Momentum: Thoughts on a Homeschooling State of Mind (eBook)

Thoughts on a Homeschooling State of Mind

J. Lockwood White (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9586-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Book Description The Prussian Military Model is a strange and inane framework for a child's day: -Group people by abilities -Learn distinct skills in that group -All groups change activities after specific periods of time marked by a bell or buzzer-like sound -Evaluate with grades frequently -Give Awards Homeschooling has no distinct model but presents numerous ideas for in-schooling students, teachers, admin and all lifelong learners. It is as much about in-schooling as homeschooling. Practical activities, humor and provocative notions............are all offered by a forty-five year veteran teacher, (Urban/Suburban), Winner of the Star Ledger Silver Pen Award 2007, Grandmother, Science teacher, Hiker, Skier, Forager, Salamander migration facilitator, Stream-team worker, Bragger, Cranky World Citizen, Sprout House founder. Ideas that are all over the map, including, but not limited to, Nature-based, Place-based, Primary Source, Respect for Play, Social Responsibility and authentic content-rich learning, are forthcoming for the reader's choosing, in rattling, entertaining, essay format.

Finding satisfaction and entertainment in learning more and more local mini eco-systems and mini habitats, Joanne studies more plants before 10 a.m. than most people do all year. Author of: Sprouting the Curriculum: Perversely Logical thoughts on Improving American Education, she lives in Morris County, NJ and spends lots of time on the north shore of Long Island, NY. Alway the playful generalist, never the specialist. Forty-five year veteran teacher, Urban/Suburban, Winner of the Star Ledger Silver Pen Award 2007, Grandmother, Science teacher, Hiker, Skier, Forager, Bragger, Cranky World Citizen, Sprout House founder. Abandon the Prussian Military Model as a system in which children spend their day. It harms many. It stiffens their neuron formation into odd formations. Do things that are contemplative, important, environmentally productive, helpful and highly engaging instead. Employ the teachers that can pull it off. Not Just for Homeschoolers !!! All adults are homeschoolers. All children are weekend homeschoolers. All teachers can think like homeschoolers.

Textauszug

Abandon:

Prussian Military Model

• Group people by abilities
• Learn distinct skills in that group
• All groups change activities after specific periods of time marked by a bell or buzzer-like sound.
• Evaluate with grades, frequently.
• Use an Award System

This is a peculiar model in which children should function. Prolonged, perpetual weekday activity should be engaging, systemic, and organic.

Achievement

Horace Mann, bless his heart, is mostly responsible for creating public education in Massachusetts and then the United States. Such a noble idea deserves a lot of credit. He was a Brown University graduate who then became a lawyer, Massachusetts legislator, and then Massachusetts Secretary of education. In that role, he traveled to Europe studying their education systems. In Prussia, he found that their education system was based on their military model and it was funded by taxes. The idea was brought back to Massachusetts, and it quickly spread to most other states. Previously, one-room school houses had not been particularly well-organized, especially if there were large numbers of children. The other problem was the cost of maintaining schools and teachers. This new model was a compelling achievement, but the bones of this idea have been largely entrenched and static since 1850.

(The) Art and Practice of Homeschooling

Step 1

Acquire some Vertical Curriculum (VC) (see appendix)

The target here is Math and Language Arts. Invest in lockstep curriculum and follow it at the child’s own pace.

Step 2

Fully engage in the world around you (Horizontal Curriculum) (HC)

This includes:

1. the living and non-living world (plants, animals, rocks, minerals, stars, planets, moons, tides, weather, bacteria, etc.);
2. physical science such as forces, construction, and simple machines;
3. history of your neighborhood, including dinosaur species;
4. genuine social projects such as trash clean-ups, citizen science, or any volunteer work that appeals to the child. Do not call the media to publicize to the world how great you are for doing it.
5. cross the curriculum as much as possible. Notice all the links of one subject to another, as well as notions of relating things from the HC to the VC, but don’t beat it to death.

Will you, the adult, be researching and relearning all the material above? Yes.

Step 3

Fully realize that you will be taking dictations into a journal of things the student is encouraged to encode from their experiences until they are interested and able to write. This could take as long as age twelve. This journal also becomes their “reading material” from time to time. This will someday be a treasure. Learn to print beautifully, not for the sake of the treasure, but for easy deciphering.

Step 4

Truly believe in the powerful joy of play.

A Huge Space

Homeschoolers have a dedicated space in their brains for unforced learning...a huge space. They are salivating as I tell them about an articulated back loader that I have seen on a flatbed being pulled somewhere.

