Rational Homeschooling

Cross-posted to Rational Homeschooling

Well, I have posted on what I consider to be rational parenting.  Since the title of this blog is Rational Homeschooling, I figure I should elaborate a bit on what that means to me.

Rational Homeschooling includes:

• Educating oneself on learning, education, cognitive science, etc. to ensure good practice
• Determining what your definition of an educated person is; for example:
  • An educated person should have all of the knowledge needed to score well on the SATs
  • An educated person should have the skills to research whatever information they may need
  • An educated person should have a solid framework of knowledge in the literature, sciences, history and arts in order to fill in the framework with connected knowledge as they develop (my personal definition)
  • insert your (educated, reasoned and deliberated) definition here
• Developing specific goals that lead toward your target of assisting your child in becoming an educated person
• Keeping in mind that being an ‘educated person’ is not an endpoint; one is never finished learning.  We have only a few years to contribute to our kids’ educations; these are milestones we are working toward, not destinations.
• Treating one’s children as capable of learning anything they set their mind to; capable of knowing when is and is not a good time for them to be trying to learn something; intelligent consumers of information
• Allowing one’s children to make choices in their education so that they become good decision makers and so that they have ownership of their journey

Rational Homeschooling does not include:

• Creating artificial grades to reward or punish
• Demanding completion of items based on purchase price, perceived notions of obedience vs. disobedience, or ‘the principle of the thing’
  • Making children learn things the parent him/herself does not know and is not willing to learn

Micro-management of kids’ leisure time

In

An Allowance That’s Measured in Minutes, Not Cents, the New York Times discusses the practice of awarding children 'screen time' (this includes tv, video games and computers) in minutes based on chores, math drills, etc. I totally agree with Parental Tech who says, "I can’t imagine any reasonable parent regulating access to books, or
board games in this way. Why is it different just because it’s
electronic and interactive?"

It seems that the basic American parenting system is 1) Find out what the kids enjoy. 2) Exploit that to get them to do what you want. 3) Make sure it doesn't happen too often!

From the article:
They may feel that their children’s time would be better spent reading
a book, playing outside or talking directly to another person,
according to Richard N. Bromfield, a psychologist on the staff of
Harvard Medical School. But for the most part, screen time is seen as
acceptable in moderation.

Well, it seems that creating an environment where kids cannot accomplish the things they want to accomplish, and forcing them to do other things instead, is supposed to make the kids grow up to spend time on those very things they were forced to do. I assume that's the goal anyway. Funny how fifty years ago sitting around with your nose in a book or daydreaming were considered a waste of time for kids.

For parents who don’t want to keep track themselves, there are devices
that will turn off the television or computer automatically when the
user has reached a time limit — (although some of today’s children may
be more likely to know how to reset the device than their parents do).

The parents can't even be bothered to follow through on their own rule?

Dr. Bromfield, the author of “How to Unspoil Your Child Fast,” (Basil
Books), cautions parents not to overuse household currency systems.
Children are motivated both externally by pleasing their parents or by
getting a reward, he said, as well as intrinsically, where they want to
do the right thing, or high-quality work, because it feels good inside
to do so.

Hm, so bribing them to do what you want them to do doesn't make them feel good inside? What a surprise! I am sure that I would feel good being bribed to do certain things in order to enjoy my leisure time. Instead, I evaluate what's important and I spend my time that way. It has taken a lot of practice to be able to do that, since I wasn't allowed to learn it growing up!

Cross posted at Rational Homeschooling

Experts say to allow kids to socialize at school!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7142816.stm

You mean kids at school weren't allowed to socialize? Shocking! What about all those "what about socialization?" queries from school-supporters? According to BBC News, Cambridge University has found that discussion, collaboration and interaction among students provides 'valuable opportunities' for learning.

Quote:
"This challenges the traditional view that talk and
social interaction among children are irrelevant, if not disruptive to
learning," the report added.

Cross posted at Rational Homeschooling

Parents talking to their kids makes them smarter?

According to this article from the Independent (UK Newspaper), poor children do worse at school because their parents don't talk to them enough. I guess homeschooling should produce geniuses! I talk to my kids all day.

Quote:
The research also highlights the importance of teachers adopting a
conversational style with their pupils to get the best responses out of
them, rather than relying on direct teaching in front of the whole
class.

Cross-posted at Rational Homeschooling

Millions of Maps

Thanks to ilearntechnology for pointing out this site.

