I Think We Decided to Do It!

Take Gage out of school that is. I admittedly have not picked up my book How Children Fail for quite some time and am still only about half way through. Aside from being crazy busy with life as of late I really like to allow information that makes me rethink things this much to settle in and observe the content taking place within my own life. Which I believe it has. Deciding to take Gage out of school for the remainder of the year has not been an easy one, mostly because he seemed so dead set against it. I do not believe that children benefit when they are forced to do something but do believe they can when they are encouraged or better yet able to sort through some of their feelings. So when Gage came down with a cold around the Thanksgiving Holiday and the children had more time off of school anyway we allowed him to do things on his terms. He stayed home sick both Mon. and Tues. and then they had the rest of the week off. Of course after having a week off when the next Mon. morning hit he was not feeling up to going to school but decided anyway... the next morning as suspected he took another "sick" day... and the day after that.

What amazed me about observing his time off was that he was much more relaxed of a child. He had fewer out bursts and melt downs (not to say he didn't have any at all). We did not tell him how to spend his time so much of it was spent playing video games but much to my amazement on the days that his sister was home sick as well they did spend a good chunk of their day writing and drawing together and he even read to her. Many times I noticed Aubriel would ask to spell something and he would very quickly say "I don't know" but then once she would start sounding it out and writing letters on her paper he would then help her finish the word correctly.

So after his few days off for this week we explained to him that as much as we would love to allow him to spend his days however he sees fit the state does not agree and he would have to decide to either go to school or home school. He VERY grudgingly attended school the next two days and before we knew it things were back to "normal" out bursts, melt downs and all. This is when Dave and I talked about what had taken place over the last two weeks and decided it would be much harder to live with ignoring the fact that there is an issue with our son and school than to try home schooling and send him back if it doesn't seem to be helping.

"Many people, having finally realized that human intelligence in any broad and important sense is not fixed but highly variable, may be and indeed are drawing the wrong conclusion that we can now set out to 'teach' intelligence just as we used to try to 'teach' math or English or history. But it is just as true of intelligence as it has always been true of school subjects that teaching - 'I know something you should know and I'm going to make you learn it' - is above all else what prevents learning.
We don't have to make human beings smart. They are born smart. All we have to do is stop doing the things that made them stupid.
Ingenious teachers, 'gifted' teachers, teachers who are good at thinking up new and better ways to teach things, can do just about as much harm to their students as the teachers who are content to plug along with the standard workbooks and teachers' manuals. These gifted teachers can't stop teaching. They are like someone who ties to help a friend start a car by giving it a push. He grunts and strains, the car gets rolling, the engine catches and begins to run. The driver says, "It's going now, you can let go." But the pusher won't let go. 'No, no,' he says, 'you can't go without me, the car won't go unless I keep pushing." So the car, now ready to run at full speed, is held back - unless the driver wants to break free and leave the helper on his face in the road. And most learners, children above all, can't break free of their teachers."

This week we also had teacher conferences once again at the children's school. Kain's went much as expected... "such a pleasure to have in class... so smart... has great ideas... spends his time well... ect, ect, ect." This comes as no surprise, Kain is a pleaser and things come easy to him so this is much how his conferences go. We of course are very proud of him but that has nothing to do with how he learns or even how smart he is. Aubriel seems to be very much like Kain so of course we hear the same from her teacher. The expectations of her being in K are of course quite low but honestly I think she is probably a bit beyond many of what they are touching on I fear her getting bored more than anything, mush like the above example taken from How Children Fail. Then we get to Gage's conference and I hear. Gage is making great improvements, he participates, always knows what he should be doing and has his stuff in front of him, is really laid back and joy to have in class. He is doing good in all areas and I can rarely say that about anyone!" Say what?!

