Dumb Ox Academy

Steph over at Throwing Marshmellows (I still haven’t learned how to link!) has a really good post On Being Ready that I found really thought provoking.  She was talking about how learning one’s times tables is a basic skill and how an unschooler approaches this critical skill. 

One thing I have come to realize as I think about unschooling vs. traditional schooling is how differently each side approaches teaching skills.  To a traditional educator (and this is how we adults were pretty much raised) skills must be learned and then knowledge follows.  And there is much to be said for this approach.  I myself tend to think in terms of providing my kids with the 3 R’s and then letting them be more delight directed in other subjects.  I think unschoolers though see things in terms of children learning the things they are interested in with the skills coming in naturally because they must be learned in order to follow that interest.

Last year my now 11 year old went to school.  He had been homeschooled since Kindergarten.  He didn’t learn to read until after he turned nine.  The principal and teacher were very concerned about him.  I had been through this with my older son, so I wasn’t so worried.  I told them that my kids so far seem to be late bloomers when it came to reading.  Once they got it, it took them about a year to get up to grade level and then things were fine and you’d never know they were late readers.  But they kept saying he was behind in his “skills.”  The only problem I saw was that he wasn’t keeping up with their lockstep sense of what children need to know when.  I see no difference between when a child learns to read at 5 or 9.  In fact, a late reader doesn’t read a lot of junk.  The truth is skills are pretty basic and can be learned much faster later.  I learned this with my older kids too.  My 15 dd loves Algebra but she still doesn’t have her math facts down well.  Granted she now sees the need to work on learning them, but I decided long ago, I wasn’t going to sweat it with her.  Well, actually I’d go in and out with it.  Sometimes I would get all panicky about how she didn’t know them well and then beat myself up for not drilling her to death over it.  And other times I think, well, yeah, that is a bit of a weakness, but I knew my math facts really well and almost flunked Algebra!  I was totally clueless about it.  I hated math and she enjoys it.  So she has to use a calculator sometimes.  Big deal!  I mean she does know her times tables to a degree, just not with lightening speed at times.  There are some she stumbles over.

That said, I still believe in teaching skills, I just think they can be taught gently, according to when the child blooms, and they shouldn’t be overemphasized as so very critical that one can’t proceed without them.  There is no need to learn your times tables by a certain age, except for testing purposes.  The concept of learning multiplication has happened pretty naturally in our house and many of easier ones are also learned painlessly.  It is just speed and a few of the harder to stick in one’s memories ones that have remained a bugaboo.

The one skill area I continue to struggle with is writing.  Because my kids were late readers and because they acted as if they were allergic to writing implements, their writing skills are probably “behind.”  That is if you ask them to write something with a pencil and paper.  They are okay at the key board.  Both my older ones write on the PC.  My oldest adapted The Holly and  the Ivy into a play entirely on her own.  She also talks a lot to her friends on line. My oldest son has written poems and several short stories on his own.  However, when I read their writing I see how they need to hone sentence structure and work on spelling and punctuation.  And the truth is you don’t come off as very literate without those skills.  This year I tried to really make them write (in a schoolish way) and for the most part it bombed.  We worked with how to write a great introductory sentence, etc. etc. Those technical skills they really need.  I wouldn’t call our attempts successful.

So I am going to go back to my gut feelings and teach these basic writing skills in a gentler way, with me working right alongside them and infusing as much joy as possible into the process.

I hope what I just wrote is coherent.  I have a pounding headache.  Will got some kind of terrible stomach thing and was sick all night and I was up with him a good part of the night.  I have lots of laundry to do because this thing was so violent he didn’t make it to bathroom or bucket several times.  Poor thing, he is miserable.  He is lying on the couch next to me.  He is stirring.  I think the clacking of my keyboard is starting to bother him.

Gotta run to the store to get Gatorade anyway. 

Cheerio (said a bit wearily)