is up!
Question of the month for Unschooling Voices #6
What interesting activites, projects or experiments have your kids done this past year? We’ve gotten some really cool ideas from other unschoolers so tell us what you’ve done in 2006!
Unschooling Voices (last minute) reminder
September 27, 2006 By
October’s question: Unschooling Math: If you’re like me and went to public school, you grew up being taught math from a text book. Now, as an unschooling parent, how do you live math when you’ve been conditioned to think of math in school terms. How do you go from one to the other?
How do you live math? : One day at a time 
In the world that I live in math is all around me.
There are sales taxes to be calculated. 14% in New Brunswick.
Land here is officially measured in square metres but otherwise measured in acres. A hectare is 10,000 square metres and an acre is 43,560 square feet. There are 2.47 acres in a hectare.
Gas is sold in litres. Odometers measure in kilometres. Gas mileage is discussed in miles per gallon. There are 4.54 litres in a Canadian gallon. 100 miles is approximately 161 km.
I have a household budget to maintain, interest to pay on borrowed money, retirement to save for, etc. I’m renovating a house. There are materials to buy, quantities to be calculated. Whether or not we let other people (or technology) do it for us, math is all around us.
How do you go from one to the other? : For Emma, the only tool we bought specifically to help her learn math is cuisenart rods. The rods are fun and I’ve already made a fair number of interesting designs and structures with them but I expect she will learn math mostly from a hefty pile of coins and things like lego. But our primary method of ‘teaching’ her math will be letting her see us do everyday math.
Although 13 years ago we were not doing it this way, we migrated to what I consider a foolproof approach to teaching math. Don’t introduce the ‘school’ math until they already know how to do the math. Once they can add then show them paper addition. Once they can subtract then show them paper subtraction. Both geometry and algebra are amazingly easy subjects to explain when the person you are explaining them to is someone who can do arithmetic and enjoys it.
If I were to offer advice to a parent looking to teach their children math it would be to do math. There are an endless number of fascinations and games in math. 
Thought of the week
September 15, 2006 By
It seems that I’ve wound down to about 1 insightful (not inciteful) post a week. All of the driving and being away from family is wearing me down in terms of new ideas for thought provoking posts. Fortunately, all of you are still visiting here and leaving me comments which give me things to think about. And while I’m driving I do get a good chance to think. The issue tends to be more one of having the mental energy to write. For this post, I have to thank Kim who left a comment below. Here is the excerpt of her comment that gave me some food for thought:
… I believe now, that some people need more help than repetition based on their motivation to learn how to do so. It is about 10% of the population and they need spelling guidelines, sadly, which most of us never needed to think about. Sorry to rant, but I just wanted to bring it up because dyslexics are often underrepresented in the homeschooling world.
As is quite often the case with me and a comment the things that come to mind are not really a response to the comment. More often than not my train of thought rebounds from the comment and heads off in a different direction. In my early career, synergy was a buzz word everyone was using to describe it.
I’m going to start by saying I have a very low opinion of repetition as a method of learning. I’m going to differentiate repetition from practice. Practice is trying to do something over and over again until you have mastered it. Repetition is doing something over and over again period. I don’t expect that my children (or anyone else’s) will learn from repetition. They do learn from practice. In this instance, I don’t expect Emma will learn to spell from us spelling for her over whatever period of time. Instead, by enabling her to communicate, we are giving her a skill that she will want to keep. Eventually she will be in a spot where we are not there to be a crutch to that skill. It may take her quite a while (possibly years), but she will work it out.
TBH, my spelling is brutal on first pass at a word. But, I’m a better than average speller because mispelled words do not look right to me. Some words take a half dozen changes before they do look right. I’ve read a few thousand books. I’ve seen nearly all of the words I use in writing in print thousands of times. Up until a certain point in my life if I wanted to write something I had to have a dictionary with me. And I’m confident that as long as my children develop a taste for reading they will be able to do the same thing I did.
