Saturday 5 March 2011

'Teaching' children; Part 2

Yesterday we looked at the teaching of reading in an informal but very effective way. People have in the past said to me that although they can see how this might work with a small child learning basic skills like reading, they cannot believe that this method would work with formal academic subjects like physics or biology, especially if these are being studied at GCSE level. In fact it is even easier to use this technique for secondary education. The essence of the process was, as readers will remember, to prevent teaching, learning and studying being separate from everyday life and play. By doing this, no resistance to being taught would develop in a child's mind. I want to take two simple topics from the IGCSE biology specification which I used. These are mammalian dentition and the carbon cycle. It is vital to know about both in detail if one wishes to aim for A* in the examination.

The best way of learning about mammalian dentition, the type and distribution of teeth in a mammals head, is to examine a skull. When my daughter was eight, we found a dead squirrel in the road. I suggested bringing it home and cutting off it's head. This is the sort of weird, gruesome idea which appeals to young children. I will deal later with the question of what I would have done had my daughter not wished to do this. In the event, she was very keen, although chose not to decapitate the thing with the branch loppers, preferring to watch and go 'Yuk' when the bones made a satisfying crunching noise. We then buried the head in the compost heap in order to strip the flesh. This was a good opportunity to teach about the carbon cycle. We dug up the head at intervals and watched the maggots feeding on it. We could also see strands of fungus. It was plain that these organisms were eating the flesh. Once I pointed out that they gave out carbon dioxide, it was very easy for my daughter to see how the carbon in the flesh was being recycled and returned to the atmosphere.

We followed this up with a mouse's head, a hedgehog and then a crow. The great triumph was finding a fox which had been run over and bringing that home. I removed its head with the garden spade and stuck that in the compost heap as well. This led to a certain amount of coolness with my wife, as I left the headless fox at the end of the garden for months. There was even more trouble when I tried to smuggle home a dead seal which we found on the beach; it was at this point that she put her foot down!

Once the skulls were prepared, looking at the different types of teeth together and working out which was which was great fun. I have a set of the little stick and ball molecule models and we made an organic molecule and then took it apart and combined the carbon atoms with oxygen to see precisely how the chemical process of decomposition worked. We followed this up with trips to the Natural History museum in London. At no time did any of this feel like teaching, although I was working to a plan, decided what I wanted my daughter to learn and ensured that she learnt it. However, a curriculum does not have to be a dead and sterile thing. It can instead be a springboard; a way of generating ideas for exciting and pleasurable activities.

What were the advantages of doing things like this? First, it was great fun. We still talk about the head hunting days and even my wife now laughs about the headless fox which became for a while a conversation point in the garden. Secondly, it gave my daughter great kudos among her friends. They were madly jealous, because their own fathers were not bringing home dead foxes and chopping off their heads with the garden spade. My daughter was also able to show that she did not mind handling maggots, which was impressive. Another good thing was that my daughter learned first hand by watching it in action, how greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere. This is important because although everybody talks about climate change, few seem to understand the true mechanisms involved. Finally, of course, it enabled her to get a biology IGCSE at A* when she was fourteen.

What are the possible disadvantages of this scheme? Perhaps a child would not be interested in the subject? This is unlikely, as she would not be required to do anything herself. Besides, I have yet to find a child who is not fascinated and horrified by watching heads being chopped off. Suppose my daughter had been too delicate and squeamish for this? Well, one can investigate the carbon cycle in other ways. Try this. Take a transparent disposable cup and put a piece of moist bread in it with orange peel and a few other food scraps. Seal the top with cling film and put it in the airing cupboard for a a week or so. It will turn into a fungus garden. This is another way of exploring the carbon cycle as the fungus also digests the carbon-containing molecules and turns them into carbon dioxide. Even the most sensitive child could not find that too much! Suppose the child does not wish to sit an examination at the end of all this? So what? You will have had a lot of fun anyway and it won't have cost a penny.

Incredibly, it is possible to make mammalian dentition and the carbon cycle really boring and ensure that no normal child will be at all interested in them. This is done routinely at school. Get hold of a GCSE text book and you will find that studying these topics entails looking at little black and white line drawings. I can imagine nothing duller and am not at all surprised that so many children do not wish to be taught science in this way. But then again, that is why I chose to home educate, I suppose. I wanted my child to enjoy learning, not sit staring at a textbook.