Now you are probably thinking much like we were after this "so why are we going to take him out of school?" Nothing about the child that was just described matches anything about the child we have come to know and love. I certainly believe he can be all of those things, we was at one time BEFORE he started school. Which left us with the question... "Is he playing us for fools or is he so scared when he is at school wears himself out 'playing' the role of a model student that when he walks in the door after the day is done he just has to let it all out? So we asked him. His response is... "I'm scared. There are 3 kids in our class that act like that (meaning how he acts 75% of the time we see him) and our teacher will pick them up and take them out of the room to talk to them. Kind of like what you guys do with Brody when he is hitting us or something." So nothing about this description makes me think the teacher is abusive or anything but someone other than your own parent doing this can be quite terrifying for a young child but it isn't even the physical ones that can be scary for children and impede their learning.

Now I must note that I really like Gage's teacher... He seems like "my kind" of teacher, very laid back and allows children to learn at their pace, very accepting of all but won't take any crap... I'm all for that. I actually believe that if Gage had gotten him last year school might be quite different for him. But I believe that Gage has already became an answer-centered child.

"Kids in school seem to use a fairly consistent strategy... ...One way of describing this strategy is to say that it is answer-centered rather than problem-centered. The difference can best be seen by comparing the way in which the two kinds of people deal with a problem.
The problem-center person sees a problem as a statement about a situation, from which something has been left out. In other words, there is in this situation a relationship or consequence that has not been stated and that must be found. He attacks the problem by thinking about the situation, by trying to create it whole in his mind. When he sees it whole, he knows which part has been left out, and the answer comes almost by itself. The answer to any problem, school problem, is in the problem, only momentarily hidden from view. Finding it is like finding a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. If you look at the empty space in the puzzle, you know the shape of the piece that must fill it.
But most children in school are answer-centered rather than problem-centered. They see a problem as a kind of announcement that, far off in some mysterious Answerland, there is an answer, which they are suppose to go out and find. Some children begin right away to try to pry this answer out of the mind of the teacher. Little children are good at this. They know, especially if they are cute-looking, that if they look baffled or frightened enough, teacher will usually tell them what they need to know. This is called "helping them." Bolder children are ready to sally forth into Answerland in a kind of treasure hunt for the answer. For them, the problem is an answer-getting recipe, a set of hints or clues telling them what to do, like instructions for finding buried pirate treasure... ...Take the problem 'Ann is three years older than Mary, and their ages add up to 21. How old is each?' The problem-centered person tries to makes these girls real in his mind... ...The problem-centered person may use a formula... ...The anwsered-centered person, on the other hand, the skilled one, not the coaxer of teachers or the readers of teachers' minds, thinks 'Now let me see, how are we suppose to do this kind of problem? When did I have one like it? Oh, yes I remember, you write down something about their ages, let's see, let x equal Mary's age, then we have to let Ann's age be something, I guess x + 3, then what do we do, add them together, maybe, yes, that's right x+ x + 3 = 21, then we have to transpose the 3, how do we do that, then subtract from both sides...' and so on until he gets an answer which he takes to the teacher and says 'Is this right?' But this answer was elsewhere, not in the problem, and the answer-geting process had to be dredged up out of blind memory.
Practically everything we do in school tends to make children answer-centered. In the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of temple of worship for "right answers," and the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar..."

And here in lies where I believe our little Gage falls. At the beginning of the year his biggest complaint was the he "didn't get it" so we asked if he would ask for help and he "yes but then I still don't get it." So naturally we asked if he asked again to which his reply was "no, because I don't want the other kids to make fun of me or have the teacher get upset with me." So now he has become the "model" student. He does not cause any "problems" for the teacher so I am guessing he has become a really good "coaxer of teachers." Not to by any means imply he isn't truly making progress in many areas and a naturally smart child but his aggression and frustration when he is finally in the safety of his own home is telling me this is not a positive experience for him where he is learning much of anything but how to make it through his days without bringing to much attention to himself.

