Self-Serve Learning

2006-10-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

Textbook Inertia

It seems that whenever I get involved with home-schooling there is a subtle inertia that brings this nebulous idea of home-schooling being "the university of the mind" down to the level of completing a prescribed set of worksheets. The dampening effective of this inertia tends to deflate all the enthusiasm both my son and I may have had for the project back in September.

Let me get specific. DJ has an interest in quantum physics. Yet, we purchased the Science in Action 9 textbook, and began his Science program on page 1. Why do we (my wife and I ) do that? Surely the tactic of ignoring what the student is interested in will be detrimental to his enthusiasm for learning. In fact, the only anti-dote would be if we, his teachers, could muster infectious enthusiasm for the science textbook which would rub off on him. Generating that amount of positive energy is difficult for only one learner. If I was teaching in a classroom, I'm sure I could generate the interest AND find that it resonated with a couple of learners.

So I will attempt to buck the inertia of plodding through textbooks for "learning sake" and instead harness DJ's innate curiousity and see how far we can get into the realm of cosmology.

2006-09-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

The Princess Bride, our fall novel selection.

DJ and I started reading The Princess Bride as a novel. We have two copies so one may read aloud, and the other can follow along. So far, I have been doing the reading aloud part. I would be interested in any comments regarding the value of having students read aloud.

In the book How to Read a Book the authors suggest that too often English teachers dissect and analyze works before the student has had a chance to enjoy the materials. Case in point, many Shakespeare units involve reading plays act by act and discussing, rather than giving the student the overall feeling of reading the whole thing straight through for enjoyment. With this in mind, I wonder if it is more beneficial that I read the book aloud to him, and allow the learner to enjoy the experience of the story. If after reading the book, I want DJ to practice some expressive reading, I could then allow him to choose a selection and practice delivering that piece orally.

What I like about The Princess Bride is that DJ is sufficient familiar with the story, yet the book seems much richer in humor (as well as the back story about the story-teller) than the movie script. The fantasy "rescue the princess" story has a rich counterpoint in the real-world experiences of the writer as he diarizes his efforts to write the story.

And, the proof is in the pudding--so to speak; Danny likes it.

2006-09-13T13:55:00.000-07:00

Rus takes a swing at one of Danny's assignments...

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life." - Robert Louis Stevenson

This pithy statement by the author of such literary classics as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde can be examined in more detail if we re-order his statements in a logical fashion.

The only end in life is:
- to become what we are capable of becoming, and
- to be what we are.

On the surface this seems like common sense–especially the last statement. How could anyone be anything different than "what we are"?

I would suggest that people often attempt to be something they are not, and often times it is for good reasons. Imagine a young man that wants to be an actor, and yet he has met the girl of his dreams and wants to marry her and start a family. He may decide to become a dentist, so he can earn lots of money to take care of his family. He may never realize that being a dentist is not "who he is", yet he may live his whole life with a vague feeling that something has gone wrong.

Not being what we are; or better stated, trying to be something we are not, is probably the leading cause of unhappiness in our world.

The other assertion is "to become what we are capable of becoming", and the problem here is do we know what we are capable of?

Grandpa Warren has several times mentioned that his time in the Marine Corps, showed him he was capable of more than he thought. How do we know the limits of our capabilities? I myself completed a 17 km mountain hike this past summer, and I did not expect I would have been capable of that!

The reason we can do things we didn't know we are capable of is that we are not afraid to try. We are not afraid to push our limits. We are not afraid to fail. When we truly fail (rather than merely give up); when we really power-out; we establish our limit, and set a target for improvement.

In essence what Stevenson's quote means to me is:
"Don't be something you're not, push yourself to the point of failure, and you will have achieved a life worth living." - Rus Hathaway

2006-09-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Well this is the first week of home education for my son DJ. We have been working on Grade 9: Math, Science, and English. Our plan for Social Studies is to develop the ideas of capitalism, socialism, and communism; and the role of various forms of governments in directing the affairs of the economy––thereby affecting the lives of its citizens. I think these concepts are best discussed using concrete examples of movies we watch together, or places we visit. Because of the grande nature of the Social Studies goals, we haven't even thought about addressing them. This week we worked on Math, and English (Science requires a textbook which has been ordered).