32 comments:

  1. 'Incredibly, it is possible to make mammalian dentition and the carbon cycle really boring and ensure that no normal child will be at all interested in them. This is done routinely at school.'

    Sadly, this is what some HE parents also do. They present the child with a workbook bought from WHSmiths and when the child would rather climb a tree (who wouldn't?) they calim that their child is resistant to 'formal teaching' and feel sorry for all those 'structured' HE kids out there being MADE (forced or manipulated) to do the same thing.

    As if that's how we all do it.

    Rolling my eyes...

    Great post, BTW.

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  2. This is exactly what I meant yesterday when I said that it's my job to find away to get my son interested. The other bonus of this is that I'm learning so much with him and he's only 6! I went to school and had a selection of very dull text books and didn't really do all that well. Dissecting a pigs heart in my kitchen was far more informative than the plastic heart model shared by 30 of us at school.

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  3. Well I don't go around lopping heads off animals! Perhaps it's because I live in the city and am therefore too 'civilised' in other words squeamish of the 'germs that are going to kill you' and such. I am quite structured and could be accused of being a little boring at times, but even when the kids were just doing what they wanted, I wasn't all that creative either and they spent most of their time watching tv. I do admire creative hands on home edders of any variety. We are hands on but probably not as much as they'd like I make up for it with loads of trips.

    My own education wasn't fantastic (when I got to college I didn't remember one thing from any of my science lessons) so I do have to rely on using very good textbooks with useful experiments included. So I tend to learn alongside my children a lot of the time and I personally find that this can sometimes limit my spontaneity as i'm not coming from a place of authority. I actually think you're probably more likely to be relaxed in your approach and more hands on if you are.

    I also think this is a great post. Although you haven't mentioned how you tackled physics or chemistry, or maths. How did you ensure the line was blurred between 'work' and 'play' in these areas?

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  4. ' Dissecting a pigs heart in my kitchen '

    Ah yes, it is amazing what one can get from the butchers. Hearts, kidneys, even lungs and so on. We took apart an octopus bought from the fishmonger when my daughter was little and were astonished to discover that it had a beak exactly like a bird's! My daughter has never forgotten this. Why read about convergant evolution in a book when you can disover it in real life? Then there was the time that we bought a shark's head from the same place and I gashed my finger on the teeth. We wondered what the hospital near Tottenham would have said had I turned up in casualty with a shark bite.

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  5. '' Although you haven't mentioned how you tackled physics or chemistry, or maths. How did you ensure the line was blurred between 'work' and 'play' in these areas?'

    Chemistry was a breeze. Lots of mixing things up and boiling things. Boiling up leaves and flowers to produce our own indicators was fun.
    We then used them to test household substances to see whether they were acid or alkili. Even tea will act as an indicator. Mixing an acid, vinegar, with an alkali, bicarbonate of soda, will produce a good deal of carbon dioxide. This can be used to power a small rocket or cause a miniature explsion. This leads naturally into Newton's Laws and so to physics. When my daughter asked how we could tell how old trees were, we used mathematics to meausre round the trunks and found a formula to calculate the age depending on the type of tree. this tied in with biology. We then measured the height of the tree using a clinometer and learning trigonometry in the process. None of this was at all like work and a good deal of it took place out of doors.

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  6. I have previously confessed that I didn't do a lot of direct practical with my daughter, which actually proved a bit of a disadvantage when she got to chemistry A level at college; the "school children" didn't have much practical experience either (it seems that many schools don't use any chemicals more dangerous than sugar nowadays!) but I had failed to notice that my daughter is actually a bit, hmm, terrified of some elements of practical....

    However I do think that there are lots of ways to learn that avoid only using textbooks, but which also avoid the need for quite such hands on methods as Simon described.....for example, when we did teeth, we used a local schools museum who run hands on workshops in a large number of biological subjects - so groups of HE children can spend 2 hours studying and handling jaws of a range of animals and it didn't quite require the dedication of Simon and daughter searching for road kill!

