The Heart of Science

For the last two years I have been trying to follow the Well-Trained Mind's guide as a starting point, and have been gradually fine-tuning it to suit our family.

Recently we've taken another look at the Science curriculum, and found that it didn't go far enough for my physicist husband. Here's some of his thoughts on the subject:

Education is not the accumulation of facts, but learning to think.

• Empiricism is at the heart of the scientific method.
• There may be many areas of human knowledge that are not empirical, but they cannot be classified as science. (e.g. we have no absolute scale on which we can measure, say, 'beauty'.)
• So in many ways 'science' is only concerned with a fairly small chunk of human experience - that which can be measured and quantified.
• Another key value for a scientist is the concept of 'falsifiability.' In short, any hypothesis that I come up with is only valuable if I can also propose an experiment that would disprove it. If I propose "All swans are white", then I can then add "and seeing a black swan would disprove this hypothesis.". Hypotheses that withstand rigorous testing may be upgraded to 'theories.'
• If we're going to teach our kids science, then first and foremost we need to teach them to be good empiricists, and to know the tools of measurement, to be familiar with the ruler, the clock, the scales, the thermometer, the voltmeter.
• Science also expects repeatability - if I measure the length of a piece of string and you measure it too, our answers should agree. If they don't, then something is wrong.
• A good scientist must hold on to a healthy degree of humility, because no matter how cherished his beliefs, a single experiment, or even a few lines of math, may prove him wrong. In 2004, Steven Hawking made the headlines for reversing a position he'd held strongly for 30 years, and lost a bet with a friend in the process. Interestingly, it was his own work that had disproved his earlier position!
• Summary: Teach our kids how to measure. Teach them how to test ideas. Teach them how to distinguish between testable and non-testable hypotheses. Science education cannot be about 'this is true because I say so,' or 'this is true because the textbook says so,' but 'this is true because we can observe and test it.'

Heather's Top Ten Requirements for Successful Homeschooling

What does it take to succeed at home schooling? Here are my top ten requirements for homeschooling parents.

1. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to engage fully with the process. You can't leave your brain at the door in this business.
2. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to be a lifelong learner - they must make a careful study of their child, of the basic pedagogical methods, of the available curriculum, and then they must craft for themselves the best approach for their family as a whole and each individual child.
3. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to take the time to translate long-term objectives (Read Shakespeare in grade nine) to short-term objectives (master basic phonics and develop pre-reading abilities) and daily tasks ("M" says "mmmm" "M-m-m-m0mmy").
   
4. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to investigate the opportunities their community affords for extension and enrichment activities, and then commit themselves to involving their child(ren) in age- and interest-appropriate activities each week.
5. A successful homeschooling parent must have a place where they and the children can work each day - preferably a place that doesn't need to be cleared to eat the lunch; and a place to store the books, papers, pens, etc. that every classroom, no matter how small, may generate.
   
6. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to provide structure for their children's daily life, because children need to know what to expect.
7. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to throw the lesson plan out the window today, because sometimes real people and real life trump lessons.
8. A successful homeschooling parent must have a back-up -- preferably their spouse -- who believes in the project, reminds them of the long-term plan, problem solves when things get challenging, and plays the role of the principal.
9. A successful homeschooling parent must always refuse to play the comparison game -- must believe in themselves and their child sufficiently that they do not fall prey to what is a devastatingly frequent experience at any homeschooling event or activity ("Well, you know, when Jonny was two he could spell all the names of everyone in our family - evenGrandfather Methuselah." ) can have you doubting everything you've ever done when your seven-year-old is still working out how to sit still long enough to read the word "cat" never mind spell it.
10. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to make appropriate mid-course corrections. The curriculum you thought you loved in September may just not be working -- but if you catch on to that by the middle of October, you will save much pain and anguish, and may well have successfully accomplished the underlying principle by June because of your change in approach.

Homeschooling Critique #2 - Quality of Education

Critique number two is often a question of whether the adults involved have the education and skills necessary to educate their children as well or better than an institutional setting. I suspect that if you were to suddenly disband the institutional education setting over night and ask all parents to home educate it would be an impossible disaster. Home schooling is not for everyone. It wouldn't work financially, it wouldn't work with people's priorities and values and time, it wouldn't work with people's attitudes towards their own education. For these and so many other reasons, home educating is only ever going to be a viable option for some.

The sad thing is that not every parent who wants to home educate, or tries to home educate is successful. Now, this is a very unusual statement to read on any homeschooling blog/website/book, but I think its a very valuable statement. My conversations with teachers on the subject of homeschooling often goes along something like this: "I had a child come back to school after being homeschooled for several years, and it was very difficult - they were behind in so many things, really far ahead in others, they couldn't wait their turn, they always wanted to be right on top of me when I was doing the demonstration, etc."

