Learning

Free Range Learning

It’s the perfect time for me to read Free Range Learning: How Homeschooling Changes Everything, which author Laura Grace Weldon sent me for review consideration. My husband Aaron and I spent much of February visiting schools because our five-year-old son Ezra will be eligible to attend kindergarten next year. Although we’re planning to enroll our boys in school, I’m glad I read Weldon’s book, which champions a way of homeschooling that verges considerably from what most public and private schools offer.

Weldon calls for highly individual, interest-led, experiential education that gives children lives full of “conversation, music, play, stories, struggles and overcoming struggles, chores, laughter and the excitement of examining in depth any of the rich wells of knowledge that humanity has to offer.” She’s critical of any system that “makes the child a passive recipient of education” whether it’s a public school or a homeschooling curriculum that prescribes conformity to standards. She doesn’t advocate any one prescribed style of homeschooling, but a flexible mix and match according to what best suits a family’s needs.

At 301 pages, published by Hohm Press, Free Range Learning looks like a textbook, but it’s not a dry read. Weldon’s writing is as clear and lively as on her popular blog, and she presents considerable eye-opening research about the value of homeschooling, like the following:

One study tested homeschooled as well as schooled children using the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales, a measure of social development. On this test, the homeschooled children scored higher in socialization, communication, daily living skills and maturity. Overall the mean score of the schooled children stood at the 23rd percentile. In contrast, the mean score for the homeschooled children stood at the 84th percentile.

Weldon also gives homeschooling parents and homeschooled students a voice in pages of anecdotes, like this one by Linda from Ohio:

I did not plan to stay home with Jeffrey. As a licensed occupational therapist, I’d been eager to get back to work in a hospital setting. But when we put him in school he did very poorly. They slapped three labels on him before he turned six. We put him in private school. That was worse. We could see school wasn’t an option for him. So Matt and I reassessed. Now I have a part-time practice at home. … I think our family is closer as a result of this style of education, and Jeffrey has no evidence of the problems the school pointed to. I’m glad our son didn’t adjust to school and we didn’t accept their labels.

When we chose not to send Ezra to preschool this year, I realized how counter-culture homeschooling is. “Which preschool does he go to?” we’re asked regularly when we’re out and about. When I reply that Ezra stays home, many well-meaning parents relay the importance of preschool for a child’s social skills and development. I’m quietly heartened that the research suggests that young kids who stay home with involved parents thrive. In the same vein, I imagine homeschooling parents breathe a sigh of relief when they read Weldon’s supportive research and case studies.

She devotes the second half of the book to providing reams of ideas for exploring different subjects with kids, including all of the usual school subjects as well as business and finance, volunteerism, and ethics. In nearly every chapter, she provides an abundance of resources, including lists of youth organizations, mentorship programs, learning communities, online courses, service travel agencies, etc.

Weldon’s ideas and resources are impressive, but her real gift is her compelling and joyful vision of what a quality home education can look like:

Among today’s homeschoolers are children who wonder aloud any time of day and whose questions are answered. Children who stay up late to stargaze, who eagerly practice the violin and study Latin, who slosh in the edges of a pond to see tadpoles, who design their own video games, who read books till noon in their pajamas. These children are empowered to be free range learners.

I was lucky to grow up with voracious lifelong learners, who were my greatest teachers. Books were stacked on every surface in our house. On weekends, we visited ghost towns and museums, attended history lectures, and met all kinds of interesting writers and thinkers. My parents liked to joke that they homeschooled us, but we also went to school. I hope to follow in that tradition with my kids.

Truthfully, when my older sister went to school, I begged my parents to send me to preschool, and I loved school all the way through college. As an adult, though, I’m increasingly concerned about our approach to schooling. As Weldon points out, our standards-obsessed education system, with its focus on test scores and grades too often discourages creativity, curiosity, risk-taking, and initiative. As my first child embarks into kindergarten, I’m just as concerned as Weldon that “the very structure of school makes the child a passive recipient of education designed by others.”

My family is fortunate to live in a community with an abundance of school choice, and we’re planning to send Ezra to a public alternative school that favors interest-led, project-based learning and favors cooperation over competitiveness. I hope it’s a good fit for him and that he loves school as much as I did. If it’s not, we’ll re-evaluate and happily consider other options, including homeschooling. No matter what we end up doing, I’m thrilled to have Laura Grace Weldon’s beautifully written book at hand. It’s every parent’s job to create an enriching household that fosters a love of learning, and Weldon offers an invaluable resource for doing that.