    Likewise in physics - a nearby science museum runs workshops and so parents can avoid the need to own a large quantity of apparatus for GCSE phsyics and still do practical. We can't be unique in Hampshire having these facilities.....

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  7. 'you haven't mentioned how you tackled physics '

    Wait until your child complains that the floor is 'cold'. If you tell her that it is exactly the same temperature as the 'warm' carpet, she will not believe you. You can demonstrate that this is so and this will inevitably lead to a discussion of what we mean my 'heat', 'temperature' and so on. It will be almost impossible for the child to avoid learning that heat is just another form of movement or kinetic energy. Ask your child why the side of a saucepan feels hot. What is she actually feeling? Nothing more than the vibration of the molecules. Show how metal expands when heated, thus proving this point. Does she know that she has special receptors in her skin which detect heat? We are now back to biology. It is possible in this way to move smoothly backwards and forwards between physics, biology and mathematics without the child suspecting a thing. Even if you are following curricula in science and mathematics, you do not need to decide ahead of time which elements you will teach on any particular day. As long as the overall plan is in your mind, you will be able to slot the various aspects in according to circumstances.

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  8. That's all fascinating and fun too, I'm sure (if you like that sort of thing!) Clearly great learning opportunities. In my family we do loads of museum visiting and going to talks and the things my children learn in those ways seem to stick. They're all off to a day at the Brighton science festival today.

    However, I do wonder how much of that learning your daughter was able to use in her exams? I'm currently (re)discovering that exam questions often don't give you much scope to reveal what you know. You have to do all that 'game playing' of stating the blindingly obvious just to get a mark, learning to write fast and use the specific terms that the examiners will be expecting - and so on. Exam technique stuff. Did you not have to spend time teaching your daughter this? Also, you're unlikely to have covered everything in a specification in a fun and creative way in your child's earlier years. There must have been some bits you just ploughed through, in at least some of the subjects?

    Of course, the point of learning is not to pass exams! But if you are going to pass exams then you do have to cover the specific material that will come up and not keep wandering off down interesting byways and that's something we find rather difficult!

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  9. 'We can't be unique in Hampshire having these facilities.....'

    I should have mentioned that if a child was really uneasy about practical work, of course museums have handling sessions. Of course, one can see all the human teeth as well and most children are interested to look at their own teeth in a mirror and identify the different types. BBC science programmes are very good as well. Did anybody else tape all the Science in Action programmes which used to be broadcast in the middle of the night? Julie is right that many schools now avoid experiments because the children are too unruly for them to be safe.

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  10. ' Exam technique stuff. Did you not have to spend time teaching your daughter this? '

    Yes I did. I did not do so when she was small and waited until she was thirteen. By that time, we had covered a lot in an informal and enjoyable way. She was sensible enough by thirteen for me to present the case bluntly; that if she wished to compete on even terms with others a few years down the line, then it would be necessary to take examinations. We both regarded this as a bit of a bind, but something which just had to be done. You are quite right, it entails special methods and sticking very closely to saying just what the examiner wants to read. Even so, we managed to gen up on this in an hour or two each day, which left us free for our other pursuits. She wasn't a fool, even at that age, and was aware that everybody has to do things that they would rather not; things like cleaning the cooker, doing the shopping or studying for exams. I don't think that there is any harm in children realising this by the time they are teenagers!

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  11. 'Wait until your child complains that the floor is 'cold'. If you tell her that it is exactly the same temperature as the 'warm' carpet, she will not believe you.'

    This is why I question your insistence that the way you 'taught' your child was different to those feckless autonomous home educators who merely facilitate their child's learning when their child shows an interest.

    I'm still trying to spot the difference.

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  12. "She was sensible enough by thirteen for me to present the case bluntly; that if she wished to compete on even terms with others a few years down the line, then it would be necessary to take examinations."

    I'm all for stating cases bluntly! We all do a lot of that in this family. I don't think of life as a competition though. I'm sure you'd think that terribly woolly headed of me but there we are. So I'm not inclined to talk my children into doing exams because they need to win. However, exams exist and (massively flawed as I think they often are) they are used extensively in the education system to control access to further learning. I have been honest with my children about that.

