Posts tagged with "unschooling"
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How Not To Teach
So this other day, me and my daughter were watching a video where the author was talking about infinity and how if you divide a number by zero you get infinity. My daughter could not understand how anything can be divided into zero parts. Or how attempting to divide something into zero parts blows up into this huge number that we call infinity. Being the smart alec that I am, I thought I could explain her how division works and how something divided by zero gives you infinity. As you can imagine, I made a huge mess of it and it showed me how little I knew about teaching to kids. If you take pleasure in seeing a grown man fumble with math, go on.
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From Unschooling To Schooling
Our daughter is now almost 11 years and she has been unschooled for almost as many years. Well, truth be told, she went to pre-school for almost a year when she was 3 years old, if you can call that school. Since 4, she has never attended school and neither have we actively taught her anything at home – hence unschooled. Some parents teach their kids at home and follow some curriculum and they are labelled as home schoolers. But since about a couple month ago, our daughter is going to school. So from unschooling, straight to school! Yeah, I know that should come as a shock :).
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What Unschooling Kids Might Be Missing Out
I have only seen two kinds of responses when someone learns that we are unschooling our daughter. Either they are worried about education or they are worried about social skills. The former manifests into questions such as “how will she manage life without knowing math and science”, or “how will she get a job or go for higher education without a certification” etc. I understand their anxiety in this matter and sometimes even I wonder how we can be so chill about it. The fact of the matter is that I know she can’t get a high paying job, But if she can understand that living happily on a small income is better than seeking peer praise and recognition for a lot of money and living in stress, then my job is done. Or at least that is what I have come to realize after all these years on the planet.
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Right To Education At Any Age
In the Indian constitution we have an article which specifies that children in the age group of six to fourteen years have the right to get free and compulsory education. It is a pretty good amendment to the constitution. But what I don’t like about it is the specific age that is mentioned. Why shouldn’t it be a fundamental right to have education at any age? Some kids or even adults may not be able to learn at a young age, and may prefer to learn at a later age. Of course no one is stopping them for learning, but it may not be free. However, with the advent of technology and internet, learning can be free at any age.
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Why I Prefer Not Having A Backup Plan
Life is full of surprises. Many things are not really in our control, yet we live life like we have control. Take driving for example. We do our best to practice defensive driving to avoid accidents. Yet we have absolutely no control over the others and how in spite of being most defensive, we could end up in an accident. There is no backup plan here. If an accident happens, we have to deal with it as it comes. Most times a plan B helps, but in some cases, there is no plan B. Strangely, I have taken some decisions in life intentionally without a backup plan. These are no small decisions. They are some of the most difficult and riskiest ones.
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A Reader's Dilemma
From time to time I get emails from readers of my blog asking me for some advice or suggestions regarding their situation. Most of them are not unusual and a general advice does suffice. So usually they are not worthy of a blog post. But every once in a while you get some really interesting questions and that’s exactly what happened a few days ago. A reader wrote to me asking for some advice and I responded. Then I felt like it may be useful advice if there are others in a similar situation. Also I wrote a lot about my own thoughts about why I am unschooling my daughter and what the repercussions could be. So I thought I should copy-paste my response here in my blog. With the reader’s permission I am reproducing our conversation with some information redacted.
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #8
Thank you to everyone who joined the virtual meetup #8. Again a very low turn-up but we had some interesting discussions. This is a follow up to that meeting where I paraphrase and summarize what happened in the meet-up. I will not cover all the topics. Just the ones I felt that might help the readers or if I felt that I needed to add more clarity to my responses.
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The Time I Could Not Resist Teaching My Kid
Normally I don’t teach anything to my daughter unless she specifically asks me about something. This is inline with our belief that kids learn best when they are curious themselves, rather than explaining something that we want them to learn. All part of the whole unschooling journey that we are going through. However, from time to time I make some exceptions. One such exception happened recently where I had to teach something to my kid without her asking me because I could not stop myself :). Guilty as charged! But let me explain.
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Follow-up to Virtual Meetup #5
Thanks to everyone who joined the virtual meetup. We had a lot of good discussions which extended beyond the scheduled one hour. I was not sure if I answered all the questions clearly. So here is a post that clarifies things a little bit in case I was not clear earlier. Here are some questions that were asked and my responses.
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Optimal Conditions For Self Directed Education
I spend a lot of time on Youtube trying to learn something or the other. And from time to time I arrive at some interesting videos shared by others. Most recently I watched the talk on Self Directed Education by Peter Gray. I suggest anyone interested in unschooling go watch it.
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