Stay out of child’s way +

Don’t try to be a teacher +

Don’t hijack your child’s learning +

Wait….wait…wait (and be patient) +

Don’t stress (talk to other unschoolers when you worry!) +

Read lots of books out loud when your child wants to +

Have lots of interesting books available +

Be ready as a resource when you child asks for it

____________________________________________________

= A child that reads. Eventually. On his own timetable.

Last night, as the whole family sat down to watch another downloaded episode of The Amazing Race, DS7 pulled out a sketch pad and starting writing words. Arp and I immediately looked at each other and shut off the waiting DVD player. Darn it – We were exhausted after a long day and really needed some veg out time, but we both knew that DS7 was working on something important and would be distracted by TV. The Amazing Race, and our own fatigue, could wait.

DS7 worked on writing short words and new combinations of letters for about an hour. I mostly just sat and watched, and answered his questions every once in a while. Many times, without DS7 noticing, I shared a happy look with Arp. Our son was learning to read. I couldn’t help but take pleasure in it.

Later, as Arp and I laid in the dark, the kids already having drifted off to sleep, we talked about how amazing it is to see DS7 learn to read, all on his own. I was mostly taking pleasure in the fact that DS7 would always be able to say that he did this himself. Kids do things themselves all the time, so there may be a tendency to understate the significance of that phrase. This is really significant, as reading is perhaps one of the first big learning processes that is stolen from children every day in school. Seeing my son start reading and writing on his own is amazing because we almost never see it anymore.

There has been a fair amount of discussion on unschooling lists about the difference between “teaching your child to read” and your child learning to read on his own juice. This is what I mean when I say that the process is stolen from the child in school. In school, the reading lessons start from day one. First you have the letter drills. Flash cards with letters and sounds. Phonics. Worksheets with those 3 lines (was it the red line on the bottom?) so that the child “writes correctly”. Through all of this, the child essentially sits back and waits for the next lesson. The child becomes a bystander. A subject. A member of the army waiting for the next order.  One of the herd.

A significant proportion of children won’t be immediately successful at reading on the school’s timetable. That’s because the school’s timetable is made for the benefit of teachers, not for the benefit of your child. It’s much easier for a teacher to teach other lessons if all the children are reading as soon as possible, and at as close to the same skill level as possible. Raise your hand if you have a child that “needs extra help”, “has reading difficulties”, or has a reading problem. Maybe the only problem is that the child is not reading in a time-frame that makes the teacher’s job easier. It’s all about the teacher, not about the child.

This is what I remind myself every time I’m tempted to become a teacher in my own home: DS7′s learning experiences are not about me. My son’s learning is his alone. He will tell me when he would like my help. He will tell me if he feels like he is having difficulty. He will tell me. He will tell me. Wait. Wait. Don’t say anything. Wait. I have to keep repeating these words to myself. I’m a product of school, after all. I’ve been programmed in those roles – teacher & subject- after all. My son’s experiences are different. He is no subject. He is in charge of his own learning.

I’ve made mistakes along the way, surely. I wasn’t always this confident that DS7 would learn to read. Early on, I invested in several stacks of Bob books in the hope it would assist his learning to read. I’d act excited and pull them out, intersperse a little phonics as we read. DS7 was not impressed. Those little lessons were pretty obvious to his attentive mind. He just wasn’t interested. He wanted to hear a story, not get a lesson. I don’t blame him. I’d be pretty miffed if Arp interrupted my coffee one morning to give me a lesson on roasting coffee beans. Please! Just let me enjoy my brew! On the other hand, I was happy to learn about coffee roasting when I chose to live on a coffee finca in Costa Rica. Remember, I chose.

Another mistake I made: thinking DS7 was ready to read simply because he wanted to read. Another mistake due to the school mindset. You see, motivation is the all-important issue in school. Teachers spend hours of the day figuring out how to motivate students. They take seminars on the subject. The thinking is that once motivation is there, learning will follow. (I know a lot about this. I used to be a teacher.) Teachers are always looking for the interest, and the “teachable moment”. Then, when they see it, they launch into a lesson that will solidify things and make the learning magic happen. Here’s how it works:

Reading in school = Teacher motivates (fun??, grades, parent/teacher pressure, stickers, “good job!”) + appropriate age + lessons from teacher.

Unschooled Reading = intrinsic motivation (fun or utility) + starts & stops of learning over several years.

