Share what you do to make sure your students can apply what they know?

[Nscribe]

The thread about the college professor's comment (http://forums.welltrainedmind.com/topic/493869-the-high-stat-kids-cant-think-they-cant-apply-what-they-supposedly-know/) made me think about that process that goes something like:

 

from exposure>>> to recognition>>> to familiarity>>>to application>>> and then mastery/creative use/ability to manipulate with dexterity and ultimately to mastery.

 

This made me wonder about what high school studies should aim to do.  Should mastery be the goal, always, in every arena?  When the expectation is a buffet of content areas and skills sets...what practices yield the result or is it really possible?

 

Learning how to learn is a skill, but then sometimes learning how to cram and get past an obstacle may be a useful skill as well.  I often hear some high schoolers talk about how it feels like a lot of cramming then on to the next thing.  I can see why it might, given the nature of high school.

 

________

 

It would be interesting to hear what others do to keep high school from being a drive-by or tour and move on experience.

[Nan in Mass]

Nscribe - I just wrote out a big long answer and then hit a wrong key and it vanished.  The gist of it was that I thought carefully about who I wanted my children to be as adults and then at the beginning of high school, I planned where I wanted them to be at the end of high school.  It varied from subject to subject.  I'll come back tomorrow and type out where it was for each subject.  The ability to get into college and even more importantly, survive college when they got there was definately part of that equation, but not all of it.  I focused on teaching them to teach themselves and gave them time to practise that.  I thought about what things they were likely to teach themselves as adults and skimped on those (history, for example lol - most adult males I know read history for fun).  I thought about what things would really limit them later (like math) and we worked hard on those.  I thought about the things with developmental windows (music and languages).  I most definately thought about the ability to cram and the ability to learn something well and tried to make sure they learned both, since I think they both are useful as an adult outside the academic sphere.  I'll be back tomorrow. : )

Nan

[Nscribe]

Nan, sorry your post poofed, look forward to the follow up.  I am chewing on my own question tonight...

[Nan in Mass]

I'm back.

This is something I've struggled with for years. I tend to talk about "balance" in the posts where I was asking this question. Other people talk about depth versus breadth. Not everyone sees this as an issue, especially if they are European. My impression is that the ones here on the board usually say something like, "Of course you are going to begin with a light survey of everything before you begin to study things more in depth. How would you go into depth if you didn't have the breadth first?" They seem to be coming from a less diverse cultural base. Their government has written a curriculum that all students go through so everyone (in theory at least) has the same knowledge base and what is part of that knowledge base feels much more defined to them. Academic skills are carefully (in theory) incorporated within the teaching of that base. There is a lot less discussion about what should be in that base and the base doesn't shift much year by year so there is more room to teach the skills. Nobody worries as much about squashing creativity or teaching creativity. Instead, they worry about teaching academic skills and that knowledge base. That is my impression, at least.

 

We, on the other hand, are struggling with a mostly undefined, shifting knowledge base. Our textbooks aren't meant to be finished; they contain everything a teacher might possibly want to teach about a subject and the teacher is expected to pick and choose. This is distinctly unhelpful to most homeschoolers unless they realize that. Even in skill-based subjects like math, which skills are considered necessary shifts and grows from year to year. Skills get pushed lower and lower. Art skills can't be taught because that might discourage creativity. Fortunately, few people can stand listening to the result of taking this approach in music, so music skills are still taught, although there is still some discussion about how to teach them in such a way that creativity is encouraged. (Orff, for example, although when you really investigate, you begin to realize that most of what Orff did was with musicians who were already full trained. Not that the method that bears his name doesn't work... Like most innovative things, a great deal depends on how the method is applied. Chicago math is an example of this.)

 

The philosophy stuff gets complicated fast and begins to sound like educationalese gobbldy gook. I don't think you really need to worry about all that. I think first you need to do is decide which things your children are likely to need in their lives (involves some scary winnowing), then think about what experts in those things know, then think about what sort of base you need to give your children to put them on the road to becoming that later if they want or need to. And on top of that, through that, and under that, you need to teach good solid academic skills, unless you decide that they are never going to want to learn something in an academic way. Some unschoolers do decide this. Their children learn to learn things in unacademic ways. And some don't.

 

I aimed for a mix. We tried to show our children non-academic ways to learn things and a good bit of what they learned, they learned in a non-academic way. But I wanted them to go to college, and I know from my own adult life that often the academic way of learning something is fast and easy whereas the non-academic way is slower and more expensive, especially if you are just trying to learn a little of something in order to do something else. So - I needed to teach learning academically. Part of that is how to cram. I deliberately loaded up my sons their last semester at community college to the point where they would have to do some cramming and be forced to do a less than stellar job on everything. The result wasn't pretty and they didn't have time to learn it really well, but hopefully they had enough of a taste of it that they have some idea of how to balance their classes and get through. We talked about meeting random-seeming requirements for qualifications and tried to teach ours that it is better to bow than to break. I refused to use all of high school for these lessons and it might turn out not to have been enough. We'll see what happens, ultimately.