Not all home schooled children are better off at home -- but unfortunately the only homeschooled children that my teaching friends have had the opportunity to encounter were those for whom everyone had obviously agreed homeschooling wasn't working out for. They had not had the opportunity to see those for whom homeschooling was a success.

I don't think there can be any hard and fast proof for this one, but the increased value top Universities such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc., are putting on actively recruiting (and frequently giving full-ride scholarships to) home educated young people says something to me about the success of a large number of homeschooling families to adequately and effectively educate their children -- not just to be "average" but to shine in the midst of the brightest of company.

Homeschooling Critique #1 - Socialisation

The biggest critique of home educated/homeschooled children is that they are poorly socialised - a fact which is unfortunately sometimes true. But it is my observation that often those children who are poorly socialised (or perhaps differently socialised might be a better term) come from families where everyone is a bit different. And my observation of children in school is that those who are poorly socialised come from families where everyone is a bit different. I suspect the main difference is that there is probably a higher proportion of differently-socialised families homeschooling than there are in the average school system.

Every homeschooled child is different. Some may well have turned out more poorly socialised if they went to school than if they stayed home, some the other way around. My personal belief is that socialisation is something you learn first and foremost at home. So if you want your children to have good social skills than the best thing you can possibly do is interact regularly with people in a multitude of social settings, with people from a multitude of ages and cultures. By doing so in front of your children, you will model positive socialisation to your children and have ample opportunities to teach and encourage their efforts towards positive socialisation themselves.

Defining Canadian Classical Homeschooling

What does it mean to be Canadian? The key to being Canadian, as far as I'm concerned, is being a part of a rich, multicultural society. To be Canadian is really to be international - our culture, our country, our language, our heritage is full of the strands of the people of the world. My thesis? That if you understand the world, its cultures, religions and histories, than you will understand Canada.

Classical education is a term that has been revived in the last 90 years by educators who hark back to the medieval system of the trivium. It has been laid over the 20th century model of a twelve-year education system as follows:

Grammar Stage: Years 1 - 4; students are expected to learn the grammar or facts of the various courses of study.
Logic Stage: Years 5 - 8; students learn formal logic, and begin to ask questions about the facts of each subject.
Rhetoric Stage: Years 9 - 12; students focus on expression of ideas, building on the facts and logic study of the previous eight years.

Classical education is often based heavily on the historical cycle, and therefore focuses its energy each year on a given period of history and a related discipline of science.

Ancient History ~ Biology
Medieval History ~ Earth Science
Early Modern History ~ Chemistry
Modern History ~ Physics/Computer Science

This four year cycle is then repeated for each stage of the trivium.

Homeschooling, or home educating as it is called in England, is simply educating a child outside of the normal structure of institutional schooling. Home schooled children may be educated in small groups (a "co-op" approach), or at their kitchen table. They have the potential advantages of a small class size and education tailored to their learning styles, strengths, weaknesses and interests. Their schedules can be flexible enough to fit around other social activities (such as skating or orchestra, Girl Guides or family time), and their social interactions can readily include multi-age and even multi-generational options.

You Have to Know Your Child

When a baby is first born, it (mostly) cannot hold its head up. The muscles in its neck simply aren't strong enough to manage this task. I was watching someone recently with their four-week-old. They were holding him on their lap, facing them but in a sitting position, and helping their son practice holding his head up. He wasn't really trying, but I know that in a couple of weeks, he'll be picking his head up off his mum's shoulder and watching his brothers and sister run around playing, and he'll be thrilled at his new-found skill.

Which is to say that you have to think ahead when you're teaching. Lets face it, our board books were well loved before we actually got to read through an entire one from start to finish in one sitting, but now the girls can't find books to satiate their appetite for words. A toddler needs introduced to the idea of building a block tower, and encouraged to practice his hand/eye co-ordination by trying it long before they can do anything but knock it down, but the lego structures my seven-year-old nephew can create now rival his dad's. We had to sing the alphabet song and trip over the magnetic alphabet pieces for a long time before our daughter started asking what the letters were, and unless we took her finger and helped her to trace each shape as we clean them up together for the #*&^! time today, she would still be working out the process of deciphering one from another. It takes mental effort to think ahead, but it is a necessary step for any educator, if they want to keep their students engaged and working to their fullest potential.