For a moment allow me to digress into a little rant on repetition. In one of my programming classes, I would give the students the option of write a program called knight’s tour in lieu of other assignments. The object of the program is for it to be given a spot somewhere on the chess board and the program would find a path for the knight to move (the knight moves in an L) around the entire chess board using each square only once.
There are two approaches to solving that problem. The first is to evaluate the board and based on the things you know about the board and the movement of the knight. Using that knowledge you build into the program a set of rules it will use to determine which of the available moves is most likely to lead to a solution. There are a few sets of rules that work really well and a solution will be found on first try.
The second way is to have the program try randomly until it finds a solution. This does work eventually. It would probably take 5 to 10 minutes on the computers you are using. Among programmers this is called ‘brute force’ programming. And I believe that educational methods which rely primarily on repetition are brute force education. Nearly every math curriculum I’ve seen has been brute force.The thought behind it is that eventually the kid will learn it through sheer repetition. The curriculum itself makes no effort to accomodate itself to the learning needs, abilities or interests of the child.
The other thing that Kim mentioned was dyslexia. I have a few thoughts on learning disabilities (LD) in general. the first one I would like to tackle is ADD. Now, we have to realize up front that children are born with varying strengths and weaknesses. It’s one of the things that make us individuals. In those strengths and weaknesses there are going to be some who have weak control over their attention.
I had a student who I believe was ADD. During the first test I gave him, in the first 10 minutes or so he wrote like crazy on the test paper. Every once in a while he would stare off into the corner of the room for a few seconds while he thought about the question he was working on and then write some more. Somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes, he looked off in the corner. As best as I could tell he did not move from that position for over an hour. After every other person had handed in their test, he was still there. I had to say his name 3 times to get his attention. Because of the expression on his face when he looked around, I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that until then he had no idea that any of his 40+ classmates had left. To the point where he stopped on the test, he got 100%. The remainder was blank.
8 months later he was in his fourth class with me. He didn’t miss a thing through any of my 2 hour classes. There were often times I would reexplain things for him or answer questions. I’m convinced that the main 2 differences were that he was interested in what I was teaching and that it was not repetitive. I did not teach the same things twice. It was a transformation that took time as well. Do I think he was ‘cured’? No. I’m sure that he still deals with his weak attention control today.
A second LD which is ‘growing’ is ADHD. I don’t know what your experience has been, but every child I’ve met who had been diagnosed as ADHD had a very active mind that was always on the go. I would expect that an ongoing diet of repetition is a brutal assault on an active mind. The second tidbit I have on ADHD comes from a workshop I attended 3 years ago on LD. There was a study which showed that up to a certain age (8-10) dyslexia was often misdiagnosed as ADHD.
Finally, I’d like to write my thoughts on dyslexia. First, I’m going to tell you some interesting facts about dyslexia and dyslexics. Then, I have a story and I’ll finish with some thoughts I have on the subject.
- NASA recruits dyslexics. The statistic I was given in the workshop mentioned above is that over 50% of their staff are dyslexic.
- A substantial number of children exihibit symptoms of dyslexia at ages 5-6.
- The majority of the children above (I believe about 2/3) lose the symptoms by age 8.
- I have a CD at home of a workshop given by a doctor specializing in learning disabilities. I’m going to paraphrase what she said regarding the studies she had participated in in the study of dyslexia:
Medically there is only one way that she had found that would differentiate between a young dyslexic and non dyslexic child. The fact that a young child showed symptoms of dyslexia was not an indication that they were dyslexic. The medical test consists of monitoring the child’s brain with an EEG while giving it a test. Not a medical test but a school test like spelling. What the EEG shows is the degree and type of stress the child experiences.
