My beef with the public school system

More than 100 years ago Maria Montessori got it right. She believed that children learned through spontaneous self-development. If the right environment was provided for children to experience different challenges and learn new skills they would excell in ways that traditional education can't compete with. She also believed that grouping children by major growth periods was better than grouping them by 1 year intervals. In other words she instituted a multi-age, child directed classroom. A study in the Journal of Science in Sept. of 2006 upheld the belief that Montessori educated children do better academically and socially than their peers educated in traditional public schools.

I was a Montessori educated child. I taught myself to read when I was 4. My mother went back to school. She didn't have enough time to spend hours reading to me during the week. It made me mad. So... I showed her! I taught myself to read. Looking back, I'm sure that the hours I spent in school taught me many of the skills I needed to put it all together and really read. The teachers also took turns during the week choosing our language of the day. One teacher spoke Spanish with us, another spoke German, and yet another spoke English. We didn't just learn a few words or phrases of each language; we spent most of the day speaking to our teachers and our friends in whichever language was chosen for that day. Our teachers fostered mental flexibility and taught us to seek challenges rather than boredom.

And therein lies my beef with the public school system. Conformity seems to be the word of the day. If you're different there are all sorts of interventions the school's willing to help you with in order to make you more normal. If a student is falling behind the class there is help available to assist them with catching up. It's all very nice and seems to be in the students best interest but what I see is that the final result is to make everybody the same.

We are not all the same and it is damaging to believe we should be. I was an advanced student. That should be a good thing, right? In reality it was horrible. Being advanced meant that I got to do the same kind of homework for weeks while the rest of the class caught up. Hours worth of busy work, no challenge except to keep from turning my homework into paper airplanes and sailing them out the classroom door. In the beginning I loved school. By the time I graduated I was skipping more days than I attended. Of course, I was advanced so I manipulated the system so that most of the skipped days were school excused, but the reality is that I attended only 80 days of my senior year. Imagine how much better a student, and how much better a work ethic, would have been developed in an environment that rewarded individuality and provided constant challenge and opportunity for growth.

The school system (at least around here) is broken. It's not the fault of the teachers. They do an amazing job within the guidelines they're given. I believe that each and every person I've encountered in the Nampa School District truly cares about my child and wants to help him. I also believe that if they do get to help him become "more like his typical peers" they'll break him. There's an underlying belief that if we can just get everybody to the same level of (insert something here) the world will be a shiny, happy place and we'll all live happily ever after.

My son is different. He thinks at a different rate of speed, in different directions, and about different subjects than his "typical peers." Different isn't bad. It isn't even less than optimal. It's just different. He isn't broken, we don't need to fix him. We just need to help him learn. Amazingly, spontaneous self-development occurs when you allow a child to pursue his own interests in an environment that's supportive and rich in stimuli. Who would've thought it?

My grandfather, mother, and I are all scientists by education. By trade I'm a mother and dog person. By trade my mother is a microbiologist and my grandfather was a leader in the field of micology and forest pathology. I keep hearing that America is falling behind the pack when it comes to science and math. I'm not sure what education looks like in the countries with the best outcomes in these fields (ooh! research project!!) but I bet it doesn't look like American education today.

Successful scientists question. They don't follow the pack. They are amazing problem solvers. Clear linear thinking is required to insure that the scientific process is followed (and your results are solid). Abstract leaps of logic are required to tackle problems that no one has ever solved before. Einstein was not a normal student. Luckily he found good mentors who helped him in his education while he was still very young. It wasn't the school system that developed Albert's mind and love and learning. It was that amazing ideal espoused by Maria Montessori, spontaneous self-development. What if Einstein were "helped" to fit in better with his peers? Would he have followed the incredible road that led to his many discoveries in the realm of physics? Or would he have worked harder to learn basketball, to dress, and act, and talk like the other kids in his class? Would he have accepted that his classmates were his peers? Or would he have continued his quest for information and understanding that allowed him to meet his true peers?

Conformity makes it easier for those in charge to stay in control. In a school system that lacks parental involvement (even though the school welcomes parents, most don't visit regularly) the teachers either need a new method for teaching or they need the majority of the students to be somewhat similiar in learning styles and needs. Heaven forbid we shake the system up enough to try something like Maria Montessori's education model. A world without grades, the sky would fall!

I think I finally get it

Today, for the first time, I think I finally get it. When you're dealing with highly distractible children incorporate movement into everything you teach. I'd heard it, but I didn't get it. Until today. How do you incorporate movement into a language arts lesson? Math, sure... build with your little blocks, move the blocks from one pile to another, there's lots of movement in math. Language arts... not so much. Or so I thought until this morning.

