Why we don't use a curriculum

[This post started off as a comment I left on Hawksbill & Barbnocity's blog....]

Most of the unschooling families we know use some kind of curriculum, albeit on their own schedule, and with modifications. I asssume that non-unschoolers are even more likely to use curricula. But I've been very resistant to the idea.

For one thing, I don't believe in an academic canon that every educated person should know. The world is a gigantic place, and any canon is necessarily limiting. The idea of "universal knowledge" has historically been used for elitist and exclusionary purposes, particularly by the 19th century aristocracy in their attempt to cling to privilege in the face of the "new money" merchant class. I also think that defining the "important" knowledge is inevitably ethnocentric when it comes to history, geography, politics, or the arts.

I've also accepted that my kids are going to specialize in certain fields long before they ever get to college, which means a curriculum could only ever be supplementary. When we first decided to homeschool, I read every homeschooling blog I could get my hands on, and for a couple of weeks I was freaked out. I would read about a 9-year-old obsessed with astronomy, a 13-year-old Shakespeare afficionado, the 8-year-old who loved algebra, etc, and I would conglomerate all these talents into one imaginary Genius Homeschooler. Eventually I realized that homeschooled kids have freedom to pursue their interests, and they retain more of their natural desire to learn, therefore there is no way they're all going to learn the same set of facts and skills. I had to let go of my old schooly idea of "education" as one particular set of knowledge, everything else being merely a hobby. I began to realize that my kids would know more than other kids in a few areas, and less than other kids in many areas. Just like adults. Who decided specialization shouldn't occur until college, anyway?

I do encourage math and reading, but I see those as tools we are picking up along the way, not as the main topics of study. Anya can read words like "heart," "brain," and "caudal fin" because she's obsessed with her books about fish; other words and true reading will follow because they are useful to her. I've told her numerous times that scientists use a ton of math, and if she's going to be an icthyologist she'll need to keep learning math. These tools get picked up while she pursues her own particular interests, and it would be a lot harder to teach these things in any other context.

I believe that learning is the weaving of new data into a sort of mental narrative of the world, a narrative which is unique to each person. This web of accumulated knowledge is most efficient if it is allowed to develop organically, using whatever connections come naturally to that person. A curriculum organizes information on your behalf; it draws connections between topics on your behalf. And if today's Study Unit is ancient Egypt, that discourages you from going off reading about the domestication of cats or the Aztec pyramids, because that would mean interrupting today's lesson.

I am constantly noticing how everything relates to everything else. Recently Anya asked me about Canadian money; then we talked about why no women were on American coins; I explained that men have more power now but that was not true 30,000 years ago; then we Googled Queen Elizabeth II, which led to more Googling of famous crowns, scepters, and jewels; which took us to geology and mining, and touched on economics (rarity = higher value). Oh, and Persia came into it as well, as their crowns put European crowns to shame. I don't want to interfere with this intense linking of concepts (and neurons) which I witness on an hourly basis. Even the most Waldorf and informal curricula still imply that "Now is the time to discuss X, we'll get to Y later..." which is in some sense preventing connections from occurring.

I know that unschoolers use curricula mostly for suggestions, but it seems to me that if you follow a kid's stream of consciousness you wind up touching on most everything. I can barely keep up with Anya's curiosity-- I don't need suggestions!

Some Anya quotes

Yesterday the kids were playing together, getting riled up and being silly and laughing hysterically. Then it sort of died down, and from the other room I overheard this:

Anya: You're a pretty nice baby, aren't you.
Tristan: Uh-huh!
Anya: Yeah, you're pretty nice.
Tristan: Uh-huh!
Anya: You're not a very smart baby, I'm sorry to say.

I had a good laugh at that one....

She uses this new tone now, best described as "let me break this to you gently." She used that tone a few weeks ago when we were getting ready for a family party at my parents' house. My dad had been outside doing some last-minute yard work and getting chairs out and so on, and he was still wearing his old grungy clothes. Anya came up to him and saw the holes in his jeans, and said: "Pop, those pants look really good on you, but I'm not sure they would be polite to wear to a get-together."

And a few days ago I was brushing my hair and she came into the bathroom and said "Mom, you look beau-- well, you look pretty good." Gee, thanks, kiddo! =)

Deschooling math

This morning Anya and I sprawled on the floor with the Magnadoodle and I wrote out a math problem: 12 + 14, written vertically. We haven't done math in a month, but there was a brief time when she could do two-digit addition. In fact, she did a few pages worth. She'd draw a vertical line to separate the tens and ones, and add each column separately.

