This week I was sharing with dd19 some of my thinking about the development of intrinsic motivation, and why giving young children regular opportunities to choose their own activities and pursue their interests is a critical factor in developing internal motivation.

While discussing this, she asked me about a dilemma that her college is having.

(At the end of last year, dd19 was asked by her college administration to serve as a workshop safety instructor for this school year.  This is a paid position that will also look good on her resume; it was offered to her because she has excelled in her studies as well as being capable and responsible.  This is how she gets to hear about the administrative dilemmas faced by the school.)

The dilemma is that a significant number of students don’t do the coursework or homework.  They come unprepared and their approach to addressing their own lack of responsibility is limited to complaining to the teachers that they have such busy schedules and how can the teachers expect them to get the work done?

The administration is now discussing how to handle this.  What they’re planning is that all students who haven’t done the necessary work will be expected to come to make-up sessions that they’re going to have to pay for.  Dd19 asked me if based on the principles I shared with her, do I think that this effort is going to work?

“No,” I told her, “it’s not going to work.”  They’ll pay the extra cost with lots of grumbling but they still aren’t going to take their classes seriously and will continue to complain about how unfair it is.  What they need is to have a personal  commitment to getting a good education, and this step isn’t going to motivate them to be engaged in their learning.  This isn’t a judgment on these students.  They’ve grown up with a focus on the outcome rather than the process (get the good grade/diploma rather than get an education), and they’re just continuing in the way they’ve been trained.

Dd wanted to know, what would help students take responsibility for their own learning?  The most obvious thing is that they  be allowed to continue doing what they’re doing and experience the natural and logical consequences.  What would those consequences be?  They won’t get good grades, won’t be able to graduate, won’t be hired, are hired but don’t have the skills to perform well.  At any point along the way they can reassess and decide to apply themselves if they want to get different results.

Dd said the college has a policy that doesn’t allow for students to be failed.  I thought this was unusual but a day later read this article and sadly this has become very common.  As kids become less resilient and unable to handle stress, institutions have lowered their standards and expectations so students won’t be distressed.  (What makes kids resilient?  Why can’t they handle stress?  Important issues to address to understand what’s really happening but this isn’t part of the debate – it’s all about school policy. )

The college has tied its own hands and has no power.  They’re going to be left resorting to giving speeches about the importance of working hard that most students won’t pay any attention to.

At some point, there will be consequences for these students.  They aren’t developing their character base and they aren’t developing their knowledge base, and this will affect who they become and how they perform in all aspects of life – not just on the job.

Avivah

>>My wife has been talking about home schooling some of our children. One of the concerns that I have, is that on a regular basis my wife will comment to me that she does not have enough help/time to get the daily chorus done in the home, and that the home is not as clean as she would like it and she cant function in an unclean home.

My question is if she were to home school would would that not just add it too the problems, if she cant find the time now to do the chorus and the daily house routines how would she be able to find the time when she has to spend time learning and exploring with the children?<<

There’s no question that if you choose to homeschool, there’s more activity and mess happening and less time to devote to cleaning.

Does your wife have realistic expectations of herself?  Some women are naturally extremely fastidious and often they need to loosen up and be a bit more realistic about what having children around is like.  Here are a couple of humorous descriptions that I’ve seen shared recently to describe the reality:

“Want to know what it’s like living with kids? 

1) Gather everything you own.

2) Throw it on the floor

3) Pick it up.

4) Repeat for infinity.”- (source:Topher Writes/twitter)

“Yesterday I cleaned the house….which was dumb, because I still have kids living here.”

I’m a person who likes things to be neat and am naturally on the organized side.  But my house often doesn’t look the way that I want it to.  I continually choose the standard for our home, and my criteria for that is 1) a home that feels comfortable 2) that I can maintain with a minimum of resentment and stress.   That standard isn’t what I wish my home looked like but it’s what I can do on a daily basis from a place of emotional sanity (even though I often feel embarrassed when people stop by unexpectedly!).  I can tell when I raise my standards too much, because I start to feel irritated or tense with the state of my home or my family members and that’s my cue to cut back and reestablish a healthy balance.

