Free Learner

John Taylor Gatto audio

For those of you who are homeschoolers (and those of you who aren't!), I discovered a treasure trove of downloadable John Taylor Gatto audio.  Gatto was a New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year, during a career in which he engaged in (as he puts it) "sabotage" against the system on behalf of his students.  In part, he provided official cover for them to escape school and pursue their own goals.  The year he won the New York State award, he quit--  publicly, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. (This page includes the op-ed / resignation letter.)

I particularly recommend The Guerrilla Curriculum and On the Scientific Management of Children.

Bullying robs us all

From the LA Times:

[Susan] Boyle's story resembles that of Paul Potts, a shy cellphone salesman turned opera tenor who won the first season of "Britain's Got Talent" in 2007 by belting out a credible rendition of Puccini's aria "Nessun Dorma."

Potts' performance was another online sensation, with more than 43 million views to date. Bullying at school undermined his confidence, he said in interviews. Boyle also told a British newspaper that she was bullied at school for her frizzy hair and for having learning difficulties.

Susan Boyle has been an inspiration to millions in the past several days.  Paul Potts' story is every bit as inspiring, given his downtrodden, miserable demeanor.  In both cases, bullying in their early school years helped to squelch their talents.  Bullying can haunt people for their entire lives-- why on earth do we tolerate it?  What gifts are we collectively throwing into the trash bin by allowing children to be bullied?

For more on Potts try this (his early performances on Britain's Got Talent) and this (the final -- which he won).  Even as a woman who has watched the Susan Boyle YouTube clip approximately 597 times in the past 48 hours, I have to say that Paul Potts is every bit her equal in surprising and wonderful talent.  And unlike Susan Boyle, he seems to wear an expression of pain on his face, even when the judges are exclaiming that they're blown away by his abilities.  This poor guy was seriously damaged by bullying.

Incidentally, Potts didn't go to a music school to learn to sing opera.  He took some prize winnings and went straight to Italy.  As an unschooler, I love that!

Thoughts on reading

Yesterday I ran across a good post about reading, which had this to say about reading in schools:

What was more disturbing was that the second a child succeeded in reading a level with only a few mistakes, they were given a harder book. There was never any ease or comfort in reading. It was always a hard, boring chore. Children were not allowed to linger in a level to achieve fluency, to enjoy the reading, they were always being forced to struggle through to the next stage to try to keep up with provincial requirements.

I left this comment:

You make a great point about kids being moved on to the next reading level as soon as possible, keeping them constantly frustrated. That's really unfortunate. Even when kids are reading books below their reading level, they are still cementing spelling & grammar rules simply by absorbing them from the text. Plus, not only does it make them more confident readers, but it allows them to read the book more dramatically (whether out loud, or just using their internal, mental voice) because they aren't distracted constantly by challenging words. My daughter used to say that yes, she could read, but she couldn't read "like the audiobooks." She meant that it was hard to imagine the setting, the voices, & the emotions because the text itself was still quite challenging. I submit that if you can't get wrapped up in a book enough to imagine the characters & their tone of voice & so on, you are not fully reading that book. But of course, in school it's simply a matter of being able to say the words aloud. (I'm sure we all remember listening to other kids reading aloud in a total monotone, with no regard for the ends of sentences!)

When we found the Freddy the Pig audiobooks, I realized that my kids can learn an immense amount of vocabulary, random cultural knowledge, figures of speech & proverbs, grammar and syntax, all from audiobooks. All that's missing is deciphering symbols (reading, as it's often measured in school) and correctly arranging symbols (spelling and punctuation). They get everything from an audiobook except the mechanics, in other words. In fact, they get more, because the voice acting is usually quite good, and those vocal cues help kids understand unfamiliar slang or vocabulary. The Freddy books are chock full of old proverbs and odd slang (plus the word "phaeton"). I guarantee my daughter learns more listening to Freddy than reading any of the crappy early readers used in my old elementary school.

A blogger (I wish I remember who it was) once said that the early schooling years are all about symbol manipulation, and I agree.  There is a great deal of focus on the mechanics of language, and very little focus on why we read and write language in the first place.

