The Right Side of Normal

A great thing about homeschooling is being able to let your children teach you how they prefer to be taught and then helping that unique process unfold. It is so worth the time to figure out how your child and you can best work together, particularly if your child is not ready to fit in a conventional classroom. An observant adult who is not feeling rushed to make a child do things at certain times can see that learning is something that can be caught, not just taught, and this leads to all sorts of reconfigurations about what children can and can’t do. However our school-based conceptions of learning are increasing teaching time in class and students who don’t take instruction well while sitting still—or who simply can’t sit still—are finding themselves to be second-class educational citizens.

This blog post at the Washington Post by an anguished father, who has ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) himself, notes that even in the best schools in the United States children with learning differences are not treated well. He concludes:

In the meantime, my kids will struggle through school, battered along the way, and, like their father, be forced to discover most of their talents and passions on their own, outside of school.

This family feels deeply wounded by school though education experts often claim that children such as these, sometimes called right-brained learners, need even more costly processing and highly trained teachers than other students. However, just as homeschooling proves you don’t need to follow the conventional prep school route to gain admissions to Ivy League schools, so it is proving you don’t need to hire learning specialists to help a special needs child.

Cindy Gaddis, a homeschooling mother of seven, is an observant, caring adult to a variety of right-brained learners and she has shared her knowledge and experience at conferences and through articles for many years. She, her children, and the many others she has helped show that it is possible for ordinary parents to work with right-brained learners. Outside help is sought when needed, but Gaddis inspires you to see how much you can accomplish with your right-brained learners in your home and community.

Cindy Gaddis has distilled her experiences into a fantastic book, The Right Side of Normal: Understanding and Honoring The Natural Learning Path for Right-Brained Children. I urge you to read it no matter what type of learner you or your children are; you will find many examples of how to approach topics from different angles for different learners, how to find and develop your patience when your children learn in fits and starts, and lots of genuine work samples that show you how to provide useful feedback to your children and to others who care and work with them. This is a marvelous, empowering book that supports parents and children to think about special needs education through a different lens.

Cindy is making a limited time offer: if you purchase a print copy she will include a free eBook copy for you to share with others.

Teach Your Own: A Seminar About Homeschooling and Unschooling

I’m trying to gauge interest for bringing my latest workshop about homeschooling and unschooling to Portland, ME.

If 10 or more people contact me via email (pfarenga at comcast.net) by October 3 or sooner with interest, my friend Beth Della Torre Callahan will find me a space to do the seminar and I’ll send out registration materials to all who contacted me with interest.

Proposed Location: Portland, ME

Proposed Date: Saturday, Nov. 3, from 9AM to 1PM.

For detailed information about the seminar, and to read testimonials by people who attended the most recent one, click here.

Maturity Is Not Created by College

Here’s an interesting and well-written essay on what is like to be a young adult who became an unschooler in high school and who then decided not to go to college by Emma Zale that was published in the Daily Kos.

I was struck by this passage in particular, about the relationship between attending college and people’s perceptions of your maturity:

As I began to interact more and more with these mid-to-late-twenties/early-thirty somethings, I noticed something startling -- the majority of them were in the very same situation that I was. We were all working blue-collar (or more menial white-collar) jobs, trying to launch some kind of artistic or otherwise higher paying career. In the case of my co-workers, who were virtually all college graduates, I (the youngest among them) was their boss.

They felt like my peers, and whenever I admitted my age to them, they tended to be astonished. When I would reveal that I had not only never gone to college, I had dropped out of high school... their jaws would literally drop. “But you're so smart,” they would say. “You're so mature.”

To the latter I would often answer: “Well, I've been out of school for nearly 5 years,” and that seemed to resonate with them. But what does that say about what constitutes a person's maturity in the “real world”? Because I had been in it for as long as some of them had, I read as 25-30, when I was really just shy of my early 20s. It seemed that not only was college not always indicative of success, it wasn’t necessarily a barometer for maturity, either.

Learning Without Us

A new article in Educational Leadership was brought to my attention: Preparing Students to Learn Without Us by Will Richardson. As I read it I thought, once again, here is an educator willing to entertain this thought as long as the teacher remains in charge of how the learning occurs, in this case by linking a student’s personal interest in something to the core curriculum in whatever convoluted way necessary to achieve the goal.  The main point that John Holt, Ivan Illich, and others make so often—learning is the result of the activity of learners, not necessarily a result of teaching—always seems to get quickly lost in all school reform discussions. Instead, how teachers and schools are altered by technology that can personalize learning becomes the issue, and we ignore the human disruptive innovation—people learning from situations and other people outside of conventional schooling—and focus on the machinery: how technology will make existing schools continue as they are, only better. The important insight provided by Jacques Ellul and later Illich, that schooling itself is a technology used to control a population, is glossed over or not even considered in the rush to claim the latest technology that will change schooling.