It’s art to them. The thought of this monster makes them so happy. They get giddy thinking and talking about how it works. They really know how it works. They have been given the gift of time to learn how it works.

Artificial Intelligence

I hate to even give this a speck of real estate in these pages. Artificial intelligence (AI), in most cases, not all, serves the reductionist wing of the education community. It doesn’t generally provide help for primary source learning. It removes all the fun of going down rabbit holes to sustain a super broad picture of a system. Its strength is narrowing down the field to reach the goal quicker. Process, however, is as important as product. Sure, homeschoolers have been known to waste time occasionally, but when the dust settles, the process shapes neurons.

As for helping teachers, yes it helps the reductionist model . . . no question. (see Wish I Could Ignore It)

Authentic Childhood

Human childhood should look a little like the juvenile stage of other mammals. Busy with reality and fun, learning like crazy, and “remembering” or somehow unconsciously retaining the needed schemas, they are on “automatic” even if they are responding to a parent. Unless there’s trauma, juvenile raccoons in Florida act similarly to juvenile raccoons in New Jersey. Ditto for humans.

Lest we become partial to mammals, baby octopuses (not even closely related to mammals) are worth careful study because they are mind-blowing in every way. Their abilities and probably their anatomy are the result of having to do more with less. Hold that thought and then do what you want with it.

Homeschooling is in the title of this book. Homeschooling can be exhilarating as it stands in a web of possible, unexpected connections, but it can also just be a state of mind for adults as well as children. Take these blurry essays in any direction and then, in the privacy of your own head, make them more lucid or just let them simmer.

Authenticity Be Damned

Why can’t anything be just as it is? If it’s good, it now needs to be blown to the stratosphere. It can’t just be exactly as it is. There’s always got to be an exaggerated angle. This current promotional mentality does a disservice because the truth is experienced eventually, resulting in a deflation of the actual product or service. So much energy goes into being pumped up, overstated, photographically enhanced, and musically rendered in seventh chords that the actual “thing” gets less creative attention and dedicated work. There’s only so much time in a day . . . spend it on the quality of the activity rather than aggrandizement of the activity.

Yes there are occasional bad days in homeschooling, but since “we” don’t advertise for anyone, it’s entirely realistic. All the energy goes where it should go. All the problem-solving goes where it needs to go. Being authentic enables a lot more mileage.

Basics

This teacher’s house has photos of our woods (same view) in every season and every two weeks in the spring. Boy, do we love poring over the changes in these photos.

I take a photo of a certain flowering shrub every week in spring. My students love to draw or paint these sequential pictures and construct new knowledge every week. One of my students likes the photos but doesn’t seem as interested in rendering them. Pressure is not the recommended course of action.

I try to find a fiddlehead and take a picture of it every day. This one we worship in person (and in a photo). Someday soon, I’ll make sequencing cards out of these.

Saplings in the woods. Forget the activities . . . just worship.

I take a photo of the position of the sun relative to a post on a fence at the same time of day about every eight weeks. Periodically they look at these photos, they say profound things about our orbiting celestial bodies. Ninety-nine percent are crushingly accurate.

This is Place-Based education. Know your surroundings. Identify the wildflowers in the cracks in the sidewalk. Promote and study everything about your “place.” Find the good places to play.

Bicycles and More

Humans really get that they are missing out on something by not being able to fly, but they hardly ever say it. Instead, they realize that they are really having fun when they are swimming, skiing downhill, sledding, skim boarding, surfing, doing jump shots in basketball, skating, zip lining, biking, or doing recreational drugs. None of those things take the place of flying but there is some liberating overlap. Most would agree that we should omit the drugs. These ways of moving transcend the restrictions of gravity or produce the illusion of defying gravity. These activities mostly cheat because they need props, but there is no denying a euphoric state. This is a wonderful platform for learning; with lots of this in your life, the sky is (not) the limit! Flying substitutes and nature immersion are kinds of pre-emptive therapeutic triumphs. We must find flying substitutes for “individuals with disabilities” as well. Given the range of disabilities, it would need to be quite specific, but the thrill that always comes to my mind is the very long rope swing from a high tree limb. Relatively uncomplicated, nature immersion for individuals with confined mobility necessarily is a priority.

When your day provides opportunities for verve, you have more gas in the tank for programs and skillwork, and you’re learning without even knowing it.

Jean Piaget identified the concept of “sensorimotor” intelligence. When this...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9586-2 / 9798350995862