How Children Learn - Sports

Be careful not to push a child past his natural limits of fear and caution
p. 177 "if we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him.  If, however, we are careful not to push a child beyond the limits of his courage, he is almost sure to get braver."

p. 178 "But we respected her natural timidity and caution.  The result was that she wanted, and leaned to combat her fears and overcome them."

Letting our children explore deep water
p. 182  "then the lifeguard joined me in telling him that he had to stay at the shallow end, that he wan't big enough or a good enough swimmer to swim at the deep end.  For a while he argues, as best he could, but when he realized that we were really not going to let him swim in the whole pool, he began to cry, or rather, to roar, with disappointment, humiliation, and rage."

"It seems to me now that we were very foolish and mistaken in what we did.  If I had it to do again, I would say, "Okay, swim to the deep end if you want, and I'll just swim along with you."  I don't blame him in the least for being indignant that we denied it to him and, after all his good work, gave him this ringing vote of No Confidence."

Why are we so unwilling to let our children explore "deep water?"  Is it because we are too lazy to go with them and provide a safety net for their exploration?  Aaron is such a fearless and determined soul and we are constantly telling him he can't do all the things he wants to do.  How do I help him safely push the limits of his existence?


Advance and retreat, exploration and consolidation
p. 187  "A very common pattern in children's learning.  First a great bold leap forward into exciting new territory.  Then, for a short while, a retreat back into what is comfortable, familiar, and secure.  But we can't predict, much less control, these rhythms of advance and retreat, exploration and consolidation, and this is one of the main reasons why the learning of children can't, or at least shouldn't, be scheduled."

I see this a lot with Jonathan.  Once introduced to a new skill, he cannot adopt it right away.  He has to ruminate on it for an hour or two, a day or two, a week or two, or longer.  Then all of a sudden he surprises me by doing (without coercion or persuasion) that which he was so afraid or unable to do before.  I remember last summer how I tried to teach him to swim and he rebelled against my efforts to push him to swim without floaties.  Then one day he decided on his own to try.  It helped that his friend Christopher was already swimming without floaties.  He never feared again.


Competence models in sports
p. 189 Children learn to play sports much faster and more naturally when they can play with, see, and imitate older kids.

How Children Learn - Reading

READING

Competence Models
p. 128  "It is certain that a child is greatly inspire and helped to learn by what are often called competence models--people who can do things better than he can.  But we ought to remind ourselves now and then that sometimes a competence model can be altogether too competent. . . No doubt it is exciting and inspiring for a child interested in athletics, or music, or dancing, or art or drama, or whatever, to see, once in a while, adults who do those things superbly well.  But as day-to-day examples, these experts are probably much less useful to a child than slightly older, slightly bigger children who do things slightly better than he can."

This is why having a big family can be so beneficial to children.  All but the oldest have a string of competency models that are just slightly above them.  How can I provide my oldest with less intimidating competence models than myself and dad?  Suzuki group lessons are a great opportunity for this in music.

The hard sell
p. 130  Beware of the temptation of the "hard sell."  "Children learn very early to be wary of too much adult enthusiasm."  Just leave the new materials or games lying somewhere and let the children approach them at their own leisure.


Encourage the spirit of independence in learning.
p. 132  When children reject our teaching. . . "Far from having decided that reading was not worth knowing, she probably wanted to learn to read very much.  What she rightly resented was my taking it upon myself to teach her without being asked.  When she learned to read, it was going to be by her own choosing, at her own time, and in her own way.  This spirit of independence in learning is one of the most valuable assets a learner can have, and we who want to help children's learning, at home or in school, must learn to respect and encourage it.

We don't forget the things we learn for our own reasons
p. 134  "The things we learn because, for our own reasons, we really need to know them, we don't forget."

Children learn by testing hunches over and over until they come to a knowledge of a thing.
p. 138  "Children's first hunches about anything are extremely faint and tentative, the merest wisps of intuition that a certain thing may be so.  Each time children test one of these faint hunches and have it confirmed by experience, the hunch becomes a bit stronger.  What we might call a 5 percent hunch becomes a 10 percent, the 10 percent, a 20 percent, and so, slowly, all the way to the point where they will say with conviction that they know that such -and-such is true."

