What do you want to be when you grow up?

Every year thousand (more likely hundreds of thousands!) of teenagers sit down with a parent, or a teacher, or a school counselor, and try to figure out what courses to take the next year.  And these students are asked "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  A few lucky children might actually have an answer but most have no clue.

So what is a student (or parent) to do?  The key is to keep as many doors open as possible.  Take classes that will lead to many opportunities.  If there is really no direction or preferred subject then try a few of these simple tasks.

Without thinking too much, quickly write down three things that you would like to achieve in life.  There are no limits except that you have to stay a human and probably live on Earth, although that is becoming unnecessary.  Then write down three things you would get if you could have anything in the world.  No restrictions. Remember these tasks have nothing to do with reality or being practical.  This is pure fantasy land.  Next, three things you would like to learn right now.  And lastly, three people, living or dead, whom you would like to meet.

Now take your lists and find common factors.  With the achievements: are they solitary or in a team?  Do they require physical skill, mental skill, both?  Are they competitive, collaborative, or a combination?  With the things: what is the appeal of each?  Do they represent a certain lifestyle?  Is that a life based on security (house, family) or adventure (fast car, world trip) or freedom (island holiday)?  For learning: are they hidden passions?  Would they take you somewhere else?  And people to meet: why did you choose them?  What do they represent that you admire?

All of these, particularly if done over and over with no repetitions allowed, will start to show you what you would like to do.  The trick is to take these clues, explore possibilities that lie in this direction, and make this into a viable career.  If you are still wandering, then head in a direction that has a secure future, while keeping your eyes open to other opportunities.  Luck is being open to opportunity combined with the courage to go for it.

So, what courses do you take?  Mathematics, because almost every career out there needs you to be able to do consecutive steps with precision.  English, because communication skills are vital.  The best idea in the world is useless if you can't communicate it to someone else.  History teaches us our place in the world.  How we got to where we are and why others might be in a different place.  And science is crucial to understand and examine everything around us.  A second language opens up huge vistas of understanding our global community.  The words of any language reflect the priorities of that people.  Take a broad spectrum, do your absolute best, and keep those eyes open.  You will be amazed at what lies out there.

And don't worry about what you will be when you grow up.  You'll find out when you get there.

A Very Tilted History of South America

This week we were studying the Incas.  There was a line in the book which really caught my attention.  "Because the Incas had not yet invented the wheel, the mountain paths did not have to be very wide."  I thought, "Wait a minute, why can't we flip that around?  Because the mountain paths were not very wide, the wheel would not have been very useful to the Incas."

It makes me laugh when I hear anyone talk about an unbiased view.  Do you have an opinion?  Then you have a bias.  Are you breathing?  Then you have an opinion!   And guess what?  That opinion is based on several prejudices of which you may not even be aware.  We all have basic assumptions given to us by our society, but that is fodder for another blog!  Here, just let me clarify that I am not talking about blatantly prejudiced views but more pervasive tiltings which reflect the culture and motivations of the author.

Incan history is particularly fascinating because there are almost no primary sources.  They apparently hired professional memorizers (South American version of minstrels and town criers?) so they had no need for written history.  Of course, like most history, the memorizers only remembered big events involving important people.  After the Spanish arrived it would have taken some time for the Spanish to learn enough language to engage these memorizers, the few that probably were still alive.  And the Spanish had to justify their treatment of the Incas by demonstrating that these people were primitive and barbaric.  So many filters that the history recorded by the Spanish (the only written history that we have) probably had very little to do with reality.

How many of you have heard the story that the natives, having never seen a horse before, thought that the horse and rider were one creature and were the god incarnate?  This was the popular story told to me as a child in school to explain the rapid conquest of the Incan empire.  In truth, this is highly unlikely.  The Incan Empire rivaled Rome in its sophistication and development.  There was a complex bureaucracy, superb road and infrastructure system.  Huge cities and a population estimated at around 12 million.  Books like to point out that they were technologically backwards, having no wheels, or ships, or writing, or metal tools.  The geography  precluded wheeled transportation.  The only water around was an endless ocean.  They could not see islands on the horizon to indicate that there might be purpose to head out to sea.  I have explained perhaps why they didn't need writing.  Necessity is the driver of invention.  If they didn't have metal tools, then they didn't need them.  They certainly were proficient at working gold and other metals.

