unschooling teachers
Jennifer Deets
I've been following the conversations and have noticed several references about teachers and teacher preparation. Lest anyone think I'm unaware of my potential biases, I'll say that I teach at a college of education. Having discovered the joys of unschooling with my husband and children, I have taken that approach, as best I can, into my university classes at all levels. It is exceedingly difficult to try to model a deschooling idea and an unschooling approach all in the span of 16 3-hour meetings. But difficult is not the same as impossible, so I try. My students read authors (not very unschooly, I know) who have long since been overlooked in university education programs. My goal is to spark some interest and to help the students imagine ways around the stifling, creativity-killing bureaucracy of institutional schooling.
I do this for several reasons. Although I know that unschooling is a rich and beautiful way to learn, most people are going to send their chidden to some kind of school. And some of those people shouldn't unschool their children anyway. So I want schools to become better, slower-paced (in the sense of not rushing through a certain amount of material in a certain period of time), more loving places, and as with unschooling, the learning will come.
One of my undergraduate students told me yesterday that she doesn't stress as much about my class as her others because she knows that I'm not going to nit-pick her writing or make her think my way. Then she said, "Yet you correct more of my writing than my other teachers and when you disagree with me you tell me why without telling me I'm wrong." Maybe it's just an isolated incident, but I hope that she will go into her classroom a year from now and remember how it feels -- emotionally and intellectually -- to have been cared about and to have been in a situation where grades weren't the issue.
Although unschooling is a life I can't imagine turning away form, I know that it is not for everyone, not even structured homeschooling is. Schools, in those cases, will be the best for many children. If all we do is deride schools and the people who work in them, we abandon a chance to make changes for the benefit of the many terrific children and adults who are part of them.
Jennifer
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I do this for several reasons. Although I know that unschooling is a rich and beautiful way to learn, most people are going to send their chidden to some kind of school. And some of those people shouldn't unschool their children anyway. So I want schools to become better, slower-paced (in the sense of not rushing through a certain amount of material in a certain period of time), more loving places, and as with unschooling, the learning will come.
One of my undergraduate students told me yesterday that she doesn't stress as much about my class as her others because she knows that I'm not going to nit-pick her writing or make her think my way. Then she said, "Yet you correct more of my writing than my other teachers and when you disagree with me you tell me why without telling me I'm wrong." Maybe it's just an isolated incident, but I hope that she will go into her classroom a year from now and remember how it feels -- emotionally and intellectually -- to have been cared about and to have been in a situation where grades weren't the issue.
Although unschooling is a life I can't imagine turning away form, I know that it is not for everyone, not even structured homeschooling is. Schools, in those cases, will be the best for many children. If all we do is deride schools and the people who work in them, we abandon a chance to make changes for the benefit of the many terrific children and adults who are part of them.
Jennifer
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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In a message dated 4/16/2002 5:13:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
jdeets@... writes:
such an open mind about teacher training.
I struggle with this paradox constantly -- I teach in a mostly, but not
entirely, traditional way, but completely unschool at home. It certainly is
possible to take some of the "lessons" we learn from unschooling (excuse the
expression <G>) and use them to make classroom learning more "natural" and
more kind and more effective for more people.
I've always hoped that, someday, the big "unschooling experiment" that we are
all engaged in, will impact traditional schools, too.
--pamS
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
jdeets@... writes:
>Hurray Jennifer. I think this is so cool, that you unschool and still have
> Although unschooling is a life I can't imagine turning away form, I know
> that it is not for everyone, not even structured homeschooling is. Schools,
> in those cases, will be the best for many children. If all we do is deride
> schools and the people who work in them, we abandon a chance to make
> changes for the benefit of the many terrific children and adults who are
> part of them.
such an open mind about teacher training.
I struggle with this paradox constantly -- I teach in a mostly, but not
entirely, traditional way, but completely unschool at home. It certainly is
possible to take some of the "lessons" we learn from unschooling (excuse the
expression <G>) and use them to make classroom learning more "natural" and
more kind and more effective for more people.
I've always hoped that, someday, the big "unschooling experiment" that we are
all engaged in, will impact traditional schools, too.
--pamS
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]