 

I'm going to post this and then come back and talk about specific subjects.

 

Nan

[Nan in Mass]

So - this all looks really scary if you think about it in the very black and white terms we were using in that other thread. I don't think it is really like that at all. Really, there is a lot of grey area that is "good enough". You want to hit that grey area for the subjects you are interested in. You've probably already eliminated lots of them. If you aren't a musical family, you might have eliminated music already. My husband and I feel like sailing out into the middle of the ocean and staying there forever whenever we think about debate, despite understanding about logic and the political power to change the world. You need to teach thinking in some subject, but I think you can count on this crossing over to other subjects. We, obviously, are not word-oriented enough to want to teach thinking through logic and debate. We would rather do it through math and a million why and how questions in daily life. If you hate numbers, then you might prefer to go the logic/debate route. So some subjects are eliminated, or done with the intention that nobody is ever going to actually try to use them. Some subjects can be learned as an adult to the level needed, if they ever are needed. Lots of things came under that heading for us. Computer programming (to my dismay) landed in that catagory. That is almost all creative work and yet middle one got NONE. Ug. On the other hand, it can be learned as an adult and it isn't necessary for most other things, so oh well. Some subjects land in the endless category. Math is one. Fortunately, math is one of those lovely grey subjects which is almost all skill-based. With skill-based things, once you have learned a few skills, you can be creative with those skills without having learned ALL the skills. I just taught one of my extra kids how to use bar diagrams. She has huge holes in her ability to do arithmetic, but with bar diagrams she can solve problems that most people use algebra to solve. She is definately being creative in how she uses them. It took me about 4 hours to show them to her and work through enough problems to give her some ideas of how they can be used. I think that as long as you teach the why behind each concept in math, drill enough that the tool becomes easy, and make sure not to keep the application confined to a few word problems at the end of a chapter of lessons, you don't have to worry about math. "Creative" in math means being able to apply the concepts that you know to new situations. This happens all the way along, if the child understands how numbers work and isn't just blindly memorizing algorithms. Math is a good subject to work on thinking because the problem-solving steps can be defined and practised and there is an endless supply of "fun" puzzles with which to practise. We pushed that over into real life problem solving by trying to do lots of things and make lots of things. With things like art, music, and foreign languages, we decided to focus on skills and not on content. There is content in those subjects, but we decided they could learn the content later, if they wanted to, but during their teenage years, they were going to need the skills as an emotional outlet. Obviously, we couldn't teach to mastery in all of those at the same time, so we chose to try to give them a bit of a base in each. In music, we had them learn to play the piano and worked on sight-singing and learning the songs our family sings for fun. Or at least we tried. In art, I taught them to draw and then left them to teach themselves anything else they wanted to know. When we began a language, I had a goal in mind. In Latin, it was to be able to read The Aeneid. Failed miserably at that one lol. It was also to teach them grammar and how to learn a language out of a book. In French, it was to be able to really use their French - have conversations, live in a French speaking country, read a novel. (More successful there, at least with youngest.) In Japanese, they needed a little survival Japanese. No creativity was needed for Latin. Quite a lot was needed for the other two but it wasn't what one normally means by knowing enough of a language to use it creatively lol. My youngest said one of the hardest things about living with French-speakers was that he couldn't use the language in an amusing way. (This is something my family does constantly.) He could make jokes, but often, nobody got them because either they didn't cross over culturally or people assumed they were a mistake. He couldn't just be lightly amusing. I would assume the same thing would happen if he tried to write poetry in French - in one way, it would be very creative and poetic, but not in the way it would be if he had full command of the language. In history, we decided they needed a really basic knowledge base but we would leave them to learn the rest on their own. As far as applying history, we decided they needed to be able to tell family stories (we worked on story-telling as part of literature), research their own family history (research skills came from science and writing ws writing), and they needed some perspective (Latin and travel gave them this). I didn't think they would ever be enough of a historian to really need the huge historical base in a particular area needed to do "real" history, and I didn't see why they couldn't aquire that base as an adult if they ever decided they needed it. Science was a different story. Our lifestyle requires a good knowledge of natural history. This was the knowledge base we worked on from the time they were little - everything from how the tides work to where a squirrel sleeps in winter. We thought it was likely that they would have to DO science some day, so we wanted to make sure they had science skills and knew how to be creative in this area. That meant we had to do something other than just textbook science with them. On the other hand, they also needed to be able to survive a science class. We did natural history the first two years of high school (creative work and skills) and textbook science the second two (textbook skills, classroom skills, outside grades for college, general knowledge base, etc.).