Letting go of unrealistic standards isn’t something you do once and it isn’t easy.  It takes constant effort and reminders to yourself to keep your priorities focused on what’s most important to you.   If together with your wife you decide that a clean home is honestly your highest priority, then homeschooling will probably be too much pressure for your family.

Is your wife trying to hint to you that she wants you to be more involved or more appreciative of her efforts in the home or with the kids?  Often people don’t say exactly what they mean and women have a tendency to hint around rather than tell their husbands that they need some positive feedback.  If this is the case, showing her you appreciate all that she does and are happy with how the home runs would go far in resolving this concern.

Or is your wife organizationally challenged and your house is in fact overwhelmed by mess?

There are a lot of strategies to help create systems but I always suggest parents get the kids involved in cleaning up.  There’s no reason that a mother should be doing the bulk of the work on her own once she has kids who are old enough to help.  You can get even very young children involved – my three year old delivers piles of clean laundry to each room, puts his dish in the sink, helps clean up toys and helps me load the washer, etc.  It’s enjoyable for young kids to do things with you when you approach it a fun way.

By working together with you they learn life skills, children learn an appreciation of what’s involved in keeping the house together (an appreciation they’re unlikely to value until they’re on the older side of their teenage years :)) and if you use the time to connect with them and not to be a drill sergeant, you build the relationship with them!  Win-win-win.  🙂

There are a number of strategies that you can adopt to help keep your home running smoothly and people of all different organizational styles homeschool effectively.  Before you start thinking about what those strategies are (a google search will turn up loads of ideas), realize you can’t have it all.  You can’t have kids home all day and expect it to look like a home in a magazine.  And would you really want to?

Avivah

As the summer winds down, I’ve seen comments from parents of children with developmental delays, commenting with surprise at the gains their children have made during this extended period that they haven’t had therapies!

It’s kids with recognized delays that we assume most need structured learning and whose lives are often filled with nonstop therapies, and most people assume educational theories that are applied to neurotypical kids don’t apply to them.  But just like any other child (or even more, because kids with disabilities are continuously structured and have a constant focus on what they can’t do), they need space to process and do things that are enjoyable for them, without a focus on performance.

Does that seem counterintuitive?

It’s like I’ve been saying for years, kids learn best from play – direct instruction is the least effective modality!

Fortunately we’re now arriving at a beautiful place and time in which parental intuition and research studies concur – kids do best with lots of play, interest directed activities and unscheduled time to process their learning.  Not only that, evidence is showing something very interesting and even disturbing – the push for early academics is actually damaging in the areas of social and emotional development.

Here’s a great article I’ve been meaning to share with you for a while.  Take a look and see what you think.

The results of the studies quoted may surprise parents who are convinced that intensive direct instruction will catapult their child to success.  I believe that it’s when we dismiss the value of play, when we discount games and fun as having no positive value that we do ourselves and our children a grave disservice.

Childhood only comes once and what our kids need more than anything is for the time to be filled with play, activities and love.  This is what sets a solid foundation for academic success.  When you’re ready to address academics at a later age, they’ll pick up the skills they would have spent years in school reviewing in a much shorter time than you think possible.

We’re burning our kids out by pushing them so hard, from such a young age.  In the highly stimulating and competitive world our children are growing up into, a solid emotional foundation is more critical than ever.  We don’t know what exact skills they will need, but jaded and bored kids growing into jaded and bored adults aren’t primed for success in any area of life.

Avivah

The last bit of vacation is winding down and this post is going to be a little bit  of everything!

Ds9 went to day camp for the first time this year and loved it.  Not surprisingly, he brought home ‘Best Camper’ award – he had a lot of camp spirit!  He’s now participating in a week long science camp which he’s also enjoying; a side benefit is that he comes home and teaches everyone else what he learned!  Ds7 was also signed up for this but got cold feet when I took him the first morning, and refused to continue even when I told him I was going to have him moved to an older group that would be a better fit for him.

