Constraints
This month marks the second anniversary of our home education experiment. I really shouldn’t call it an experiment since it appears to be the norm for the foreseeable future.
This was our third attempt at home education. The first attempt goes back to Game Fanatic’s second formal year of schooling when we made a temporary move to Canada. My plan was to home school while there so we could keep him up to speed with our local curriculum. That didn’t work out and when September arrived, he started at the primary school. The second attempt followed our return from Canada in the middle of the following year. By late October, he was back in the classroom at a new school.
The reasons the first two attempts failed were many but ultimately, it was due to trying to emulate school in a home environment. For some children this might work but for Game Fanatic it definitely didn’t. By the time we pulled the boys out of school, Game Fanatic was in year seven. It was clear that a classroom learning environment was never going to work for him. We spent four years trying to work out problems that couldn’t be fixed. Actually the first year back went pretty well for him with a brilliant teacher who really “got” him from the start. Teachers like that are rare, and even this teacher was limited by needs of many of the thirty other children in the class.
Lego Lover started formal schooling a couple years into the schooling experiment and all went seemingly well the first year. The second year was a different story and it’s still not completely clear what changed. In retrospect, I think the problems were already there and we were blinded to their effects.
Our start to the current experiment began well enough. Despite trying to emulate school at home to some degree, the boys were happy to follow along. Game Fanatic tried particularly well, especially because he wanted there to be no chance of returning to school. As the weeks wore on, this method became less effective and eventually I tried to move more towards natural learning.
Natural learning basically leaves the direction in the learner’s hands and the job of the parent tends to be more as a facilitator. It doesn’t fit as neatly into the education department’s eight learning areas. It often jumps around from subject to subject, grabbing little bits of knowledge over time. It is sometimes lacking in organisation to the point of being totally chaotic.
Our home education program is continuing to move towards this model of learning but we aren’t quite there. I find it hard as a parent, brought up with conventional schooling, to let some of the basics fall by the wayside because I honestly don’t have confidence they will learn what they “should” learn. But then again, who is to say what they should know. We have pretty much stripped down to formal work in maths only for Game Fanatic and maths, spelling and grammar for Lego Lover. The rest is up to them and I am meant to help them along.
Over the last term, I have found my confidence in leaving the boys to learn as they will wavering at times. This is especially true for Game Fanatic. He is mostly locked in his room doing I know not what. That’s not completely true but it feels that way at times. He is learning, and it’s far more than he would within a school setting. He has a low threshold for boredom and is absolutely lost in the classroom because he stops functioning. At home it may not seem like he’s doing much but I do find that he has been learning in all sorts of roundabout ways. He pursues his interests in games and stumbles on all sorts of learning that he doesn’t expect.
Today he was playing a game on the Playstation 2 and was soon asking about historical events and personalities that were unfamiliar. I sent him off in search of the knowledge he was seeking and he was actually willing to find things out. His motivation to learn has been rekindled and becomes greater all the time. Two years ago, if he had a question and we told him to look it up, he would have be happier to never know the answer rather than expend the effort to find out more.
I don’t worry as much about Lego Lover. Firstly, he is younger and I don’t feel the pressure to have him doing the type of “work” that older kids do at school. The second reason is because the child is an absolute sponge, just sucking up the knowledge as he comes across it. He really follows his interests and stores the information in ways that simply don’t occur with his brother. He spends much of his time involved in Lego design. He also creates drawings on his computer, pixel by pixel. Today he spent hours recreating the emblems for the various incarnations of Transformers on a simple paint program on his computer. He practices and practices and I can see a great potential towards engineering in his future should that be where his interest lies down the road (that’s what he wants to do when he grows up). We do our “book work” two or three times a week and the rest of the time is mostly spent on his own pursuits.
So I do see that natural learning can work and it is working. And yet, I still cannot let go completely and leave them completely to it. I blew up at Game Fanatic last week when the term was ending. At the time, I just felt like he wasn’t doing anything. It probably didn’t help that I was feeling the effects of pms at the time. But it just felt like we were getting nowhere. Rationally my brain tells me he is learning and I have anecdotal knowledge of this. But how does one quantify the knowledge when it’s mostly in his head?
Perhaps the root of my anxiety over this is really the moderator visit that will be required in the next few months. We have little to no visual evidence, which is what is preferred by the moderators. Technically, the visit is to assess that we have some sort of program going. Technically, they don’t really have any say in what our kids are learning or how they learn it. The only real goal is to show evidence that progress is being made. Funny how the schools aren’t required to show evidence of our children’s progress (at least not on an individual level. At least for Game Fanatic, they would have failed miserably.
We are currently on holidays at the moment, but as I reflected above, the boys are still actively learning all the time. There are no boundaries to their learning. Game Fanatic even commented on the horror that he again had learned something when he was playing his game. He would have been serious a couple years ago but he is just amused now.