The story: A few weeks ago, Emma and I were drawing and writing on letter paper. The marker I was using was a black sharpie (permanent ink). Since we were making them for each other the last thing we did was fold them up so the other person could open it. When Emma opened the one I did for her she opened it up so that she was looking at the back of the sheet. Because I’d done it with the sharpie the ink had soaked through the paper and she could see what I had done. She looked at it for a few seconds and turned to Andrea and said, ‘it says …’ And she was right. Not only were the letters backwards, but the sentence went right to left. Until Andrea told her she had no idea that she was looking at the wrong side of the page. She’s 5. Am I concerned that she may be dyslexic? No.
I think that many children are able to do similar things when they are in that age range. IMO, dyslexia is only a disability in school. I believe that dyslexics can mentally flip things around on the fly and whether it is a b or a d does not slow them down. It’s when they are under pressure to pick the one that we recognize as being right that a problem surfaces. The fact that young children spell would ‘woulb’ doesn’t mean they don’t know how it’s spelled. It might say that they are brighter and more capable than we are.
And that is my 2 cents worth.
Reminder
August 28, 2006 By
This week is the deadline for Unschooling Voices.
Tonight I looked after a bunch of other stuff and hope to be catching up online tomorrow night. I have gotten to any of the comments left since Thursday night. Actually, this is the fiurst time (outside of work) that I’ve sat in front of a computer for more than a couple minutes since Thursday. A flu or virus is going throug hthe household. Yesterday was Meaghan’s day to feel like sleeping the entire day and it was Andrea today.
Welcome to Canada!
August 6, 2006 By
Today we had more than one not entirely unexpected surprise. Last night, I checked my email for the first time in a week and found an email from Marion (translated to english) who homeschools in Austria. She had sent it yesterday to let us know that she was in New Brunswick. With a bit of coordinating this morning, we provided directions and Marion and her family arrived after lunch. We talked most of the afternoon. It’s amazing how fast the time flew by.
Emma alternated between playing and being a hostess which is something she has done for at least 2 years whenever there have been children visiting. Sarah was at work for a full day, so she missed it 
Everyone had a great time We hope they enjoy their trip across Canada.
The second surprise was that we discovered that we were going to have to tear up part of the bathroom floor where it had been had been removed and replaced in the last bathroom remodel (1969-70). Tonight we got a good start at that. It’s going to be a bit more work. But, it will elimate some challenges that we had that I wasn’t sure exactly how we would solve. So, in the long run, it may not take any more time to finish the room. We are just going to do things in a different order. Hopefully tomorrow Andrea will have a chance to post a few updates and photos.
Elevated question
July 24, 2006 By
Kay left these two questions below:
Classical education teaches logic, reason and rhetoric which is something that I never learned going to public school. I never learned how to spot fallacies or argue properly, so to me it seems as though its a must…but my heart just can’t get there. Is there a way to help children in those three areas without a classical education which suggests that the child learn in chronological order and be forced to write, read, write read all day long?
My son will be 12 in a couple of weeks and he does talk about going to college someday, I’m just starting to get a little bit freaked out and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Kay, I think I will answer the second question first since I can answer that out of experience. Our son will start college in another month or so. What we told him a couple years ago was that if he wanted to take his program of choice at college then he would need to work through these sections of these books. Because I was teaching at college in that field at the time, I already knew what books he needed to work in. But that is something which you have lots of time to find out. What is important about that strategy is that the choice to study whatever subject is still his. If he starts digging into it and decides he doesn’t like it, then he can search around for a field which suits him better. In the mean time, he will have 4 years where he can explore his interests and gain experience that will help him make a choice that HE will be happy with.
There are, from my perspective, thousands of tools which are readily available which train in logic, reason and rhetoric. Before I get to the tools, I would like to explain why I’m going to give you the answer that I give you. As I mentioned above, I used to teach at a technical college. Everything I taught was somehow related to my field of expertise, which is computer programming. Some students had about 500 hours in my courses over the duration of the programs I taught in. What I would tell them at the beginning and remind them of as often as the opportunity presented itself was that what would make them a good programmer was programming.