But this morning she couldn't remember how to add 12 and 14, and I knew why. I had known all along that she wasn't understanding the tens and ones places, and she didn't see that 12 + 14 is just 10 + 10 + 2 + 4, or 20 + 6, or 26. She certainly didn't see that our vertical addition algorithm is nothing more than a short-cut for this regrouping process. So of course she didn't remember it. It takes more than three or four worksheets to memorize an algorithm that makes no sense to you.

Interestingly, this morning she did attempt to break the numbers down into parts that were easier to add. She divided both 12 and 14 in half, and tried to add 6 + 7 + 6 + 7. Unfortunately, she was then stuck with 13 + 13, which got her nowhere-- but it was the right idea.

Then she told me she was going to write down the "close answer" (close as in near). She said "It won't be exactly right but it's the close answer." And she wrote 24 underneath, because she knows two dozen is 24 and since 14 is close to 12, the answer must be close to 24.

We did another problem, 35 + 43, and Anya tried to figure it out by determining how many fives there were in 43 and then trying to count up from 35 by that many fives. She did count that it took eight 5s to get to 40, but got frustrated by not knowing what to do with the 3, and somehow that idea fizzled out.

All of these attempts (and other variations she tried) required more thought and more advanced math, such as dividing 43 by 5, than if she had remembered the cookbook rules. If kids memorize those rules too early, and spend their remaining time on mere quality control (speed and accuracy), this prevents them from understanding math. But most classrooms aren't designed for allowing the natural logic of arithmetic to be discovered. Math manipulatives are often used in early grades, but when "the rules" must be memorized before many kids are developmentally ready to deduce those rules or truly understand them, the manipulatives thing becomes lip service. Kids will learn to get the right answer the same way that I make my car run without knowing a thing about the engine. Follow the rules and forget what's happening inside the black box-- just like working the assembly line, not coincidentally.

Going back to this morning-- at another point we were playing with marbles. I made a grid of 12 marbles, in 3 rows of 4, and showed it to Anya. If you look at it that way, it's obvious why 3 x 4 is the same as 4 x 3. One way it's 3 rows of 4 and the other way it's 4 columns of 3, but it's 12 marbles either way. (This also comes up with legos: is it a 2 x 4 piece, or a 4 x 2 piece? Either way it's got 8 dots.) I also showed Anya why 3 x 3 is called "3 squared," since you literally make a 3 by 3 square. Anya got some marbles and quickly figured out that she couldn't take ten marbles and make a multiplication problem using 4, because you can't make even rows of 4 with exactly 10 marbles. (I resisted using the term "divisible," since it won't sink in until she's run into this issue a number of times.) And a while back, she figured out (by playing with plastic circles cut into different fractions) that you can't make a fraction equal to one half unless you have an even number of pieces, which means the number on the bottom has to be even.

In contrast, I don't think I understood multiple-digit arithmetic until at least three years after I had, as far as the school was concerned, mastered these concepts. One day I was thinking about dimes and pennies and I suddenly realized what borrowing and carrying were all about, that it was simply a matter of changing in too many pennies or changing a dime for needed pennies. It would have been a lot easier to have had that revelation at the start. Another example: it was only in the last year that I realized why the area of a right triangle is 1/2 the base times the height, and that is the simplest thing imaginable. A right triangle is always half a rectangle, and what's the formula for the area of a rectangle? Duh. It's embarrassing, but see, I had no trouble memorizing the formula, and then I just never thought about it again. I'd see a right triangle and "1/2bh" would leap to mind, and that was the end of that thought process. So, at best the rules are unrelated to real understanding; at worst, they prevent real comprehension.

One of the more common questions voiced by those who don't homeschool is the whole "What about math?" thing. I suspect they believe memorization and repetition is the only way to learn math because, again, the rules don't make any sense and can't be arrived at organically. I suppose this is why most people hate story problems: because story problems make it harder to determine which set of memorized rules to apply. They try to make you think about the concepts involved, but many people never had a chance to grasp those concepts.

Death by a thousand conversations

I'm someone who believes that in general, you shouldn't ask kids to do something unless you have a good reason. And that you should be willing to explain your reasons to them, for their sake but also for your own sake. I'm an Alfie Kohn devotee, and I believe from my own experience (and Kohn's books) that external motivations, i.e. threats and bribes, don't work well in the long term. So, I explain, and I explain, and I explain.

And because we're unschooling, whenever Anya has a question, I explain... and explain further. She's a chatterbug, and I'm sure that this is helpful long-term, because she learns a lot from our conversations.

But I get bone-weary from all this discussion. How do tornadoes happen? Why can't you make a cake out of only sugar and eggs and milk and no flour? What do spies do? What's a war? Oh, and could you make sure your answer is understandable to 6-year-olds, avoid anything scary, and condense your response to no more than 5 sentences?

