First we have Aidan with grandma’s guitar. He is drawn to strings and enjoys strumming but resists any thing that might resemble instruction (which is typical for him). He likes to place his fingers about the frets and strum–listening for variations in tone and vibration. Here we see him demonstrating his unique method of experimentation; a rare musical performance, as he is not nearly as comfortable with this form of expression as he is with other forms.

Click the links below for more of Aidan, acting, singing, and dancing.

See Aidan the puppeteer –>

  Earth Scouts inaugural meeting

Earth Scouts works to empower kids by having them work together and try to make differences in their communities and in the world. It focuses on five broad topics/principles (respecting nature,   The Earth boardpeace & nonviolence, economic justice, human rights, and participatory democracy). The idea behind it is that you provide different activities for the kids to introduce topics and to help inspire them, to provide greater understanding on these topics, to allow for them to demonstrate what they have learned, and then to provide opportunities for them to put the principles into practice.

I have to admit I was a little nervous about our first meeting and how well it would go. Not nervous so much in what we wanted to do but more with the size of our group. We have 21 kids participating in our Earth Scouts group. The facilitator’s handbook recommends no more than 10! In addition to having double the suggested number I was a little worried about how everything would play out since some of our regular homeschool meetings have seemed, in my mind, a little chaotic and noisy. But, everything   Aidan and mini-Aidanwent well. It probably helped that a few of the younger kids who typically come to the regular meetings were not at Earth Scouts, and also that a number of the parents who typically sit off at the tables talking during our regular meetings were more engaged with their kids and our activities. The activities all seemed to flow nicely and the kids really seemed engaged and excited to be part of this. For this first meeting one of the main activities was that all the kids made a “person” to represent themselves which they will place around our earth board at each meeting. The final result of this was pretty cool!

•  2 hours
•  49 volunteers
•  50 boxes of food
•  10,800 meals
•  30 kids fed for a year

Together with a team of 49 volunteers, we prepared a specially designed food mixture of a vegetarian chicken flavoring including vitamins and minerals, dehydrated vegetables, soy nuggets, and rice. This mixture is designed specifically for children who are starving to death. We worked together at stations to bag this food into 400g bags, which we then heat sealed, labeled, and packed into cardboard boxes for shipping. In two hours time we packed 50 boxes each containing 36 bags of food. (Each bag is enough for 6 meals.) In two hours, we packed 10,800 meals which can provide one meal a day for 30 children over the course of a year. Not bad for a couple hours of work on Monday afternoon. Aidan loved the work. FMSC is one of the few places it seems in the area that welcomes the help of even small children. I suppose there is something special about children feeding children. We are definitely going back–hopefully with even more helping hands.

Learning, to me, means making more sense of the world around us, and being able to do more things in it. Success in school means remembering the answers to teachers’ questions they will ask, getting clever about guessing what questions they will ask, and about how to fool them when you don’t know the answers.

Update: 10/27/2008
Ok, I finished this little book and found it both useful and inspiring. Holt offers specific strategies for working with kids in areas of reading, writing, math, science, and music; however, what I found most compelling was his refrain throughout the book that children learn best when they are not being taught. Actually, no, he goes further than this with his assertion. He says that active teaching of children (even by the best intentioned) can impede learning. This may sound like an overstatement, but I witnessed it myself as I was reading the book and working with my son Aidan.

One morning, I took it upon myself to begin working with some beads at the kitchen table–moving them around in different stacks to see how 10 beads could be represented physically in a variety of different ways (a set of three and a set of seven, two sets of five, five sets of two, and so on). I was playing with the nature of numbers using these manipulatives–the beads–to see how many different ways I could mix and match the same set of ten. I was working independently while Aidan was doing something else–until he noticed me and asked what I was up to. I explained that I was just figuring some stuff out. He became intrigued and wanted to see and hear more of what I was doing. So, I showed him. It was going swimmingly for a good 15 minutes until I began to ask him questions about the arrangements of beads and different possibilities. This is when he stopped. He looked at me suspiciously across the kitchen table, paused, and then stormed out of the room in huff yelling, “Mom, Dad’s trying to teach me something!” He was angry, and, according to John Holt, for reasons that make perfect sense.

Learning is as natural as breathing. But if you think about breathing too much, you may find yourself short of breath.

Holt writes about the perils of uninvited teaching, saying that when we seize the moment to “teach” kids (or anyone really) something, we convey a double message. The first message, according to Holt, is “I am teaching you something important, but you’re not smart enough to see how important it is. Unless I teach it to you, you’d probably never bother to find out” (129). The second message is not much better. It goes something like this: “What I’m teaching you is so difficult that, if I didn’t teach it to you, you couldn’t learn it” (129). These are messages of both distrust and contempt and they are very clearly understood by children (129). I witnessed this first hand with Aidan, and since coming to think of it in these terms, I see it all the time. I know immediately when I cross the line with Aidan, and as I see myself doing it, I regret my misstep. I also see evidence of the long-term effects of this double message of teaching in the college students that I work with. By and large, there is a systemic resentment of teachers and an institutional process that sends messages of contempt and distrust for 12 plus years of their young lives. I really am starting to get this now.

