All of a sudden gravity no longer affects you when you’re inside your house! What happens next?
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Brave Learner Home: The Curriculum’s Not Working!
Help! My Plan isn’t Working!
There’s a reason home educators call October: Curriculum’s not working month!
That’s because all those beautiful plans that live in your imagination have been put to the test and real life doesn’t always match our fantasies!
These are common questions I hear from parents:
- What can be done with a program that cost a lot of money, but my kids hate it?
- When is it time to throw in the towel on a curriculum and try something new?
- What criteria should I use when switching to a different plan or program?
- How do I know if a program IS working or not?
- How important is a child’s happiness in plan development?
Good news! I have ideas to try and suggestions for how to rescue a homeschool on the wrong track.
I’ve told you lots about Brave Learner Home and the power of our membership community. Join us and get the support you need!
Podcast: Overcoming Resistance in Learning
Parents sometimes confuse two important issues. They care about their students getting the appropriate education, and so they prioritize what they consider the right subjects taught in the right ways through the right programs.
Meanwhile the child is resisting. That resistance is expressed as a global unhappiness with the subject or any effort required to address the subject. To create a desire to learn, the child must find the work personally meaningful and useful in some way.
In today’s podcast episode, let’s talk about how you can connect learning to something in the child’s current life.
Show Notes
Two ways parents respond:
- One kind of parent doubles down and requires the child to complete the work despite the whining, complaining, and poor performance.
- The other kind of parent tries to accommodate the resistance by making the task easier or letting it go for a period until the subject never gets done.
The first kind of parent doesn’t know how to get the child to be happy.
The second kind of parent doesn’t know how to ensure the child makes progress in learning.
Let’s look at a third way that will address both parents.
Read the rest of this entry »Don’t Derail Thoughtfulness
The multiple-choice test ‘right answer’ thinking is what often derails thoughtfulness—evidence of caring about the question, not just surmising the answer a test-maker had in mind.
You’re in class. Teacher hands out the test. Hands on the clock tick. 50 minutes to answer 50 questions. Scantron hits your desk—ding!
What happens in your body? A thrill of adrenaline? Sweat?
You get to the end of the first question: four choices. You can’t decide between (a) and (b). Clock ticking. You can make good arguments for either of them. Clock ticking louder. You fill in one bubble, then erase it, and fill in the other. It’s hard to know which one is right. From one perspective, (a) makes complete sense. But you like (b) because it makes more sense to you.
Finally: you know! You know because you do one thought experiment to help you. You ask yourself, “What did my teacher have in mind when creating this question?” You stop consulting your own thoughts, ideas, and powers of synthesizing.
On you go—new method in mind. You won’t think about possible answers. Instead, you’ll ask “What’s the most likely answer the test-creator wanted me to supply?”
Goodbye critical thinking.
When we reduce learning to right answers alone, and decide whose right answers we must learn, and then put that right answer thinking under timed pressure, we eliminate an important force in our education: our own powerful minds!
Even math. Even spelling.
What would happen if your child could explain why they thought 7 x 8 was 54 or that “field” was spelled “feeled”?
How is it helpful to simply tell that child “You got it wrong?”
This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!
For more help, I’ve got a whole chapter addressing “multiple choice right answer thinking” and how it’s destroying our children’s natural capacity for wonder and intellectual growth in my new book, Raising Critical Thinkers.
Friday Freewrite: Sleep Habits
Can you fall asleep practically anywhere, or do you need to be in your bed at home to rest easy? Write about your sleep habits.
New to freewriting? Check out our online guide.
