When Sara’s phone rang, she was surprised to find it was Ryan. He was at the local community college taking his first math test that semester, pretty much his first regular test of his life. What was he doing calling her?
"Mom, I don’t know what’s going on in this test,” Ryan whispers, “I don’t know anything.”
Sara explains further,
He was almost in tears. Where are you? she asked. I’m in the bathroom. For whatever reasons the teacher let him get up in the middle of the test to go to the bathroom, which was kind of surprising to Sara. He was in a complete panic, because he didn’t recognize almost anything on the test.
Sara was thinking that she should have coached him better. She should have prepared him for a ‘test’. His unschooling experience at home included very little formal math instruction and no test-taking outside of the 3rd, 5th, and 8th grade standardized tests he was required to take. So, she just gave him the best advice she could think of,
So, Sweetie, just take a breath, do what you can. Do not get caught up on any problem you don’t know, just go on to the next one. Just let go of this one. This is going to be a bad test, that’s fine. Yeah, you can fail or whatever.
So, Ryan gets the test back, his grade is 30. He went and asked the teacher if he could take a retest or do extra credit. Sara reports,
To his teacher’s credit I like that he said, "No, actually, I’m not going to coddle students. If you bomb something, learn something from it."
To some, this approach to learning math might seem faulty or inadequate. However, this was the plan Ryan’s mother had all along.
I just figured it’s going to be what it’s going to be... He can take however many remedial classes as he needs to get up to speed.
Ryan and his siblings were not just homeschooled, they were unschooled. Sara, believed all along that when Ryan needed to learn math, that would be the best time for him to study math. He would then use it for something that mattered to him. After badly flunking the first math test, he moved on through the class, taking an accounting test and getting an 82, but because so many people did badly, the teacher rounded up, and Ryan ended up with a 92. And then on the probability test he got a 90, and finally on the statistics test he got 102. And this is a kid who had almost no formal math background. He acquired math skills as he learned about things he was interested in, but never followed any math curriculum.
Unschooling philosophy discards the whole idea of curriculum. Sara believes that kids are wired to learn what they need to know when they need to know it. Therefore, no set of skills or knowledge is predetermined for unschoolers. A traditional curriculum sets forth exactly what needs to be learned and when a child should learn it. In a school setting one might argue that the knowledge and skills sets defined in a curriculum are necessary for children to learn because they are needed to accomplish the next step in the curriculum, not because the children need to use them in their lives.
Ryan had been entirely unschooled after a year in Kindergarten. But he has set his sights on college. As Sara contemplates the collegiate journey for Ryan she admits that he has, “holes in his learning.” It is an interesting term. There is no way anyone knows everything there is to know. There are always holes in one’s learning. But the term holds meaning for many because they are referring to the learning described by a standardized curriculum and an unschooler who isn’t following any curriculum will most likely have those kinds of holes in their learning.
Photo by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash
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