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Feeling stuck? Slow down.

By Abby Quillen

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu

Full confession: I like fast. I like to move fast, work fast, learn fast. My dad used to tease me about how quickly I walk. “That’s not walking; that’s sprinting.” I love running and zipping across town on my bike. I like page-turners.

But I’m embracing the power of slow.

Anat Baniel, a clinical psychologist and dancer, teaches people how to overcome limitations and find joy in their lives. She guides people through deceptively simple, gentle movements, which she says rewire the brain to learn. She’s had amazing success helping children with severe disabilities learn to walk and live full lives. One of the nine essentials in her method is slow.

“Fast, we can only do what we already know,” she writes. “That is how the brain works. To learn and master new skills and overcome limitation, the first thing to do is slow way down. Slow actually gets the brain’s attention and stimulates the formation of rich new neural patterns. Slow gets us out of the automatic mode in our movements, speech, thoughts and social interactions.”

I was reminded of the power of slow recently when I learned to code eBooks and revamp my websites. Frustration dissolved when I let go of hurrying and simply allowed myself the time and space to learn. The process became fun.

I’m astonished at how quickly problems evaporate when I simply ease my foot off the gas pedal, whether it’s a toddler tantrum or a disagreement with my husband or a piece of writing that’s not coming together. And slowing down transformed the way I cook and eat.

But I’m the most amazed by how slowing down can instantly transform the way I see the world. The moment comes bursting into life. My senses turn on. Everything is rich and vibrant and alive.

I still like fast. I just realize that it has its place. Fast is best when we’ve taken the time to learn something and already mastered it. “When we do something fast, and without tension, it can be both exhilarating to do and exciting to witness. Our brains are built to turn slow into fast,” Baniel writes.

But to grow and change and to really experience our lives, we must harness the power of slow.

I am fortunate to live with true experts in slow. When a walk turns into an opportunity to inspect a blade of grass or watch a snail inch across the sidewalk, I’m usually tempted to hurry my boys along. But when I crouch to inspect a pile of rocks or listen to two crows calling to each other, I am nearly always grateful to have such brilliant teachers in the art of slow.

Have you learned to embrace the power of slow? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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How To Learn Anything

By Abby Quillen

A few months ago, I said “shoes” in a conversation with my husband, and one-year-old Ira appeared in the doorway carrying his Stride Rites. That’s when we realized he can understand everything we say. It seemed to happen overnight.

Every day Ira learns a new word or two. “Doggy, doggy, doggy,” he squeals as the neighbors’ poodle trots over. “Bawk bawk,” he calls to the hens. Meanwhile, he’s guiding himself through a crash course in running, climbing, and riding a strider bike.

Four-and-a-half-year-old Ezra is teaching himself how to read, write letters, draw, paint, ride a scooter, and take photographs.

It begs the question, is it easier for kids to learn new things?

Scientists used to think so, especially when it came to language acquisition.

But new research in neuroplasticity suggests otherwise. It turns out our brains optimize themselves throughout our lives, reorganizing sometimes in dramatic ways, like after someone has a stroke.

That’s great news if you’ve always wanted to learn a second language or become a painter. If you put some effort into it, you can probably do it.

Here’s a little example from my life:

When I was about five, my best friend and I put on a concert for our moms. We sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

When we were done, both of our moms applauded.

“He’s a natural,” my mom said, beaming at my friend. My friend was undeniably musically gifted. He went on to later sing in a band.

I, on the other hand, sounded a little bit like a wounded tabby.

Into adulthood, I struggled to stay on key even when I was singing along to my favorite songs. By the time I reached 30, I figured I should erase singing, at least in public settings, off my list of past times. Most people who heard me politely agreed. Read: my husband.

Then Ezra was born. When he was about a month old, I was pacing up and down the hallway in the middle of the night rocking him as he wailed. On a whim, I sang a lullaby I halfway remembered my mom singing to me.

Ezra grew instantly quiet and gazed at me.

Singing, it turns out, is a maternal super power. So, of course, I was going to continue singing even if I needed to buy a case of earplugs for my husband and cats. I crooned the same lullabies over and over — at naptime, in the car, at bedtime.

