Beyond "butt in seat" time

Chaouia girls in Algeria learning to read from Marian Hostetler, 1965. (Mennonite Church USA Archives)

Every U.S. state has different legal requirements for homeschoolers. in the state of Georgia, homeschooled students must work for four-and-a-half hours a day, 180 days per year.

The powers that be know that they can’t hold everyone to the same academic standard.

They don’t even try to measure students by their accomplishments or require that homeschooling parents have specific credentials beyond a high school education.

“Butt in seat” time is all they’ve got left. It also happens to be how we determine whether someone has earned the right to rejoin society after incarceration.

As Drucker said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” We end up cultivating and building systems around that which we pay attention to. If we’re designing a school experience, whether as a homeschooling parent or educational administrator, it’s important to make a conscious choice about what we want to focus on.

When we measure an educational experience by the number of hours of instruction, there’s no point in going deeper. The bell will ring at the end of the day regardless of how effectively the time was spent.

The alternative, for some, is to measure by the curriculum. When we complete book 7B we’re done with math for the year. When we finish unit 20, that’s it for sixth grade science.

But this approach, too, is limited. It encourages a superficial relationship with the material being studied — the reading, discussion questions, and projects all become things to get through rather than absorb. When we need to take more time, we’re afraid to fall behind schedule (or behind the others), and when we zip through the assignments quickly, we have the illusion that there’s nothing left to learn.

A better approach to measuring education is a growth-based one. It’s uncomfortably subjective at times, requires frequent monitoring and updating, and doesn’t align nicely with a particular calendar or curriculum. But it is incredibly powerful — and more importantly, empowering.

With a growth-based approach, we document the student’s initial level of skill and knowledge in a given domain, and then look for opportunities for and evidence of growth as we move forward.

The student and teacher will notice that a particular skill is getting easier (evidence of growth). Once a new threshold his reached, the teacher (and sometimes the student) will see a new challenge related to the current task (an opportunity for growth).

When you’re deeply focused on growth, a task is done for the day when you feel a sense of satisfaction and visible progress. Then you move on to the next task.

Sometimes, the feeling of satisfaction is elusive — that’s a plateau. In that case, the task is done when you begin to experience fatigue or boredom after a period of intense effort.

Your work is complete for the day when you begin to feel fatigue or boredom after having experienced several episodes of intense, satisfying effort. For some people, this comes after less than an hour — for others, it can be several hours. It may also vary by the day.

After that big, growth-oriented push forward, time can be spent on activities that are rewarding or productive but that you’re already good at (for example, reading, making art, engaging in physical activity, or doing routine tasks).

It makes sense to take breaks every so often — a week or two of deliberate disruption of the routine due to travel, a service project, or some other adventure. You’ll know you’ve had a long enough break when you can’t wait to get back to learning.

This growth-based approach to education is pointless to measure with grades, but you’ll see benchmarks in retrospect. Here’s what your drawings looked like in September, and now here’s what they look like in March. Your essays are longer and the language is clearer. Your YouTube videos are more professional. You can explain how to simplify a radical to a classmate, and sixth months ago you required an explanation yourself.

Not only will the teacher and parent see the progress, the student will see her own growth. But even more significantly, she will feel the progress. That is the best measure of learning, one that motivates us to continue even when we are struggling.

Such a feeling can’t be tracked on a standardized test, but it makes all the difference in life. When you know what growth feels like and you know how to go after it, you won’t be content to just sit there and put your time in. You’ll be looking for what you can get out of it.