In terms of English, my wife administered the Schnell Spelling Test, and determined that DJ spells at the level of an 11 year-old. This is consistent with CTBS testing that has placed him around grade five. We definitely have some work to do.

The Math program has been more successful, although there are times when he makes simple mistakes and I wonder if he is engaged. I decided to address some of these simple mistakes as if they were gaps in his knowledge rather than lapses in his attention. He had difficulty working with addition and subtraction of signed numbers, and the concept of subtracting a negative is difficult to illustrate beyond rote memorizing the rule, "subtracting a negative is adding a positive".

The folks at VideoText Algebra teach the concept by saying that a minus sign in front of a number means "the opposite of". Therefore -8 means "the opposite of eight" which is negative eight; or -(-3) means "the opposite of negative three" which is positive three. They also used an analogy of a series of football plays to illustrate positive and negative addition: 3 yard gain, and a six yard gain followed by a 5 yard loss and a 2 yard loss results in a net 2 yard gain.

I learned an interesting lesson from an unlikely source. A young fellow came to fix my air-conditioner, and we got talking about his schooling. He told me that he had always been good in math, and that during his high-school years, his teacher would explain concepts to him, so that he could explain them to his peers. The young man said the secret to teaching concepts to his friends was to find an analogy that fit the concept, and which his friends would understand. Obviously, knowing what his friends were interested in (essentially knowing what they know), he was more adept at finding useful analogies that fit conceptually.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Tipping Point, makes the point that we often share a huge knowledge base with our friends. We know pretty much everything they know. He claims that to access new information, such as sources of potential employment, we need to tap into our network of acquaintances, because we have much less knowledge in common with them. In other words, our potential to learn something new is much greater from an acquaintance than from a friend.

The young air-conditioner mechanic turned Gladwell's point around. He demonstrated that it is easier to integrate new information from your network of friends precisely because of the body of information that is already in common.

2006-06-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Wow... talk about a pregnant pause!

For everyone who has been holding their breath waiting for this next post, I'm sorry I didn't get to your funeral. (Meant to be ha ha funny.) But actually, it seems like I am the one that has come back from the dead. I ended up getting so diverted that I stopped posting for a little while (3 years), and now I am back.

Update: J finished grade 8 through home education (I'll post at length on that later), and then went to public school for grade 9 and 10. He did well in grade 9, achieving honors standing, and we are waiting to see how things turned out in grade 10. The second semester he had a job which kept him out late (working at a local movie-house), this could have affected his marks.

New Challenge: D (J's younger brother) has just finished 4 years of school, and he is going into grade 9 next fall. He does NOT want to go back, even though he is an extroverted 'party guy' personality. (Uncle Cal, has dubbed him 'party guy' and the name fits.) So I am going to make plans to home educate him.

Myself, I am taking a sabbatical from my career, and will probably focus on building another business. For personal interest I am going to be working through an MIT OpenCourseware syllabus 24.00 Problems of Philosophy (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Linguistics-and-Philosophy/24-00Fall-2005/CourseHome/index.htm). I'll redouble my efforts to keep you all informed.

2003-10-16T16:51:00.000-07:00

Back to blogging.

I was away all week Oct. 6th - 11th visiting other home schooling families in northern Alberta. Originally J was planning to come with me, but a last minute call offering him some work convinced him to stay home. So we got no school work done last week. But I visited many homes, and J earned some money.

We got back into it on Oct. 14th, the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving weekend.

At first J. was not very enthusiastic about doing school work. He balked at doing two science experiments in his book, complained that we didn't have the materials (a piece of purple cabbage, a balloon, and a 2 litre pop bottle). Once we got home from the grocery store he was quite eager to get started. The experiment involved boiling the cabbage (creating a blue water--a base) and then adding vinegar, which turned the blue water pink. We took pictures, and hopefully we'll post them sometime.

The other incident involved stopping by the library to find materials for a report on Ancient China.

I dropped J at the library and told him to look for some books, thus I was surprised when he came back 2 min. later and said "they don't have anything... I'll do a google search at home". It dawned on me that I would have to introduce him to my favorite research tool. . . the Reader's Guide to Periodicals.

