Link time!

[conuly]

This man asked for accounts of children - unschoolers or children attending free schools, mostly - who learned to read on their own. And that's what he got.

Another one of those math blog entries! Gosh, I like posting these things, every week, so I'm sure to post every week.

One on how "nobody knows what they're doing", pretty interesting

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

That article annoys me, because it so clashes with my personal experience. I agree with the principles like not pushing children and so forth, but who says that that is better done outside of a school? I truly believe that had I not had a good reading teacher (as I did in school) I would have remained illiterate. This is because I needed some help with reading, and nobody else who had tried to teach me was competent. I also know that the other things that my family tried to teach me that I was not taught in school I developed serious problems with. I refused to wear anything but velcro until around age 12, because my family had so frustrated me by not listening to me about how I wanted to learn to tie my shoes when I was 5. I developed a phobia of programming that I still have (but became weaker when I was taught some coding in college by a teacher who knew how to teach).

Basically, what I learned is that bad teaching can be massively damaging. Bad teaching can happen in a school or it can happen at home. It can happen anywhere. But I suspect you'll get more bad teaching when the people doing the teaching do not know what makes teaching good. Which is why I prefer people who have studied how to teach well. Although someone's actual competence matters far more than any degree. Show me someone who can clearly teach, and that is who I want, whether they have any degree or not. Show me someone with a degree who clearly is doing a bad job, and that's a problem.

But the fact that some kids learn on their own is really irrelevant to those of us who need help. And it's not really "on your own" if you are getting good help. I suspect their system works because the people teaching the kids about reading when the kids ask for help are giving the kids good answers, which not everyone does. I am deeply opposed to bad teaching, and I think that can happen with any methodology (in schools, in unschooling, etc.) So, it seems kind of silly to draw the lines in those methodologies.

But I truly owe my knowledge and abilities to good teachers, and in my case, they were all people who had been trained in how to teach. The people who tried to teach me things who did not have training tended to make my life worse. I would come to them for help, because I wanted to learn, and they would teach me so poorly that I would learn to stop trying to learn from them. If I hadn't had real teachers, I probably would have learned the lesson to stop trying to learn at all.

[siderea]

I agree with the principles like not pushing children and so forth, but who says that that is better done outside of a school?

I do, for one. The exigencies of mass schooling simply require it. Which the article discusses. Did you actually read it? Because nothing in your comment actually suggests you did.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I agree that schools pushing reading before a child is ready for it is a problem. But if a child is ready for it, then a traditional school can be great. Nobody in my family pushed me to read, but because none of them knew how to teach reading well, my desire to read was turned into an incredibly painful hatred of learning, which I managed to refine into a hatred of learning from my family. I would ask them to teach me how to read, they would teach me badly (because they didn't know what they were doing), and then I would fail to learn and feel bad. Obviously the problem is that the teaching was bad. Every other ingredient was good.

In my experience, good teachers teach well. They don't push kids and they know how to teach the material. I learned exceptionally well in public schools because I was incredibly lucky to have good teachers. I had trouble learning whenever I had bad teachers. I don't learn very well on my own. And as I said, my family's attempts to teach me left me with phobias for some topics (the ones that I was not taught in school and thus had no corrective experiences). This is the problem with bad teaching. Bad teaching can happen in a school or outside of it.

I don't see how schools encourage bad teaching though, except in some cases where they try to push a kid too fast. I agree schools should make less of an effort to push a child faster than the child seems comfortable going, and this is harder to do with large child to adult ratios. But I also feel that children should be taught by people who know how to teach, because bad teaching can be very harmful. While it is easier to adjust to a specific pace outside of a school, it is harder to find a good teacher outside of a school. Sure the best case scenario is one on one teaching with a good teacher, but that's hard to get. And I'd rather have my pace be less ideal than be taught by a bad teacher.

[siderea]

I'll take that as a "no, I didn't."

[leora.livejournal.com]

I don't feel like a fraud, because I feel that what is valuable is knowing what you do and do not know, and as I do reasonably well at that, I feel good about it. I don't need to be insecure about not knowing countless things, because I know there will always be more I don't know than I do know.

But I do generally agree with the piece. As I tried to emphasize in support, especially when someone felt like they didn't deserve their privs. If you know what you do not know, then you won't make a mess with them, and privs were often given on the strength of a firm view of what you do and don't know. You still need to know stuff, or there is no point, but a modest stuff you know category with little not knowing what you don't know is fine.

[tungol.livejournal.com]

The reading article fits very well with my personal experience. I and my three younger siblings were all (more or less) unschooled. I learnt to read fairly young (around age 5); my younger siblings all learnt to read quite late (around age 10). I don't think anyone ever taught me to read (though I don't really remember learning to read or not being able to read).

My siblings did have some reading lessons from parents/friends, so it wasn't 100% unschooling. But I don't think my parents were very concerned with them learning to read late or pushed them very hard.

All my siblings really took off as readers when a parent was reading a book to them, and they got impatient with how slow it was going and started reading ahead. Within a year, my sister V. was reading classics like Jane Eyre.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

I think that's what most "unschooled" reading boils down to--READ WITH THE KIDS.

I literally cannot remember being unable to read. Apparently I picked it up around three and a half from the many many books my mother used to read to me (sitting so that I could see the pages also). No formal instruction (by either good or bad teachers, see above discussion with leora), it just happened.

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

I appreciate these. Thank you for finding them and posting them here.