Sunday, April 27, 2008
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Developmental Milestone Alert!
Orrin is rolling over! The first roll happened while I was talking on the phone with Solon on Thursday, and he rolled over several times today! He's rolling from tummy to back, just like all of the books told us he would. It's funny to watch; a LOT of effort goes into it, with a lot of squeaky sound effects, and then finally flops onto his back and looks quite surprised to be there.
He'll be running all over the neighborhood in no time!
He'll be running all over the neighborhood in no time!
Friday, April 11, 2008
Schooling, Part 2
As promised, here is Part 2: my thoughts on my kids’ schooling! By the way, if you’re interested in this topic and you haven’t yet read all of the comments on Part 1, you should take a look. My mom weighed in with her perspective, and we touched on a lot of what I wanted to cover in this post.
It’s interesting, being a momma and thinking about the best path for my kids’ education. Although I am passionate about unschooling and hope that my children decide to shape their own education at some point, I am not certain that I want to have my kids at home right from the beginning. I feel this way for a couple of different reasons. Here they are:
-I am really glad that I experienced both the public school setting and the Montessori setting before I started unschooling. It gave me a base of experience to understand what the rest of the world was doing and what it was like. Once I started unschooling, I think that experience helped me to relate to my schooling peers in a natural, relaxed way, and I know that it prevented me from taking my unschooling privileges for granted. It made me really want to seize the day!
-As a homeschooler/unschooler, I met a lot of kids who had homeschooled/unschooled for their whole lives who were not very good at socializing, making friends, or having conversations. I think that they just hadn’t had much practice relating to people their own age aside from siblings. I could see these kids really struggling with loneliness and awkwardness. I want Orrin (and his sib(s)) to learn how to navigate social situations without me as a fallback!
-I don’t have any model of unschooling for younger kids. As I mentioned in Part 1, when I began unschooling, I already had a solid foundation in reading, writing, and mathematics. A few of the lifelong unschoolers I met as a teen had learned to read and write a lot later in life than their schooling counterparts (the ones I have in mind learned around age twelve or thirteen), and they experienced a great deal of shame when their illiteracy was revealed in the world outside their homes. These kids’ parents had good intentions -- they believed in the unschooly philosophy of not forcing kids to learn what they’re not interested in learning -- but I think they did their kids a real disservice. Who would wish shame and humiliation on their child? Those feelings have a way of sticking -- long after the cause has been cured.
I don’t mean to imply that every lifelong unschooler/homeschooler is socially awkward or illiterate -- that is certainly not true. I guess that the root of what I am trying to get at is that I think that it’s important for kids to get some hands-on, in-depth experience interacting with people outside of their families. As I see it, the most useful aspect of school is that it’s where children first begin to get an inkling that other families are different from theirs, and that other people function differently than their loved ones. The melting pot of school gives kids the opportunity to learn how to successfully deal with all kinds of different people and situations. There’s the useful lesson that school teaches -- not the academic stuff, which can be effectively learned at home!
Of course, every kid is different, and that weighs in heavily on the choice as well. I, for example, was a kid who was very intent on learning the rules. I knew the “right way” to play the game to get the A’s and the gold stars, and I was going to be very good at it. Because of that, my parents pulled me from public school after kindergarten and sent me to Montessori, a place where objective evaluations like A’s and gold stars didn’t exist. That was a really good choice for me (although I still struggle with cravings for outside feedback and evaluation).
This post is by no means an open-and-shut dismissal of homeschooling and unschooling for young children -- just a little exploration of some of my thoughts and feelings about it. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my own kids’ education. What are your thoughts for your kids? Let’s start a dialogue!
It’s interesting, being a momma and thinking about the best path for my kids’ education. Although I am passionate about unschooling and hope that my children decide to shape their own education at some point, I am not certain that I want to have my kids at home right from the beginning. I feel this way for a couple of different reasons. Here they are:
-I am really glad that I experienced both the public school setting and the Montessori setting before I started unschooling. It gave me a base of experience to understand what the rest of the world was doing and what it was like. Once I started unschooling, I think that experience helped me to relate to my schooling peers in a natural, relaxed way, and I know that it prevented me from taking my unschooling privileges for granted. It made me really want to seize the day!
-As a homeschooler/unschooler, I met a lot of kids who had homeschooled/unschooled for their whole lives who were not very good at socializing, making friends, or having conversations. I think that they just hadn’t had much practice relating to people their own age aside from siblings. I could see these kids really struggling with loneliness and awkwardness. I want Orrin (and his sib(s)) to learn how to navigate social situations without me as a fallback!
-I don’t have any model of unschooling for younger kids. As I mentioned in Part 1, when I began unschooling, I already had a solid foundation in reading, writing, and mathematics. A few of the lifelong unschoolers I met as a teen had learned to read and write a lot later in life than their schooling counterparts (the ones I have in mind learned around age twelve or thirteen), and they experienced a great deal of shame when their illiteracy was revealed in the world outside their homes. These kids’ parents had good intentions -- they believed in the unschooly philosophy of not forcing kids to learn what they’re not interested in learning -- but I think they did their kids a real disservice. Who would wish shame and humiliation on their child? Those feelings have a way of sticking -- long after the cause has been cured.
I don’t mean to imply that every lifelong unschooler/homeschooler is socially awkward or illiterate -- that is certainly not true. I guess that the root of what I am trying to get at is that I think that it’s important for kids to get some hands-on, in-depth experience interacting with people outside of their families. As I see it, the most useful aspect of school is that it’s where children first begin to get an inkling that other families are different from theirs, and that other people function differently than their loved ones. The melting pot of school gives kids the opportunity to learn how to successfully deal with all kinds of different people and situations. There’s the useful lesson that school teaches -- not the academic stuff, which can be effectively learned at home!
Of course, every kid is different, and that weighs in heavily on the choice as well. I, for example, was a kid who was very intent on learning the rules. I knew the “right way” to play the game to get the A’s and the gold stars, and I was going to be very good at it. Because of that, my parents pulled me from public school after kindergarten and sent me to Montessori, a place where objective evaluations like A’s and gold stars didn’t exist. That was a really good choice for me (although I still struggle with cravings for outside feedback and evaluation).
This post is by no means an open-and-shut dismissal of homeschooling and unschooling for young children -- just a little exploration of some of my thoughts and feelings about it. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with my own kids’ education. What are your thoughts for your kids? Let’s start a dialogue!
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