Everything I need to know I learned in school

Part 2 of Everything I need to know I learned on Google

On the other hand...

At the end of "Everything I need to know I learned on Google" I said,

I love it when something comes up multiple times and connections are
made.  It doesn’t just excite me, it also makes their eyes light up and
we relish the knowledge together!  It makes me all the more aware of
connections that are happening all the time that I miss because I don’t
know enough.  If we had not just read about scurvy we would have
completely missed that connection.  If we had not been “doing” history
we would not have been reading about Da Gama and the age of
exploration.  If we were not homeschooling, there would be no way to
find those connections with what they are learning.  The more knowledge
we expose ourselves and our kids to, the more connections can be made,
and knowledge will grow exponentially.  The more we wait for knowledge
to find us, the less likely it is to make itself at home.

I don't want to leave it at that. It kind of sounds like I'm saying the only way to find these connections and to build knowledge exponentionally is to do schoolwork.  This couldn't be further from the truth!  Anyone who went to school long enough to get a diploma or a degree or two would likely find that thought hilarious if they thought about it for a minute - everything I need to know I learned in school?  With the possible exception of the medical field and maybe some of the math and science fields, I would argue that the large majority of successful people learned almost none of what they needed to know in school.  I learned far more that needed to be *un*learned than I did useful stuff! 

Everything that I use in my work today has been learned through years of experience, independent research, experimentation, and voracious reading.  I know (and use) a lot of information about education, math education, cognitive science, technology in education... did I learn any of it in the pursuit of my BA, credential or MA?  Nope.  I learned it on my own when I was interested.

I went to drivers education and drivers training.  Is that where I learned how to drive?  Nope.  I read the DMV booklet a few times to pass the written test.  My poor mom and dad had to risk certain death allowing me to practice driving in their own vehicles so that I could learn how to position the car, drive defensively, follow the laws and courtesies of the road, etc.

I love computers, and really enjoy web design, photo and video editing, and troubleshooting other peoples' computer problems.  The few computer courses I was required to take in college were always a few years behind what I already knew how to do.

I play the piano.  Not exceptionally well, but I play.  I got an electronic keyboard for Christmas one year, along with a few beginner books, and learned to play.  Occasionally my dad would sit with me and guide me, give me tips, etc., and he also showed me the wonders of using chords.  He could be considered a piano teacher, but purely on my request.  Wait, that doesn't count!  One of the reasons I picked up playing the piano fairly easily was because I had learned how to read music already in school.  I played the clarinet in the school band for a few years, so was already very capable of reading music.  Something useful I learned in school! 

I parent.  Pretty well, I think.  Nobody taught me how, certainly not my own parents (sorry mom and dad!), although they did teach me quite a few things that I did *not* want to do!  They parented, but I parent completely differently.  I read books, talk to people, read blogs, etc. and figure out how I want to do things.

I'm good at math, up through algebra at least.  I'm good at helping others learn math.  I learned basic math in school.  I learned more basic math in a college math education course (like, why we 'borrow' and 'carry', for example).  I got As in the courses I needed to finish my degrees.  When I got my first teaching job, and it was teaching algebra, I had to take the textbook I would be using and relearn all of it so that I could teach it well.

I know how to sew (not very well), to knit (very badly!), the rules of lots of games, the lyrics to hundreds of songs, the storylines to thousands of books, movies, and plays, how to bake, how to follow a recipe, how to care for a pet, how to ride a bike, how to roller and ice skate, when to go to the dr., lots of constellations, how to find the directions without a compass, most of the states, lots of countries, a little bit of drums and guitar, a lot about Mac vs PC, how to run Cub Scout and Boy Scout packs and dens, and most importantly, how to make my kids feel important, respected, and loved!

Of all of the things that I enjoy and pursue in my life today, almost none of it came through formal education, and certainly there's nothing that I couldn't have learned outside of formal education.  I bet the same is true of you!

Homeschooling can provide the best opportunities for learning that are to be had.  Why? Because you are not restricted to a room full of children who know as little as you, with one teacher who may or may not know as little as you but won't have much time to share what s/he does know because s/he has to maintain control, follow the bell schedule, complete the paperwork, cover the standards, and make sure you can pass the multiple choice test.  This is a very stifling environment for the expansion of knowledge!  Of course, it is an efficient way to pass the masses through a cursory bit of education, prepare them to be workers, and hopefully the majority come out able to read and do basic math!

Homeschooling *can* provide the best opportunities for learning that are to be had.  That doesn't mean it always does.  And it doesn't mean it has to happen through the same methods used by schools.  There is a lot of education research out there that talks about the best ways to teach children.  Most of the time, the strategies that are recommended are based on either A) the strategies that students who are good at the subject use (i.e., good readers do this, so let's teach everyone how to do this; good problem solvers do that, so let's teacher everyone how to do that); or B) the strategy that helped the highest percentage of students answer the highest percentage of multiple choice questions correctly.  This is very useful information for people trying to create a product or service that will effectively reach the majority of students.  Not as useful for someone living and working and learning with one or two (or more) students who don't have anything to prove, but have lots to learn. 

That's not to say that education research is not useful for homeschoolers.  Cognitive science and learning how people learn and how people forget and how to learn more and better is always useful information!  It's even more important to keep that in perspective and not let it dictate the way one lives as a homeschooling family.  In this environment, where the whole world is available as a resource and real life is all around us, there is no need to create an artificial learning environment. 