But we can put an abrupt end to this process by constant testing and quizzing
p. 140  "Knowing this about children's hunches makes me understand more clearly than ever why, and how, our constant checking up on children's learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. In How Children Fail, I said that the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.

Another reason: "Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued.  The structure collapses.  Under pressure, children stop trying to confirm and strengthen their faint hunches.  Instead, they just give them up."

How much time is wasted "learning reading skills" and being tested on them, compared to time spent reading?
"I later knew a boy, taught at home by his parents (both of whom worked during the day), who did not begin to read until after he was eight.  When he was eleven he moved to a new town and wanted to go to school so that he could meet some other children, and also find out something about what school was like.  The school gave him the usual reading tests, on which he scored at the twelfth-grade level.  But of course he didn't have to spend hours a day being taught reading skills and being tested to be sure he had learned them.  He could use that time to read."

I find myself constantly tugging myself back from the edge of anxiety about Jonathan and the fact that he has been slower to read than many of his peers.  I need stories like this to confirm my faith that he will ultimately read when he is ready.

Children are not railroad trains.  Time and sequence is irrelevant to the learning process.
p. 155  "Timetables!  We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule.  The railroad man figures that if his train is going to get to Chicago at a certain time, then it must arrive on time at every stop along the route.  If it is ten minutes late getting into a station, he begins to worry.  in the same way, we say that if children are going to know so much when they go to college, then they have to know this at the end of this grade, and that at the end of that grade.  If a child doesn't arrive at one of these intermediate stations when we think he should, we instantly assume that he is going to be late at the finish.  But children are not railroad trains.  They don't learn at an even rate.  They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be."

"Not only that, but they often don't learn in what seems to us a logical sequence, by which we mean easy things first, hard things later.  Being always seekers of meaning, children may first go to the hard things, which have more meaning, are (in Papert's word) less dissociated from the world--and later from these hard things learn the "easy" ones.  Thus children who read well certainly know a lot of "phonics," but they have probably learned at least as much phonics from words as they have learned words from phonics.   No one taught me that the letters PH say the sound "fff."  I figured it out, probably from hard words like "photograph" and "telephone."

Children do not need to be made to learn. . .
p. 157  "Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how.  If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them."

This is hard doctrine to swallow, I know.  But deep down inside me I know it's true because it's true of me!  I learned how to read because my grandmother read fairy tales to me over and over again.  And I just figured it out!  On my own!  


Round pegs for round holes
p. 170  "When the then Labour Party prime minster James Callaghan said in a major public speech on education that what Britain needed was "round pegs for round holes," it was clear that this educational revolution had come to an end, and for just the same reasons that had put an end to all earlier revolutions of the same kind.  Needless to say, what children were or might be learning was not one of those reasons"

Back to cassette tapes
p. 172  "In many elementary school classrooms children dictate stories, directly or through a tape recorder, to their teacher, who writes out the stories and returns them to their authors.  For many children, these stories are much more exciting to read than some old book.  By such means many children who had not been at all interested in learning to read have become interested."

What a wonderful idea for a Christmas present!  I think I'm going to get Jonathan some cassette tapes.  I remember when I was a kid, hiding out in my room and making recordings of my own stories, game shows, etc.  It's a great outlet for creativity!!!

How Children Learn - Talk

John Holt

TALK


What makes two-year-olds so touchy?
p. 83  "I suspect that early infant talkers. . . mean to send messages with their voices, as the big people around them obviously do, and they think that these messages are being received.  Suddenly, perhaps around the age of one and a half or two, it dawns on them that most of their messages are not being received at all, and that they really can't talk like other people, but must go to a lot of trouble to learn how.  This may be one of the things that makes two-year-olds so touchy--they have just discovered that among all the other things they don't know how to do, they don't know how to talk.  They are bursting with things to say, needs, and feelings, and awarenesses, but have no way to say them.

Being willing to do things wrong
p. 84  "Every child learns how to make the sounds of his own language. . . How does he do it? . . .  The answer seems to be by patient and persistent experiment; by trying many thousands of times to make sounds, syllables, and words; by comparing his own sounds to the sounds made by people around him, and by gradually bringing his own sounds closer to the others; above all, by being willing to do things wrong even while trying his best to do them right."