Furthermore, teaching "at age level" as a solution to this will rarely work. A boisterous seven-year-old boy may well need to be working on advanced soccer dribbling techniques, but may still be struggling with his alphabet - mostly because its too difficult to sit down and complete the official work in the official way. A five-year-old girl, on the other hand, may well enjoy having the entirety of a high school world history textbook (I recommend the Usbourne History of the World!) read to her over the course of her kindergarten year ... and you'll be amazed at how much of the information she retains. My almost four-year-old is learning to read (she even let Grandma and Grandpa listen last night!) but is steadfastly wed to her diapers and can't really understand why mommy thinks the toilet would be preferable.

All this is to set the stage for the following: as a parent, you knew when to encourage your child to take their first tentative steps - sometime between 8 - 18 months. You knew when to encourage their first words, when to encourage them to use a ride-on toy, when to first have food directly off your plate, whatever it was. And I would suspect that it wasn't the exact same day as the other kids in your pre-natal class were ready for it. And the same is true in education. Each and every child is unique. I firmly believe that there is no possible way an off-the-shelf-curriculum, bought based on age-level, could possibly be appropriate in every subject for every child (or in fact any subject, for any child!!)

The bottom line? You know your child best. Observe them. Watch what they're interested in. Figure out the next step. Make sure that you and your spouse are clear on your really long-term goals (by 18, they should be able to live independently on their own and have the opportunity to go towards whatever post-secondary experience they are interested in, for example). Look through curriculum, consider the general course of study suggested, get the major points and make sure you cover them on your child's own pace. Always be a couple of steps ahead of yourself - so that you know where you're trying to get to and are ready with the next challenge when the 'teachable moment' appears. If you can get your child through the terrible twos, then you can certainly teach them to read, write and 'rith - you just have to know your child.

homeschooling from scratch

I never expected I would be a homeschooling parent. As a child, I met many homeschoolers in mission and church circles who were social misfits, whose parents had kept them out of the secular school system to avoid them being 'tainted' by the real world. I wanted my children to know and understand how to rub shoulders with the very real human beings whose paths they would cross every day, and to understand the global world they lived in - a diverse world where a knowledge of other ideas and religions, and other cultures histories and geographies, not to mention language could make the difference between a fatal misunderstanding, and an affective partnership.

Unfortunately the real world experience of secular education left much to be desired. For the same reason as I had shied away from Christian homeschooling, I found myself quickly frustrated by the scope and breadth of current public/state (vs. private) school curriculum. And bottom-end private school curriculum wasn't much of an improvement. I finally found a school with a curriculum I liked ... the cost was well in excess of $20,000/year per child! Not a likely scenario.

So I did some more research and discovered that a few people were homeschooling using a similar approach to curriculum. It is called the Classical Curriculum model, and has several slightly divergent approaches to it, but the main theory is a four-year, three-cycle approach, whereby the first four years are spent at the grammar stage - learning the facts; the second four years are spent at the logic stage - learning to question the facts; and the third four years are spent at the rhetoric stage - learning to discuss the facts, the questions of the facts, and the conclusions the questioning has unearthed.

Well, when you homeschool, you can't turn your brain off on the subject of curriculum and send the children out the door to let someone else do your thinking for you. That was out when we first made this decision. But some homeschoolers use pre-packaged materials available from various curriculum publishers - they come with all the books, all the exercise pages, and all the equipment aids needed to teach all the subjects each year. These are not readily obtainable for the classical curriculum. There are classical curriculum methods which give lists of potential textbooks/workbooks for each grade level, but unfortunately we have found that they are either, a) americentric; b) below our daughter's functional grade level; or c) poor attempts to teach the subjects Trevor and I are each educated in. (It does help that Trevor has a degree in physics and I in history!)

So I have reached the conclusion over the weekend, having tossed out the english curriculum ages ago, and tried heavily modifying the math, science and history curriculum (strangely enough, the geography curriculum actually works!), that I will actually have to throw out the science and history curriculum completely, and will likely only be able to rely on the modified math curriculum until the end of this year. I am therefore homeschooling from scratch!

And to make it just that little bit more challenging, I am doing it all out of a carry-on-size suitcase worth of materials - that's right, just 15kg of books for two children of different grade levels, for everything including background texts, notebooks, pens and pencils, and teachers resources.

All of which is to say, that on the days when this blog gets written in less than it might, you can think of me sat at the dining room table at my in-laws house, trying to explain the history of medieval asia to a seven-year-old whilst listening to my three-year-old learn to read! (Please note that although she is determined to learn to read, she is still not potty-trained ... )

Off to brush up on my grammatical structures!