I think I'm in love

the only problem is that he's been dead for 130 years. My RAL of Democracy in America finally started and I've only read the 100 page introduction and chapter 1 and I'm blown away. The scope of Toqueville's accomplishment cannot be overstated. Even the stuff he got wrong is fascinating because he should have gotten it right. Plus it makes me feel smart. Let me explain:

As my dedicated reader's know I think JC is why the Sudbury schools work so well. Read my other posts, I don't have time to get into it right now.

Well, Mssr. DeTocqueville called civil juries "the most energetic means of making the people rule, the most efficacious means of teaching it to rule well". Brilliant. God I wish I was that eloquent.

I wonder if he would mind if I called him Alexis?

Attendance

So last year there was no attendance requirement for Des and Amelia because they were 5 and NYS doesn't require children to be in school until age 6. I bet you 75% of parents don't know this.

This year they have to be in school for a minimum of 5 hours a day and can only have 10 absences for the year.

However, if we want to go to the city for the day or if they want to visit their grandmother they can make a motion for the activity to count towards their attendance. This is because Sudbury recognizes that life is a learning experience and that learning often takes place outside of school.

Students age 16 or over can make a motion to be excused from the attendance requirement? Huh? How can that be? They don't just make a motion I think they have to go through a committee or something and explain why. The reason why they can do this is because this is seen as a transition period where they learn to become responsible for themselves and their time and presumably their activities start taking them more and more into the outside world. It's quite brilliant.

Compare this to the typical high school experience where they go from the control of school and parents often to the total freedom of college. No more bells, no more asking permission to go to the bathroom, specific times for meals, no more parents. No wonder so many kids (myself included) go bananas at college.

The kids will also be taking a school bus (the holy grail for homeschooled children. One mom I know when asked what she couldn't provide for her kids said "They all want to take the bus").
This will pose a challenge for us in the morning. One of the attractions of sudbury is the flexibility in when you spend those five hours there. We could take our time and get in a little later if need be. Now they are going to have to be at the bus stop at a certain time and that's that. It sort of goes against the philosophy but the district doesn't have to support the quirks of my family, it just has to provide transportation.

Vacation

I was off to the beach for a few days but will be back with my trenchant insights in the coming week.

Summertime

The cicada's are singing in the trees almost constantly. At night, we have a veritable symphony of crickets and peepers. I spent yesterday afternoon at a backyard birthday party, sunny but neither hot nor breezy. Summer's colors are grass green, sky blue and cloud white. Those would be great colors for a flag. I would emigrate to a country who identified with summer colors.

This has been a well paced summer for me. It isn't whizzing by but I don't feel stuck either, I am studiously avoiding all of those obnoxious back to school reminders. I refuse to let the market spoil my fun just to sell me stuff!

This year I am striving for a more gradual transition. Step one is to be more conscientious about bedtime because there will be a bus this year so they will have to get up earlier. Hey I just thought of another great thing about sudbury. Going back to school there isn't a huge change because they aren't exactly going to be corralled behind desks!

amelia in the water

It is so lovely to watch Amelia in the water. Des and his friends flop and splash, they aren't totally confident in their ability to stay afloat. They always seem to be gasping and sputtering but having a great time.

Amelia, even when she doesn't know what she is doing, looks like she is in her element. She tries to swim the crawl and it isn't exactly graceful but when she tires she just turns onto her back and floats. The sun catches her and she closes her eyes and seems to be completely at peace.

When she plays she is like an otter. Diving under and popping up again, hair sleek at her head. She can spend hours by herself or she'll do crazy jumps off the dock with Des.

I love summer.

What's the difference?

Sometimes I talk to people about Sudbury schools and they ask "Oh, are the local schools bad by you?" I honestly don't know. The schools in our old town were considered to be excellent but I still wouldn't have sent my kids to them. There is also an expensive private school(9000 a year) two miles from my house but my choice not to use it has nothing to do with the money(well maybe something).

To compare good and bad public schools or to compare public schools to most private schools is like comparing a Ford to a Mercedes. One is really expensive and carries a lot of cache but at the end of the day is still a car. Still has four tires and a steering wheel, still primarily used to get you from point A to Point B in exactly the same manner as a Ford.

I don't want a car for my kids. I want them to have a jetpack that takes off with groovy little rocket fired roller skates and maybe has some sort of propeller system for hovering. I want them in a TARDIS.

I think our current methods of education are so deeply flawed that I look at any form of traditional schooling as just being a variation on a theme. If it involves insisting on teaching a discrete set of facts to the exclusion of others, if it is about one set of people(usually teachers) controlling the entire day of another set(the students), or about creating artificial social settings that have very little to do with real life, I don't want any part of it.

More on proximal learning and constructivist theory...No yawning!

So I've taken the time to read up on this a bit more, thank you wikipedia.

Here are some new terms that I have learned:
metacognition-awareness of one's cognitive processes and use of this knowledge to self-regulate one's cognitive processes or knowing how you know stuff or knowing how you learn stuff

zone of proximal development or in academic circles, ZDP- Lev Vygotsky came up with this as an argument against standardized testing He thought that learners should be tested on how they solved problems not on what they knew. The zone of proximal development is the area of knowledge that is just beyond the learners stage of development or level of mastery. It is the difference between actual developmental level and potential developmental level. He thought that material should be introduced ahead of a developmental stage because it would rouse a set of skills as they were maturing and help them to fully develop. OK, I can get on board with that.

Constuctivist theory- good old Piaget thought that knowledge was not so much acquired as it was constructed by assimilating knew information into an existing framework. It is a way to describe how humans learn not a prescription.

Social constructivism is a way to apply constructivist theories to learning.

I also found some abstracts of different studies about zones of proximal development and proximal learning applied to study skills and I noticed some recurring themes:

People will learn things more quickly and more thoroughly if it is their own idea to learn it in the first place.

Learning should be a collaborative process between people with different levels of mastery.

Knowledge is part of a whole and shouldn't necessarily be split up into different topics.

Hmmm,could there be a school set up that actually encourages this type of learning?