Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sandradodd/teaching. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query sandradodd/teaching. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Teaching gets in the way

"Teaching" is a problem, in an unschooling light. Learning is the goal, and teaching gets in the way.

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Saturday, August 26, 2023

Dancing in the light


Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

I once described the difference between teaching and learning as where you shine the spotlight. In teaching, the spotlight is on the teacher. There may or may not be a learner taking in what the teacher is doing.

With learning, the spotlight is on the learner. The source is unimportant. There might be a teacher. There might be a set of blocks. There might just be the learner's thoughts.

If that's called "teaching" then it pulls the spotlight away from the learner. The light shines on the source as if it were the actor in the process.

I think parents like to feel like a child's learning is their project. If the teacher isn't in the spotlight, then something they aren't in control of or directing is happening.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Sandra Dodd (click it)

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Teaching is a problem.

"Teaching" is a problem, in an unschooling light. Learning is the goal, and teaching gets in the way.Holly's profile against the museum-lit Bayeux Tapestry
SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Leon McNeill, of Holly Dodd looking at the original Bayeux Tapestry,
in France in 2005

Saturday, July 29, 2023

When choices come easily

The idea of "self discipline" isn't as helpful to understanding unschooling as the idea of making mindful choices is. It's similar to the difference between teaching and learning.

SandraDodd.com/teaching/

SandraDodd.com/control

If you think of controlling yourself, and of your children controlling themselves, it's still about control. If people live by principles their choices come easily.

SandraDodd.com/self-regulation
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Mastering ideas about learning

As some of my articles are being translated (now into Japanese, French and Italian) I see how much of my writing and thinking is about language itself, and so some of these ideas won't translate. But sometimes, that fact is very good. Some of our confusion about teaching and students and study and learning, in English, has to do with the words we use, and if the problems don't exist in other languages, that's wonderful for them.

In Romance language (Italian, French, Spanish and so on) our "teacher" translates to something along the lines of "maestro," a word we have too in regards to music direction. And we have the English cognate "master" which is more currently left in "master of arts" and other college-degree titles. Once that meant a person was qualified to teach at the university level. That meaning is gone in the U.S., pretty much.

Considering the word family from which "maestro" comes (and not knowing all its connotations in other languages), the English verb "to master" means to learn. It means to become accomplished in the doing of something. Whether mastering horseback riding or blacksmithing or knowing and controlling one's own emotions, it's not someone else does to you or for you.

So for any translators or bilinguals reading here, have sympathy for English speakers who can't get to natural learning without disentangling all the graspy words and ideas about teaching and education and their implications that learning is passive and teaching must be done to a person.

SandraDodd.com/wordswordsother
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Sunday, November 10, 2024

Learning not to teach


For years I have recommended that new unschoolers stop using the word "teach" and replace all statements and thoughts with phrases using the word "learn" instead. I've gotten much flak back from people saying it doesn't matter, or that's "just semantics." What started as a theory with me became belief and then conviction. Unschoolers who cling to the idea of teaching will handicap their own understanding of how learning works.

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Annie Regan
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Monday, January 18, 2016

Life-in-progress


The structured homeschooling that involves buying a curriculum and teaching at the kitchen table on a schedule is not the control group the school system needed. Those who practice “school at home” serve to reinforce the school’s claims that they could do better if they had more teachers and better equipment. When a structured family has high test scores, the schools say “SEE? We could do that too if we had one teacher per three or four students.”
. . . .

Scientifically speaking, my children are not a control group. They’re not isolated and kept purely away from school methods and messages. But what is unquestionable is that there are now thousands of children who are learning without formal teaching. They are learning from the world around them, from being with interesting and interested adults doing real work and real play. Instead of being put away with other children to prepare for life, they are joining life-in-progress right at birth, and never leaving “the real world.”

SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo of Holly Dodd and Adam Daniel, by Adam's mom

Repeated, photo and all, from October 11, 2011. Holly is twenty-four years old now, and Adam is ten.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Choosing not to "have to"


Please don't think that you "have to." Then it won't be a fun choice you've made.

There are a few phrases that can keep parents from really relaxing into unschooling. Letting go of "teaching" and "have to" will go a long way toward seeing learning and choices. And not just seeing them, but feeling them comfortably, living with them, and with them in you.

SandraDodd.com/haveto and SandraDodd.com/wordswords
photo by Eva Witsel
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Wednesday, August 31, 2016

One tiny step

Taking the dog for a walk in beautiful fall light

Until you drop the idea of teaching, you won't see the learning all around you.

One tiny step opens up a new world of learning.

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Eva Witsel

(Okay, maybe it's not a tiny step, but even if it's a series of awkward steps, get over there!)

Saturday, December 12, 2020

Learning not to "have to"

Please don't think that you "have to." Then it won't be a fun choice you've made.

There are a few phrases that can keep parents from really relaxing into unschooling. Letting go of "teaching" and "have to" will go a long way toward seeing learning and choices. And not just seeing them, but feeling them comfortably, living with them, and with them in you.