My mistake was thinking that all a child needs is a little motivation and they would read in lickety-split. Sometimes that does happen. Sometimes a kid decides to read and manages to get from non-reader to reader in a number of weeks or months. More often it seems to happen gradually, in little steps, over several years. Totally normal. In school, the teacher might be panicking that her student is suddenly unable to get to “the next level”. Diagnosis of some sort of “reading problem” usually follows. As an unschooler, I had to learn that these pauses are natural. I learned to reassure DS7 that it would pass, the learning would come. No need to panic. I reassure myself, too.

As exciting as last night’s accomplishments were, I’m reminding myself all those things again. Maybe DS7 will work on this every night for several weeks. Maybe he’ll put it aside for awhile and work on something else. It’s OK. He’ll get it eventually, in his own time. No need to rush. Life is long. There’s plenty of time.

No big shock here.  You can pick & choose the basic reasons why – all work & no play makes Jose a dull boy?  Or perhaps that punishment doesn’t work?  (see Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards)  Or, as many critics of homeschooling say, that kids need school to be ‘socialized’ – then perhaps they should be allowed to be social instead of cooped up in a classroom being trained for a cubefarm.

2. Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete

I’ve never quite gotten the whole concept of ‘friending’ online.  Peeps with thousands of friends?  It’s some version of reality that I know nothing about.  Peeps seem to agonize about over defriending/unfriending someone, in case someone is offended or if they themselves regret it.  I’ve culled my list 3 times in the past 6 months, and gone are the people I haven’t seen or spoken to in the past couple of years.  Or the high school peeps I added during my first couple of weeks on Facebook who I don’t even recall speaking to.  I don’t know how people have hundreds of people as ‘friends’ as the status updates and this and that all become annoying, time-wasting noise.

That’s my heavy-handed metaphor of the week , inspired by a New York Times article (copied below).

Once I started down the path to becoming an unschooler, one of the things that really bugged me out about school was how it seemed to be a training ground for corporate labor. A ‘good’ class was one that was quiet and behaved, which is exactly how a cubefarm should be. People are pushed to work for an ambiguous goal that has nothing to do with who they are.

The similarities to a corporate job creep me out. The worst job I ever had was working in a financial services company. I took the job for one stupid reason – health insurance – and spent the next year and a half desperately looking for a new job.

It was horrible and soul-less. I didn’t understand why anyone cared or who aspires to be make a middle-management position by 30. Needless to say, I didn’t quite fit in. For future inspiration, I saved my performance review, where it states for posterity, that I need to be more social with the group. Maybe I wasn’t properly socialized after many years of spending 6 months in India during the academic year

But I digress.

I’m now wondering exactly how far away from the mainstream I’ll be in 5 or 10 years. A generation ago I don’t think anyone would’ve considered paying students for grades, except for a few parents here and there. I asked my dad about getting paid for grades once and he was adamantly against it.

Giving an adult a financial incentive to do a thankless job is one thing, but doing the same with children and learning is just plain wrong. I cringed when a friend’s 3 year old said that he ‘like winning because winners get more ice cream.’ I don’t know what will motivate him, or the kids in these schools when they’re older. Will they always need to chase a prize? Will they need some compensation for everything they do? I shudder to think how some of these kids will grow up and view the opposite sex.

Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?

By JENNIFER MEDINA

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.

School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.

Each of these schools has become a test to measure whether, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg posits, tangible cash rewards can turn a school around. Can money make academic success cool for students disdainful of achievement? Will teachers pressure one another to do better to get a schoolwide bonus?

So far, the city has handed out more than $500,000 to 5,237 students in 58 schools as rewards for taking several of the 10 standardized tests on the schedule for this school year. The schools, which had to choose to participate in the program, are all over the city.

“I’m not saying I know this is going to fix everything,” said Roland G. Fryer, the Harvard economist who designed the student incentive program, “but I am saying it’s worth trying. What we need to try to do is start that spark.”

Nationally, school districts have experimented with a range of approaches. Some are giving students gift certificates, McDonald’s meals and class pizza parties. Baltimore is planning to pay struggling students who raise their state test scores.

Critics of these efforts say that children should be inspired to learn for knowledge’s sake, not to earn money, and question whether prizes will ultimately lift achievement. Anticipating this kind of argument, New York City was careful to start the student experiment with private donations, not taxpayer money, avoiding some of the controversy that has followed the Baltimore program, which uses public money.