Programming is like riding a bicycle. You can talk about it all you want, admire all sorts of different types, debate endlessly about the advantages and disadvantages of different models, watch videos of professional riders riding their bikes. But, in the long run, the only way you are going to learn to ride a bike is to get on one and ride it. You may be wabbly at the start. The only way to become a good bike rider is to practice.
Skills are developed through practice. Public school was supposed to teach us logic, reason and rhetoric. But I expect few people learn it there because the exercises they are given are too structured and controlled for any student to get any practice. If your children do not want to follow a course of study then making them do it will not teach them the intended subjects, whatever they are, simply because the only skill they are really exercising is enduring a controlled environment.
For logic, I would suggest things like stretegy games (eg. chess), books like 2, 3 or 5 minute mysteries, mystery novels (eg. hardy boys), puzzles, brain teasers, etc. Any of these will provide lots of practise in logic.
TBH, in thinking about it, the first thing that came to mind for both reason and rhetoric were books. Lots and lots of books. While I don’t have any great issues with the classics, I don’t believe that the reading material has to be classics for the reader to learn from them. From reading we learn how other people say things and discover there are writing styles that we do like and others that we don’t. I’ve never felt that I was particularly articulate. When I write, I write, to some degree unconsciously, in a way that reads well for me. Secondly, you can provide them with lots of opportunities in day to day life to practice both of these things. In our home we talk about the news, politics, history, science, etc. in a way that comes as close as it can to being equals.
I think almost anyone will become a natural problem solver, thinker and speaker/writer if they have the chance to immerse themselves in other people doing those things and practive the skills themselves.
Are there other readers who can constructively add to this?
Unschooling and parenting
July 16, 2006 By
Unschooling Voices #2 (August issue) will soon be published. The optional August question is, “Do you extend the principles of unschooling (trust, freedom, etc) into any other areas of your child’s life?”. (Details on submitting blog posts) When I first saw the question, I thought to myself, “What a good question. I’d love to answer that.”
But when I had given it some thought (and I do have time to think about such things while driving to and from home on the weekends), I realized that, except in a tangental sense, I couldn’t answer it. In fact, given the way I approach most things that I do in life, it seems an odd sort of question. It occurred to me that a good illustration of my approach to life would be a discussion Andrea and I had a few years ago.
At the time, she was a member of an online moms forum which had a section set aside for attachment parenting. Over an extended period of time we had a fair number of conversations about threads on attachment parenting. Finally, because these discussions had piqued my curiousity, I asked her, “What’s attachment parenting?”
Her explanation started with, “What we do…”
You see, I’m not really the sort of person who reads up on various theories and methodologies and says, “Ah well, that’s a great theory/methodology.” And I really did not understand what unschooling was about and why it worked, etc. until I was already doing it. Realistically, in our early stages of unschooling, I would never have described us as unschoolers.
The reality is that unschooling does not extend into other areas of our children’s lives. Instead, through time, our parenting principles (trust, responsibility, maturity, etc.) inserted themselves into our educational strategy. No one will become responsible without responsibility being delegated to them. No one will become mature without the freedom to make choices. The inherent message in controlling, watching/supervising, evaluating and testing is that object of the control cannot be trusted, is immature and iresponsible. A child that always has to wait for an authority to tell it what he/she is supposed to do next cannot learn diligence. A very necessary component of diligence is initiative.
What I’ve said in the paragraph above was obvious to me for a long time before I recognized that what we were doing educationally was contrary to our overall parenting strategy. I don’t think it is particularly necessary for me to describe in minute detail what we were setting out to achieve as parents.
What I recognized several years ago was that the most valuable thing we had done toward that end had nothing to do with our choice in curriculum. We have given our children thousands of hours of free time that their publicly schooled counterparts were deprived of. We delegate things to them by which they learn responsibility. We trust them. There is nothing particularly complicated in terms of the principles of what we are doing. For us, unschooling is a means to an end rather than being an end in and of itself.