I’m sorry ds7  isn’t continuing since I think he would have loved it if he would have gotten past the discomfort of being in a new and uncomfortable situation, but I also think you have to honor your child’s feelings and give them a chance to make decisions of their own.  We can’t expect our kids to make good decisions without giving them opportunities as they’re growing up to have a say in decisions that relate to them.

I’m gearing up for my fifteenth year of homeschooling – though I have my general educational philosophy that underpins everything I do, I keep my eyes open for new resources that will enhance our learning experience.  It’s important not to fall into a rut.  Every child has his own needs and this preparatory process isn’t automatic at all.  It’s about thinking about who your child is and what his needs are.  It’s so gratifying to see the groundedness and intrinsic motivation that homeschooling has given our children a chance to develop.

Last week I attended the yearly exhibit for dd’s industrial design college.  It was impressive and fascinating to see what the students have created and designed, and the quality of their work.  It was also nice to hear dd’s fellow students and teachers tell me that dd19 is considered the best student in her class (despite being the youngest).  One teacher said a number of very positive things which made dd uncomfortable, and she jokingly said her teacher was exaggerating.  Her teacher was quick to correct her and said, “I have lots more to say and I’m not even saying half of it!”

The teacher then said to me, “I’ve never seen a student like this and I truly want to know, how in the world did you raise her to be like this?”  Of course the teacher doesn’t know she was homeschooled, but home education is a huge part of their success.  Every single child is a genius in some way – we unfortunately don’t get to see that in most children because most kids don’t ever have the chance to recognize their gifts, let alone develop them.  If our kids are unusual, it’s only in the opportunities they had.

Ds7 has just started reading, which is exciting to see!  I don’t teach reading as much as I support reading readiness; this is our eighth child to teach himself to read.  Ds7 is gifted spatially and mathematically but when I saw that his auditory processing was weak I expected his reading would come later.  It’s when your child seems to be learning skills later than the typical academic curve that you really have to trust their ability and desire to learn.

I love that he can learn to read when he’s really ready without comparing himself to others and viewing himself as stupid.  Because of course, he’s not.  We each learn different skills at different times and the child who learns to read at 5 is not necessarily brighter than the child who learns to read at 9.  What really affects a child’s long term success isn’t how early or late he  but if he has an intact sense of who he is.

On a different note (no pun intended :)), dd14 just picked up the clarinet and is starting to teach herself to play.  Ds13 plays the harmonica and native American flute, dd14 plays the native American flute and started learning guitar at the beginning of the summer, ds16 plays the guitar and dd19 plays the classic flute – dd19 had six flute lessons to get started but other than that, none of them have had any lessons.  They just picked up instruments and kept spending time on it.  I’m glad they enjoy their music and find pleasure in playing.   The beauty of seeing our children learn when they’re ready and have an internal interest never fails to move me.

I finally ordered tiles for the kitchen backsplash and they arrived this morning.  Today I sent dd19 and dd14 to the hardware store to buy the supplies so we can get started tiling – I wanted to do this in the summer when the older boys were also home but I wasn’t able to get down to the store to choose the tiles.  So despite their willingness we weren’t able to start until now.  That’s not a bad things since the older four kids have done tiling in the past so now the younger kids will have a chance to learn how to do it.  It’s empowering when kids learn life skills!

We did get some other things done during vacation, though.  A nice benefit of our kids having a wide skill set is that we don’t have to do everything ourselves and this helped my husband and I shorten our ‘to do’ list at a time we were very busy.  For example, ds22 and ds16 installed light fixtures in the living room and kitchen, and dd19 recovered a couple of chairs and fixed two dining room chairs that were wobbly.  Nice not to need to hire people for this!

When we moved we changed to a different health insurance that went into affect July 1.  I started the process to get Yirmiyahu’s surgery rescheduled and last week got a surgery date (end of October) and even a pre-op date!   The last time we were supposed to have this surgery no one told me anything about what to expect and definitely never scheduled a pre-op meeting; then we arrived for the surgery and found out they had scheduled ds3 for the wrong operation!