After a while my brain goes numb.

Having given you that context, I had what you might call a 'parenting failure' today-- hardly a rare event, I admit. It happened like this:

Me: Anya, you've been out of the bath for a half hour, will you get dressed, please?

Anya: Why should I?

Me: Because we don't want your butt showing all day.

Anya: I think I have a cute butt.

Me: You do have a cute butt, but I don't want to look at it all day.

Anya: So don't look.

Me: Listen, will you just put on underwear, at least? As a favor to me?

Anya: Will you just do me a favor and stop asking me to put on underwear?

Me: Someone might come to the door, you need to at least have underwear on.

Anya: Okay, if someone comes to the door, I'll run upstairs and put underwear on.

Me: Look, it's not normal to go around naked all day, all right?

Anya: Well, it's normal for me!

Me: You need to wear some clothes. People wear clothes for a reason.

Anya: Like what reason?

Me, losing it: I AM YOUR MOTHER AND YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY! GO AND PUT ON UNDERWEAR!

Oy vey.

A different sort of learning

Even though I consider myself an unschooler, there are times when I get antsy because we aren't doing daily math and reading lessons, or because Anya used to know where all 50 states were and has now forgotten half of them. For instance, my husband's relatives from down south are coming up to visit, and I find myself wishing Anya were reading.

At times like that, I have to remind myself of all the stuff Anya's learning that doesn't "count" as learning in a school setting. Stuff she learns because she's with me all day, and can ask questions whenever they pop into her head. Stuff like:

• What a "chain reaction" is
• How to count using 4 vertical scratch marks + one diagonal mark, in groups of five
• What an electrical outlet "adapter" is (e.g. one that converts 1 plug into 3 plugs)
• That the water should be boiling before the noodles go in
• What hit points, armor class, constitution, and charisma are (for you DnD fans)
• How soccer is called football everywhere on earth except the US
• What weddings and wedding rings are all about
  
• What ear mites are (in cats)
  
• Why hot and humid is worse than hot and dry
  
• That heavier letters need more stamps
• What a gift card is
• What abstract art is
• Words like violet, teal, chartreuse, army green
  
• The Chinese symbol for "rain"
  
• What "hold your horses," "fit as a fiddle," and "you're a goner" mean

There are probably 200 other figures of speech I could add to that last item, if I could recall them. Lately Anya is fascinated by idiomatic expressions, and will stop you and ask questions if you happen to use one. Also, her choice of words is getting more creative, and often sounds strange to adult ears. She was dialing a phone number the other day and said "Mom, I can't remember how it goes... could you direct me to the numbers?" Or, when she was painting: "I made the symbol, and then I put my style around it." I made toast one morning and she called to me: "Mommmm-- the toast ejected!" She has a decent vocabulary, which is no surprise since she talks to me All. Day. Long. But I don't get to call that "teaching," and if I measure against a traditional school curriculum, creative word choice doesn't count for anything.

Anya spends a lot of time watching her goldfish, captured bugs, bugs outside, birds in the yard, etc. She's absorbing a lot of information about animals, but not necessarily the kind of data you can form into multiple choice questions. I've learned a lot, too, including that science texts and our society in general tend to underestimate animals (including young humans, while I'm on this topic). Many insects, for instance, wash themselves in a manner that is not unlike a cat washing itself. They rub themselves all over with their front legs, including brushing off their antennae. Who knew? (Non-insect bugs don't do this, as they are dumb as a doornail in my experience.) And our goldfish are affectionate with each other. I am sure there is a scientific explanation for the fish remaining within an inch or two of one another, even though we have a 5-gallon tank; and for brushing each other with their extra-long tail fins. It's a schooling instinct, or perhaps it keeps the algae off their scales. I am sure there is also a scientific explanation for the fish zooming through the shower of air bubbles from the bubble wand at the back of their tank, then shooting through the rock tunnel and back into the bubbles again, one following the other. There's just more oxygen above the bubble wand, and they like the rock tunnel because they instinctively seek shelter. But Anya and I know that the fish enjoy each other's company, and that they play together. You'll never read that in an academic book, since academics have a positive terror of being accused of anthropomorphizing. (My father-in-law, a consummate academic, once accused me of anthropomorphizing when I was talking about a human being.) So, Anya's learning that you can't take a whole species and collapse it into three sentences in a biology text. Those texts are very useful, and we look stuff up in books and online all the time, but there is also the wonder of the natural world, which can't be scrunched into "Chapter 4: Aquatic Vertebrates." I count this as learning, too.

But I still wish Anya could read. I just can't help it.