All caretakers right now are in a hard place trying to do right by our kids regarding education. I found a way to make my place scads softer, and my family’s emotional state skyrocketed into positivity and joy as soon as the decision was final. Amazingly, it has stayed that way! Maybe yours would too.
We are radically unschooling, beginning today. Here’s why.
Let’s analyze it. Is it a worthwhile investment for parents to become emotionally overextended in an effort to mimic school? Figuring it all out drives my brain haywire. In one week I have 36 classes to deliver to my daughters, ages 6 and 8. I’m smart as fuck, I’ve CEO’d a tech start up so I can seriously organize shit, I even have an MA in cognitive science which is largely about how learning occurs in the brain — and on the second day trying to orchestrate the 36 classes, even while everything went exactly right and the girls played along cheerfully — still the experience was shatteringly stressful. By lunch I was texting my husband, who works full time from home but was out on a site visit, “Please please tell me you’re almost home.” I burst into tears that night.
Does it make sense to do this? What would happen if you yourself scrapped remote learning entirely?
Analyzing the remote learning crucible
1. Claim: Their teachers know what they have been exposed to so everyone can start together in August on the same page.
Reality: Teachers have no idea which kids have been taught what or how thoroughly. They cannot expect anyone to have learned everything.
SO: Before any assessments can be done they’ll have to teach it all again. Next Autumn (God willing) my daughters will be re-exposed to the material I am stressing so hard over delivering, whether I put our family through this or not.
2. Claim: Public school teachers are experts who design effective activities to get important ideas across.
Reality: Effective instruction heavily depends on evidence-based practices specific to the situation, customized at a minimum for the age and environment of the child. No such evidence exists to be leveraged in designing remote activities, though. Schools are not creating materials optimally designed for the home environment (as they must be to be effective) because such materials and activities have never before been mass delivered and analyzed. Instead, distance learning curriculum is trying to mimic the school setting just like we are, and it’s tanking hardcore too.
SO: Remote learning cannot be the most effective method, because all the effort switching between those 36 short, hopefully short subject-specific classes could be re-allocated to cultivating sustained, deep focus with material they find fascinating and are far more likely to remember.
3. Claim: Public curriculum targets exactly what they need to know, better than you can.
Reality: Says who? Definitely not the data. We inherited subjects and the basic hierarchical, didactic, colonial school paradigm from England 200+ years ago. It is based on the delivery of specific tacit facts that get memorized — and that made lots of sense when the only way to access facts was in-person education. Now facts are a dime a thousand. So what do our kids actually need to experience to be effective critical thinkers and contributing citizens? Memorized facts? Not without context, association, meaning. All of the time spent memorizing state capitals and abstract trigonometry, if your kid ever needs that information, what are they going to do? Yup, same thing you would: Google. Learning things requires knowing things, having hooks to hang more hooks on, so clearly they need to digest and metabolize information. Actually they need to LOVE digesting and metabolizing information, because our future is going to depend on people who can learn rapidly and deeply.
SO: Unschooled kids dig deep into stuff they find fascinating, so they are much more likely to understand and remember it. Deep, engaged thinking — the sustained focus we want to cultivate — only occurs when the kid WANTS to know what’s being taught. If we find something they ENJOY — Slime? What’s in it? Why does it stick together that way? Why does it feel slidy? — we can use it to dive into a learning experience that involves facts but mandates their analysis and application. That conceptual manipulation of information to apply to any specific situation is the heart of expertise, the Holy Grail of education, scaffolding skill transfer from one content domain to another.
I have full resources at my disposal, financial and temporal and cognitive, yet even so, trying to mimic their school has me exhausted and overextended. There is no way I can recreate their experience at Global Village Academy, an excellent bilingual immersion charter school. I was angry and heartbroken that I couldn’t do it when 95% of America has fewer resources than I do, and we all have to do this.
Wait.
Do we?
Actually, no.
At least in Colorado, we totally don’t.
To sum up, facts:
If we pull our kids out of formal education for the rest of the year, they will be taught everything next Autumn anyway.
There may well never again be an opportunity to wildly enrich their education customized to their life paths this way.
If Momma is miserable, all are miserable. The best way for this Momma to not be miserable is for me to be learning fascinating stuff too, to feel effective as a parent, and to know I am doing my best by my children. If I stop spending the day trying to mimic what cannot (and might as well not) be mimicked, I can spend it modeling the skill of learning and doing stuff that makes me happy, which vastly increases the likelihood my whole family will be happy.
It could have a deeply formative positive impact on the trajectory of their lives. I was homeschooled for one year as a child and it massively influenced the trajectory of my life in a positive way. I designed independent study classes in high school and undergrad, then in grad school I designed a class to learn Arapaho and I have been working on Wind River Reservation helping revitalize the critically endangered language ever since. My uncommon and fulfilling career is a direct result of the one year I was homeschooled at 10 years old, because I learned that learning itself is really fun. I speak 9 languages well enough to have unscripted conversations — because watching Netflix typically doesn’t scratch my brain enough, so I learn languages instead. I totally attribute how fun learning has become in my life to that year my Mom let me devour anything I wanted to, and I experienced how fun recreational study is. Maybe that can happen for our kids too.
So what’s the action plan?
My daughters, as of today, are abandoning the GVA remote curriculum entirely. Instead their learning will be in and through projects, real-life projects. My daughter told me she has always secretly wanted to play the violin, which thrilled me because I always have as well — so I contacted a friend who played as a child and she told us to learn the names for the anatomy of a violin so remote instruction can happen later — and today we are both excited to begin. In addition to the tacit facts of anatomical names, learning the violin is a doorway to every subject: acoustic science which is largely math, history, art, everything — what does an instrument say about the culture that created it? A piano has to stay still, so the people have to stay still, so they have to have an agrarian society. Real-world problem solving is most effective since it is itself a critical life skill — and we need to find homes for our two new baby guinea pigs, so it’s time for lessons in creating attractive and informative marketing materials while identifying the most effective demographic to target.
We can all make this opportunity an unforgettable experience of discovery, joy, and togetherness for our families. We can give our children the loving sensation of knowing their family values their individuality and wants them to succeed in their own quirky, unscriptable ways. Sounds a whole lot better than shattering pointlessly to me.