A child who has a parent able and willing to observe and assist with their spelling and grammar as they go about daily life does not need spelling lists and spelling tests (which, according to the research, do not produce better spellers anyway).  A child who has a parent ready and able to read to them and to provide them with books, and to discuss those books and other stories with them does not need a formal lesson in literature with a worksheet to learn literary analysis, character, setting, plot, etc.  Those are artificial constructs for teachers who cannot manage meaningful conversation with 30 kids.  A child who is provided and surrounded with interesting books, software, websites, timelines, movies, tv shows, materials about real history and real science does not need to experience those subjects in bite size chunks spread over 12 years with no real depth and lots of repetition.  A child who is introduced to and familiar with numbers and patterns and how people use math in daily life does not need to spend 4 years learning place value, one power of ten at a time, and 3 years learning long division with one more digit each time, and 4 years studying fractions without ever figuring out what they really are.  I truly believe (and it has been proven, both in Sudbury schools and in public schools in years past) that students who are exposed to math in daily life can learn all of elementary math in less than 6 months once they are preteens or teens (or sooner if they are motivated).

Granted, using a school-like curriculum is an easy, thought-free way to ensure that a broad array of topics are presented to your kids.  But does the cost of schooling this way outweigh the gains?  It depends a lot on the personality and learning style of the kid, the motivation and style of the parent, and frankly, the capacity for and interest in learning of both the parent and the children.  Some kids come away from worksheets, drills and disjointed lessons with some new information and perhaps a new interest in something that can be pursued after the lessons are done.  Others come away with a disdain for anything remotely related to school, negative feelings about themselves, and a lack of motivation to learn anything.  Most come away with a mixture of the two.  The alternative, not using school-like curricula, requires a great deal of focus, dedication, insight and patience on the part of the homeschooling parent.  It's not a matter of ensuring that specific material is covered; reasonably intelligent people interacting frequently with their kids will cover more 'content' than a kid would learn in public school anyway.  It *is* a matter of not neglecting the child's potential, interests, and capacity for learning, staying on your toes and one step ahead, and responding appropriately to questions and curiosity.

That is where connections will be found and cemented.  I (and probably Ben) don't remember the name of the explorer we were reading about when we first came across scurvy (in fact, I had to look it up when I wrote the first part of this and it was only a couple of days later); I will never forget what the vitamin deficiency is or where that vitamin can be found.

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Will, William and Ben are skiing at Sierra Summit

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Everything I need to know I learned on Google

Being fascinated with learning and education, I read a lot of articles, research, stories and blogs about education, cognitive science, and learning from every perspective.

My mental image of learning (which is based in cognitive science research mixed with my imagination) is this.  Each of us has our own tree of knowledge.  Our knowledge is organized into branches, which split into many directions (this is obviously simplistic, as our knowledge connects to each other too; imagine a giant spider web of neurons surrounding the tree so the knowledge is connected entirely).

Every piece of information we come across needs to fit into our tree. If we can make sense of it,
it will build on a part of our tree to make it even bigger.  If we can’t make sense of it, it just drops with nowhere to hang.

There is a school of thought that the knowledge we have is not nearly as important as knowing how to learn, and knowing how to research.  That we can find everything we could possibly want to know on Google anyway, so stuffing it all into our brains is pointless.  This school of thought is popular among many educators in schools and universities across the country, many homeschoolers and unschoolers, and many other random people.  The problem with this theory is twofold: first, if we don’t know about something, we don’t know how much we don’t know, and therefore would have no reason to look it up.  Secondly, when learning something new it is much easier to have somewhere to hang it than to have to go back and construct the branches leading up to that piece of knowledge at the same time as constructing the new knowledge.

One of the awesome things about homeschooling is the ability to use the child and teacher’s trees together to build knowledge in both.  The whole point of this post was to share this story that happened a few days ago.  Ben and I were reading his history lesson together.  We were reading about the Age of Exploration and Vasco da Gama’s first trip to India, on which many men got scurvy and died.  Ben asked what scurvy was.  I said that I wasn’t sure, but that I knew it was a deficiency of some vitamin, and that it was common among pirates and explorers and others who spend a lot of time on boats, because of the types of foods they could bring with them.

That wasn’t a good enough answer (especially since I didn’t know which vitamin they were deficient in), so we went to wikipedia (first link upon googling scurvy).  There we found that scurvy was caused by a deficiency in vitamin C, due to the inability to keep fresh fruits and vegetables on the ships.  We clicked on vitamin C and there was a detailed chart of foods containing vitamin C and how much vitamin C they contained.  This, of course, was fascinating to Ben because anything that quantifies or enumerates things and puts them in lists or charts really attracts him.  We looked at pictures of strange fruits, vegetables and berries we’d never heard of.  We read all about pomegranates because we have talked about them before and Ben has never seen or had one.  We looked at the strange meats you’d have to eat to get your vitamin C from meat rather than plants.  Finally, we went back to the history lesson.

So what’s my point?  A couple days later we were reading My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, which was Ben’s novel selection for literature.  It was deep winter and Sam, who was living in the Catskill mountains wilderness using his survival skills, began to develop symptoms of scurvy.  The book never mentioned scurvy, it just talked about the symptoms he was experiencing, dizziness, fatigue, etc., and the fact that there were no greens to be found.  Hmmm…. scurvy!  Sam did not know that he had scurvy, but he found himself gorging on the livers of the birds that he ate for awhile until his symptoms abated.

I love it when something comes up multiple times and connections are made.  It doesn’t just excite me, it also makes their eyes light up and we relish the knowledge together!  It makes me all the more aware of connections that are happening all the time that I miss because I don’t know enough.  If we had not just read about scurvy we would have completely missed that connection.  If we had not been “doing” history we would not have been reading about Da Gama and the age of exploration.  If we were not homeschooling, there would be no way to find those connections with what they are learning.  The more knowledge we expose ourselves and our kids to, the more connections can be made, and knowledge will grow exponentially.  The more we wait for knowledge to find us, the less likely it is to make itself at home.

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