Don't mess with reading

Tonight, for the first time in many, many months, Anya read out loud to me.  She normally hates reading out loud, as she does not like being evaluated.  But she had this rain forest frogs book and wanted to share it, so, out of the blue, she asked if she could read parts of it to me.

Here are two of the paragraphs she read aloud, with only 2 pauses on the words "chemicals" and "moist":

Poison dart frogs don't need to hide or escape.  They hop fearlessly about on the forest floor during the day.  Their bright colors warn predators, "Don't touch me."  Only a few animals can eat them, because their skin contains bitter-tasting chemicals.  Some of these chemicals are very poisonous.

. . .

Many rain forest frogs do not lay their eggs in the water.  The eggs of some frogs are protected by foam nests along the water's edge or on overhanging leaves.  The foam keeps the eggs moist and helps protect them from predators.  Often, the tadpoles hatch within the foam, and rain carries them into the water.

She read about 20-25 such paragraphs very well, the way an adult would, changing the tone of her voice and indicating the ends of sentences.  I am not patting myself on the back, because I did not teach her to read.  I gave her the very basics of phonics, those unreliable rules which are violated incessantly in our idiomatic language, and she taught herself from then on.  I have not even tested her reading in any way in quite a few months.  I saw her with books, I assumed that learning was taking place.  (Even when, for months, those books were almost entirely Garfield comics; we now own virtually the entire series.)

Her reading tonight was not like the student readings I remember, where texts were recited in a monotone that made no exceptions for periods, commas, or dialogue.  Anya read "very poisonous" quite dramatically, as she did other phrases and sentence clauses.  She also stopped to insert her own comments, making connections between the text and her existing knowledge of rain forests, frogs, endangered species, etc.  So I had no doubts about her reading comprehension.  It was, altogether, nothing at all like "reading group" in my old elementary school.  This is not so much because schools are doing something wrong, it's largely because they are failing to do something right, namely: let children choose what they read.  If they find something they want to read, they're going to learn to read it.

Anyway, I have no idea what a third grade reading level looks like, so I went and googled "third grade reading level example."  Argh!!!!

Apparently, one is not allowed to merely... like... read books in the third grade.  No no no!  You have to play games & do quizzes about "rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration" and "consonant blends and digraphs" and "using an index" and "root words" and "compound words, contractions, and common abbreviations".  It's all about jargon, people!!!  Have YOU taken the Homophone Challenge?  Have YOU read 'Success with Suffixes'?  Have YOU played 'Feast of Antonyms'?

As my husband says, institutional schooling is all about making you use your left brain, and your LEFT BRAIN ONLY.  No wonder reading comprehension is difficult.  These kids have been trained to the see the trees and nothing but the trees, and never the forest.

Another thing I came across was a list of spelling words for the 3rd grade.  Now I ask you, does anyone seriously believe that a child won't learn to spell "park," "size," or "about" at some point?  Even in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods?  If you know that a kid is going to pick up words like "bike," "team," and "wash," and probably within another couple of years, is it really necessary to take up class time making them "use the word in a sentence" in third grade?  Why not use that time to let them read what they want from the school library, instead?

Proper spelling simply gets absorbed, as do most grammatical rules, during reading.  The other day Anya was doing a math worksheet that said "Name" and "Date" at the top, only she didn't know the date.  So she wrote "UNKNOWN" in the Date slot.  I had no idea she could spell that, and I don't think she considered whether or not she knew how to spell it... she just wrote it.

I think it is very useful to learn parts of speech, the definitions of prefix / suffix / root, and all of that.  But it is trivially easy to teach this in, say, 7th grade, when kids have probably already noticed the ways that words are put together.  By then, they will eat up jargon like "adjective" and "root word" because those terms will give a name to something they'd already noticed, if almost subconsciously.  But to insist upon such knowledge in 3rd grade is simply a means of standing in the way of real reading.

You want kids to read better?  Give them a library and a wonderful librarian*, and then stay the hell out of their way.

* We have one at our local public library who shares Anya's love for Bunnicula and first introduced us to Freddy.

Yes, we're still homeschooling

I don't often write homeschooling posts these days, because they would tend to be a collection of miscellany and short anecdotes.  I guess I exhausted the bigger philosophical and political considerations at my old blog.  But we are indeed still homeschooling.