From the site:

A sampling of the Library of Congress Geography
and Map Division’s 4.5 million treasures has been digitized
and is available in Map
Collections: 1500 - 2003. This activity introduces historical
maps from the American Memory collections. A graphic
organizer, for analysis and note taking, and a set of guiding
questions for each type of map have been provided.

Cross-posted at Rational Homeschooling

learning with poker

High Stakes for Poker as a Learning Tool

A Harvard
Law School professor and a group of his students formed an organization
this fall — the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society — dedicated to
demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They argue that the
game, which is probability-based and requires risk assessment,
situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be an effective
teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in business and law
classes.

“I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as
sixth grade, when they’re dropping out of math,” said Charles R.
Nesson, the Harvard Law School professor who began the society with a
group of his students. “I’m thinking of kids who are into their video
games but instead of Halo-3
and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that has
real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather than
snuffs it out.”

Although I completely disagree that games like WOW lack intellectual depth (the Harvard professor obviously does not play video games), the benefits of poker listed here are intriguing. In my experience kids aged 10ish and up tend to really enjoy poker, and the more they learn about probability and human behavior, the better at it they become.

Of course, Christian conservatives disagree. From Focus on the Family,

“Kids are extremely vulnerable to gambling addiction,” said Mr. Hills,
who likened poker to a “gateway drug” that leads to the harder stuff
like craps and slot machines.

Who said anything about kids gambling? Playing poker doesn't have to involve chips at all, but even if it does the chips don't have to be connected to anything of value. People play for matchsticks, for paper clips, for plastic poker chips, for pennies, for absolutely nothing. This is slippery-slope fear mongering.

From Arnold I Barnett, who teaches mathematical modeling at the MIT Sloan Management School:

“I’m not saying poker should replace algebra,” he said. “But you
have problems to solve in poker, and for students to see how
mathematics can help them in real-life situations seems a whole lot
smarter than having them determine the volume of some strangely shaped
object.”

He added that he could see the educational value on the
graduate level, too, because the game involves not only figuring out
your own hand but also deducing your opponents’ cards — skills, he
said, of use in law, business or real estate.

Cross posted at Rational Homeschooling

collaboration in learning

Quoting from a post on Wikinomics from Remote Access.

1.) There are and will always be, no matter what you do, large mobs
of smarter people outside of your organization than there are inside.
From Boeing to Xerox, the book gives numerous examples of ways that
companies have developed porous boundaries, allowing them to decide
what functions are best performed in-house, while handing over others
to individuals outside the company who may be better suited to the
work.

Implication for education - first of all, wouldn’t it be great if
you could outsource some of the things in your classroom (some mindless
grading quickly pops into my mind) to someone else, so that you could
concentrate on innovation and planning in your classroom? The second
thought is that as the teacher, you are no longer the smartest person
in the room. Collaborators from across he globe can be brought in to
your classroom to mentor your students; and this is OK. As a teacher at
this time in history, I feel strongly that our jobs are only partially
about teaching. Our jobs are also about connecting. Connecting our kids
to other learners and to information. How do we develop classroom
structures and routines that both honour and utilize the possibility of
porous classroom boundaries?

As homeschoolers, we have even more freedom to outsource. There are so many brilliant resources online, in the community, at the library, etc. that can be taken advantage of at any time. As a homeschooling parent, it is not always easy to connect our kids in their *learning* with other people. But with the emergence of web 2.0 it has become so much easier than ever before! Wikipedia, blogs, forums, etc. make it easier for homeschoolers to learn from a quality social learning network than their schooled peers in a lot of ways!

2.) Customization - Google allows its employees to spend 20% of
their time on projects of their own design and development. As well, on
the other side, many online businesses allow you to truly customize
your experience, the information you receive, the look of a product you
purchase, etc. to fit your needs and your life.

Implications for education - On both sides, customizing education
could have huge implications. Imagine giving kids 20% of their day to
pursue an agenda of their own that is focused on some large issue. What
would they design? What kinds of questions could they wrestle with?
What could the come up with? Imagine the skills of independent
research, growth and learning they could attain. On the other side, the
implications for us as teachers are huge. Kids simply need custom
designed educational programs. While a nightmare for us at first
glance, there needs to be tools that allow this to happen. For us to
truly motivate and engage kids they need custom sources of information
and assessment that meet their skill level and needs.

Infinitely easier for us to carry out than a teacher with 30 students at a time. There is no one size fits all education model. Even the best approaches are effective for some and not for others. My kids spend 80% of their time on projects of their own design and development. They have developed amazing skills of independent research and learning!

Cross-posted at Rational Homeschooling 

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Cross-posted at Rational Homeschooling