I would like the opportunity for us to learn how to learn.
Lately it’s been feeling like we were doing stuff to get by: perfunctory piano
practice; hasty homework; chores after considerable chiding… If an interesting
idea or word came up while reading, the suggestion to dig out the dictionary
didn’t spark curiosity, but hatred.
I am absolutely certain that almost every teacher that I’ve
ever met would LOVE to foster children to follow interests along twists and
turns, but who has time? With the
core standards, the state tests, and the large class sizes their jobs are
enormous. I’m actually amazed and
uplifted by the amount of enrichment and encouragement that my kids have been
given. The fact that I worry that
there’s a get-it-done-get-it-done-okay-good-enough-time-to-move-on-culture at school is actually a beef with the
DOE and current societal sensibilities, not with teachers or public school.
Example: there was a time when a child would go to the
school library and have a very tactile experience while looking up books in the
card catalogue. Once the card was
selected, the book was hunted down, and a different card taken from a pocket on the title
page upon which the child had to sign her name (an action that said: I am
taking responsibility – my name is currency), then walk up to the librarian and
hand him the card (contract, if you will) while stating first and last name so
that the card could be filed accordingly.
Things changed. Fine. I’m not done weeping in my pillow over
the loss of card catalogues, but I have accepted that computers can keep up
inventory, blah, blah.
When I started volunteering in the library I was pleased
that the children were expected to tell me their first and last name when
checking out a book so I could click accordingly and scan the barcode on the
back of the book. It was a
quasi-social lesson, a very brief public speaking stint. It was sweet when the time came when I
could remember a name, and a bit of a bond was created.
A plan presented for the future in order to get-it-done faster? The kids will each have a shelf card
with a barcode on it (that will pull up their name), so they will need only to hand their shelf card and book to the person checking
out and it can be: scan-scan, next, scan-scan, next. I know I’m not the only one that feels like it’s a cold
idea, so hopefully a social exchange will not be sacrificed to the god of efficiency, but it illustrates the point that “smart” and “progressive” seem to
always be linked with “efficient” and “fast.” I feel that an authentic learning process usually isn’t efficient.
So if school needs to be efficient for obvious reasons,
where can passionate, curiosity-driven learning happen… if by the time they are home from school, and free of homework, we are about tapped out? Curiosity is often mental
meandering; finding purpose usually happens after considerable bumbling about.
And now it’s time to make a muddle of this. I’m saying that
time should be thrown out the window, right? No. I also
believe that there’s an important companion to this – personal
time-management. I want my kids to
learn that if they have an hour and have A and B to accomplish they must figure
out how that works. Instead of
being kept on task (which needs to happen at school for obvious reasons), I
want them to realize that there are consequences to spending too much time on
any one thing. If they choose to
spend the entire hour on B, I want them to own up to the consequence of not
getting A accomplished. Put another way, I hope they learn to either a) find balance in their lives, or b) be
courageous enough to say that A wasn’t valuable to them (or B was
crazy-valuable -- because it was passion-driven), so the consequence will be taken like a (wo)man of character.
Tall order for anybody, let alone a seven and nine-year
old. I’m not saying that any of
this is going to happen while we home school, but the value that I put on it
did indeed help me make the decision.
That’s why it’s number six on our list of top ten reasons – it’s
valuable, but perhaps too far-reaching to earn a higher ranking.
