A Brave Writer’s Life in Brief

Do you ever wonder if your kids are retaining anything they learn? Yeah, me too. I wondered about it all the time. Thank goodness you have a resource I didn’t discover until years after I finished homeschooling my kids.

Enter: Barbara Oakley, PhD—the mastermind behind the wildly popular Coursera course “Learning How to Learn.”

Barbara Oakley is a force to be reckoned with. She went from having a math phobia to getting her PhD in Mechanical Engineering (after mastering Russian, by the way). She learned how to learn anything!

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Barbara’s work focuses on the complex relationships between neuroscience and social behavior, and we think that any Brave Writer fan is also going to be a fan of Barbara’s newest book – Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens – which teaches kids and teens simple tricks for learning difficult subjects, even if they don’t feel like they’re “good students.”

Although learning is quite complex and the most important aspects of it can’t be distilled into a simple list of “three things you can do to learn better,” there are a few vitally important ideas that we’d like to highlight:

1. You want to create neural links that your short-term memory can call to mind instantly.
2. You need to have both focused and diffused modes, meaning you sometimes need to give your mind a break and let it wander! If you feel are banging your head against an idea, you are probably overusing the focused mode. Doing something else allows the diffused network to work through the idea.
3. You need to develop effective tools for dealing with procrastination.

There’s a lot more, of course, but this is a great starting point for learning how to learn!

In the book, these principles are then broken down into practices that children and young adults can do to reinforce the concepts.

And especially for young children, the practice is really important – they need the practice to develop these neural structures in the first place! Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear that the U.S. public education system often does not provide enough practice for these neural patterns to develop.

If you want to learn more about Learning How to Learn, you can join us in The Homeschool Alliance later in August for an in-depth discussion on how you can bring this learning experience alive in your families!

In the raging debate about which philosophies of education are best, many of us feel batted around and inadequate to live up to the expectations of those ideals. There’s a reason why homeschooling parents live under a cloud of inadequacy. I address that head-on in this podcast. Tune in and feel relief!

The Seduction of Ideology

When we adopt a particular style of homeschool, we tend to be seduced by ideological purity – we hear the principles, we hear the ideals, and then we believe that the only way to get the benefit is to adopt it perfectly.

But here’s the thing… true ideological purity is impossible, or at least ineffective.

When you believe in a system first, you forget about the human beings in that system and you end up favoring the system over the human beings.

So to protect that radical ideology, whatever it is, you have to get rid of the people who can’t live up to it fully and we start to believe that the principles are perfect.

Find Safe Communities

If you’re ever in a homeschooling context that shames you for your personal experience, it is not a safe space. It is okay to have ideas challenged – but it should be done in a way that takes into account your emotional well-being!

Your kids won’t grow if you threaten them, right? Well you can’t grow if you feel threatened, either.

The Problem with Purity: We’re Complex!

No human being – and no family – can live up to any system perfectly because human beings and families are complex systems.

And there are three important aspects to being a complex system, as it pertains to homeschooling:

1. Learning doesn’t happen without safety, without the ability to take risks – and that needs to be in partnership with supportive people.
2. Social science shows us that each person is socially located, meaning you have a culture, age, race, region, native language, and economic framework. That has a real impact on how you perceive the world, so what might work for one family may work completely differently for yours.
3. We are in process at all times; we are not static. We are constantly changing, growing, and adapting.

If we don’t have self-knowledge about our own complex system, the way we interpret the principles of these philosophies may not be practical.

3 Principles for a Healthy Education

These are principles that you can adopt that don’t have anything to do with a home education philosophy:

1. Look for sources of inspiration!
2. You need handholds. It’s almost impossible to follow inspiration and then not know what to do. If you’re suddenly inspired to learn about art, is the best way to learn just to go to the museum? It might be a starting point, but at some point it’s helpful to be taught about art appreciation so that you know more about what you’re looking at and why you’re there – and some of those handholds are pieces of curriculum!
3. We need tools and models of implementation. In addition to a philosophy, you need someone showing what you’re learning about and tools to practice it.

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Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!