These were highly intelligent and advanced people.  They could easily separate a man and a horse.  Most likely their isolation and relatively conflict free lifestyle left them vulnerable both to the Spanish weapons and Spanish germs.   The truth is we will never know and that is something that I love to read in a history text.  How refreshing when the author admits that these are merely probable guesses.  Sometimes we can figure out more using our own brains and relying less on the highly coloured accounts of the conquerors.  

My point is that, in any history, unless you can examine the primary source yourself, there is a  tilt in the account.  This is not a bad thing unless it is not acknowledged.  The first thing we always do when reading a text is figure out the slant of the writer.  What is the purpose of the writer?  What world view or paradigm does the writer hold?  Are there other criteria that might be in play?  For whom is the book written?  By any chance, are the publishers trying to make the "Acceptable Curriculum Resource List"?  :) 

Honour the Parents

All parents know that moment when they realize just how fragile and vulnerable their little new baby is. At that moment they want to do everything to protect the child. We spend an enormous amount of time and energy keeping our babies and children safe. But it is more than this. We also want them to be happy and to avoid the growing pains that we went through ourselves.

But we also have to acknowledge the reality - that, if we want them to thrive in this less than perfect world, we cannot completely shelter them. No matter how much we wish to. Our job as parents, and as teachers, and as role models, is to teach them how to deal with the real world. It is no good to prepare them for an utopia that not only doesn't, but also in all likelihood can't, exist.

No matter when a child is first introduced to the larger society - daycare, playgroup, kindergarten, camp - the parent brings one critically important factor to the experience: the knowledge of the child. No one knows a child better than his parent. To anyone working with that child, that knowledge is priceless. The first insight into the makeup of the child comes from the parent. I have always felt that the first parent-teacher interview of the year should involve the teacher asking questions and the parents revealing their intimate knowledge of the students. Any teacher would benefit from this viewpoint.

Parents are always partners with the other people who help their children learn and grow. Parents should be respected for this and their role acknowledged. Just like we no longer just take the pill that the doctor gives us and stay ignorant about our own health, neither should we completely turn control of our child's education over to teachers and administrators. Yes, they know what is best for the average child, but your child is never average. In fact, the average child does not exist. It is a manifestation created from large amounts of data to provide a program that will suit most children most of the time. I would argue that that is not good enough, nor is it the way to run an education system.

Given the training and experience that good teachers have, they should be able to individually work with the parents for each child. Whenever I carefully express this opinion in the presence of teachers they always reply that there are too many children to do this. And yet, each teacher at the elementary level is only responsible for 30 children. This does not mean that the teacher needs to teach each child individually but that they first learn each child from the parent and from their own testing methods. Then they group the children for each skill at the appropriate level. They supply the tasks and the tools and let the children work it out in their own best way at their own time. With properly expressed expectations and responsibilities, this is not chaos but engaged learning - the only kind of learning that is meaningful.

Ask yourself this question: what lessons do you remember from high school? Why do you remember them? How much do you now consider useless? The curriculum has been put together by professionals who realize all the skills and knowledge that children should have to succeed in the real world. The fact that some of that you found useless is not the fault of the curriculum itself but the manner of the delivery. An unengaged student may learn enough to pass the test but will not learn what they will need to go forward in life. Many of us had to relearn what we were taught because we did not learn it the first time.

I can hear some of you now saying, "But I never needed to know the date of Confederation! I never used trigonometry!" But that is not what you were supposed to learn. Canadian history is not about the date of Confederation but an appreciation of where our country came from and how that affects decisions that are made today. Without this awareness we have no hope of understanding the factors behind the issues of today's politics - Aboriginal claims, French rights, social services, health care. And trigonometry is not about triangles and angles but about precision and multi-step procedures that require intense focus and accuracy. These are valuable skills and are the underlying reason for the curriculum.

So I repeat in conclusion that students must be engaged to learn. Teachers must know their students in order to engage them. And parents are the best source for this information. If teachers wonder why so many parents are not involved in their children's education, the system does not respect the knowledge and value of the parents. Embrace any teacher who does. They are the ones who will best teach your precious child the skills needed to thrive in this world of opportunity. 

Mathematics of Happiness

I have always been fascinated with mathematics.  When I was young I saw a sign on my grandmother's desk which read "Monday is a lousy way to spend one seventh of your life".  That got me thinking about the numbers of my life.  Bear with me while I play with them a bit.

If I live productively to be eighty years old I will have lived 960 months or 4,160 weeks or 29,120 days.  If I dread Mondays, that will be 4,160 miserable days of my life.  If I even take off the first 20 years in which I was not working and the last 20 years after I retire, that still leaves 2,080 unhappy days.  That just seems wrong.  I can't waste that many days when there seem to be so few in total.