However, unschoolers and some alternative schools have, for decades, supported independent learning for children, without using any of the latest educational technology as their justification for doing so. They use people in their families and communities, classes, projects, volunteering, and other opportunities to live and learn; they aren’t being tracked and assessed dynamically through cookies and cameras, but rather engage and discuss their situation with those working with them in order to know how they are doing. Many homeschoolers do use online courses, but I think not nearly as much as they use offline courses and learning opportunities (I wish there were more research about homeschoolers and their use of distance learning compared to how school uses it now and proposes to use it in the future. Does anyone know of such studies?). It is interesting to me that trusting people to decide what, when, how, and from whom they will learn is palatable to most educators only when they can use technology to control and predict what learners are doing. Technology is truly, in this instance, a double-edge sword.

The few dissenters cited at the end of the article give me hope that some in the teaching profession feel they should not be in the people-shaping business—trying to mold individual students to fit into job slots determined by their performance in school—and have not lost sight of a student’s humanity, dignity, and unique powers to learn.

The article starts off, as many do today, by paying lip service to the idea that we are learning all the time and that school interrupts that process. Unschoolers, in particular, can use or take heart from the arguments being made in support of letting learners control more of their learning and, who knows? Perhaps among teachers who think as the dissenters in this article do, we have allies who want to help create a learning society built around democracy and free will rather than a regime of mandatory continuing education, built around the plans of others and controlled through technology. Here are some excerpts to give you the gist of what I’m trying to convey about this article, which can be read in its entirety: Preparing students to learn without us.

The ability to learn what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we have access creates a huge push against a system of education steeped in time-and-place learning. Notes McLeod,

Between adaptive software that can present and assess mastery of content, video games and simulations that can engage kids on a different level, and mobile technologies and online environments that allow learning to happen on demand, we need to fundamentally rethink what we do in the classroom with kids. (personal communication, October 1, 2011)

That rethinking revolves around a fundamental question: When we have an easy connection to the people and resources we need to learn whatever and whenever we want, what fundamental changes need to happen in schools to provide students with the skills and experiences they need to do this type of learning well? Or, to put it more succinctly, are we preparing students to learn without us? How can we shift curriculum and pedagogy to more effectively help students form and answer their own questions, develop patience with uncertainty and ambiguity, appreciate and learn from failure, and develop the ability to go deeply into the subjects about which they have a passion to learn?

. . . ."It requires a totally different skill set on the teacher's part," Stutzman says. "We have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, because we don't know the exact direction that a class will go when we walk in. Depending on student questions, reflections, or activities, our plans could quickly morph into something we never dreamed would happen at the outset."

In other words, it's risk and reward. "It's scary not to know exactly where your students will go if their curriculums are potentially different, and it requires a lot of adjusting," Stutzman explains. "But the benefit is that students get to see our genuine reactions to new discoveries as well as to challenges, and they see us model the learning process together." Students understand that there is no one "right" answer that the teacher expects, that there are many answers, and that the teacher and students will likely discover many of these together.

. . . Assessment changes as well. Donhauser says that the emphasis moves to assessing in the moment rather than at the end of a book or unit. "Rather than having a defined product that I receive from 25 students," she says, "I receive 25 individual assignments with their own unique content, insights, and styles." Using Google Docs, students continually update their progress, and she provides regular feedback. Students also give one another feedback on their plans as they go. Everyone follows a rubric that covers such areas as standards, learning outcomes, artifact explanation, blog posts, learning activities, work ethic, and research.

. . . Despite the promise of personalizing learning and some teachers' best efforts to give their students more agency in the education process, many educators wonder whether the concept goes far enough in preparing students for the wide array of learning opportunities outside the classroom.

Many educators cite an important difference between "personalized" learning and "personal" learning—the latter connotes a deeper degree of autonomy for the learner. Some, like Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and a longtime education blogger, see that as an important distinction. "Autonomy is what distinguishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us," Downes (2011) tweeted last fall.

. . . It's a potential summed up nicely in the white paper The Right to Learn (Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation, 2011). The authors write,

We need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources. (p. 6)

Research and Interviews Focused on Unschooling

Peter Gray has completed all three phases of his research about the benefits, reasons, and challenges of unschooling at Psychology Today. It is good to have this information available, as it will be eye-opening to those who think unschooling is just unparenting, though to long-time unschoolers none of it is really news. For instance, according to this research, the biggest challenge for unschoolers is defending their choice to unschool to friends, family, and the general public. Talk about the more things change the more they stay the same—in the first issue of GWS, August 1977, there’s a story, “What To Tell the Neighbors.”

Dr. Gray puts a very positive spin on his research by following it with an interview with Kate Fridkis, an adult who was unschooled. Kate is 25 and lives and works in Manhattan. The interview is titled, “Meet Kate Fridkis, Who Skipped K-12 and is Neither Weird nor Homeless.” I urge you to read her interview, and then to check out this piece by another grown unschooler that was inspired by reading Kate’s interview.

Emma Rosloff is a 23-year-old writer who worked in the restaurant business until recently. Emma writes about moving in and out of school, unschooling and how it helped her, and why she has, so far, decided not to go to college. I want to share this thought that Emma leaves with:  

The majority of the servers I worked with at my breakfast job had college degrees they weren’t doing anything with (and I was their boss).

. . . Again, not trying to put down going to college, either as a route to a career or just for the sake of the experience. Not at all. Just trying to advocate a kid having enough of a sense of their own interests and abilities to make that choice for themselves, and to be informed when they do.