 

Going to post this and then come back and talk about art for a sec. : )

 

Nan

[Nan in Mass]

Art is a good example of what 8 was talking about. I noticed that my oldest and his friends up through 4th grade were very happy to draw and paint and sculpt. They weren't results-oriented, or they weren't discerning enough to be unhappy about the results, or something. At about age 10, most of them suddenly didn't want to draw any more. They didn't mind doing craft projects, ones where the art work was more abstract or copied, but they were distressed by their inability to draw something accurately. I thought this was really sad and swore I wouldn't let my younger children get to that point. That meant that I had to teach how to draw. This is a mechanical skill. It has nothing to do with creativity. To draw something you are looking at, it is a matter of learning to "pop" your vision into the mode where you see what something really looks like (the round top of a cup looks like an oval when viewed at an angle) and pracising lining things up on paper so the proportions are right. Do this for about three pads of paper and you will be able to draw reasonably well. No creativity involved. To learn to draw something from your imagination, you can go through a book like Draw Squad. This requires a bit more creativity, but not much. Mostly, you are learning the rules of perspective and some basic asthetic rules. Nothing about the process squashes creativity because there isn't really anything creative about what you are doing. Once you can draw, even poorly, you can use it for creative purposes. This applies to other subjects, too. In order to be creative when playing the piano, you need to be able to play what you hear in your head. This takes a fearsome amount of practice. In order to be creative when writing, it helps (not as timing-dependent as music, luckily) if you aren't having to think about the mechanics of writing. I taught technical writing and didn't worry about whether my children could write poetry. I left the creative bit to them. They were profusely grateful lol. I taught story-telling but I didn't make them tell their own stories. We practised with folk tales. One of them did make up his own stories but the other one didn't. One of the few times I forced creativity was when I was trying to undo public school damage to the oldest one - I made him make me a "farside" cartoon each week for a year. That was really more an excersize in problem-solving and thinking than it was in creativity. I guess leaving them to pick their own paper topics or projects and design their own science experiments was forcing creativity as well. Hmm... Or solve difficult word problems or puzzles... I guess I did do quite a lot that forced them to be creative, but it wasn't what one traditionally thinks of as being creative - make me a painting or write me a piece of music or a short story.

 

Ok - I've written a book. I feel like it was all too much of a muddle to really answer your question. If I had more time, I might be able to distill it down to a nice short list of things like trying always to stick to assignments that began with a blank piece of paper. Hopefully you can pull out the bits you want and ignore the rest and I didn't wander too far from the topic.

 

I can tell you that leaving my children to take themselves further in most subjects was a deliberate strategy, one which has worked beautifully. By not forcing them past their interest point in many things, we set them up to continue on their own. That was a tricky point to find because it was a moving target. If you'd asked me last year, I would have said that I almost but not quite completely failed with my youngest and music. And yet, so far this year (freshman at college) he has sent me several recordings of he and a friend jamming, some music by a friend, showed me his favourite piano at family weekend, talked about minoring in music, and taken intro to music (that music appreciation I totally ignored). I guess you have to remember that it isn't your education.

 

Nan

[Nscribe]

Nan...I could quote repeatedly from what you wrote. The bit about music and few being willing to listen to the results made me laugh, so true.

 

One thing I do not regret so far with Dd is clearly establishing between us what would be required for her to earn a diploma/graduate from our "school". She was given the opportunity to look at the options available at other schools (which might be feasible alternatives) and decide. It might seem cold and rigid, but with her boundaries and clear expectations often set us both free and avoid strife. We revisted it as we wound up last year, the requirements did not change but I wanted her to be clear on the expectations and own the choice.

 

Over the last couple of years Dd is taking, or has taken, a couple of courses online or on-site that have helped me frame expectations a bit. Watching her do Lukeion, APUSH online, and a couple of locally offered courses in the sciences and humanties has given me a frame of reference in terms of what is reasonable to expect from her and from a course of study. It has helped to guage how much can be done in a week, what challenging looks like at this level and what at least someone(s) else with experience deemed reasonable in terms of expectations. When asked now, I suggest it is worth it to us trying a couple of courses recognized for their expectations and get a feel for what to do in other content areas. It is expensive, but I think it may have saved us some experimentation costs and bought some peace of mind. It has been good for her and for me to see she can do it by some external standards beyond tests.

 

I love the way you describe your thinking and goals.  I think this helps us all and especially those trying to get a handle on what to do and how.  I am out in the world a great deal and wind up in a lot of conversations with parents and teens about highschool, college and education in general.  There are so many extemes and nuance doesn't seem in practice.  The changes in the system in the last couple of years seem to generate even more talk.  It is refreshing to see/read/hear a thoughtful response/conversation.

