So what the heck does it mean to be an “internally motivated learner”? Is such an animal the exception or the rule? And can internal motivation drive even formal academic learning? In a culture where conventional wisdom seems to think that most of formal education needs to be mandated and externally motivated to be successfully undertaken, I think these are very important questions.
Certainly infants and toddlers learn most or all of what they learn for internal reasons. Infants don’t need to be motivated or instructed in how to walk, they are driven to do so and through practice, trial, and error they figure out how to do so. Toddlers learn to speak with a minimum of instruction, by listening to people speaking around them and learning to vocalize words and put them together into phrases and sentences. They learn a myriad of other skills involving coordination of their bodies with their brains on their own as well. Continue reading →
Homeschooling and Educational Diversity – Part 2
I thought it was appropriate to follow up yesterday’s discussion launched by my thoughts about trying to sort out a few of the societal issues around homeschooling, and whether it is an appropriate educational path for some kids.
Confessing again my position up front, I gravitate to the educational path of “unschooling”, where the learner sets their own curriculum and works at their own pace, generally outside of a formal educational setting. But I have come to the conclusion that “unschooling” is not for everyone. The truth as I see it, and this seems to be something that a lot of people have trouble grasping, is that no one educational path, even the conventional instructional academic school, is for everyone. Continue reading →
Thoughts on Homeschooling in Alaska & Promoting Educational Diversity
There is an extensive article in today’s online edition of Education Week, Critics Question Alaska Home-Schooling Success, from the Associated Press on issues with home-schooling, particularly state regulation of this educational path in Alaska.
The article starts out stating the issue clearly and succinctly… Continue reading →
Ever After
I think many of us have that particular movie that we can watch over and over and seem to never tire of its familiar scenes. A piece of work that calls out themes and values that we hold dear perhaps, and inspires us once again, every time to go out and live those things we hold dear. For our daughter Emma, her mom and I, that movie is “Ever After”, writer/director Andy Tennant’s feminist re-visioning of the Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore.
The film invents a historical context for Cinderella as the character Danielle De Barbarac, the daughter of a woman from the landed gentry and a commoner father, which by patrilineal protocol made Danielle a commoner as well. Danielle never knew her mom, who died when she was an infant, and was raised by her father, who she adored, but came to die an untimely death as well, soon after remarrying Danielle’s step mother. The story is set in the environs of the French royal court during the early 1500s as it is just beginning to be influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance. Continue reading →
A Dad Learns to Thrive on the Mommy Track
In the 23 years since our kids were born, I have made a conscious choice to lead a more balanced life, including a primary focus on wearing my parent hat. This choice led to a strategy of trying to carefully choose my jobs and career path to minimize work hours and job stress, while attempting to also maximize the flexibility of my schedule. Based on the common nickname for this sort of work strategy, I was a male parent on the “Mommy track”. Continue reading →
Age Segregation and Youth Human and Civil Rights
When I was a young teen I spent six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year in age segregated classrooms where I was often uncomfortable, stressed out, and felt disrespected by many of my peers and even some of the adults that controlled the classrooms and the encompassing school environment. And I certainly was not there by choice, finding every excuse I could (usually illness… real or imagined) to stay away. Looking back I think I was suffering from institutional age segregation and having my rights as a human being given short shrift. Certainly, as a youth and not an adult, I had no guarantee of full civil rights under the U.S. Constitution.
First of all, I will admit to being a bit of a provocateur in that initial paragraph to build my “hook” for this piece. But I am hoping that it is a prescient, though provocative, statement of a step forward in human rights that is still percolating in our future, and the debates to come surrounding the evolutionary trajectory of the human race. Continue reading →
Late for Graduation?
There is an article in September 3 online edition of Education Week magazine, “Why Not Count Them All”, addressing the issue of whether kids who are a year or more “late” graduating from high school should be counted in school graduation statistics. For me, the whole idea that the process of formal education encompassing generally over a decade of one’s youth leading hopefully to high school graduation has a high-stakes “schedule” makes no sense. It is an unfortunate remnant of the industrial era in which public schooling flowered and unfortunately a residual but inappropriate conventional wisdom of that era. Continue reading →
Prescription for Education
For a year we medicating our son with the stimulant Adderall, after an ADD diagnosis, to try and make him better able to successfully navigate and perform in the conventional academic environments of his middle school, but eventually realizing that we were instead dishonoring and disrespecting who he was.
Our son Eric had always had a crisp and incisive mind, but like me he seemed to be “right brained”, that is he was highly creative and his thinking process were very non-linear, his mind taking off in several directions at once based on any stimulus. That mind served him well in all his venues – including home, travel, preschool and early elementary school – for the first seven years of his young life. He actively pursued areas of interest, enjoyed the wisdom of others, absorbed and synthesized huge amounts of information and experience, and was a joy to the adults – parents (most of the time), relatives and teachers – that he interacted with. Continue reading →
The Devil in the Anatomical Details: Putting Gender in its Place
As a parent who has watched his two kids, one male and one female, grow up among their peers, I have witnessed much of that adult obsession with gender focused on children, and youth culture. Sure… part of a kid’s developmental process is to gender identify. But from my experience as a kid, and later experience watching other kids, most of that developmental process has nothing to do with whether you are a boy or a girl. Being “all boy” or “daddy’s girl” are adult inventions, romanticizing to point of fetishizing gender identification. The reality seems to be that most kids quickly and easily gender identify and don’t need all these vicarious expectations and other baggage heaped upon them. Continue reading →
The Devil is in the Details
In Islam, according to Wikipedia, “The primary characteristic of the Devil, besides hubris, is that he has no power other than the power to cast evil suggestions into the heart of men and women.” The Islamic Devil is a trickster who uses smoke and mirrors to confuse you as to what is really important. Though I do not believe in deities, good or evil, I think this version of the Devil is a useful metaphor and archetype, certainly more right on than the Christian version, which is profoundly malevolent and has the power to control souls, even against their will, if they are not determined and skilled in their resistance.
As I plunge into this stream of thought and attempt to capture some of it in this written piece I have to acknowledge all the complexities, connotations and resulting imprecision of language, particularly written language in the case of this piece, that revolves around words that might mean one thing when we write (actually in my case type) them with an initial capital rather than lower-case letter. But that said, the complexities, connotations and imprecision reflect the richness of our common experience and our ongoing struggle to fully grapple with it. Continue reading →