Anya went through a major reading and audiobook phase over the past 3 months, so I left her to it, and we haven't done much else, recently.  It was about one year ago that she began reading, and she has been learning on her own, since "doing reading" together does NOT work for us.  She really likes an old book series featuring Freddy the Pig, written by Walter Brooks in the 1920s to 1950s.  There are 26 of them, each around 220-250 pages, so we are in hog heaven (sorry, couldn't resist).  I like it that the books have old slang, old figures of speech, and old words (such as the word she learned that her dad didn't know: phaeton; I wouldn't have known it either, had it not been for regency era novels).  They also have moral messages that are not overdone or heavy-handed, as well as witty social commentary.  And they introduce ideas from the adult world, such as how banks, trials, and political campaigns work.  I think these books are brilliant, and can't believe they were out of print for so many years.  I came across this NPR piece [scroll to the bottom] on how the books got republished, after a small regional publisher was talked into attending a mass Friends of Freddy meeting.  He was so inspired by these fanatical Freddy fans that without knowing a thing about the copyrights or anything, he got up and gave a short impromptu speech promising to publish them.

In the last week or so, we've returned to math after a long hiatus.  Anya's been finishing off equations with a mix of symbols (+, -, x), where a different number is missing.  E.g., [blank] + 5 = 9, 3 x [blank] = 21, etc.  There was an equation written out like this:

    [blank] = 5 - 4 + 7

She had written in 6 as the answer.  This is a perfect example of what used to happen to me in school all the time-- her reasoning was absolutely logical, even though she got the wrong answer according to mathematical convention.  I asked her why she'd put 6 there, and she said "Because 7 plus 4 is 11, and 11 minus 5 is 6."  That is, the equals sign was on the left, so she read the entire equation moving from right to left, assuming it should be read in reverse order.  In school, this would have been marked wrong, no explanations given on either side.

A friend of Anya's who is about the same age went back to school this year, after having been homeschooled for a year and a half.  Today I was talking to his mom about how he really adores his teacher.  She mentioned that he had read a long book (120 pages) and written a book report summarizing it, then attributed this largely to the teacher by saying the teacher had "done so much for him."  But Anya has also had a leap in reading ability in the past few months, and all I've done is supply the books.  Possibly, around the age of 6 or 7 or 8, many kids have this reading explosion.  But because this friend goes to school, and this was a school assignment, somehow his teacher is given some of the credit for his reading that 120-page book.  I thought this was kind of sad-- it's his accomplishment, not the teacher's. 

The truth is, you can't actually "teach" a kid to read.  You can give them the very basics, the most common rules of phonics; you can force them to memorize certain common words; you can help them when they get stuck on a word.  But that's really not very much.  English is ridiculously idiomatic and phonetically inconsistent.  Every supposed phonics or spelling rule is broken constantly.  You carefully teach them that when a "g" is followed by "e" or "i" it makes a "j" sound, and the first sentence they come to contains the word "get".  We imagine we are the reason they begin reading, but frankly, most of those rules and explanations make kids frustrated and confused when they turn out to be wrong, which is often.  And yet, in spite of our rather bizarre written language and the enormous English vocabulary, when kids are ready they pick it up like a sponge.  That reading explosion is not due to teaching.  You can't simply install this mixture of motivation, brain development, and epiphany inside a kid's head.  The best you can do is to get their foot in the door (phonics & common sight words), wait (and wait, and wait), and be ready to jump in with books they'll love when the reading explosion begins.

By the way, I have no idea what people mean when they talk about whether a child is reading or not.  Anya could read her name and the words Mom, Dad, and Moo when she was 2.  Was she reading?  She could sound out a few words at 4, and a good number of simple words at 5, but she couldn't string those sounds together (e.g. "hhh-aaa-t" never became "hat").  Was she reading then?  We were at that stage for two solid years.  When she was 7 she began reading the Webkinz site and Frog and Toad, but not fluently.  Was that reading?  I can now definitively say she is reading, but I am not sure how other parents decide this.  I suspect we homeschoolers discuss the ages when our kids started reading, but have many different ideas of what "reading" entails.

