To follow up with yesterday’s post on very early childhood education, I was looking at photos of my children when they were young, and remembering how they interacted. Because they modeled how they were treated, they taught each other. When the Little Man was 2, and the Eldest was 8 going on nine, she would sit him and the Junior Mad Scientist down and ‘teach’ them. I usually had workbooks in the house – they weren’t expensive. I usually picked them up at the dollar store. Tracing letters and numbers, and identifying colors and shapes, all those things didn’t have to wait on school, or even on me to teach them.
If, to build a metaphor, the education we begin with is the powerplant that helps run our later life and successes, then it does need to be as broad and flexible as possible. For one thing, something I’ll keep repeating until I’m blue in the face, every child is different. Twenty kids in a classroom are twenty different little minds who absorb information in twenty different ways. There are ‘learning styles’ we can lump them into – textual learners, aural, kinetic… but those are loose and frankly, if you pay attention you’ll realize that one child might use all three, depending on what they’re learning. If we design our powerplant to, say, burn oil only, what happens when you run out of oil? better to build one that can use whatever fuel you can find, be that book, video, hand’s-on, or a combination of all of the above.
The Junior Mad Scientist is with my mother for homeschooling currently, with me adding some remote encouragement and suggestions. We were having some trouble getting her interested in reading textbooks, but she was happy to explore videos and sometimes audio of the same topics. Mom reports that she’s very interested in hands-on things like learning to cook and keep bees. Once we find a subject she’s interested in, we can use that as a hook to pull in other topics she’s wary of, like history and chemistry. Cooking and chemistry go hand in hand. Unfortunately, her experience with school is that it was tedious and boring and gave her nothing she thought she could use. So Mom and I have an uphill battle as we try to revive her love of learning.
Because that’s the power of education. If it can imbue a love of learning into the soul, then that person will be able to keep on learning and growing, fueled by an insatiable curiosity. A man who regards all learning as fodder for the fire can do much. The difference here is that an unconscious learner might not be as efficient in ingesting and using the information they gather through time. The conscious learner can seek out material to cover the holes in their knowledge. Say, for example, someone who knows how to access the internet, download Minecraft, and play it. But they don’t know how to keep themselves safe from malware and Trojans when interacting online with other servers and players. (I’m carefully not looking in the direction of my son while I type this)
It took me twenty years from graduating high school to graduation with a Bachelor’s of Science. I never stopped learning during that time, both consciously and unconsciously. Much of my learning that I undertook deliberately was in pursuit of the business – marketing, graphic design, teaching skills, comedy, and more. Some of it was simply because it was part of my lifelong passions – cooking different cuisines and styles, cultivating heirloom veggies and herbs, identifying and cultivating native plants and pollinators. The end result, when I did go back to school, was that some classes were easier than others – maths suffered, as I had not practiced anything more than basic accounting in those twenty years. On the other hand, I got very nice notes from professors – one on my first exam in field botany, where she noted that ‘you should be teaching this class.’ and the other from a sitting judge and professor who wrote on my term paper that I ‘write better than many lawyers and prosecutors.’
I got a good start, all those years ago. But perhaps the best thing about it was that I never want to stop learning. I have been trying to make time for MOOCs or other classes – I want to learn how to code in Python, for example – but that will have to wait until life calms down a little bit. Right now, I’m learning more about houses than I ever thought possible, despite having lived in one all my life!
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4 responses to “Going On”
My primary goals as a teacher had nothing to do with the subject I taught (history) I wanted to teach just two things. One, to love learning. Two, to learn how to learn. Teach just those two things, and the learner will self-teach, forever.
I took a long and wandering course from high school graduation to college degree, in part because of career demands, in part because of how difficult I found it to deal with non-learning courses. That is, I found it very difficult to force myself to attend classes and do work for courses that were nothing but BS, and often ideological BS – especially after a full day of corporate BS.
BTW, that’s a nice picture of the Miami Fort generating station. I’m used to looking down on it from the trails in Shawnee Lookout park, but this view looks to be from the Kentucky side of the river, and slightly downstream. Kentucky and Ohio are captured there, with Indiana just out of view to the left.
I managed to avoid most of the BS classes when I went back, but did have a few I gritted my teeth and got through.
That photo was taken while driving over the bridge on 275. I was in the passenger seat at the time! I was trying to capture the river in flood.
I have spent probably significant portions of my last decade of employment in formal and informal on-the-job training as an instructor, mentor, tutor, etc. In the last phase of that employment, which was actual formal Computer-Mediated training classes, the chief thing I stressed and tried to imbue (successfully to a good degree, I think, by my short-term observations), was to always be a life-long learner and a life-long teacher. If you learn something, teach it someone else as soon as practical afterwards.
After the formal classes were done, and we were in the just come to me for questions phase, we ran across unique items that one or the other of them encountered that wasn’t part of the training. I showed them how to do it, with their own interactive use of the knowledge, and then sent them off with the admonition to “show the rest of your team. You are the team ‘expert’ on this one at the moment.”