    I suppose where we'd differ is that, like you, I'm happy to help my children pick their way through exams and I'm spending a fair bit of my time doing that at the moment. But, equally, if they decide it's just not for them then I would respect that choice and be ready to help them follow other paths. What would you have done if your daughter had got to fifteen and told you she wasn't prepared to do any more GCSE work?

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  13. Simon, having read your comments about the temperature of the floor and carpet and how you can work your way down to biology, you're not really that different from my definition of autonomous education. I'd follow the same sort of path, offering the information in such a way as to invite further interest and questions. It's still child-led, but presented in such a way as to make the child want to lead where you'd like them to go. The interest is there, to make the child more receptive, and that's what's important. If the question isn't asked, try again another day.

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  14. 'I'm still trying to spot the difference'

    The difference is that I was working according to a plan of education. I had the subject specifications in mind and zeroed in on the chance remarks of my child which would provide a way in to some aspect of the curriculum. This is, as I understand it, different from autonomous education. You might remember the opposition to the idea of having a plan of education for the coming year which was contained in the CSF Bill. I would have been quite happy with that, many autonomous educators would not. This is the essential difference in approach.

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  15. 'if they decide it's just not for them then I would respect that choice and be ready to help them follow other paths. What would you have done if your daughter had got to fifteen and told you she wasn't prepared to do any more GCSE work?'

    Her sister chose to drop all academic work at the age of sixteen and go and work with horses. Nobody was at all fussed about this. One cannot actually make anybody study for GCSEs! Without the willing cooperation of my daughter, the whole IGCSE scheme would have failed anyway.

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  16. Teacher Julie says-We can't be unique in Hampshire having these facilities.....

    All Museums are closing down in Alton im afraid Julie thanks to HCC! so is the court house!

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  17. suzyg:'I'm still trying to spot the difference'

    simon: 'The difference is that I was working according to a plan of education. I had the subject specifications in mind and zeroed in on the chance remarks of my child which would provide a way in to some aspect of the curriculum.'

    I'm still waiting to find out how you would have dealt with it if you hadn't had this child-made opportunity. Or if she hadn't shown an interest in temperature during the year you had told the LA that you were going to study it.

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  18. Peter and Carol why is it always 'Teacher Julie' or 'Old worn out Web' or some such? I enjoy your comments though.

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  19. "Her sister chose to drop all academic work at the age of sixteen and go and work with horses. Nobody was at all fussed about this" Really Simon? I'm sure I've heard you pronounce doom concerning the future prospects of children who do not take 5 GCSEs and at least achieve A grades. Not an autonomous home educator, but isn't this one of the situations you constantly use as an example of why, in your opinion, AE fails? The fact that autonomous home educators may follow their childs interest and not force them to take academic work or exams if they don't want to? Or have I been reading the wrong blog? I'd say you've been quite unfair to AE HE then!

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  20. 'I'm still waiting to find out how you would have dealt with it if you hadn't had this child-made opportunity. Or if she hadn't shown an interest in temperature during the year you had told the LA that you were going to study it.'

    Most children complain at some point in a year about walking on a cold floor, or the sea being too 'cold'. If by some miracle this did not occur, then I would have asked a question of the 'have you ever wondered?' variety.

    As for what i told the local authority I would be studying, I can see no problem at all about this. If I said that we would be looking at the carbon cycle, I would be sure that we made a fungus garden, decomposed a head and so on and did actually study the carbon cycle. If I said that we would be investigating acidity, then I would have boiled up red cabbage for my child and shown her how the resulting blue liquid turned red or green according to the presence of certain substances. I have never yet known a child who was not impressed by these dramatice changes in colour, far more interesting than litmus paper.

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  21. 'I'm sure I've heard you pronounce doom concerning the future prospects of children who do not take 5 GCSEs and at least achieve A grades'

    I have never said anything of the sort. I have mentioned having five GCSEs at grades A*-C. Both my daughters achieved this bare minimum and I would have been uneasy had they not done so.

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  22. Aha! So here's the answer to my question.

    "Both my daughters achieved this bare minimum and I would have been uneasy had they not done so."