Already, a gun fired at school

It wasn't a usual school shooting, but a boy in Ohio did fire a gun twice in a school hallway yesterday.  He was apparently intending to kill himself, and was maybe practicing firing the gun.  The principal and assistant principal talked him into dropping the gun.

What struck me was this:

"He did put the gun to his head numerous times," Lombardo said. "He never really said why he was doing it. He did say it wasn't like him to do this, and he was fearful that he had ruined his life."

In a local news video, the principal reiterated: "He was basically saying it wasn't him, he doesn't know why he's doing this."

Yeah, that's called dissociation.  "I'm not me," the kid is saying; "this is not real."  In his case, his own existence did not seem quite real to him.  In other cases, neither the other students and adults in the school nor their own existence seems real, which makes it easy to both murder others and commit suicide.  This disconnection from reality can be a side effect of common psychiatric medications, as discussed in this article on psychiatric drugs and school violence.

Whenever there is a school shooting, I assume a priori that anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and/or ADHD stimulants were involved.  So far I do not know of any school shooting where the kid was not medicated.  Columbine happened a few days after Eric Harris's Luvox dosage was doubled; Kip Kinkel was taking both Prozac and Ritalin; the Virginia Tech murderer was on anti-depressants.  Doctors prescribe these drugs but fail to monitor kids afterward, even though we know that suicide, violent thoughts, and psychosis are more common side effects in adolescents than in adults.

The argument that these kids were crazy to begin with, so of course they were on meds, does not stand up.  In most cases newspaper reports suggest the shooters were fairly normal until recently, and/or did normal and everyday things just prior to the incident.  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as we all remember thanks to Michael Moore's film, attended their 1st hour bowling class before going on to murder classmates.  And in the days just before their rampage, they had flirted with girls and talked about prom.

If parents want safer schools, they need to mount campaigns to reduce the percentage of students taking psychiatric drugs in their communities.

Fire school administrators

My kids may not attend school, but nonetheless I'm very aware of the impending financial disaster facing many public schools.  It's like a quintuple-whammy of Very Bad Things coming down the pike:

1. Falling state and local government revenues, resulting in budget cuts
2. A a recent tripling of diesel prices (busing costs are 2nd only to payroll)
3. A sudden inability for local governments to borrow money
4. The freezing of some school investment accounts, causing cash flow problems
5. Major inflation, meaning everything tangible is escalating in price

And so we come to my suggestion: fire school administrators.  Not every single one, but a good 3/4 of them.

John Taylor Gatto, in his book "A Different Kind of Teacher," calculates that New York state spent 51% of all money earmarked for public schools on administration costs (again, this was at the state level).  At the local school level, another half of the remaining funds were given to administrators.  Only a quarter of the money was spent on teachers, classrooms, and supplies, or what most people think of as "school".

Administrators police the top-down, centralized, and industry-controlled school agenda.  If the Carnegie Foundation wants more control over schools, they must increase supervision of teachers and restrict their autonomy.  They must also restrict students' freedom, policing their speech, clothing, time outside school, and so on.  All this policing of students and teachers requires administrators, and we've got a hell of a lot more of them than we had 50 years ago, or even 20 years ago.

Of course, if you let administrators go, then how are schools going to handle all that standardized testing?  Simple: stop testing.  Testing is supposedly about quality control and improvement of schools, but what I'm talking about is a full-on crisis in which you're doing good if the building is heated, the buses are running, and you've kept it to <35 students per class.  Forget testing.  Most states would save tens of millions of dollars right off the bat, not including what they could save in administrator salaries.

Administrators also review teacher performance and okay their lesson plans and so forth.  Stop doing that too.  If a teacher is considered in any sense qualified, that should include being able to design lesson plans, for crying out loud.  New teachers could be mentored to senior teachers, if need be.  Let parents evaluate what their children are (or are not) learning.  Yes, they are capable of that.  It's just that our current system pats them on their little heads and tells them not to be involved in their child's education, because the school will handle that without their input, and frankly their input is far from invited.

