When my son has a day or afternoon learning at home, i always write in a small notebook what we have done that day, and something positive that I have noticed in his attitude to learning. I also include a random fact of the day about China we have covered. (I haven't yet mentioned that we are teaching him how to write graffiti; I think that conversation can wait until the day he decides to spontaneously redecorate her classroom). At his IEP, we agreed that I would do this and his teacher would sign it, to underline the message that home and school were in agreement on the project of his ongoing education. Bless her, she doesn't just sign it, but reads attentively and writes positive comments. She even gives me, erm I mean him, a sticker for working hard at this homeschool stuff. It's awfully encouraging.
Further evidence that I am not a natural unschooler. But I have my moments; I was reading today a book by a very inspired Australian lady who didn't just home-educate but also had sixty-five animals and a compost toilet, and lived by the principles of permaculture in remote Australia. One of her sons didn't read until he was twelve. They were all too busy having fun outside, building their own house and climbing trees. They would do nothing but play with Lego together for days. I can imagine her having palpitations at our style of home-ed. If we have a style, it could be summarised as "turn off that telly and do something else for a bit." Also, my son hates Lego. So we didn't seem to have much in common.
But she was talking some sense in amidst the odes to organic composting. One of the points she made was the importance of play. Because this is a new field to me, I am deeply and immediately affected by any book or article I read on the subject of home learning. Immediately I danced off into a happy place where play was all I cared about for my son, and he would ABSORB arts and crafts and mathematical formulae in a sort of ongoing Platonic dialogue with me, the wise all-knowing parent, who knows the exact right MOMENT and WAY to answer the desperately earnest questions of your learning-thirsty child. (I can see technical problems with this learning-in-the-moment thing. Trust my luck, we'd go four years without an educational question and then my child would demand to learn quadratic equations whilst I was desperate for the toilet. By the time I got back, the moment would have passed and they wouldn't care any more. I'd miss THE MOMENT and it would never happen again). But, you know, she did have a point. One of our most successful lessons this week has been when I simply presented him with a few erasers bought at Kmart, that came apart into intriguing geometric shapes. I didn't suggest he did anything with them, largely because my brain turns to mush where anything involving spatial reasoning has been involved. (One of our internal doors hasn't shut for almost three weeks. I blamed the damp Auckland climate. It took my husband to return from Canada and point out that there was a large piece of Lego stuck in the hinge. I can now see why my son hates the stuff). Because of this, he had to use his ingenuity and creativity, and spent a happy halfhour inventing shapes and mazes on the floor, and taking his beloved Skylanders figures on journeys through them. Not the sort of knowledge you can test and condense, but important and useful nontheless. Creative play. Very good I think for a child in chronic pain.
This was good because afternoons are always tricky. If he has been to school in the morning he is pretty wiped out. I do not try to set him serious academic work because I reason that school will have done that justifiably already. This afternoon was particularly tough. He'd been awake with pain and anxiety until one-thirty in the morning. Which meant I had been awake until two am. So whatever I did, it needed to have minimal parental involvement and minimal opportunity to get wrong, otherwise we would have screaming tantrums. And he might be grumpy too.
To get him home without complaining too much, I bundled the wheelchair into the boot, took the front wheel and demanded to know what he knew about a famous person. He hadn't heard of said famous person, so I told him something about their childhood. He asked to know what that person did when they grew up. (It was Helen Keller. Socialism and Swedenborgianism, if you are interested). So we came home and I looked up the answer on the internet. So far, so calm. But I had to leave him with Dad, because I needed to go out.
I dumped four library books on the floor in front of him. Two were loosely related to the topic we are "doing," and two were just random non-fiction that I had liked the look of. "Your task this afternoon is to find two facts that you didn't know. And bonus point if you find a fact that your father doesn't know." The jetlagged figure sitting on the sofa nodded vaguely. My son looked distinctly unenthusiastic. I left them to it. When I came back he had not two, but five facts to tell me. Two he had found that his dad didn't know. I felt like giving him a big sleep-deprived hug. Instead I gave him the chocolate we had promised him if he could outwit his dad.
Should I be giving him chocolate for doing his work? I dunno. His teacher gives him stickers, is chocolate worse than that? Chocolate is nice. It can cheer me up anytime. Better a bit of chocolate now and then than endless opiates for the pain. As I pondered the Cumulus Chocolate Theory of Pain Relief, I realised that it wasn't just about distraction from pain, nor the reward. It was also about making a mental association, that learning can be fun.
And I want to do that, because it matters to me. We are a family that enjoy learning. Richard and I have both spent way too much time studying for our own good. So really, if I have a homeschooling philosophy, it's increasingly just that. I want home learning to be fun. I don't really care if we end up parsing grammatical structures or building cuckoo-clocks out of plasticine. Because ultimately, I see home learning not as a goal in itself, but as the best antidote I've got to boredom, anger and pain.
And of course, introducing fun and laughter doesn't just have to come from me. Sometimes it's about letting down our guard a bit, letting our children have fun at our expense.
At bedtime, he wanted to stay up a bit. "Can i go on the computer?" "Yes, if you do something educational." He found graffiti-creator and started messing around. Then he wrote DIE KERRY. He looked at my husband and I, to see the effect. When he saw me laughing, he wrote some insulting stuff about his father's favourite rugby team. Spelling it correctly, I noticed. Fun. just messing around. Except he was writing, and learning, too.
Sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that take you a while to work out. Having floundered in a sea of educational confusion, I am starting to pick a path. When I have an idea, or read a hippy tome promising me that the way to educate my son is limitless Lego, I am starting to assess the stuff I read against a simple benchmark. "Very impressive/creative/freespirity/structured. But will my son enjoy it?" Some things I can pick as suitable in advance, some I will only find out by trying. The book he chose for fact-hunting was actually one I had taken out for my own enjoyment, not his. I thought he would be bored by it. Conversely, some things I am sure he will adore will fall on barren ground. Ah well. I can always strew the barren ground with carefully-placed stickers and chocolate.
No comments:
Post a Comment