An unheard voice
July 8, 2006 By
A week ago Joanne posted Unschooling Voices #1. The question for the July edition was, “How did you and your family come to unschooling?” Because of the schedule I’ve been running, I didn’t have the opportunity to answer the question in time for the July edition. But I do think it is a question worth answering. Before I get to that…
The optional August question is, “Do you extend the principles of unschooling (trust, freedom, etc) into any other areas of your child’s life?”. (Details on submitting blog posts)
The simple explanation of how our family came to unschooling is that it was all a matter of time. But that doesn’t really say very much. TBH, I have known for years that there was a single moment at which I stepped onto the path that through many twists, turns and dead ends eventually lead to unschooling.
A little over 10 years ago, our oldest was in his third year of school. At the time, we were still somewhat following a school-at-home program. He was doing math that he had originally learned two years before. In the course of helping him with it, I came to the startling realization that even though he knew how to do the math, he had no idea as to why he was doing it beyond that was the way it was done. What I wanted to say next was some estimate of how long it took me to get over that. I spent about 5 minutes thinking about it. I have a sneaky suspicion that I haven’t gotten over it and that I probably never will. In any event, I spent the next week or two helping him understand why we borrow when we subtract.
I could write pages and pages describing hundreds of things that happened between then and now. I can summarize it somewhat tangentally. All of my teenage children are excellent at math because the only interest I had in teaching them was that they understood what it was for, what purpose it served and why it works the way it does. If you ask them a question that involves math it is unlikely that any of them will reach for a pencil in paper. They do math in their head. If you are wondering what approach we used in planning and adjusting over the years, the simple version would be that if it didn’t work, we threw it out. No preconceived idea/assumption or ‘proven method’ was exempt from the possibility that it was erroneous.
There are times, of course, when most of us second guess ourselves. But unschooling is not something about which I second guess. When you are standing on the side of the road in the dark and your child is tangled up in a bent up mountain bike describing the symptoms of his injuries, you don’t have alot of time to decide what is important. What you think about in the hours and days that follow define that for you. Speaking from experience, whether your child can list off the political leaders of your country through history is not important. Being able to compose a paper conforming to APA standards does not make or break a life (and is, in fact, worthless to you in a situation like that). Given the amount of the typical child’s life that is invested in school, I believe our society has a serious priority problem.
IMHO: Rote learning is worthless. Sitting a child at a desk and giving him or her a sheet of math questions to do which serves no purpose to the child beyond proving to you that that the child is capable (or demonstrating that in those circumstances he or she can’t or chooses not to) is a hideous offense to another life which is every bit as valuable as your own.
In refering to the accident above, I hope I haven’t suggested that prior to it we spent alot of time second guessing what we were doing because that wasn’t the case. There are things that come along in life which are gateposts from which there is no turning back.
(For readers who have joined since we started this blog, in the Fall of 2004, because of the glare of headlights from oncoming traffic, Addison hit a washout on the shoulder of the road, flipped his mountain bike and broke 4 vertabrae in his neck.)
Spam Irony
April 25, 2006 By
In some of the other posts where I talked about comment spammers, people have left comments wondering why they do it or why go to so much effort for so little gain. The hope of comment spam is to raise the spammer’s site in the search engine ranks by having links to the site on as many web sites as possible.
The irony is that if you look at our sitemeter referral stats, at any given time somewhere between 10 and 20% of the referrals are from search engines. Although it’s been a while since I checked, I was curious tonight and looked at the search queries and results that people clicked through to from a search engine. Tonight, in most of the search queries, we were on the first page. Some of the queries were:
- Sean Paddock (6th)
- creating a banner with gimp (3rd)
- christian life (6th)
- temperament god gave you (1st)
The reason I find this so ironic is that I haven’t made much of an effort to get the site to show up in search engines. The thing that will get a site up the search engine ranks the fastest is people clicking on something from the site that show up in a search. The search engines track how often searchers chose a website. I can only conclude from this that searchers have chosen this site quite often. Perhaps, if spammers put something worthwhile on their sites, they might have better success with the search engines. I think I’ll just keep up with what I’ve been doing.
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