Learning to Learn

By Becki Biberdorf

In my quest to more fully embrace educational freedom, I've been reading (again) The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn. The revised, expanded international edition, no less.

And I decided to have a conversation today with my younger two sons.

It seems learning has gotten confused in this house with "school". Truthfully, I can't say I disliked school all that much growing up -- well, until Jr. High and then Highschool. I suspect highschool wouldn't have been nearly so tiresome if I hadn't had to endure 7th, 8th & 9th grades already. Back then, we attended 9th grade at the Jr. High School. How undignified was that? By highschool I had become pretty much bored with the whole idea. I was biding my time 'till more important things presented themselves.

By then I was a decided "outy". Mostly I was just shy, but somehow this translated into not being (or least not feeling) popular. Oh, how I hate the "p" word, but I don't think it's possible to traverse the teens years in this culture (certainly not in a typical highschool) without some concern about one's popularity. Today I prefer the word "independent" and I embrace it.

I'm not sure it was my "independent" status that was solely responsible for my disliking highschool, though. In all honesty, I had a little circle of friends and I was even in the Cheer Block and went to every basketball game. In fact, I think I had a crush on a basketball player -- you know...."what's his name?" Funny.....I think I can name approximately 4 people from highschool -- and none of them was a basketball player.

And it wasn't that highschool was a stuggle for me academically. With minimal effort I could pull A's but I was not often motivated to put forth that minimal effort. And unfortunately, I carried this character flaw into college where I lasted 2 1/2 years before dropping out of the institutional education mill.

Maybe I was just a typical teen. I certainly didn't believe homework was a worth-while way to spend my evenings and weekends -- even though somehow it is the expectation that this is the life's work of a young person. Homework rarely, if ever had anything to do with real life (certainly not my real life). Nor did many homework assignments have much intrinsic value in and of themselves. And if there really was any value in any particular assignment, I'm sure the very fact that it was assigned killed the likelihood I would extract something valuable out of it. And last, but not least, homework certainly never instilled in me a passion for anything other than to be done with it.

And while I was an avid reader, I resisted assigned reading like the plague. And yet, long after an assignment was due, I would sometimes find myself reading wonderful and terrible things like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. In fact, I remember my history teacher finding me reading this book in a study carol one day long after the assignment was past and he asked me incredulously, "Why are you reading this book NOW? Why didn't you read it when it was assigned?" I think I just shrugged. I think he just sighed and walked off. I felt kind of bad, but I slunk down in my chair and began reading where I left off. I can't remember his name, either, but I've sometimes wondered if he actually did understand my delimma. I'm sure he couldn't let on if he did.

Did I even understand back then? Probably not. But today I understand it all too well. The love of learning has to be personal and internal. Sure, I can read an assigned book and learn something worthwhile, but the knowledge is not really mine until I desire to take hold of it. And the desire to take hold of knowledge isn't usually instilled when reading something soley in the context of it being an "assignment".

So back to the conversation I had with my two younger sons this morning. I told them I recognize that something has gone awry here. I told them that I've observed that calling learning "school" is a definite turn off to them. There is no quicker way for me to turn the light out in their eager eyes than for me to suggest we get busy on our "school work". On the other hand, when I leave it up to them to suggest wonderful things to learn about, the well too often appears to have run dry.

On the other hand (yes, I know that's three hands, but bear with me) I recognize that they can be very passionate about learning all kinds of things.

My oldest was a math whiz from toddlerhood -- he noticed numbers from baby-hood practically, and devoured anything he could read about math. That is until he discovered "writing" around the age of 15. Suddenly he started devouring books about writing. He began to write - maybe badly at first, but he still loved to write. He gained a following. He looked into publishing and learned what was involved in that. He is now pursuing a college education (and hopefully, a career) in writing. So far, so good.

My 12 year-old is suddenly interested in learning German (my 16 year-old was too until he realized that it would be turned into a school subject - sigh). Actually, my 12 year-old is interested in all sorts of things -- mostly things that are his idea. He is a delight. That is, until I tell him it's time to "do school". Unless, of course, it's his idea that we do school. Do you see the problem here?



My 16 year-old loves history. He told me today he wished we could subscribe to the History Channel. He knows that's a lost cause because we're too cheap to buy cable TV service (not to mention there's just too much other garbage that we're not interested in dealing with on cable), but he thought he'd give the plug anyway. I admired his effort and I reminded him that there are all sorts of history channel DVD's we can borrow from the library and he perked up. Now, here's the killer. If you were to ask this son (in the context of wanting to know what interests him in his schoolwork) if he likes history, he'll moan and complain that history is boring.

HOW has this happened?!?!?!? I have embraced freedom in our learning (to some extent). I have allowed him to learn history by offering him biographies (which he devoured as a young boy) and he and his dad love to watch history documentaries together. We never cracked open a history textbook -- until highschool. And even then I purchased the most un-textbooky and homeschool-friendly textbook I could find (Notgrass). And yet, he thinks history is boring.

Sigh.

Really, I'm just a little bit beside myself. I know this is a bit of a hand-wringy essay. I don't yet know what solutions will present themselves to our "school" dilemma, but I'm pretty confident they will. And when they do, you can read about it right here.

Until then, I'll keep reading and learning. And encouraging the boys to do the same. Trying all the while to not mention that some people would call what we're doing "school".

Shhhh! No sense spoiling a perfectly good day of learning.