I’m really pleased so far with the doctors here and how things are being handled.  Our new pediatrician is American and I like her a lot; when I took Yirmiyahu for an ultrasound, the technician from a friend from Baltimore!  So, so nice.  It was worth going through all the frustrations with medical professionals in the north just to be able to appreciate the difference when living in a place like this.

We had a nice mellow summer staying close to home and enjoying our time together.  It’s never long enough but I loved having everyone home for an extended period!

I hope each of you had a relaxing, summer and you’re feeling renewed and recharged for the year to come!

Avivah

A reader asks the following:

>>I am really struggling right now, b/c I want to homeschool so badly, and my oldest is 5, so this is really where it actually begins (the fall), and I’m so scared of failing him. I feel like I don’t have the Jewish background to give him what he needs and I don’t have the organization skills or patience to give him what he needs. But I so desperately believe in it and want to.

How did you take the plunge and get over your fear? How did you learn what he needed to know, specifically about Jewish subjects? And how did you give that to multiple boys? When I think about teaching my oldest son kindergarten, I can maybe handle it, but when I think about 4 years from now, when all three of my boys are going to be at different levels, it’s sooooo much to wrap my mind around… I get lost. Any advice, I would reallllllly appreciate<<

This question – how do you do what you think is right for your child when you doubt your ability to provide for their needs? – is one that most mothers have at some time, whether they’re homeschooling or not!

If there’s a gap in your Jewish background, then you can learn alongside your child.  Learning to read , daven and share knowledge about the holidays and weekly Torah portion are generally comfortably taught by parents.  If anything on that list is intimidating to you, look for supplemental support.

You’re not on your own.  If you’re living in a Jewish community, there will be resource people you can turn to for specific ideas, suggestions and guidance.  There are also online resources that can help fill in any gaps.  (Readers, please share sites/resources that have been of the most help to you!)

Being organized is a helpful trait in life but being highly organized isn’t the primary quality necessary to effectively home educate your child.  The primary qualities are a dedication to your child’s well-being and a willingness to find resources to help him get what he needs, along with enjoying spending time with him.  Nothing stands in for a passion to do what is best for your child!

Last night I spoke to parents interested in learning about homeschooling and one asked me about how to overcome the fear of making the decision to homeschool.  There’s nothing to do about the fear except act on the basis of your convictions.  My experience was that the hardest thing I did was make the decision to homeschool because I was facing the fear of the unknown and making a choice different from everyone I knew.  That makes everything look much more intimidating and frightening!  But everything after that first decision everything was easier.

Live in the moment.   If right now you can meet your son’s needs, then right now you’re fine.  If you get to a point you can’t meet those needs, you have the option of getting other people involved in your homeschooling life (eg tutor) or sending your child to school.  Don’t feel that the choice you make to homeschool now obligates you to continue to the very end of the educational path – that’s way too much pressure.  As time goes on different factors in your life will change and you may have help later on from sources you can’t anticipate now.

Looking ahead is all well and good but sometimes we can overthink things and the result is we’re afraid to take action today because of the fear of what will happen a few years down the road!

Avivah

I’m going to be speaking this Sunday night about: The Truth About How Kids Learn.

This will be an inspiring, entertaining and profound look at what our kids need for real learning to happen!

The information and perspective I’m sharing will be valuable for parents of schooled kids as well as teachers – and if this is you, you’re welcome to come! – but my focus in the question and answer session will be on how to apply these ideas in the home learning environment.  (There is plenty that those who aren’t homeschooling can do to facilitate their children’s learning – get in touch with me if you’d like to arrange for me to speak on that focus at a different time.)

Here are the specifics:

What: “The Truth About How Kids Learn”

When: Sunday August 9, 8 – 10 pm.

Where: 22/4 Nahar Hayarkon, Ramat Beit Shemesh, 15 shekel fee

Looking forward to seeing you then!

Avivah