Some principals had no qualms about entering the student reward program. Virginia Connelly, the principal of Junior High School 123, in the Soundview section of the Bronx, has experimented with incentives for years, like rewarding good behavior, attendance and grades with play money that can be spent in the student store.

“We’re in competition with the streets,” Ms. Connelly said. “They can go out there and make $50 illegally any day of the week. We have to do something to compete with that.”

Barbara Slatin, the principal of P.S. 188, on the other hand, said she was initially skeptical about paying students for doing well. Her students, many of whom live in the nearby housing projects along Avenue D, would surely welcome the money, she said, but she worried about sending the wrong message. “I didn’t want to connect the notion of money with academic success,” she said.

But after a sales pitch by Dr. Fryer, Ms. Slatin said she was persuaded to try. “We say we want to do whatever it takes, so if this is it, I am going to get on board,” she said.

In 1996, P.S. 188 was considered to be failing by the State Education Department, but it has improved dramatically over the last decade. In the fall, it received an A on the city’s report card. Still, fewer than 60 percent of the students passed the state math test last year, and fewer than 40 percent did so in reading.

Teachers at the school said that this year, they had noticed a better attitude among the students, which they attributed to the incentive program. One recent day, fourth graders talked eagerly about the computer games they have been playing to get ready for this week’s state math exam. During the school’s recent winter break, dozens of students showed up for extra tutoring to prepare.

“My teacher told me to study more, so I study,” said Jazmin, who had already taken eight standardized exams this school year. “I did multiplication tables. I learned to divide.” When asked why she took so many tests, Jazmin replied earnestly, “To show them we have education and we learn stuff from education and the tests.”

The students spoke excitedly about their plans for the money. Several boys said they were saving for video games. Abigail said she would use it to pay for “a car, a house and college,” apparently unaware that the roughly $100 she’s earned this school year might not stretch that far. Another little girl said she would use the money simply for food. When asked to elaborate, she answered quietly, “Spaghetti.”

Changing the attitudes of seventh graders seems to be more complicated. At J.H.S. 123 in the Bronx, for example, a seventh-grade English class was asked one morning if there were too many standardized tests. Every hand in the room shot up to answer with a defiant yes. But at the same time, the students all agreed that receiving money for doing well on a test was a good idea, saying it made school more exciting, and made doing well more socially acceptable.

“This is the hardest grade to pass,” said Adonis Flores, a 13-year-old who has struggled in his classes at times. “This motivates us better. Everybody wants some money, and nobody wants to get left behind.”

Would it be better to get the money as college scholarships? Shouts of “No way!” echoed through the room. “We might not all go to college,” one student protested.

So is doing well in school cool? A few hands slowly inched up. But when their principal, Ms. Connelly, asked what could be done to make being the A-plus student seem as important as being the star basketball player, she was met with silence.

For teachers, bonuses come with ambivalence. So toxic was the idea of merit pay for individual teachers that the union insisted that bonus pools be awarded to whole schools to be divided up by joint labor-management committees, either evenly among union members or by singling out exceptional teachers.

Still, nearly 90 percent of the 200 schools offered the chance to join the teacher bonus program are participating, after a vote with each school’s chapter of the teachers’ union. At many schools this year, including P.S. 188 and J.H.S. 123, a decision has already been made to distribute any money they get across the board, and they are trying to include secretaries and other staff members as well.

No teachers were willing to say the rewards were unwelcome, but few said the potential windfall would push them to work harder.

“It’s better than a slap in the face,” said Ms. Lopez, who has taught at P.S. 188 for more than a decade. “But honestly, I don’t think about it. We’re here every day working and pushing; that’s what we’ve been doing for years. We don’t come into this for the money, and most of us don’t leave it because of the money.”

Newer teachers seemed more positive, saying the bonus was a rare chance to be rewarded.

“I tell my students all the time that I can sit in the back and hand them worksheets and get the same amount of money as I do if I stand in front of the class working with high energy the entire time,” said Christina Varghese, the lead math teacher at J.H.S. 123, who is in her 10th year of teaching. “What’s the motivation there? At least this gives us something to work toward.”

It will be months before Ms. Slatin and her teachers know whether they have earned the bonus, but initial test scores are promising. On one test designed to mimic the state math exam, 77 percent of fourth graders met state standards. Roughly half of those who did not were just below the cutoff, making it possible that more than 80 percent of the students would pass the test this year — a virtual dream for the school.

“We want to believe it, but it makes me nervous,” Ms. Slatin said. “Those are not numbers we are used to seeing.”