How soon is this willingness gone?  Jonathan and Aaron both have expressed to me fear about new tasks because they want to do it RIGHT.  How much could we all learn if we were a little more like children?  This seems to me to be the crux of what Jesus meant when he asked us to be like little children.  


If we taught children to speak
p. 84-85 "Bill Hull once said to me, "If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn."

Stop quizzing kids!
p. 94-95  "Nor did I test him by saying, "What's this? What's that?"  This kind of checking up is not necessary, and it puts a child in a spot where he will feel that, if he says the wrong thing, he has done wrong and is in the wrong.  I have seen kindly, well-meaning parents do this to young children, hoping to help them learn.  Almost every time the child soon took on the kind of tense, tricky expression we see on so many children's faces in school, and began the same sad old business of bluffing, guessing, and playing for hints.  Even in the rare case when a child does not react his defensively to questions, too much quizzing is likely to make him begin to think that learning does not mean figuring out how things work, but getting and giving answers that please grownups."

p. 95 "A child's understanding of the world is uncertain and tentative.  If we question him too much or too sharply, we are more likely to weaken that understanding then strengthen it.  His understanding will grow faster if we can make ourselves have faith in it and leave it alone."

"This is particularly true of children just learning to read.  They have a lot of very tentative hunches about the connections between the look of printed letters and the sounds of spoken words.  If we give them enough time, they will gradually, as they read for pleasure, test and confirm and strengthen these hunches, and make them a part of what they really know.  But if we put too much pressure on these hunches, by continually asking children questions about what this or that letter says, we are liable to jar these hunches loose altogether and convince the children that they don't know anything, can't figure out anything, and must depend on us for all their information."

The "teacher devil" in me
p. 96 & p.98 Holt twice talks about ways to encourage speech development in children by talking through what you are doing on a daily basis. i.e. "Now we'll tie up this shoe; pull the laces good and tight; now we'll get the boots. . . "  However, he later corrects himself, saying that "I suspect that most people who try to talk this way to children will have so much more teaching in their voices than love and pleasure that they will wind up doing more harm than good.  If talk is not honest, does not have real feeling behind it--like most of the talk children hear on TV--they will not think of it as something they can or want to do themselves, and hence will learn little or nothing from it."  He was not at all happy about what he had previously written and later refers to the constant temptation to "teach" kids what they haven't already learned for themselves as "the teacher devil in me."

True observation can only occur in an atmosphere of trust.
p.104  Speaking of  research on the way children learn, Holt argues that "We cannot learn anything important about other people until they trust us."


This has particular bearing on a conversation I had with my brother-in-law the other day about how children learn.  He held up a book called, "Teaching with the Brain in Mind," which is a compilation of research on how better to teach children based on brain research.  Something bothered me at the time and it took until now for me to understand what bothered me so.  I was trying to explain to him that children, if given the proper environment, don't need to be "taught" at all.  They learn differently from adults in the sense that their minds are absorbent.  This idea isn't just espoused by Holt.  It is central to the theories of Sinichi Suzuki, Maria Montessori, Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Thomas Jefferson Education.  The difference between these and the brain researchers is that these people spent a huge amount of time being with and observing children in their natural habitat.  They gained the trust of the children they learned from.  Their work was a labor of love and in every respect represents true art--rising above pure science.  This is why I just don't even buy the whole "teaching with the brain in mind."  It's the teaching that's the fundamental false assumption underlying the entire theory.

The Myth of "Bad Habits"
p. 113  Correcting bad "habits" only deprives the child of the opportunity to identify and fix mistakes on their own.  The less they have to depend on us, the faster they can teach themselves.

p. 116 "A word to the wise. . . is infuriating."

Correcting children is not only unnecessary, it can be counterproductive
p. 118 "Many of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.  Yet it is important that we should, because they are perceptive and sensitive, and very easily hurt, humiliated, and discouraged."

"Answer Pulling"
p. 123 "The teacher asks a series of pointed questions, aimed at getting students to give an answer that he has decided beforehand is right.  Teachers' manuals are full of this technique--"Have a discussion, in which you draw out the following points. . ."  This kind of fake, directed conversation is worse than none at all.  Small wonder that children soon get bored and disgusted with it."

p. 124 "It can't be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading or writing, under one condition and only one--when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own."

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.