As I mentioned recently on my Facebook page, I'm in the throes of a major uni assignment on risky play. I have to admit that I'm loving the uni work- not so much because of the course itself (in fact the restrictions of writing in an academic rather than a creative style sometimes drive me a bit nutty), but because of the things it's prompting me to do with the kids.
I chose the topic, 'risky play', myself. I've got a passion for listening to what the kids want and trying to respond. And in one of my workplaces- my favourite one- risk is on the kids' agenda almost every moment of every day. If they're not trying to climb the fence and escape like Violet, they're on the roof of the shed, or up a tree, or playing Kung Fu Panda games, or crashing the bikes into one another and sprawling on the concrete pretending to be in need of an ambulance.
It's a high-energy demographic, and I love it- kids being kids, fearless and gutsy, the way it used to be in the days when parents and carers weren't so damn precious. When the media hadn't scared the heck out of everyone by publicising and inflating every sad accident, so we'd assume the world was suddenly a more dangerous place than before. When the lawyers hadn't encouraged everyone to play the blame game for money.
I suppose it's a bit like stepping back in time. To me, these kids feel real. They're like the kids from my own childhood, fifty-odd years ago.
Advice and observations from a qualified carer and educator to help parents and childcare professionals maintain a loving, respectful relationship with their children.
Showing posts with label problem solving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label problem solving. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Teaching children to think for themselves: subject choice in the secondary school
When I was teaching high school I worked in an extremely selective and highly academic environment. I found there were two kinds of students in my highly 'subjective' humanities field of Music.
There were the ones who wanted be given appropriate tools and stimulated to explore their own capacity for thought, then draw their own conclusions about a question and work out a way to support their argument with facts.
And then there were the ones who wanted you to give them the answer, so they could learn it off by heart and regurgitate it in the exam. Invariably, the latter students had parents who had decided that paying private school fees gave them a right to their children being spoon-fed the correct answers for everything, which would (in their minds) inevitably lead to the high-ranking pass in the final exams which they had paid for.
No prizes for guessing which learning strategy results in the more productive member of a workplace, not to mention the most likely citizen of Planet Earth to help us solve our very real problems. The reluctance and inability of some people to work with joy and self-belief within a grey area is, I find, extremely worrying.
What is your feeling on this? If you enrol your child in an expensive school, do you think you've purchased a pass mark at day one? Do you value subjects with clear right-and-wrong answers, like maths, above subjects which involve some degree of informed choice in the response? Do you actively steer your teenager away from subject choices which involve original thought?
Or do you look at secondary schooling as an opportunity for your child to learn to think for themselves, in the hope that this will lead to success?
There were the ones who wanted be given appropriate tools and stimulated to explore their own capacity for thought, then draw their own conclusions about a question and work out a way to support their argument with facts.
And then there were the ones who wanted you to give them the answer, so they could learn it off by heart and regurgitate it in the exam. Invariably, the latter students had parents who had decided that paying private school fees gave them a right to their children being spoon-fed the correct answers for everything, which would (in their minds) inevitably lead to the high-ranking pass in the final exams which they had paid for.
No prizes for guessing which learning strategy results in the more productive member of a workplace, not to mention the most likely citizen of Planet Earth to help us solve our very real problems. The reluctance and inability of some people to work with joy and self-belief within a grey area is, I find, extremely worrying.
What is your feeling on this? If you enrol your child in an expensive school, do you think you've purchased a pass mark at day one? Do you value subjects with clear right-and-wrong answers, like maths, above subjects which involve some degree of informed choice in the response? Do you actively steer your teenager away from subject choices which involve original thought?
Or do you look at secondary schooling as an opportunity for your child to learn to think for themselves, in the hope that this will lead to success?
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