Posted in Educational philosophy and curriculum
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After leaving a (too!) lengthy comment on the blog of a friend, I decided I’d better continue my one-sided musings on my own blog. Basically, she was worrying—and her readers, like me, were commiserating—about the challenges of homeschooling a highly gifted kid. For example, this year we’ll probably go through 3 grades of math in about 9 months. After seeing the Physics Circus she told me she might like to be a physics professor someday (presumably after being an actress and artist for a while.) How long until this child eclipses my ability to teach? I didn’t even take physics in high school! First off, I am the Queen of Outsourcing. For my freelance work, I hire subcontractors, and I have no problem doing the same in the rest of my life. If I can trade time for money by letting someone clean or organize my house, do some coaching in Chinese or ice skating, deliver my groceries, or shovel my snow, I’ll do it. (For that last one, we bartered some old drums to another neighborhood homeschooling kid—was lovely to see the shoveled walks after last night’s snow storm!) I do keep tabs on how much of my life I give away, especially when it comes to my kids, but otherwise I put the emphasis on the Manager part of Household Management. If I’m the conductor, I don’t have to play oboe, viola, and timpani drum all at once to make beautiful music. More important, I think, is trusting that my ability to teach is extremely unimportant compared to my child’s ability to learn. Thus far, Violet seems highly able to learn, quickly and with surprising retention, despite my frequent missteps, bad moods, and benign neglect while attending to the Internet. My job, as I see it, is primarily to put interesting things, books, people, and places in her path, and let her go with them. Timing is crucial, it’s true. I keep books away from her that I’d like her to be just a bit older to read. She has the reading ability of a high school senior, but I still keep A Wrinkle in Time back, just because I think she’ll love it that much more in another year or two. But sadly, I can’t know the right time. I guess, I estimate, then I close my eyes and hope for the best. My consoling analogy is that of feeding a toddler. Picky toddlers: one day they love the carrots, the next they toss them on the floor in disgust. One week they eat with gusto, so that you can never quite get them full, then for three straight days they don’t touch a morsel of dinner. Then there’s that stretch of eating only yellow food. My limited experience of the world has taught me that most parenting advice is pretty sound for dealing with people ages 2-102. When you feed a toddler, you put an array of healthy choices in front of her and trust that she will take what she needs when she needs it. She may need to get hungry sometimes to figure out what she needs, but that’s part of learning to feed herself. True, everyone feels more relaxed on those happy occasions when mom thinks it might be a broccoli day, and three trees would be just right, and sure enough Miss Toddler gobbles it up and smiles. Days when the milk gets poured over the mashed potatoes before the whole mess gets flung onto the china cabinet, on the other hand, can make you feel that you are doing everything wrong. But no. You are both—mom and child—doing it right. And I really think it works the same with education. You provide the quality control for the content, and trust the student to take it in and digest it on her own schedule. Even if she sometimes flings the fabulous biography across the room and seems to subsist on a diet of SpongeBob and Fairy Realm books. (In that case, try adapting Dr. Sears’ advice on carefully observing your kid’s educational diet—you’ll likely be surprised at how much substance is actually getting in there.) Aha, you say! But what happens when the child has an incredible hankering for blueberries, and you can’t possibly provide enough unless you started a blueberry farm? Can’t it happen that you just won’t have enough of something that your child really needs, so that it won’t make its way onto her buffet? Yes, yes it can. And by that time, hopefully you’ve taught your child to go pick blueberries. Granted, from my perspective, it is a challenge to teach a very young, profoundly gifted child to be educationally self-sufficient at the age when they’d still be learning addition and phonics in school. Just because a seven-year-old can do basic geometry or algebra doesn’t mean she has the skills or discipline be totally self-directed in her education. We’ve tried to accept the reality that the ages 5-9 would be the toughest time, when our daughter’s mental skills and her chronological age would be at their most out of whack. (Sorry, I can’t find the link for the articles; if I do I’ll add them later.) Which means it’s going to get easier. The fussy toddler won’t starve to death, and the demanding learner won’t atrophy, as long as someone is consistently providing nourishment of some kind, all the while pushing self-care skills and increasing independence. The avid nurser eventually weans, the potty-resistant kid doesn’t go to college in diapers, and the gifted-but-dependent student starts to learn online with the computer she built over the weekend. (Have I mentioned that Violet is a proud and avowed “Linux Nerd”? How many 7yos have a favorite operating system?) The day-to-day reactions of the child are not the best indicator of whether this is happening, nor is hitting a temporary plateau in development. Time is what will tell, which is really hard to take when it comes to supporting the happiness and well-being of your child. In the meantime, I have to trust my child. If she learns nothing else, maybe she’ll learn that her ideas and interests are worth pursuing, and that she can trust herself too. |
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Posted by Anonymous
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