How Children Learn - Art, Math & Other Things

Kids can use sharp tools?  Really?
p. 202  "I agree strongly with Mr. Wesley that even very young children should be given or have access to art materials of high quality, and shown how to use them carefully and well, just as we would show them how to use any other quality tools.  Freed of the limitations of bad tools, they can then begin to explore, express, and enlarge their own artistic powers.  We should not assume that they will be too clumsy, impatient, and uncaring to use these tools properly.  They are perfectly able to learn how to use many kinds of tools, including sharp woodworking tools, cooking tools, musical instruments, and cameras, that most people would insist they could not use."

Messing About
p. 219  Always let children have free play with materials before directing them.

The Montessori materials provide ample materials
for "messing about" with numbers and building up
a mental model of the territory.

p. 222 "Children need what we rarely give them in school--time for "Messing About" with reading--before they start trying to learn to read, to make the connections between letters and sounds.  They need time to build up in their minds, without hurry, without pressure, a sense of what words look like, before they start trying to memorize particular words.  In the same way, they need time for "Messing About" with numbers and numerals, before they start--if they ever should start--trying to memorize addition facts and multiplication tables.  They need to know how big 76 is, or 134, or 35,000, or a million.  They need to see, again without hurry or pressure, how numbers change and grow and relate to each other.  They need to build up a mental model of the territory before they start trying to talk about it.  We teachers like to think that we can transplant our own mental models into the minds of children by means of explanations.  It can't be done."

Crossing the line
p. 223 "Professor Hawkins rightly says, "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand."  Not only must we cross that line many times, but, in the words of the old spiritual, nobody else can cross it for us, we must cross it by ourselves.  Being shoved or dragged across does no good."

Children see the world as a whole and make their own connections according to their interests
p. 232  "[Children] see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less.  They do not divide it up into airtight little categories as we adults tend to do.  it is natural for them to jump from one thing to another, and to make the kinds of connections that are rarely made in formal classes and textbooks.  They make their own paths into the unknown, paths that we would never think of making for them.  When they are following their own noses, learning what they are curious about, children go faster, cover more territory than we would ever think of trying to mark out for them, or make them cover.
 
Our task is to keep a child's curiosity well supplied with good food.
p. 233  "People have often said to me, nervously or angrily, that if we let children learn what they want to know they will become narrow specialists, nutty experts in baseball batting averages and such trivia.  Not so.  Many adults do this; the universities are full of people who have shut themselves up in little fortresses of artificially restricted private learning.  But healthy children, still curious and unafraid, do not learn this way.  Their learning does not box them in; it leads them out into life in many directions.  Each new thing they learn makes them aware of other new things to be learned.  Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on.  Our task is to keep it well supplied with food.

Keeping their curiosity "well supplied with food" doesn't mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves.  It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food--like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).

How Children Fail

I've been reading John Holt's "How Children Fail" and have had a few epiphanies in the course of my reading. The book was recommended by a fellow TJed mom as a good precursor to "How Children Learn," which I'll be studying in my Abigail Adams Academy "Classic Mom's" Class. I know that I'll need to keep a sort of notebook or commonplace book for all my notes and writing, so I figured I would house it in blog form instead of hard copy.

First of all, as I begin the journey of a Thomas Jefferson Education with my children, I find myself gravitating over and over again to the conveyer belt. Today I decided we were going to "do school" as I had seen it done by another TJed mom. Obviously whatever I did I was doing it wrong, because J and A were just about as resistant and contrary as they ever have been. Even a reading lesson J asked for last night ended abruptly as he announced that it was boring and he wanted to stop. I have to keep telling myself that he is still in core phase. I just don't know how to "do" core phase. Yet. I've read all the books but implementation is a stickery place for me.

What I often find happening when I try to implement something new is that I begin to feel a tight, stressed feeling in my gut. I feel angry, impatient, forceful. The day feels like a failure. I know it is--not because my children have failed. I have failed. I have failed to keep myself in a place of faith and calm. The kids can feel that and they resist it. They feel the unspoken requirements pressing in on them and they push back.

I have to develop a strategy for when I do that. I need to just stop and read a book instead for the rest of the time. Reconnect and relax.

Holt notes that fear is one of the greatest impediments to learning. Stress shuts down a child's brain. I see that in J. The moment he feels stress he freaks out, whines, runs away from the situation. Reading in particular stresses him out. I can imagine he'll be a late reader. I just have to have faith that it'll happen on his own time table. Reconnect and Relax. We'll get there.