A few months later, after I (coincidentally) finished singing” Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” my husband grinned. “You taught yourself to sing.”

He was right. For the first time in my life, I could hold a tune. Effortlessly.

What had changed?

I’d paid attention to it.

As I’ve written before, we often forget the astonishing power of our attention. Paying attention to something invariably transforms it.

“Whatever you pay attention to thrives; whatever you don’t pay attention to withers and dies,” Karen Maezen Miller writes.

We tend to pay attention to what we’re interested in. So if you’ve always wanted to learn something and haven’t yet, maybe it’s time to ask yourself whether you’re really interested in it.

Or, you could try to find a screaming infant who loves the sound of Spanish verb conjugation or PBS painting shows.

Have you learned to do something new lately? Do you want to? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Lessons From the Garden

By Abby Quillen

“Can we plant the pumpkins this day?”

“Let’s go see if the peas are growing!”

“Mom, the chickens are in the garden again.”

Oh yes, those are the sounds of spring around here. It’s our fifth year growing vegetables in our backyard. It’s amazing how much easier it is than that first April, when seven months pregnant, I dragged my husband out to help me dig a garden bed in our brand-new backyard. I wish I’d heeded the wisdom of permaculturists, who recommend observing and analyzing a site for an entire year before planting a single seed … and also the wisdom of my body, which wasn’t happy about my grand gardening visions.

Those are just two of the hard-earned lessons I’ve learned from five years of gardening. Except for one summer of gardening in Colorado several years ago, my husband and I are gardening newbies. My dad planted a vegetable garden for one season when I was a kid, and it was one of the most thrilling summers of my life. I couldn’t wait to go outside every morning to see what was growing. I knew I would be a vegetable gardener someday, and during the many years my husband and I spent renting and moving around, I longed to get my hands in the soil.

I wasn’t a natural.

Those first few years, I labored over my garden plans for hours while studying Steve Solomon’s Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. I’m thankful for all I’ve learned from that book, and from others. I still refer to books. But even for a word lover like me, gardening is one of those things you learn by doing. And, oh, how I’ve learned.

My first big lesson: I’m not really in charge.

Yes, I can plant at a certain time and mix the fertilizer. I can water or not water. I can fence the chickens away from the first tender sprouts. But I’m collaborating with the weather, the rain, the soil, the wildlife, bugs, insects, and bees. There’s a certain amount of surrender involved.

Over the years I’ve surrendered to stunted squash, wilted cabbage, and unripe tomatoes. To chickens shredding the lettuce, bugs eating the spinach, kids eating the cherry tomatoes.

I’ve learned to let go of perfection.

My next big lesson: gardens have healing powers.

For a couple of seasons, gardening became a chore. Work. I’d trudge out and dutifully plant the seeds and water. I’d mix my fertilizer and mindlessly sprinkle the soil with it.

I believed in growing my own food. I wanted to harvest vegetables from my back yard. But I’m not sure I loved the actual gardening part.

Last spring, overwhelmed with caring for a three-year-old and an infant, I wasn’t sure if I’d plant a garden at all.

“Maybe it’s a good year to let our plots lay fallow,” I announced in March.

But, at the end of April, I got a great deal on a bunch of starts and planted.

Then my dad died.

I spent much of June in Colorado. And when I came back, it was incredibly uplifting to see the peas twisting up their trellises and the lettuce, rainbow chard, spinach, carrots, and heirloom tomatoes crowding their beds, reaching for the sun.

I spent so many hours with those plants over the next few months, watering and weeding, watching and listening, sitting.

I was surprised a few weeks ago when I pulled out my gardening journal. Every season I meticulously record what I plant, what’s growing and what’s not, when I fertilize, etc. Last year, I didn’t jot down a single note after April 29.

And yet, I learned more from gardening than ever before.

The garden is the perfect place to grieve. Quiet, buzzing with bees, bursting with life. The plants have so much to tell us about life and death, about patience, about just being.

Now, as I embark on my fifth growing season, I feel no sense of duty. No obligation. I only feel grateful and excited.

What lessons have you learned from your garden? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Learning Outside the Lines

By Abby Quillen

Recently I heard an interview with the herbalist Cascade Anderson Geller. She shared a story about a teacher and healer she met in the remote Choco region of Northern Ecuador, where she went to learn about the local plants and healing methods.

Geller had been suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and had consulted scads of doctors and bodywork practitioners in the United States. She didn’t tell the healer about the carpal tunnel, but he immediately went to work on her wrists. The next morning, she woke without the nagging tingling and pain she’d been coping with for months.

Later the healer saw her consulting a book about the plants in the region and approached her. He sniffed the book and ran his hands over it, then asked if he could borrow it.

When he returned it, he said, “You know, you can’t really learn anything about the plants except from the plants themselves.”

He asked her what the book was made of. She told him, and he explained that the reason the book must help her was because it was made from trees, and the trees were speaking to her.

“It was profound,” Geller says. “But of course, I still like books, because that’s what I was trained with. Whatever we were trained with as a child, that’s what we relate to and what we go back to. … With our training in academics, it’s a stretch to trust any other source.”

Geller’s experience reminds me of my journey through pregnancy and birth several years ago.

I grew up in a house filled with books. I always loved school, and books were a huge part of my childhood and my life. My love of words and research have served me well in many areas. They helped me excel in college. They’ve helped me get jobs. They help me write for publication and understand many things about the world and about people. No one can deny that words have power and that books can change us, heal us, teach us.

But several years ago, like Geller, I realized that books also have limits. I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, and like so many expectant mothers, I’d read towers of books and endless magazine articles and websites about pregnancy and birth – about what to expect during labor, about how to handle contractions, about breathing and positions and the various “methods” of coping.

I felt like I was lost in a wilderness of techniques – Bradley, Birthing From Within, Hypnobabies, with their various colloquialisms filling my mind. Which one would help me tackle this Herculean thing I had to do sooner and sooner with each passing minute?

With just weeks left in my pregnancy, I had an epiphany. I didn’t need to cram for birth like I was taking the LSAT. I didn’t need to manage it like I was putting on a benefit concert. I just needed to show up and experience this thing, whatever it was going to be – the pain, the emotions, the exhaustion, the joy. I just had to live it.

It was such an incredible relief.

I would tell you more about the actual birth, but I don’t remember it well. I do know that the experience changed me more profoundly than any book I’ve ever read. And afterward came a truly Herculean task that would make all my preparation for birth seem absurd and hilarious – parenting. Just weeks after my son was born, as I paced the halls with him, I knew that birth would be the easiest part of our journey together.

Who would I turn to for advice? Dr. Spock? Dr. Sears? Penelope Leach? The Baby Whisperer? The Smartest Baby on the Block? How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk? Love and Logic? I read them all, and many more.

Then my son turned one, his personality started to emerge, and the parenting books began gathering dust. I’m sure it helped me in some way to read them, especially the ones that emphasize kindness, listening, compassion, warmth, and connection. Those are good reminders for all walks of life.

But parenting books can also get in the way. Recently I was talking to a writer friend and mentioned a how-to-write-fiction-book that I love, and he replied, “I can’t read any more how-to books. They just make me a worse writer, because I stop listening to myself.” I think the same can be true of parenting books.

I used to run into another mom at the park occasionally. She had a new baby and a five-year-old, and she was training to become a parenting educator. She loved to talk about parenting books. Her favorite was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. She had charts in her bedroom, with scripts to help her remember what to say when dealing with behavior problems. If her five-year-old was acting out at the breakfast table, she would excuse herself for a moment to consult the dialogues.

She is a smart person and a loving and patient mother. But I noticed something strange about her interactions with her kids. They were stilted, scripted, and unreal. She wasn’t being herself.

That’s when I decided that being ourselves with our kids is the most important thing we can do, more important than handling every behavior issue perfectly, more important than having a baby who sleeps all night or a toddler who eats vegetables.

As my son grows older, I’m learning to trust things that you can’t learn in books, namely my instincts and my relationship with him. I try to let them guide me in knowing what to do when he’s tired, stressed out, sad, or angry. I don’t always do the right thing. I’m not always patient; I’m not always kind; and I’m not always fair. Neither is my son. So I’ve also come to trust in the amazing power of the apology.

Mostly I trust that just as it was when I was growing up, family life will be messy. It won’t fit into scripts or how-tos. Books will never capture its insanity, or its joy.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Family life is messy. Books will never capture its insanity or joy. It must be lived. #parenting” quote=”Family life is messy. Books will never capture its insanity or joy. It must be lived.” theme=”style1″]

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What do you think? Are there things we have to learn outside the lines?

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