"The other day I was working with a sixteen-year-old boy who was having trouble with first-year physics. I asked him to do one of the problems in his book. Immediately he began to write on his paper..
Given:
To Find:
Use:
He began to fill in the space with a hash of letters and figures. I said, 'Whoa, hold on, you don't even know what the problem is about; at least think about it before you start writing down a mess of stuff.' He said, 'But our teacher tells us we have to do all our problems this way.' So there we are. No doubt this teacher would say that he wants his students to think about problems, and that he prescribed this form so that they would think. But what he has not seen, and probably never will see, is that his means to the end of clearer thinking has become an end in itself, just part of the ritual mumbo-jumbo you have to go through on your answer hunt."

So earlier this week I sent in for the form I need to fill out to home school. It sounds like from what I have read the state of WI has some of the best laws supporting home schooling. I figure I should be able to start the first of the year. This way we can try it and if he likes it continue and if the 3 of us (Dave, Gage and myself) decide it is not working out for the best he can go back come fall. His biggest concern was not being able to do gym but our local Y offers a home school gym class so I can enroll him in that. I am scared, excited, nervous, and feeling quite liberated... I figure I can't make things much worse at this point and believe it is my job as his parent to do what I feel is best for him rather than convenient for us (of course if that was the case I would probably take all of the kids out of school!). I want him to be excited about learning again before it is too late.

David and I often joke about where Kain gets his book smarts from since it couldn't possibly be one of us. We of course base this on what the school had to say about our education...

"Now, Edward's former teachers gave him many hours of special, individual 'help' on arithmetic. But their help consisted in trying to get him to learn the recipes for the problems that he was suppose to know how to do. None of them tried to find out, as for years I never did, just what he did know about numbers, what sorts of mental model he had of the world of numbers and how they behaved. As a matter of fact, this boy, if he if feeling good, can carry out correctly quite a number of arithmetic recipes; he is by no means the worst in the class in this respect. But this knowledge is apparent, not real.
The distinction is vital, yet many teachers do not seem to know that it exists. They think, if a child doesn't know how to multiply, you show him how, and give him practice and drill. If he still makes mistakes, you show him how again and give more practice. If after you have done this about a dozen times he still makes mistakes, you assume that he is either unable or unwilling to learn - as one teachers put it, either stupid, lazy, disorganized, or emotionally disturbed.
It's the same old school rule, all the way from our most hopeless inner-city schools to the graduate schools of our most famous universities: when learning happens, the school and teachers take the credit; when it doesn't, the students get the blame. The words change s little, from bad and stupid to 'culturally disadvantaged' and 'learning disabled.' The idea remains the same. Only when the results are good will schools and teachers accept the responsibility for what they do."

This was me in school when my mom pulled me out to start home schooling me.

I went on to read about another book John Holt quotes which reminds me of David aside from him being placed in "the dumb class" although I believe that is only because he quite intelligently kept his grades just good enough to keep him from being physically labeled but certainly not verbally.

"In his very important and very funny book How to Survive in Your Native Land, James Herndon has one very revealing chapter called 'The Dumb Class.' That class, which he taught for a few years, was made up of the dumbest kids in junior high school, the kids who couldn't and didn't learn anything. And even among these one boy stood out as clearly the dumbest kid in the dumb class, utterly hopeless at any kind of schoolwork.
One day Jim met this boy in a bowling ally. To his utter astonishment he found that the kid had a paying job there, keeping the official score for the evening bowling leagues. he sat on a high chair between two lanes, scoring for both of them at once, keeping track of strikes, spares, ect. Jim points out that this job was not some federal program to give dumb kids something to do. The bowling alley had hired and was paying the kid to keep score because he worked quickly and accurately - no one in the highly competitive leagues would have stood for mistakes.
So, Jim thought, I'll give this kid problems about bowling in school. He couldn't do them! His answers to problems about scoring in bowling were not only wrong but absurd. The dumb kids might be smart in the world, but as soon as they stepped into the school they became dumb again. It was the school itself, boring, threatening, cut off from any real experience or serious purpose, that made them dumb."