Given the perils of heavy-handed teaching (which all “teaching” is in its traditional incarnation), what can we do not to teach but to help our kids learn? Holt offers suggestions that make good sense if you have faith in the idea that learning is as natural as breathing. He reminds us, “Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made. We know what these are. They include time, leisure, freedom, and lack of pressure” (100). The best we can to help our children with their learning is to provide them with “access: to people, places, experiences, the places where we work, other places we go–cities, countries, streets, buildings. We can also make available tools, books, records, toys, and other resources” (127). We can answer the questions our kids ask us, but must resist the temptation to seize every question as a teachable moment–in which to lecture at length. If children want to know more, they will ask. It’s the most natural thing for them to do, as long as it is invited and encouraged.

Self-directed learning is the deepest learning. The best learning is rooted in reality. The college students I teach (and many students I have known in my life) reference this thing called “the real world” all the time. “When are we going to need this in the real world,” we say. I am starting to see the wisdom of such a statement that has previously seemed like the complaint of a lazy mind. Children want nothing more than to make sense of the real world (and not the artificial and abstracted world of school). Holt states this well.

To make an abstraction out of some part of reality we must take some meaning out of it…. Children resist this continual abstracting because their chief business in life is finding and making meaning, putting meaning into a world that must at first seem wholly meaningless to them. It is not a weakness on their part but a strength. (104)

So, on our regular long drives to our real world adventures about town, I will find some comfort in Aidan’s incessant questioning about literally everything, his ongoing chatter, his moments of silence as he thinks to himself (and ignores us), his assumptions that we are right there with him as he connects stray details from literally months prior with something he just now observed. All of this, I understand, is his making sense of the world around him in a way that is very real, deep and lasting, and in a way that demonstrates he is, indeed, learning all the time.

  The original shot.

I thought the original shot (while taken a cloudy day) was decent until I dropped into LightZone and made a few clicks of the mouse to create the tweaked version.

  The “LightZone” adjusted version.

The LightZone “Relight” tool made an immediate improvement with just a single click. I went a little further though, and isolated the handful of leaves in the photo as a region to add some color saturation. Then, finally, I sharpened the photo just a little to bring out some more local contrast in the details. Total editing time was about 5 minutes.

• http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/polymer.html
• http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20051012/LZActivity.asp
• http://www.pslc.ws/macrog/kidsmac/wiap.htm
• http://pbskids.org/zoom/activities/sci/
• http://www.msichicago.org/online-science/activities/activity-detail/activities/make-slime/

As I said, check back in the next couple days because I’ll be putting together some resources and information for learning and playing with slime at home.

The aim…is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. –H.L. Mencken

It was unnerving to feel Gatto’s words offered up as an indictment of public schooling in this country, while simultaneously observing firsthand the products of such a system sink back into their seats, passive and docile. What could I say or do to jar them out of their comas? They seem to be quite unaware of the forces institutional life have on them, and yet exhibit it through and through. They say nothing, though, neither denying nor confirming its influence. They just sit. After some prompting, one said he was bored. I asked him what he thought about Gatto’s comment on boredom in “Against School.” Then I read Gatto’s comment to him because he had not gotten that far in the reading.

One afternoon when I was seven I complained to [my grandfather] of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. (33)

At this, he shrugged, and said. “Well, I can’t do anything about this. I have no choice. I have to be here.” I quickly reminded him of his choices. He could, of course, leave. Or he could participate in the discussion rather than tune it out. He could have done the reading, and, as a result, begun to consider ways to break away from tired roles. (Is this logic circular?) Or he simply could choose not to be bored. At this, he slunk back down in his seat and became quiet. My attempt had backfired. I had become that teacher, chastising the slacker student, thereby widening the gulf between us. This was not my goal.

What accounts for this utter helplessness learned by so many of our students? Is our system as Gatto describes it? One “deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens–all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’” (36)? This sounds like the stuff of good conspiracy theory, and yet it rings so true. I have observed this time and time again first hand. It’s like the scene from The Wall when the uniformed kids with facial features literally blotted out march methodically in single file through the factory school, dropping one by one into a giant hopper to be ground into meat for mass consumption.

As out there as this film is, it really strikes a chord. Now if only my students could hear it resonate.

“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
               -Thoreau

Each day, Ms. Connie directs our focus to new ways of seeing. We look closely for squirrels and chipmunks and find hatless acorns and split black walnuts, freshly gnawed middens–evidence of their presence. From Milkweed dripping white to the green brain of the Osage Orange to the fallen azure of Jacob’s Ladder, we study flower, fruit, and seed. After some conversation on the day’s lesson in a clearing near the woods, twelve children, moms, and trailing dads begin their silent hike–into the forest, crossing a creek bed by way of a fallen tree, perhaps stopping for a while in the hidden classroom, a log on the forest floor with room for all to sit, beneath the shade of Maple, Oak, and Mulberry.

After kicking through the crush of Ash leaves, later we rest on fairy’s carpet to munch a snack of ants on a log and tell stories of our adventures–those past and those yet to come.