Administrators handle disciplinary cases... but of course, the disciplinary system itself is usually a bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy, labyrinthine structure which would be better handled by one adult with an ability to relate to children than by hordes of Vice Principals toting Codes of Conduct.

Fire them, I say.

Superintendents from across California have been all over the papers bemoaning the recent 10% budget cut to education.  "I just don't know where we can make cuts," they whine.  Of course they don't!  They're administrators!  Ask a hamstrung, micro-managed teacher with 7 bosses where they should make cuts-- I dare you.

Homeschoolers have a stake in this, too, because the worse off the schools are financially, the more they will resent students who leave school to learn at home.  If you're the principal of a school in New York state, and three of your students leave to be homeschooled, that's a $45,000 loss annually.  You might have to let a staff member go.  Isn't it likely that principals and teachers will make it more difficult to homeschool once they are scrabbling for every last dollar?

The whole time homeschooling has been legal in most states, schools have been relatively well off financially.  Under Clinton the economy did fairly well, and during the 2001-2007 housing bubble, local government revenues went up substantially every year in much of the country.  (Higher property values mean higher property taxes, and that's the main source of revenue for local government; much of that filtered down to the schools.)

Therefore, I don't feel that homeschooling has really been tested.  On lefty blogs you'll often hear that homeschooling is snobby and selfish, a privilege for the rich.  Only one homeschooling family that I know of is wealthy.  Most are getting by on under-the-table work, on an adjunct faculty salary, on the salary of blue collar jobs, etc.  Clothes are bought at second-hand shops or traded, food is grown in backyards and food co-ops and comes from sales at Trader Joe's, and cars are frequently on the fritz.  Nonetheless homeschooling is seen as elitist.  As schools deteriorate, I imagine things will get uglier and homeschoolers will begin to face harassment.

But the schools don't need to deteriorate, if only they fired the administrators and de-centralized.  The Powers That Be will resist that with everything they've got.  They've had a century to consolidate and control schools in an increasingly top-down manner, to dictate to teachers, to design curricula, to determine tests and textbooks.  They won't give it up willingly.  But maybe we can get a "meme" going, a rallying cry of sorts:

Fire School Administrators.

Faux multiculturalism

At the grocery store today we bought a "Math Basics, Grade 4" workbook by the School Zone Publishing Company.  The word problems in it are predominantly about Mexico or feature Hispanic names, which is apparently an effort to appeal to Hispanic students, but it just comes across as annoying.  "The distance from Mexico City to Cordoba is about 170 miles...."  "The average number of people living in one house in Mexico is 6...."  "Juan's book about Mexico has 456 pages...."  "First Melinda read a book about Mexico with 250 pages...."

Then of course you have the stupid problems, where clearly it is of no benefit to any ethnic group to have themselves mentioned therein:

Miguel is a mousetrap maker.  Once he made 563 mousetraps out of bubblegum.  He made another 447 mousetraps out of doorknobs.  Quite the clever fellow!  How many did he make in all?

Um.... what? 

As a kid I would get stuck on the stupidities of questions like this.  How do you make a mousetrap with bubble gum?  And who the hell has that many doorknobs lying around?  Or how about this one:

Luis spends all day thinking.  One day he thought of 1,599 funny jokes to tell his friends.  His friend Pedro thought of 2,735 very funny jokes to tell.  Was there ever a lot of laughing that day!  How many jokes did their friends hear?

I can just imagine my 4th grade self wasting precious test-taking seconds thinking: but wait a minute, is there time to tell 4,334 jokes in a day?  Let's say you're with your friends for 8 hours, that's 480 minutes... that's around 6 seconds a joke-- there's no way!

Why it's considered helpful or engaging to use Hispanic names while insulting kids with "Quite a clever fellow!" is beyond me.  But surely any misguided attempts at being politically sensitive are destroyed by this word problem:

In 1521, Hernando Cortes conquered Mexico for the country of Spain.  Then in the year 1810, Miguel Hidalgo y Costillo fought for Mexico's freedom from Spain.  How many years did Spain rule Mexico before they began to fight for their freedom? [emphasis mine]

Yeah, for the first three centuries, it was all wine and roses with those adorable Spaniards.  The stupid Mexicans didn't know they'd been taken until a guy named Miguel smacked his forehead in 1810 and said "Hey!  Wait a minute!"