    So a lack of GCSEs would have made you uneasy - fair enough I guess. If that had been Simone, would you have felt that you had failed in some way?

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  23. "The difference is that I was working according to a plan of education. I had the subject specifications in mind and zeroed in on the chance remarks of my child which would provide a way in to some aspect of the curriculum. This is, as I understand it, different from autonomous education."

    But what difference does it make if the children develop a similar body of knowledge using either approach? Again you have managed to described our education approach and we educated autonomously. Obviously there will be differences between the body of knowledge my autonomously educated children have and the body of knowledge your parent-led educated daughter has, but I doubt that the difference is any greater than would exist between one parent-led educated child and another parent-led educated child, the lifestyle descriptions are just too similar.

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  24. Well, exactly, Anonymous!

    Because all bodies of knowledge are connected, any parent helping a child explore their areas of interest will, sooner or later, cover much of the same ground.

    I'm still intrigued as to what would have happened if the younger Webb had refused to engage in exploring dentition or the carbon cycle but had decided instead to study ceramics or colloids or the development of the Sumerian city state. What if none of the topics on the LA's list were followed up?

    Would Simon have had to do some cognitive contortions to sneak the pre-planned subjects in, or explained to the LA that they had done other stuff instead?

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  25. "Wait until your child complains that the floor is 'cold'. If you tell her that it is exactly the same temperature as the 'warm' carpet, she will not believe you."

    Lots of practical experiences also helps quicken understanding when a child decides to study from a text book. Even if the reasons behind some things feeling colder than others have not been met before the child reads it in a text book, their experiences will make reading the text interesting when they have what I call 'light bulb' moments, often involving the child finding me and saying, 'mum, mum, look! This is why the tiles feel colder than the carpet!'. I'm not sure why the first commentator thinks that text books or work books are boring, they can be great when they pull together varied experiences and explain them. My children get a thrill from making these discoveries and connections for themselves. It wouldn't be nearly as exciting for them if the book just confirmed things they had already been told.

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  26. Simon Webb wrote:

    "We followed this up with a mouse's head, a hedgehog and then a crow. The great triumph was finding a fox which had been run over and bringing that home. I removed its head with the garden spade and stuck that in the compost heap as well. This led to a certain amount of coolness with my wife, as I left the headless fox at the end of the garden for months. There was even more trouble when I tried to smuggle home a dead seal which we found on the beach; it was at this point that she put her foot down!"

    This actually made me laugh out loud. I would probably be in the same camp as your wife on that matter despite I grew up on a farm and saw cow skulls all the time and thought nothing of it.

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  27. "I can imagine nothing duller and am not at all surprised that so many children do not wish to be taught science in this way."

    The likes of Brian Cox and others are trying to make science look fun in order to attract more young people into science. What they don't seem to understand is that science is already intrinsically fun. It is the education system that is the problem, and the way schools teach science.

    The schools are putting kids off science, HEers are the ones having fun!

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  28. anon says-Peter and Carol why is it always 'Teacher Julie' or 'Old worn out Web' or some such? I enjoy your comments though.

    Because Julie is a teacher and Webb is worn out peddling the same old rubbish!

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  29. ...*runs off to find some roadkill...* =P

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  30. We found that a cage works better than a compost heap. We found that bits were removed by other animals and some bones just disappeared completely, I think the chemicals may have been too strong for them. A cage prevents things like hedgehogs dragging away bits of your roadkill but lets plenty of flies in to lay their eggs. BTW, the natural history museum cleans their skeletons in a similar way using beetles, www.nhm.ac.uk/kids-only/naturecams/beetlecam/beetlecam-more-info.html You will probably be best storing any roadkill you find in the freezer until the weather improves and the flies come out or they tend to dry out and become mummified!

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  31. 'We found that bits were removed by other animals and some bones just disappeared completely, I think the chemicals may have been too strong for them.'

    This happens with complete skeletons, even of humans. When they tried to dig up Cardinal Newman a couple of years ago, they simply could not find ther body; every bone had disintegrated.

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  32. Yes, our experience was with complete skeletons. There's no need to limit yourself to skulls alone.

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