rigorous?
in General Education Discussion Board
Posted
Thank you so much for all of this. My son loves Great COurses lectures and I never thought of how the lecture format has the same structure as an essay. This post is helping me understand how to teach my son better writing. He has internalized that structure when it comes to oral presentations, but not to his writing. I am getting all verklempt just thinking of the possibilities!