The way I would feel, if my parents were from Mexico and I was having to do these worksheets in class, is embarrassed.  The inclusion of Mexico and Mexicans is so badly and blatantly done, with so much condescension and sheer stupidity, that I would feel embarrassed and chagrined that such idiots felt they needed to "help" Mexicans.  As if Mexican history and culture cannot stand on their own, but require some moron in a cubicle at School Zone Publishing to laud Mexicans with the ability to make mousetraps out of doorknobs.  As if.  If this is in any way indicative of the politically correct "assistance" being given to minority ethnic groups, no wonder schools reinforce race-related achievement gaps. 

Seeing the forest

One of the problems with trying to learn science in the usual schooly way (by reading a textbook) is that textbooks start with the nitty gritty... and then continue with further nitty gritty.  They never zoom out.  Detail is built upon detail, and it's merely assumed that somehow the reader will be able to grasp the broader picture.  The truth is, I think most students never see the forest for the trees.

I count myself in this category when it comes to chemistry.  I got an A in chemistry in high school, but other than some vague idea that it's very important to get your units to cancel in your equations, I don't remember a thing.  (This is rather embarrassing since both my father and my brother are chemists at heart.)  Your typical high school science class is really just a math class in a certain applied area, and since I am good at math, I always did fine.  But when I discovered the "Physics for Future Presidents" course, I realized what science could have been.  I could have been taught the concepts and the real life importance, with the math left out.  In fact, far more material could be covered in this way, because you aren't bogged down with weeks of equation manipulation.  But science is not taught conceptually because school is really job training, and it's assumed that the people who most need science are future engineers who will need to do those precise calculations.  This is more proof that school is not truly about education, that it doesn't bring out innate talents or enrich lives or promote independent thought and insight.  Nope.  It's just job training.

Contrast this with child-led learning.  This evening Anya wanted to study some chemistry, so we hauled out "Chemistry for Dummies" and sat down by the laptop.  I opened up the book to the Periodic Table and she asked "Which one of these is the most important?"  Whoa-- okay, even if I remembered every detail from high school chemistry, we certainly didn't cover that question.  I said maybe it was carbon because living things on Earth are called "carbon-based life," because carbon is in so many of the chemicals in living things.  Then I did some Googling and found this page and several others.  I said that the most important elements, from our perspective as humans, were probably the ones involved in life forms, which are hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.  I read the "carbon" blurb about how it forms the "backbone" of many long chain molecules, and how hydrogen and oxygen are obviously important because they make water, but also they link up with carbon easily, which means you can get lots of different chemicals out of just C, H, and O.  As for nitrogen, all I could say was "Well, plants need a lot of it in the soil" and that it to was often seen in carbon-based molecules.

I will freely admit that this conversation was rather stressful.  Kids tend to think their parents are fonts of wisdom on every possible topic, which of course we are not.  But Anya is so intense about it all.  "Why isn't this one important?" she'd demand, pointing to boron, element #5-- "It's right next to carbon," she pointed out.  Uh... I'll have to get back to you on that one.  Also, while I am investigating these things with my daughter, brainstorming all sorts of hypotheses and questions, I sometimes feel this wave of regret that I was not able to learn this way myself.  By high school my attitude was "Yadda yadda, just tell me the math I need to get this right on the next test," accompanied by clock-watching and a sky-high level of anxiety which made me hate living in my own skin.  The wonders of carbon were entirely lost.  The fact that out of roughly 90 naturally occurring chemicals only 4 are absolutely critical to life was similarly lost.  There was no "why" to anything when I was sitting in chemistry class.  There was only "Here is the recipe for equations of type 132, and make sure your units cancel."

I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I honestly grieve that I was taught so badly, that fulfilling my curiosity and enriching my life was never the point.  That I have gone through most of my life not fully understanding the natural world, because chemistry, biology, and physics were just classes one took in high school.  That I got my A in chemistry, forgot everything... and was totally nonplussed when asked by my 7-year-old daughter why nitrogen matters, and boron doesn't.

Specialization is for insects

Thanks go to my mom for sending me this image: