All things go through many changes in the course of their lifetime… After a few lifechanging issues I have renewed Independent Learning and Homeschooling under a slightly new name at http://indlearnerhomeschooler.blogspot.com/
Please visit us there….. This site will remain open for the time being as an archive as I move things to the new site. Thanks for your support and continued reading…. John
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All I can say is forgive me because posting everyday got away from me… I have vowed to myself to try to restart again tomorrow… I so want this to be useful….. and good… I’m trying ya’ll really… 🙂
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Tomorrow on Saturday the 23, I am giving myself a learning gift. I am going to participate in a seminar on Creativity with Dr. Karen Royer.
Dr. Royer is a specialist in the use of creativity to enrich lives, point new directions and provide new directions in learning. This is independent learning at its best… giving yourself the gift of growth…
Look for opportunities to give yourself such wonderful gifts… for they are at the core of what we who are trying to fulfil our gifts are doing.
I’ll be posting about this beautiful experience in the next Independent Learning and Homeschooling….
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Information processing… A concept that is so, so important but so limited in our busy world…. So what do we do to add to our information processing….our number crunching… our mental data filing. Well there is something magical about the hands… there is almost no learning that does not involve the hands in some way… there is a message in this…
Writing… drawing… coloring… cutting… pasting… all can be part of an information processing strategy… The best examples of this kind of journal can be found by studying the way some of the most awesome minds in the history of the world learned. Consider the journals of Leonardo…
Leonardo’s journals included everything… he did studies of zoology, human anatomy, drafts of writings, diagrams of weapons, studies for his great artworks….he literally wrote down every thought he had in the course of his life… They are fascinating to look at for their diversity of thought and creativity…. they are essentially trains of thought as they occurred to him… in great detail….
So how do we use this idea… first get a good journal… I like Moleskin journals because I just can’t seem to tear them up… Get one for every discipline you are studying.. One of my great friends has a journal in which he has his essential knowledge… quotes… formulas… drawings… and so much else…
As you read, think, study, or reflect, write down every thought you have no matter how seemingly unimportant…. then follow it if it seems to lead somewhere else….
Write down every question you have about the subject…don’t be shy…Leonardo constantly referred to his lack of learning…write down questions that come from reading… those that come from reflections… as well as those that may seem silly…
Write down things you are trying to remember… there is something magic about the hand… in writing is processing… amazing things happen when one writes down questions…. facts… learnings….
Then answer your questions…. you will find that one answer to a question leads to another question… then another and another… until you have learned as much as someone who took several courses in the discipline…
If you are a writer… write down things about your characters that you may need later… never trust your memory… a good idea drifts off into space so quickly you can’t imagine.
Include articles you find… cut them out and paste them in… then write their significant points in the journal… draw their significant points…. outline them… but whatever you do.. just work the material… so it will be digested….
Don’t worry …. in this process you will find that you wake up each day with more understanding… the more information you collect the greater your mental database will grow….
Cut pictures from magazines, journals, books,,, (your books) and paste these into your journals with captions that explain to your their meaning… to you not to someone else….to you…
Draw your concepts… forget artistry if you aren’t an artist… try to get as close as possible… just work a concept until you have learned it…. don’t study it… work it… process it… play with it… just run it through your mind without fear that you wont learn…. you…will…learn….
Reflect… take time to write a couple of pages that consolidate what you are learning in one place. Your wonderful brain will absorb this material… you will also find that this form of reflection will point out what you don’t know…
Set aside a few pages to write lists or goals about things to do to learn more about your subject.
If your discipline works with photography, travel to take pictures of locations, collect and photography samples… the act of hunting for samples will force you to explore….
Explore and note what you find… travel, research, go to libraries… make notes… carry your notebook with you where you go on your hunt… I cannot imagine that Leonardo traveled without his notebooks.
Reflect, collect, write, record…. and learn…. journaling is one of your best independent or home school learning tools…..
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Kurt Vonnegut said “The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.”
I risk a paraphrase of that magnificent quotation…
The practice of Learning isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow.
Inside every human child there is a secret place… hidden… unknown… instilled with a magnificence we cannot fathom…
A place as deep as any ocean… as individual as each child’s DNA… In fact, I postulate this place holds each child’s personal intellectual genetic compass… a pathway that is only found through following the desires of that child’s intellectual heart…
It is a place not often found… a place found only by the most blessed of people who were reared in an environment that encouraged that mad pursuit of intellectual independence toward what a “particular” child was created to do… not educated, but cultivated… placed in sacred soil where the child was allowed to grow toward who he “is”… for those who never find that special gift become those who live incomplete lives and who come to say in their old age those most tragic words… “If only”…
It is a place all but never found… for the soil in which we place most children today is not sacred… rather it is an artificial soil intended to grow discrete skills, uniformity, conformity, and the intellectual joining with the mass of humanity… humanity defined by the industrial definition of what it is to be human…
They all must read… but they will read…
They all must calculate numbers… but they will calculate…
They all must write… but they all will write…
They all must understand what they need to endure in the world… but they will endure…
and they will learn all those things through the search for that hidden place… the sacred gift that each child is given… what they were made to be…
These blessed children live in a world not defined by an expert’s definition of what a “graduate looks like”… No, they live in a world dedicated to letting them find the hidden place within their being by following their joy… by following that strong compass bearing holding true in their soul… by following their innate fascination with the creations miraculous paths…
They are the ones who walk the paths reading the compass of their heart… indeed that is the nature of those who found their genius… those who did not find that hidden place look at those who did find it and marvel… and feel the saddest intuition… did I not have something like that in me…
When we look at such a person we are looking at pure joy… we are looking at a being following the light for which they were created… the musician who plays miraculously… the doctor who heals with hands that seem dipped in sacred waters… the teacher who can reach into a child to help them find their hidden gift… the shuttle pilot who rides the thunder into the vastness of space… the carpenter who builds a house to stand the centuries… the cook who creates wonder from the gifts of the Earth… the physicist who listens to the music of the spheres… the machinist who works the elementals into shapes that allow the engines of our world to generate untold power in silence… the pastor who can communicate the eternal or quiet a grieving heart…
All these and millions more gifts are in as many children… But so few ever find that hidden place within their soul… so few…
So what must we as a civilization do?
We must remove the bindings of artificiality in what we allow children to learn…
We must renew our faith in art… music… great literature… true science…
We must renew our faith in play…for play is the foundation of creativity…
We must learn to trust that true compass within ourselves that always points to the joy… for as surely as we try to follow another’s compass or definition of learning we crush the joy…
We must give up our belief that there is “One” body of knowledge needed by every child…
We must not confine our thinking about learning to the small and mundane, but rather turn our thoughts to the greatness that could be… in every child… for in every honest and good path there is greatness…
We must trust our civilization to the miracle of the genius that created every child… we must allow ourselves to cultivate every growing child in such a way that they search, honestly search, for their hidden place… their hidden gifts… who they are supposed to be…
We must believe that we were given our minds to develop…
We must believe above all else that we do feel the tug of the compass within ourselves…
We must believe that if we follow that tug, that arterial tide within ourselves we will find our genius…
We will know when we have found our hidden place because it will be as if we have a powerful wind at our backs… those who have found their hidden place are the ones we call brilliant… the ones we call genius… the ones who inspire us…
Should we fail in this we will see no more Galileo’s, no more Bach’s, no more Debakey’s, no more Einstein’s… and we are failing…
We are failing because we have believed a lie… we have believed that every child must be measured, cut from the same dull cloth, labeled with any of the hundreds of ways we try to categorize and limit human beings… We have believed that every child must learn the same things and be measured in the same way… and match the image of “what a graduate should look like”.
We have believed the false premise that a human child can be manufactured through our well-meaning programs and curricula. We have believed that the fact that we all share DNA makes us like every other…
We have to learn that our DNA, the very thing that defines us all as human, makes us all as humanly different as stars in different galaxies… for that is what DNA is… it is an individual program… none like another…
No human child is created like any other…when we found that DNA is a living program we took it to mean uniformity of universal intent when it means exactly the opposite… universal uniqueness…
This is why there is a dawning in some hearts lighting the way to another path, an independent brook away from the stream of humanity flowing into a sea of conformity… into the religion of similarity, of artificial counting of bits of knowledge, of sameness….
Those are the hearts that beat independently, the do answer to another rhythm, another music of the spheres…..
The saddest truth is this; we will not see another Galileo, another Bach, another Debakey, another strange walker in time unless we have the courage to rebuild that which we call learning…. in our attempts to create uniformity in learning we will block the next stage in our development as human beings…. as a species specially created by God… each of us with a distinct purpose… each with an inborn joy that is lost to most of us by the time we are teenagers… the result being all the particular problems that do overtake our children because we are trying to actually create a uniform human being… as uniform as the length of each grass blade in a suburban lawn.
We must adopt a practice of learning that is only intent on finding that hidden place, a practice of learning that is independent, that results in the cultivation of the seed that is within every individually created child.
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And in the end we finally destroyed our educational power by believing that which was false, that which was wrong, and that which did not fit human development. In the years before the complete collapse of education in the United States our leaders made the mistake of believing that it was enough that a student be “introduced” to every type of knowledge in the world. We set up high stakes tests that no one in history had to pass that covered literally everything in the knowledge base that our students had been exposed to for the twelve-year sentence our society gave to our kids.
We believed the statisticians and the so-called education researchers who designed high stakes testing for us. And we paid them millions for their services. They designed tests that let one or two questions represent entire important bodies of knowledge. And we listened to so-called experts who dictated what they told us we had to know whether our kids were going to be doctors, or entrepreneurs, or interior designers or whatever.
We were foolish and daft enough to let “experts” tell us that you could tell anything from a one test snapshot of a students knowledge on school directed curriculum. Then when that didn’t work we sought to improve “test scores” by emphasizing the same thing in a more difficult and demanding fashion.
And soon parents began to vote with their feet. They began to leave the public schools in droves. It was becoming apparent that you don’t have to have a degree or a certificate to help a child learn. It turned out that much of what parents had been told about their children’s negative behavior in school was really positive behavior out of school. Parents soon became to realize that they were medicating their children into stupors only for the schools, not for the children.
And so the great rebellion began. Parents began to take their kids out of government schools in droves. They did this because education had become arrogant. Theirs was the only way, the way to educational Valhalla. And no one without a teaching certificate could teach anyone anything.
Parents didn’t stop. They began to leave in huge numbers realizing that what the schools had been doing they could be doing by themselves with their children, unmedicated, and at home. When kids started going to school at later ages and specializing earlier the behavior problems went away. The prescriptions for Ritalin and other drugs were stopped. And as the leaders looked at the kids, they didn’t see the success they fought back with laws, taxes and regulations.
They did this until they painted the people into a corner. And then first one parent said “Not my kid. My child was given to me by God. This is my child, not the state’s child. Then others rose to join the chorus so soon the air was filled with the voices of parents who were not going to take it anymore. And so, let the revolution begin… let parents vote with their feet. Let them leave the public system. For the public system seeks to create good little workers who believe in the power and the right of the state. Just remember that the philosophy has now changed from the premise that our kids belong to the government to the premise that our kids were given to us by God to care for, to love and take care of ourselves. It is time to tell the statists to take a walk. Let’s do this together.
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Today I bring you some resources on informal learning. This is rapidly becoming the new paradigm in corporate training and in some areas of formal education. We independent scholars and homeschoolers have known about this concept all the time. But it has been well hidden. Lets see what some other people have to say about it.
Mariaconner.com Check out what Maria has to say. She tells us it accounts for about 75% of corporate learning today.
Informal Learning is a new book by Jay Cross. Disclaimer… I have no connection to Amazon, Jay Cross or any publisher. I just like the book.
Informal learning in 10 minutes YouTube video series of 3 by Jay Cross.
Informal Learning Informal learning should no longer be regarded as an inferior form of learning whose main purpose is to act as the precursor of formal learning; it needs to be seen as fundamental, necessary and valuable in its own right, at times directly relevant to employment and at other times not relevant at all. (Coffield 2000: 8)
Formal and Informal Learning According to a three-year study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and performed by ASTD (Carnevale, Gainer, & Villet (1990), two out of three workers say that everything they need to know was learned on the job, rather than in the classrooms.
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Recently, I posted an entry on developing custom personal “textbooks” by collecting content from the internet. I was very gratified when that post was picked up by Openeducationnews.org. When I clicked over to their link I discovered another excellent article titled Illusion of Quality in K-12 textbooks written by Jane Park. This event was extremely rewarding to me but it was also a perfect example of why I advocate the use of personally developed research oriented material rather than the use of textbook-like materials.
The publication of my thoughts led me to discover information that provides a more complete foundation for my post. That is at the heart of what occurs in true independent learning. It also extends the post with new information that I can use to learn along with anyone else who reads it and then follows the links provided. Another wonderful benefit of this even was that I was introduced to writers working on the same concepts from whom I can extend my reach.
That is what learning is like in the real world.
Most often after what we think of as formal schooling we learn far more through the interwoven networks of our real work interactions and real research. By research I include any and all learning in any field of endeavor from developing skill in a trade to practicing medicine. All learning should be thought of as a practice.
All of that post-school learning is motivated intrinsically within us thus it is retained. I will never forget Jane Parks’ article because my mind was in what I refer to as the “Learning Mindset”.
The Learning Mindset happens when we are involved in work that has meaning to us. That is why so many people, if they are honest with themselves, readily admit they remember almost nothing they learned in school except that which they use in their lives.
An example of the worst found in the thought of education reformers taken right out of the current debate on education can be found in the January 2010 U. S. News and World Report in an article titled “The Extreme School Makeover”. The article makes the stunning statement that under President Obama’s education proposals seniors “could be expected to solve problems such as – if there are 8 x 10 to the 12th power hydrogen molecules in a volume of 4 x 10 to the 4th power cubic centimeters, what is the average number of hydrogen molecules per cubic centimeter?” Forgive me for I don’t know how to do superscripts in Wordpress. To me this immediately begs the question why would the average citizen ever need to know how to figure the average number of hydrogen molecules per cubic centimeter? And, why would we expect any student not bound for a career in a field in which that arcane problem is useful remember it past the test? Ask any senior why they need to know that information. They will answer “I need it for the test”.
Congratulations the most powerful government on the face of the Earth has labored mightily to lay another rotten egg.
This is an example of why education is failing. That question is one constructed by a committee of individuals who sat down to construct the ideal knowledge set to be learned by the ideal student. They probably asked themselves this inane question as I once did on a similar committee; “what should the high school graduate look like”? That’s a quote from the task set before the committee on which I served. That day was one of the turning points in my outlook on how education is done in this country.
After a while I realized that “the” high school graduate should look nothing like any other high school graduate. Some will most certainly look like future engineers, chemists or medical doctors. But others will look like writers, journalists or anchors. Some will look like diesel mechanics, transmission specialists, entrepreneurs and carpenters. Others will look like biologists, foresters or any of the untold professions that can be found among human beings. Further, each graduate will look different because they are not mass-produced objects put together on some obscene human assembly line.
To look at students any other way is to deny their individuality inherent to each one. That is why learning materials need to fit the individual rather than some ideal group.
Then the committee, more then likely, set out to brainstorm the things this ideal graduate would be able to “know and do”. That particular requirement given in U. S News came from some list of abstractions sewn together by such a committee like some Frankensteinian freak. All such requirements could now be required of every innocent child born in America . Absurdity on absurdity.
Tragically, this is how commercial textbooks are written. The time to blaze a new trail has long since passed. Constructing custom resources using the internet is useful for a number of reasons. Very carefully selected and modified commercial materials can also be useful. But, here are a number of thoughts on why I advocate constructing personal materials.
The simple reason that most of us don’t learn material that is simply assigned, even if we made 100’s on the assignments, was that our minds were not “personally” engaged by it. We were fulfilling someone elses goal.
We learn the things that are personally meaningful, fit our God-given gifts, fit our God ordained developmental pathways and have meaning to our particular lives.
I won’t try to outline what Jane Park wrote so well in her article. Please read Jane Park’s brilliant article for yourself here.
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When a child is taught in a traditional way most of the decisions are made for the child. All the natural power is taken away from him. The motivation to learn becomes the need to meet the deadline, fulfil the assignment and achieve someone else’s goal for him.
Force vs Respect
To a teacher this is very much like classroom management. Teachers who rule by brute force may have very, very quiet classrooms. But there may not be much learning going on. And such a teacher will soon learn that they better not turn their back. The kids are behaving out of fear, not out of ethical conviction of what is right. The teacher who is able to make the kids realize “why” good behavior and respect is important and useful will have a class that can operate peacefully and often by itself. And that teacher can turn their backs on the students because the kids have “true” respect for that teacher. They are behaving because it is the right thing to do.
The “learning mindset” vs the “programmed mindset”
The same principle works with learning projects. As long as a child is working “for the teachers goals” she will accomplish the goal but won’t always accomplish the learning. That is why when a child is told to write a 500 word essay you will often find them counting words without being able to really tell you about what they are writing. That is what I think of as a “programmed mindset”.
Contrast that with the “learning mindset”. To understand the difference just think about a child who is at play with something at any age. Such a child can go at it for hours without stopping. That is also true of research scientists, surgeons, woodworkers and writers of blogs. Those people are doing what they are doing because they are motivated by the joy of what they are doing. Some call that state of mind flow. I like to call it the “learning mindset”.
Strive to establish conditions that lead to the “learning mindset”. Here are a few ideas that will help do that.
Strive to keep a learning mindset. Never get too excited about the anxious goals and schedules set by government entities.
A very interesting take on this concept can be found at http://fongkeeken.blogspot.com/2009/11/learning.html. This is a blog called A Penny for My Thoughts and the writer gets it right.
Brian Frank has written another excellent addition to this conversation at http://brianfrank.ca/2009/12/dynamic-motivation/.
Roger Shank has written a brilliant piece called the “top ten mistakes in education” that is found at http://preilly.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/roger-schanks-top-10-mistakes-in-education/ He reminds us that there really is no learning separate from doing.
He also has a great insight into the uselessness of studying.
Think for a moment about why medicine is called a “practice”.
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Independent Learning and Homeschooling 