Unfortunately, the RGP is no longer kept in hard-copy format but is accessible electronically. I had a momentary twinge of sadness for the loss of my beloved reference set. Getting over it quickly, I asked the librarian to give us a demonstration of the new system, which was unavailable because the computer terminals were all busy. She demonstrated a similar database of Canadian Periodicals, but we didn't get a lot of useful articles.

In the end J came home and did a google search, found one website and declared himself done. Hence, when we CONTINUE this next day I'll have scouted out a few articles he'll have to find treasure hunt style.

J is interested in Ancient China, especially the Chin and Han dynasties. I am interested in recent discoveries of Chinese explorers that may have circumnavigated the globe before the Europeans. We'll see where our research takes us.

2003-09-22T10:23:00.000-07:00

J is back from China! He arrived on Saturday after spending the last two nights of his trip in Hawaii. We are looking forward to getting his pictures developed and hearing all the details of his experience in another culture.

Our first Monday morning of the year, I setup a daily timetable we will try to follow. The jist of it is that we are doing Science and Social on alternate days. Math and Language Arts will be everyday, however we will alternate between "heavy" math--"light" LA days, and vice versa. On heavy Math days he will be doing a lesson from his Algebra video course (from VideoText Interactive), and on light days we will be working on timed basic computation. On LA heavy days he will be doing Literature & Grammar, and on light days he will be doing Spelling and Vocabulary.

How much time we will spend home-schooling per day? I think the core academic material outlined above will be about 3 hrs a morning, Monday to Thursday. The afternoons, are allocated to: gym, music, computers, free-reading, and finishing any leftover work from the morning. In fact, rather than give Friday as a "catch-up" day I am expecting that he will get his day's work completed as "homework" in the evening so that it doesn't accumulate.

Friday's are reserved for visiting the local library, or going on a field trip.

2003-09-12T15:20:00.001-07:00

This week our home education has become global education. J has gone on a trip to China with his grandmother--what an experience for a 13 year-old!!

Education: is it about books or about experiences? Which is preferable? There are several ways to think about combining books and experiences.

The advantage of experience is that as long as you pay attention, the learner has an immediate context in which to integrate new knowledge. Whether performing an experiment or participating in a different culture, you are able to observe relationships and how things work first-hand. The more you can participate the richer the experience.

"Book-learning" however takes us into knowledge places we can't easily get to on our own. We learn vicariously through the author, but we have to work harder to make contextual connections with our own knowledge.

Likely, a combination of experiential and "book-learning" is ideal. An education too-rich in experience leaves a learner ignorant about things beyond his personal horizon of learning events. An education too rich in book learning (following the thinking of others) yields a person that may not have a thought to call their own.

Or perhaps this is all a fancy rationalization for going on a trip rather than getting down to the books like everyone else is doing this time of year.

2003-09-12T15:20:00.000-07:00

2003-09-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

Today J and I had a discrepancy about whose responsibility it was to prepare for science experiments. He explained that good teachers have everything laid out for the students. My point-of-view is that if you want "good teachers" you should be in school--that the point of home schooling is to do it yourself!

In the end, I had to drive to the grocery store and get some grapes for the experiment. Once J had everything he was keen to carry out the investigation.

After the experiments, there were some questions from the textbook to answer. J wanted me to mark his work and give him a grade. I refused. I explained that the purpose of all the questions in the unit was for him to clarify his understanding of the concepts; and for that purpose I would assign a Pass/Fail or Done/Redo grading. His grades would be determined by the end of the unit tests, which I hope to become organized enough to keep in a spreadsheet.

Maybe I'll convince him to setup his own website to show-off his experiments.

2003-09-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

Time invested in blogging: 45 min. and I've gotten this far.
Why do I want to do it? Let's just say its a lot like leaving a trail of bread crumbs as you walk through the forest. Today is my second day of home schooling my son J. I have a nagging suspicion that in a few months I'll need to reassure myself that somethings actually happened.

**Today we finished CTBS testing, (woo-hoo)**

But, I can't get too high about our little success, tomorrow is another day to fill.