Chris knows the alphabet upside down and backwards (really). He knows all the sounds the letters make. He has not had good success decoding words by sounding them out. It is much more likely he will guess what the word is based on it's initial letter and the overall shape of the word. For months we have struggled with this. I get so annoyed because the whole time I want him to look at the word he fidgets. He plays with his pencil. He taps his fingers on the arm of his chair. He crumples paper with his feet. He stands on books. If there aren't books on the floor, he puts books on the floor. It makes me so mad I could just scream.

Today we found my old Boggle game in the top of his closet. He really wanted to play, even though he didn't have a clue what Boggle is. Hmmm, I thought to myself. There's a box full of little blocks with letters on 6 sides. Gee, whatever could we do with letter blocks? Hmmm.... I think we could.... wait, wait, it's coming to me...... Gasp! We could build words!!!! It was exciting. It was new. It involved movement.

And yet... he still messed around with stuff with his feet. There had to be more we could do to make this work and keep me from strangling him for fidgeting. We buzzed right along through the words Ted, bed, Fred and shed.... and then.... we got to the word red. It should be simple. But it wasn't. Even after reading all the other "ed" words, red wasn't making sense to Chris. And he kept crumpling papers with his feet (where do these papers come from, I wonder? I'm sure the floor was clean when we started). Why can't this child read the simple word "red"? How hard can this be? I mean he's guessing all over the place and half his guesses don't even end in "ed".

The fidgeting was driving me mad (literally)! I had to stop it! Carol Barnier's voice (look up Sizzlebop.com if you're not familiar with Carol) suddenly spoke inside my head. I very clearly heard her beginning to say, "If you don't give a highly distractible child something to do with their body they will choose something on their own, and I can pretty much guarantee... it will drive you nuts." Soooooo...... I made him hop. Left foot... "rrrr"..... right foot....."ed"...left food "r" ... right foot... "ed" left foot... "r" right foot... "ed", and so on until he'd done the whole word 10 times. At the end we jumped with both feet and when we landed we shouted, "RED!" It worked so well we did the whole rest of the lesson the same way. At the end I would give him the word to spell and he would choose the blocks and build the word. Then I built the words and he read them. And he got it. And so did I.

I think that chairs will no longer have a place in our language arts lessons. Only time will tell if he retains what he's learning, but he surely understood more at the end of our lesson today than he ever has before. He even spelled some words on his own. It was our first really difficult "ah ha!" moment. I am so proud of us for trying something new and succeeding with it.

Our Journey Begins...

Yesterday we began our homeschooling adventure. It was a few days earlier than I had planned to start school. Sam's preschool begins September 2nd and I thought it would be nice and neat if Chris started school the same day. However, the school bus drove past our house yesterday morning and it seems school is in session ... everywhere.

Handwriting practice was our first challenge of the day. How do you spell Anderson when you are a six year old boy with the attention span of a gnat? Really, are the "r" and "s" truly necessary? Anderon would be a nice last name wouldn't it? Failing to recieve approval for that surname it was suggested that perhaps we'd rather be Andeeson's instead. Today we finally have all the letters in all the right places. Chris thinks we should do all our writing on the computer so he doesn't have to use his pencil and think about how to hold it. Can I send him back to public school yet? It's only their second day.... he can't have missed too much.

Reading and math are going well. I really like the Math U See curriculum. It's so very logical and if you don't get it when you write the problem you'll figure it out by the time you've built the problem using the blocks. Very logical, very easy. The little boys like the reading raceway. They keep trying to drive the little cling cars on the track instead of doing the work to advance your vehicle to the next space. Chris gets a little upset at them, but for the most part it's a good time for everybody.

It's a little weird to break for lunch and then take the time to cook, clean up, and do a little grocery shopping in the middle of the school day. Chris likes to come back out before dinner (we're using our enclosed patio as a school room, it's also my sewing room) and work on his special interest for the day (otherwise known as his current obsession). Currently he's learing about the different states (because he's fixated on license plates at he moment). Luckily we got a good deal on a set of maps at Costco, so we have a nice large map of the United States.

We're still doing "school light" since I really didn't want to start until after Labor Day. I think it's a good thing Chris pushed me to start early since I've found a few kinks that we needed to work out. If my official start date had passed, the time taken away from lessons would have bothered me much more. We are spending a lot more time on the mechanics of school (do you know how hard it is to find the paper with a dotted line in the middle) than I had anticipated.