“Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, like I used to, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it didn’t make sense, that it was over. they knew it”. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said the teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and were clearly not interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were all just a little bit as boring as they were.” John Taylor Cat in Against School
The dictionary describes boredom as ‘the feeling of being bored by something tedious.’ At six years old, my son had no words to sum up his school experience, the closest he could muster was to give me a description of the feeling it caused him. This feeling was ‘boredom’. Also, he often told me that he did ‘nothing’ during his school day. I knew this couldn’t be entirely accurate, however I felt this was a reality for him. Over time I came to the conclusion that if he had the wisdom of experience, he would have communicated something like: ‘learning at school has little meaning for my life, therefore I cannot participate in the activities that come my way, therefore, I live in this state of boredom that makes me feel bored.’
“We ask children to do for most of the day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, by attending, say, a conference that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Almost none .” John Holt in How Children Fail
Instead, whenever my son talked about soccer, his eyes lit up. He would clue me in on anything I wanted to know on the subject, from the rules of the game to the top scorers in the Premier League table. He pressured me to take him to his favorite team’s games and spent every spare minute practicing his soccer skills outdoors. When someone had some information about soccer, he would stop and listen adding his opinion. He read the latest football magazine from cover to cover and saved every penny to buy the football cards he religiously collected. When we are passionate about a subject we are much less inclined to boredom. This was one of the main reasons we started homeschooling almost eight years ago.
Characterizing our homeschooling approach as non-schoolers who are life learners, I recently found myself falling into the trap of providing a school-style approach to learning during a weekly lesson with my daughter (never homeschooled) and five of your friends. With the help of another mom, we took over the running of these science-based lessons. All the children wanted to attend these lessons and could leave at any time, in other words, they wanted to learn about science in these lessons. For the first six months, the children seemed engaged as we followed the Usbourne Science book, working our way through basic science experiments in the kitchen. However, in recent months they seemed to lose their enthusiasm. As his interest waned, I lost heart at these meetings. Disheartened, I could hear myself forcing them to participate, even raising my voice to be heard over their disinterested chatter.
“The greatest enemy of learning is the teacher who talks” John Holt in How Children Fail
My instincts warned me that these lessons had lost their charm. I found that I couldn’t go on any longer, this way of learning had turned into lessons that went against everything I had come to believe. We hold a meeting with all of us spread out on the floor in a circle. During this nonjudgmental environment, the children found a place to express their lack of connection to the science that we had been attempting. Through this dialogue, a phoenix of an idea emerged from the circle, taking shape as we animatedly visualized the unexpected shape of our future scientific meetings.
In mock Harry Potter fashion, we now arrive every Monday morning and symbolically enter our Room of Requirements, where each individual is working on a project they have selected to study. A project can last a week or several months. Currently, the boys are building a potato rocket launcher, one of the girls is mastering a deeper understanding of gemstones, and the remaining two girls are building their own dollhouse, complete with working solar lighting and a water fountain. This process showed me the power of listening and listening without judgment, none of us could have imagined that this would be the result.
“We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way.” John Holt in Teach yours
One of the main keys to the success of integrated learning is ‘doing’ and through doing we learn. There is another crucial element to successful integrated learning: learning must be in “context” for the learner. A subject described as “in context” are those subjects that arouse the student’s interest. I had assured myself that we were ‘doing’ the experiments, unfortunately the lessons explored lacked ‘context’ for the children. The randomized experiments, grouped more or less by theme, had no meaning in the children’s lives. One of our lessons involved an experiment that showed ice melts at a different rate when salt is applied to it, interesting fact, but how does that fit in with our lives here in Africa? In Canada, this experiment would have a better chance of being in context, especially during the winter when driveways need to be cleared of snow with minimal effort.
Formal teaching typically approaches learning in reverse, initially teaching a ‘concept’ followed by ‘doing’ and ‘context’ relegated to last position and often neglected altogether. There is a hornet’s nest of problems associated with this unnatural approach to learning. The biggest problem is that often the lessons being taught have little relevance to children’s lives, resulting in detachment from the subject and ultimately boredom. By inverting the learning experience where children can choose what they want to learn, they feel inspired and motivated. With the context firmly established, embedded learning is more likely to be the end result.
When we are initially presented with a new learning experience, we naturally look for previous hooks we might have, we ask the question, “Have I tried doing this or something similar before?” ‘How was the experience?’ ‘How successful was I?’ ‘Where did I fail? ‘What I learned?’ John Holt, in How Children Fail, believes that we learn by doing and that the prerequisite for learning is being able to imagine ourselves doing what we do. We have to imagine swimming, skiing, playing a certain song on the piano and before taking our first step in learning to walk. This leads to a trial period to learn, do it, learn from our mistakes and try again. At this point we may need some instructions from someone who has mastered this experience before, it makes sense that we watch her do what we were trying to do, and then we can try doing it ourselves. It is important that it is the student, not the teacher, who drives the learning process at the pace that best suits them, as long as this is in place, context will remain king.
My 5-year-old daughter was worried about leaving her toys and bed behind when we explained that we were moving to a new house. Without a hook for her to attach to this unfamiliar experience, she was left with feelings of confusion and worry. Before her first hook of ‘the meaning of moving’ was in her shoes, if we had described the abstract act of moving house to her, it is very likely that she would have had little interest in this out-of-context experience. Unfortunately, this is what is regularly applied in a school setting, teaching subjects that have little context in a child’s life. We may have been able to capture our daughter’s interest by giving her an account of someone moving house in story form. Possibly, by identifying with the person in the story, she has become more committed. Although she would say that this is a whisper of actual experience. Successful resolution of ‘what it means to move house’ would involve a full understanding, in the child, of what it feels like and what it means physically to move house. It is through the actual experience of moving, making move in context, that it really engages the integrated learner in the child, providing the full meaning behind what it means to move. It was this ‘making of moving in context’ that resolved once and for all my daughter’s doubts about her bed and her accompanying toys when she moved to another house.
“When you teach a child something you take away forever the opportunity to discover it for himself.” Jean Piaget
Learning doesn’t always have to involve being there physically. I have been reading Harry Potter aloud to my nine year old son. Those of you who have read the books will know the character of Sirius, Harry Potter’s godfather, who transforms into a large dog at will. In a separate conversation with my daughter, I told her that there is a star in the sky called Sirius and that it can be found in a constellation known as The Big Dog. It was a classic moment of integrated learning as she herself made the connection between what we had been reading in Harry Potter and the information she had just learned. Going a step further, she commented on JK Rowling’s cleverness in basing a character on the name of a star and connecting this character, through her actions in the book, to her constellation name. In addition, she has created an additional hook to build on in the future: what it means to create and name characters when planning to write a story.
The learning process is sacred to the individual, whatever their age. Hijacking an individual’s natural learning approach amounts to theft and is something we must guard against at all costs. When this happens, students are left with boredom as their only line of defense. In a learning environment where boredom prevails, used as a barometer, it will signal that somewhere in the learning approach something went wrong. When we entrust the learning process to the learner, the “context” is a given, the learner naturally selects what is meaningful to him, and the poisonous trickle of disconnected boredom is eliminated.