School is simpler than we make it
Who decides what’s important to know and understand? (Image by gregovish)
I had an emergency room trip a few years ago that included IV fluids. I didn’t think much of it at the time — I laid back and accepted the pomp and circumstance of hospital procedure. However, when I later realized that this treatment had cost several hundred dollars, I wondered why I couldn’t have just downed a couple of glasses of water.
Something similar came to mind in an online forum where a parent was asking about things she could buy to make recess easier for a group of children, hers and others, that she’d be educating at home. There were over fifty comments when I happened upon this post, recommending everything from chalk to orange cones to specific toys.
No one had yet pointed out the fact that kids don’t need special equipment in order to play, and that it’s developmentally beneficial for them to figure out how to make do with what they have, whether it’s a couple of sticks, a cardboard box, or an expanse of green lawn.
I see lots of homeschooling families who seek to recreate in-school experiences by creating Pinterest-worthy tableaus, decorated and coordinated flawlessly. Go ahead and google “homeschool classroom” if you’d like to be inspired — or to feel totally inadequate. The truth is, this stuff is fun if you’re into it, but none if it is necessary.
Formal education need not be so formal. At the core, students must learn to read, write, and work with numbers. The “three R’s” provide the foundation for virtually everything else. When viewed through this lens, many school activities are pointless (for instance, “color-in-the-boxes” phonics and addition worksheets for a child who already knows how to read and add).
Things go even better when you work on teaching a child to think, which is not a skill that’s always cultivated in the typical K - 8 classroom. You could do a lesson that asks students to study leaves gathered from the ground outside. Which ones came from the same kind of tree? How do you know when two leaves came from different trees? How do you describe the differences between the leaves?
This kind of open-ended assignment can go in different directions. You can draw the leaves. You can determine their species. Among other things, your child will learn how difficult it is to describe a leaf without having a specialized vocabulary. Then, we have to make the leap to realize that there is a specialized vocabulary for just about everything. How do we access it? What search term would we use to find this information online?
The good news is that these types of assignments, though they might at first lead to whining every step of the way, help a student to build meaningful skills over time. Once she gets the hang of finding information on Google, she can answer her own questions and come up with new ones. This type of self-sufficiency makes your job much easier. When teaching is easy and your students are low-maintenance, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. That’s the goal.
In our focus on reading, writing, exploring numbers, and thinking, there may be specific topics we don’t cover. We’re not going to tick every box on every curriculum map. Guess what? It doesn’t matter that much. Most people forget what they learn in school anyway, which is why middle school is both a rehash of what was learned in elementary school and a simplified version of what will be learned again in high school. The stakes are low. If your child starts ninth grade ready for Algebra I and is able to research and write a two-or-three-page essay, he’s going to do very well. The truth is, if you have the time and resources to fret about your child’s progress, he already has a huge advantage.
In the end, all of the fancy classroom trappings and “what your child needs to know” checklists are there to make the parent feel better. Your child needs a lot less than you think, and school can be much simpler than we have been led to believe. You and your children can have fun learning together, every day, no worksheets necessary. You can also cast them out on their own to figure things out for themselves for an afternoon — it’s good for them. They’re going to be fine.
If this vision of school appeals to you and you’d like some support in getting closer to it (whether you’re homeschooling or not), please reach out! I’d love to help.