So why does Monday get dumped on so badly?  Obviously because it ends the weekend and our society teaches us that fun happens on the weekends.  We are surrounded by messages that tell us that weekends are the time for partying, getting together with friends, we work our weeks so that we can enjoy our weekends.  This is all based on the notion that work is not fun.  If it is fun then it is not work and somehow it is not proper.

Perhaps this all ties in with a recurring idea in history that we are meant to suffer.  Life needs to be miserable in order to be "good" or worthy.  Happy people are either mentally unbalanced, intellectually challenged, or somehow unfairly supported by other suffering souls.  Our rational brains tell us that this is silly but we are so indoctrinated into the idea of salvation through sacrifice and suffering that we subconsciously are suspicious of truly happy people. 

I must apologize because I am unashamedly happy.  I have been that way for a long time.  I love Mondays as much as I love Fridays but then I don't work - at least not in terms of suffering.  I follow my passion and teach children.  I get fulfillment and energy from my "job" and have no cravings for weekends or retirement.

So why am I going on about the math of happiness?  Because I see it in children when they first enter the school.  Many are teenagers who have had an love of learning pummeled out of them.  The first joy of going to school in kindergarten has changed through a realization that school is often boring, usually irrelevant, and sometimes painful.  By the time they come to us, school is something to be suffered through in order to start living.

This is a crime of such magnitude that it makes me want to weep.  How can children ever acquire the skills to pursue their passion if they hate learning?  How can they even know what their passion is if they are not given the opportunity to explore it?  How can they learn what they need to know to turn that passion in a means of support?  Why does our society "teach" them that both school and work are necessary evils in life? 

By the end of Grade 12 a child will have spent nearly 2,500 days in school.  That is 2,500 days where they can be exposed to the wonders of the world with enthusiastic guides helping them along their own personal journeys.  Since we only go from Grades 7 to 12, we only have them for just over a thousand days.  And yet they can learn so quickly if they are happy.  They want to learn if school is seen as a million open doors for exploration and adventure.  It is my sincere wish that none of my students ever has to hate Mondays.  And so far, we are doing just great.

The Best School Year Ever

Next week million of children once again go to school.  For some it is an exciting time.  Time to see your friends, make new ones, learn new skills.  For others it is just the same old same old.  They are marking time until they can be free!  And for some it is a dreaded nightmare.  A place of bullying, judgement, and fear.  Sometimes we, as a society, just say it is all part of growing up.  That's what they used to say about getting drunk at a party and jamming kids into a car for a wild ride.  We don't call that part of growing up anymore.  An education which instills fear, dislike, or boredom should not be part of growing up either.  Education should give our children skills, knowledge, and above all, a love of learning.  If this isn't happening for your child, there are things that you can do.

The first question that all parents, and older students, need to ask themselves is : What is the purpose of education?  This is neither easy nor obvious and there are many different answers.  Some say that education is to prepare them for life.  What does that mean?  Teaching them accounting skills, how to get a job, time management, practical skills?  Or does it mean teaching them cooperation, teamwork, problem solving, people skills?  Or critical thinking, rational deduction, communication skills?  There are a lot of options.  Perhaps education is to show them how to follow their passion.  To develop that passion into a marketable skill.  Or perhaps the end goal is to learn how to learn so that education is a lifelong experience.  My point here is that there are many different purposes and they are all right.  You have to decide which one is right for your child.

After you have sorted out that, you need to figure out what the school's purpose is.  Do they have the same goal in mind that you do?  You need to know if you are both journeying to the same destination.  If you are not, then you need to supplement your child's education with the pieces that the local school does not offer.  One example which comes up all the time is in high school.  Parents have decided that they want their child to go to university.  They assume that somehow the school knows this.  They think that the school advisors will counsel their child into the best courses for going to university.  However the school counsellors actually have a different goal.  Their goal is to have all the students complete high school.  Therefore they may select courses which suit their goal and not yours.

First and foremost you must be an advocate for your child.  You must work with the school to achieve the end that you want.  Do not assume that they know what that is or, if they do, that they can accommodate you.  After all, they have thousands of students, each with their own goals.  It is essential that you work with the school, the administrators, and the teachers.  An antagonistic relationship will never work.  Your child will lose respect for the school and for education in general.  If you absolutely cannot work with a particular school or system then, for the sake of your child, you must change to another one.  How can you teach your child to respect teachers if you do not? 

