Our Classrooms Last Week

How Children Fail

I just finished my latest John Holt book called How Children Fail and I thoroughly enjoyed it. After years of teaching in my own classroom, I related to SO MUCH of what he had to say. One thought that was new to me was the idea that school can actually lead to misunderstanding, more confusion, less confidence in your own ability to reason, the slow destruction of common sense.

Of course I always knew that school lumbers along at a slow and boring pace, that it's disjointed and interrupted and disconnected from "real life". But I hadn't really considered how damaging it can be - not just to one's self esteem, but to one's ability to learn. I think that I've always assumed that the really confused kids just weren't very bright. Now I wonder how much school and teachers and all the nonsensical busywork impacted their confusion.

The other thing that I'll take from this book is how powerful it is to be a careful observer of learning and of misunderstanding. I think Holt refers to it as plumbing the depths of their misunderstanding - something that teachers rarely, if ever, have time to do for individual students.

And finally, what made me laugh was that this book was written in the 1960's! It could've been written today. It's all still completely relevant.

Time Goes By series

The Time Goes By series is my newest find at the library. These aren't the typical look and find books, although there are things listed to find on each page. And the pictures don't have the map-like quality of Roxie Munro's books. Instead, this series brings you to a place which you get to experience over a passage of time: A Day in a City, A Day at an Airport, A Year in a Castle, etc...

The illustrations are of the same view, but change on each page spread as time goes by and lots of things happen! They are packed with details: some pictures have cut-away walls so you can see inside of buildings, they contain lots of little stories that you follow visually, there are some people who show up only once, and others that appear throughout the day, and each page has a "follow the action" key on the sidebar illuminating the time and where it fits in.
Here is the complete list of titles.

Our Homeschooling Journey

It looks like we won't be enrolling Beck in the Homeschool Resource Center after all. At least not for the beginning of next year. You have to complete an 8 week (one hour per week) class and it just got too complicated trying to figure out childcare and rides to preschool on the mornings I would've been in the class. Now I'm thinking that we'll re-visit that idea next spring when both Beck and Yogi are school-aged. And that'll give me a year of doing our own thing and finding our way with it all.

I did manage to attend a "parents' night out" with our local homeschooling group. I was a little nervous, but found everyone to be very welcoming. Like I said on Homecake, it felt like I found "my people" and that's a good feeling.

Bananagrams

I've seen Banangrams in stores for awhile now, and a few weeks ago I finally got a set thinking that I'd put it on the shelf until my kids could read and spell words. And then after seeing all those cute little letter tiles, I decided that they'd be just the thing for my boys to play with now!

My first thought was to put out just the letters necessary to make words within a certain word group: tan, man, van, ran, etc... with the hope that they'd come up with the words. Instead, they immediately dumped my little sorted basket out and mixed them in with all the other letters. They quickly found the tiles to spell their own names and then began setting them up in tiny domino lines. So much for spelling out the "_an" words!

Now I have all the letters dumped into a larger basket and they help themselves to it as they wish. I still find myself wanting them to work on making words, but I'm convinced it's better not to push it at all - or at least I'm willing to see what happens with no "teaching" on my part.

Here's a quote I read in How Children Fail by John Holt last night that relates to this constant struggle I have in wanting to teach:

"But it is just as true of intelligence as it has always been true of school subjects that teaching --"I know something you should know and I'm going to make you learn it" -- is above all else what prevents learning.

We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that make them stupid.

Ingenious teachers, "gifted" teachers, teachers who are good at thinking up new and better ways to teach things, can do just about as much harm to their students as the teachers who are content to plug along with the standard workbooks and teachers' manuals. These gifted teachers can't stop teaching. They are like someone who tries to help a friend start a car by giving it a push. He grunts and strains, the car gets rolling, the engine catches are begins to run. The driver says, "It's going now, you can let go." But the pusher won't let go. "no, no," he says, "you can't go without me, the car won't go unless I keep pushing." So the car, now ready to run at full speed, is held back - unless the driver want to break free and leave the helper on his face in the road. And most learners, children above all, can't break free of their teachers."