If I Wanted to Study…
Levi pointed me to an excellent article entitled “If I Wanted to Study, I Would Have Gone To A Real College”. It’s a very interesting read which I recommend to all teachers, students, and everything in between.
The gist of the article is, the most important thing any student in any education setting can learn, is how to learn new things on her own, and that that is not necessarily easy for a teacher to do. I count myself lucky that I learned this lesson early. It wasn’t an accident, it was instilled in me from a young age by my parents, and reinforced by being homeschooled from Junior High through High School.
Homeschooling tends to get a bad rep. You hear about the freak of nature that lives in a house with 10,000 cats and never interacts with the world and becomes a supervillain, and naturally he was homeschooled. We heard it all when we decided to home school. “Think of the social interaction needs! Think of the lost opportunities in {sports, drama, chess club, etc.}!” I could think of a lot of other lost “opportunities” that I would be just as happy to forego. I had 6 siblings and two parents, plus friends through church that I saw every day at seminary; more than enough people to interact with. I was always ahead of my class and frankly it gets boring, so I took the plunge and accepted my parents’ invitation.
I am glad I homeschooled for a variety of reasons, but by far the most important reason (in hindsight) is that I learned to learn. I learned by book, question, and applied thought. I spent hours tinkering with computers instead of doing inane high school homework. I read not always from the reader’s digest textbooks, but sometimes also from the real books in the real world. I read American history from some old falling apart book we checked out of the library, which was intended for college students if I recall correctly. It was hard reading for a 14 year-old, but rewarding. I could go on, but I won’t. When I started college it quickly became apparent to me just how valuable this skill which I had picked up really was. College was just more of the same. I was good at it, and I did well and enjoyed it.
If I can instill only one academic skill into my children, it will be to foster curiousity and an ability to learn on their own.
October 8th, 2007 at 23:45
Despite going to public school, I was lucky to have parents that encouraged me to learn things on my own. My dad introduced me to computer programming while I was in elementary school by writing a program to drill me on my multiplication tables, and gave me a book to help me learn how it worked. He got me astronomy books and took me to star shows at planetariums. I got math books that taught me how to do stuff several grade levels above where I was in school.
When it was time for science fairs, he took me to the library where we looked through Scientific American magazines for interesting ideas, and then searched for texts to research the topics. For one project, my parents even took me to the ESC at BYU to find a Physics professor to answer a question for me.
I wish I could have been home-schooled, since there was a whole lot of wasted time sitting in the classroom, but with good parenting, public schools can work out too. I hope to provide my kids the same awesome opportunities I had.