This is one important step to helping your child have the best school year ever.  School should be a place of excitement and passion for learning.  And it can be.  If you are interested in more personal advice for your particular situation, send me a comment and I will respond privately.

Happy Schooling!



Education through Art!

They all work...or not.

New math, unschooling, whole language, Waldorf, flipping school, Montessori... the list of educational methods is very long and constantly being amended.  And they all work - for some children  And none work for all children.  We want all children to have an equal opportunity to get a good education and that translates into each child receiving the same education.  This is a fallacy that we have been dealing with at least since the advent of women's liberation.  We confuse "equal" with "same".

We do not need educational experts to tell us what any parent of more than one child can tell us.  What works for one does not work for all.  We need to stop focusing on teaching the curriculum and start focusing on teaching the child.  The focus of public schooling is how to process the largest number of children in the most efficient way with the best use of resources.  Sounds like a valid business principle.  Except that children are not products that can be assembled on a line.  And we don't really want what that line would produce, unless we are Orwellian in our social principles.  We want children to become the best that they individually can become.  We want them to be passionate about what they do.  We want them to be successful.  We want them to be productive.  We want them to be happy.

All of which relies on nurturing them in their own unique ways.  To letting them flourish and grow within the context of their passions, abilities, and goals.  The "best" method for that is to educate the child.  Sounds simple and yet rarely happens, despite the best efforts of many good teachers.  The system keeps mandating "best practices", computer generated tests and assessments, criteria that have nothing to do with what is best for the child, or even for society.

Let teachers teach.  Give them the latest research and let them decide how best to apply it.  Use some common sense is assessing whether a child is flourishing.  Listen to parents and employers when they complain about the fact that today's students are completely unprepared for life.  Those in charge of administering the enormous education system need to start listening.  High school should not be something that you suffer through.  It should not just be a place to make friends and learn social skills.  It should be a place of learning and a place where they learn that learning is powerful, engaging, important, and wonderful.  A lesson for all times.

Education Through Art

Education Through Art

Education through Art, sounds impressive but what does it mean? What is Art? Painting, dancing, music. These are the Arts. But what is Art? Art is creativity, imagination, something from nothing, of no practical value - these are many other definitions. But more than all of these, Art is the passion. Art is the soul of the machine.

Long ago Western man decided to understand things by taking them apart. If you could grasp the function of each of the pieces then you would understand the whole. Body became separated from Mind. Physical from Mental. Reason from Faith. Practical from Artistic. For generations in sciences, philosophy, and education, we have analyzed and struggled to understand what makes us work, as individuals, as societies, and as a species. The problem lies in that only some parts are reducible to components. So we studied those parts, the body, the physical world, reasoning patterns, practical applications. And we learned how to pass these on to our children. Through formal education.

For the rest, the intangible, the soul, spirit, or whatever term you choose, we left that to the spiritual leaders, to traditions, to culture. And as a species we have been doing okay. Except recently. Now we have a breakdown of these support networks. Most families no longer have a spiritual counselor. Many have left traditions and family networks far behind in our global wanderings. So we look to our source of learning. We look to our scientists and our educators. And we ask them to take care of our children. To find the best practices for teaching. And they do their best. They use the system that they have always used. They emphasize the practical, the applicable, the concrete. Our children learn to use machines. They explore the world through their fingertips and electronic impulses which bring everything they need to them. The world is on the screen before them and they are all knowing.

No, they aren't. They don't know this information; they merely have access to it. In order to learn children must have the skills to learn. They must know how to think and use their minds in multitudinous ways. To see things from different perspectives. To imagine that which they cannot see or access. To stretch themselves. But teachers cannot help them to do that if they do not want to learn. We call them "reluctant learners" and they are a growing epidemic.

But all children learn all the time. They can't help it. It is basic instinct founded on survival skills. Knowledge keeps you alive and allows you to flourish. So what are they reluctant to learn? The very things that the scientists and educators keep telling them they need to know. They are reluctant because they are not engaged. There is no passion in their learning.

What is Art? Art is passion. Art is the realm of engagement. When you educate through art you inspire the spirit to crave the knowledge. A chemical reaction becomes a dance. A math theory becomes a thing of structure and beauty. A history lesson comes alive through the full experience of empathy. The children dream of gladiators. They wince at slavery as they read, write, draw, perform. They engage with the information and then they know it. Their passions are ignited and they are inspired and they learn.

Education Through Art.