[Nan in Mass]

Oh - and it really helps to have a father nearby who constantly demands that his grandchildren apply their math and science to everything they do. : )

 

Nan

[Nscribe]

....Mostly, you are learning the rules of perspective and some basic asthetic rules. Nothing about the process squashes creativity because there isn't really anything creative about what you are doing. Once you can draw, even poorly, you can use it for creative purposes. This applies to other subjects, too. In order to be creative when playing the piano, you need to be able to play what you hear in your head. This takes a fearsome amount of practice.

...

Ok - I've written a book. I feel like it was all too much of a muddle to really answer your question. If I had more time, I might be able to distill it down to a nice short list of things like trying always to stick to assignments that began with a blank piece of paper. Hopefully you can pull out the bits you want and ignore the rest and I didn't wander too far from the topic.

...

 

Nan

It is a good book and I enjoy reading it and thinking.

 

I love the word choice of fearsome in relation to practice. 

[Nan in Mass]

Nscribe -

 

I was clear about my expectations for high school, too. Mine knew they had to study math every year, that they had to learn to draw, etc. Two very different children went through "my" school and wound up with very similar transcripts. They could have chosen public school or the community college instead. They wanted to travel and in order to do that, they needed the flexibility my school could give them. It was pretty clear whose job was whose. Their job was to learn. They did this most when they were away traveling. We all knew that. My job was to take the puzzle pieces they learned out of "school" and put them together into a cohesive picture of the world, and to prepare them to continue their education on their own after they graduated. My job also was to build good, strong adults, but that wasn't a homeschooling thing and and I didn't talk much about that with them. Day to day, homeschooling was a long series of negotiations as we tried to balance their job and my job, but overall, we knew where we were going. I would have LOVED the knowledge you gained from those outside classes. I was totally desperate for that sort of information. TWTM and long conversations here and frustrating conversations with my sister, whose kids were in public school, were the best I could get. Ug. I didn't grade because I had no idea what "good" looked like for a particular stage. Fortunately, TWTM showed me how to have my children do a learning routine for a subject (can't think of a better word) over and over again. That allowed me to leave the rate of improvement to take care of itself. It also had the accidental benefit of making my children do something badly over and over rather than only giving them assignments that they could do perfectly. My children were really used to that lol. Even in math, they never were given problem sets where they could solve all the problems. If they did something well, we all said, "Oh dear. That must have been too easy. Here - do this instead." Poor lambs. It worked, but it would have worked SO much better if I had had some idea of what was reasonable and if they had had some idea of how large a normal workload is.

 

Nan

[Nscribe]

...My job was to take the puzzle pieces they learned out of "school" and put them together into a cohesive picture of the world, and to prepare them to continue their education on their own after they graduated. My job also was to build good, strong adults, but that wasn't a homeschooling thing and and I didn't talk much about that with them. Day to day, homeschooling was a long series of negotiations as we tried to balance their job and my job, but overall, we knew where we were going. 

...

It worked, but it would have worked SO much better if I had had some idea of what was reasonable and if they had had some idea of how large a normal workload is.

 

Nan

Again, I love the first quote...    I could do with less of the day to day negotiations :cursing:  , but I realize someone will have to do them at some point or simply will not care, if I don't confront the challenge now. 

 

Dd taking these classes has cut down a great deal of the "negotiation" and that justified the cost in terms of peace.  She sees it isn't a mom is tough thing.

 

I do worry we don't have the time to practice things as much as might be best, but I struggle to see where to find more time.

[Nan in Mass]

In retrospect, it turned out that allowing all those negotiations were what made my children's education their own, rather than something I was forcing on them.  They both have told me so recently.  They were frustrating at the time.  SIgh.

 

And yah, time to practise things properly didn't always happen at our house, either.  Sometimes that worked out ok  in the end and sometimes it did not.  Obviously, we didn't practise trig enough to make it stick, and that has caused problems this year for youngest, but on the other hand, he seems to have been able to learn enough of it to survive his calc class, so I guess it was ok.  I hope whatever we did instead was worthwhile.

 

Nan

[MBM]

In regard to academics, we wanted our three kids to learn certain subjects well but we also wanted them to find what they truly enjoyed. We encouraged them to try new activities or subjects and then allowed them to discard what they didn't like and keep what they did, even if it meant giving up something they did well that would make their high school transcript more appealing. Occasionally, they came back to try again what they discarded.

 

I think it is a huge mistake to not allow kids some freedom to explore their interests. Being genuine and truly interested will make them *look good* to the right college and more importantly, help them find their path in life. Ultimately, they will be true to themselves.

 

As an old geezer, that is my advice to all parents. :)