SandraDodd.com/haveto and SandraDodd.com/wordswords
photo by Eva Witsel

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Life-in-progress


The structured homeschooling that involves buying a curriculum and teaching at the kitchen table on a schedule is not the control group the school system needed. Those who practice “school at home” serve to reinforce the school’s claims that they could do better if they had more teachers and better equipment. When a structured family has high test scores, the schools say “SEE? We could do that too if we had one teacher per three or four students.”
. . . .

Scientifically speaking, my children are not a control group. They’re not isolated and kept purely away from school methods and messages. But what is unquestionable is that there are now thousands of children who are learning without formal teaching. They are learning from the world around them, from being with interesting and interested adults doing real work and real play. Instead of being put away with other children to prepare for life, they are joining life-in-progress right at birth, and never leaving “the real world.”

SandraDodd.com/thoughts
photo of Holly Dodd and Adam Daniel, by Adam's mom
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Thursday, February 6, 2014

The more important idea

'broccoflower' at a grocery store

"When learning become the more important idea, teaching just falls away."
—Robin Bentley


SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Monday, January 7, 2019

Ideas, pulled in


Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Teaching is pouring knowledge over a child. Whether a child takes it in is not in the teacher's power. Which is why teachers punish and reward to make not taking in an idea less pleasant.

Learning is a child pulling in ideas. Those ideas are most full of life when those ideas connect to other ideas the child is fascinated by. It makes no difference if those ideas connect along a particular path. Which is why natural learning looks so chaotic and meandering compared to school.

It makes it hard to create an environment for a child to explore freely and pull in what fascinates them when someone is unschooling through a fog of TEACH.
—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/teaching/problem
photo by Amber Ivey
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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Learning not to teach


For years I have recommended that new unschoolers stop using the word "teach" and replace all statements and thoughts with phrases using the word "learn" instead. I've gotten much flak back from people saying it doesn't matter, or that's "just semantics." What started as a theory with me became belief and then conviction. Unschoolers who cling to the idea of teaching will handicap their own understanding of how learning works.

SandraDodd.com/teaching
photo by Annie Regan

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Explore the world

"Children will flourish if their needs are joyfully met as they explore the world. Creatively support your child in what he's genuinely interested in."
—Debbie Regan
Sometimes they're exploring imaginary worlds.

SandraDodd.com/teaching/problem
photo by Abby Davis
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Saturday, September 11, 2010

When will unschooling happen?

Until a person stops doing the things that keep unschooling from working, unschooling can't begin to work.

It seems simple to me. If you're trying to listen for a sound, you have to stop talking and be still.

Some people want to see unschooling while they're still teaching and putzing and assigning and requiring.

They have to stop that FIRST. And then they have to be still. And then they have to look at their child with new eyes.

If they don't, it won't happen.


SandraDodd.com/doit


photo by Sandra Dodd
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Friday, December 30, 2016

A real human being

Learn to see your child not as an ideal or a model or the memory of what a child should be like from their childhood, but as a real human being growing right there, as a real human being who's seeing and learning, and learning things that are beyond the parents' production and teaching.

They learn things that we don't know! It's awesome.

SandraDodd.com/considerations
(rephrased slightly for this post, but the original is at the link)
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp Saran
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Wednesday, February 8, 2023

It's about learning.

Unschooling is about learning, and not about teaching. Unschooling parents rely on their children's native, undamaged curiosity and on the interesting world around them.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/successful
photo by Nina Haley

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Awareness of options

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Lots of people go through their whole lives never feeling like they had choices in many many areas of their lives in which they really did. Just like it is useful for unschoolers to drop school language (not use the terms teaching or lessons or curriculum to refer to the natural learning that happens in their families) it is useful to drop the use of "have to's" and replace it with an awareness of choices and options.

How we think—the language we use to think—about what we're doing, matters.
—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/haveto
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Sunday, October 23, 2011

A Mindful Lifestyle

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Although unschooling is often described as a homeschooling style, it is, in fact, much more than just another homeschool teaching method. Unschooling is both a philosophy of natural learning and the lifestyle that results from living according to the principles of that philosophy.
The most basic principle of unschooling is that children are born with an intrinsic urge to explore—for a moment or a lifetime—what intrigues them, as they seek to join the adult world in a personally satisfying way. Because of that urge, an unschooling child is free to choose the what, when, where and how of his/her own learning from mud puddles to video games and SpongeBob Squarepants to Shakespeare! And an unschooling parent sees his/her role, not as a teacher, but as a facilitator and companion in a child's exploration of the world.

Unschooling is a mindful lifestyle that encompasses, at its core, an atmosphere of trust, freedom, joy and deep respect for who the child is. This cannot be lived on a part-time basis. Unschooling sometimes seems so intuitive that people feel they've been doing it all along, not realizing it has a name. Unschooling sometimes seems so counterintuitive that people struggle to understand it, and it can take years to fully accept its worth.



This was the description at an online discussion for many years—at the UnschoolingDiscussion list.

SandraDodd.com/lists/description
photo by Sandra Dodd
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