Having worked in education for over a decade, I’m starting to question many things that I have been a part of.
I have teacher friends who are ardently against homeschooling. I get it.
However, I’ve always been curious. And I’ve also been open to trying new things, particularly if they prove better for me and my family.
If I think back to my own school days in the classroom and in school and the best parts of it, I don’t automatically think about the area of a circle or the life cycle of a butterfly. The first thing that springs to mind is the people and how they made me feel.
As time has progressed, I’ve recognised there’s often a gap between teaching and learning. For example, I might be teaching kids how to play a G chord on the guitar but what they remember is what kind of voice I have. Or similarly, I can be explaining figures of speech to a teenager in the UK and the only thought that’s going through their head is whether they’re going to visit South Africa one day.
Learning happens. Period. Whether it aligns with what’s being taught is the question.
The skill of teaching is facilitating an environment which channels the learning towards a specific goal.
When it comes to homeschooling kids, I notice all these things and more. I notice that it takes my kids an hour to do a day’s work. An hour! Without the disruption and extraneous factors of a dynamic classroom full of kids, the work gets nailed in no time. My conclusion has been that school is about social learning for 95% of the time – it’s about tolerance and finding your place amongst social structures.
So once my kids flatten their work at home, they’re left with the question of what to do next. Screen time is the most attractive thing by far as it elicits dopamine (that pleasure hormone) out of the hypothalamus which consistently draws them (and all of us) back to cellphones or to Netflix or whatever.
Let’s face it: few of our classroom environments trigger a dopamine response.
But you can’t run on dopamine all day long. That hormone is mainly associated with coping with stress, and it’s addictive. So then that surely means that unsolicited screen time is bad, right? Kids need to learn how to deal with mundane moments too, right?
I would say both yes and no.
Yes because as a parent it’s difficult to manage kids’ emotions at the end of the day. Coming off screen time, I notice how loud my kids are. Other hormones need to work as well, so that they can follow a simple instruction like “please set the table” or “wash your hands before dinner”.
But I would say no because I notice that their conceptual understanding of things is advanced compared to my generation at the same age. They have big vocabularies, they have wild notions and they have deeper understandings of grey areas. They think critically as a result of what they’ve watched, listened to and understood on Disney Junior. And they’re as time goes on, they’re learning how to navigate our world as it moves to hybrids of virtual and real interchangeably on an hourly basis.
Also, and probably most importantly, I see a lot less anxiety and freneticism in my kids. Perhaps they’re picking up on our vibe as parents, which I’ve blogged about before. They’re still kids, but they’re not unsettled in their souls.
I haven’t said that to anyone before, because those close to my family have noticed it themselves. And they’ve commented on it.
That’s richly rewarding, and it’s been cause for doing an audit on the stuff I was a part of before. I like to ask questions of myself, especially if leads to an exploration of healthy new territory.
