Many Paths to Success in Life

Yesterday I started reading Guerrilla Learning – How To Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School by Grace Llewellyn & Amy Silver.
They were talking on p21 about how schools decontextualise information year after year and how this often bears little or no relationship to their world outside the classroom, (which results in the child’s curiousity and natural love of learning shriveling) and they wrote :-

‘yet test scores and grades don’t actually predict anything much. Higher level skills such as critical thinking are neither taught nor tested in most schools. Artistic ability, mechanical ingenuity, interpersonal strengths, musical talents, and gifts for synthesizing information are disregarded (if not disparaged). People who can quickly memorise meaningless data and deliver it on demand are rewarded, while poor test takers with other strengths are penalised. Unlike in life, the compliant are favoured over the willful. And the greatest opportunity children have to develop their strengths, cultivate self-discipline, and find their calling – is ignored in favour of the effort to teach what can be measured.”

It reminded me of a short essay I first read about a year ago called “Of Daffodils and Diesel” Have you ever read it? It is posted in a few places over the Internet, and since the author is unknown, I think it is OK to post it on my blog for you.

I always wanted to show my 19yr old daughter this article, because I’m sure it would resonate with her. She struggled academically for her entire school life, trying hard and trying hard until she gave up trying to understand and make sense of school subjects at about the Year 8 level. She continued to attend school only to see her friends, even though she was told many times that she was ‘there to learn – not to socialise’. Isn’t that peculiar? Homeschoolers are continually told that the only way children can learn to socialise, is at school! Ha! )

Anyway, if I only knew then what I know now. If only I had homeschooled her at a pace and learning style that suited her. If only I had opened up new possibilities and opportunities for her to learn about and research things that actually interested her. If only. I know we cannot change the past, but I know Jodie would have done so much better – and importantly, her self-esteem would not have taken a beating by thinking she is dumb or stupid … which she is NOT. I am pleased to say that she has continued to excel in her working life and her actual work ethic makes me marvel. She has not yet found her niche, but she is gaining valuable skills, earning a good reputation, and her confidence is a kilometre high. Praise the Lord!

It proves to me that schooling is not the same as education. Anyway, here is the article I was referring to.


Of Daffodils and Diesels
Author Unknown

I'm not very good in school.

This is my second year in the seventh grade, and I'm bigger than most of the other kids. The kids like me all right, even though I don't say much in class, and that sort of makes up for what goes on in school. I don't know why the teachers don't like me. They never have. It seems like they don't think you know anything unless you can name the book it comes out of.
I read a lot at home—things like Popular Mechanics and Sports Illustrated and the Sears catalog—but I don't just sit down and read them through like they make us do in school. I use them when I want to find something out, like a batting average or when Mom buys something secondhand and wants to know if she's getting a good price.

In school, though, we've got to learn whatever is in the book and I just can't memorize the stuff. Last year I stayed after school every night for two weeks trying to learn the names of the presidents. Some of them were easy, like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln, but there must have been 30 altogether and I never did get them straight. I'm not too sorry, though, because the kids who learned the presidents had to turn right around and learn all the vice presidents.
I am taking the seventh grade over, but our teacher this year isn't interested in the names of the presidents. She has us trying to learn the names of all the great American inventors. I guess I just can't remember the names in history.

Anyway, I've been trying to learn about trucks because my uncle owns three and he says I can drive one when I'm 16. I know the horsepower and gear ratios of 26 American trucks and want to operate a diesel. Those diesels are really something. I started to tell my teacher about them in science class last week when the pump we were using to make a vacuum in a bell jar got hot, but she said she didn't see what a diesel engine has to do with our experiment on air pressure, so I just shut up. The kids seemed interested, though. I took four of them around to my uncle's garage after school and we watched his mechanic tear down a big diesel engine. He really knew his stuff.

I'm not very good in geography, either. They call it economic geography this year. We've been studying the imports and exports of Turkey all week, but I couldn't tell you what they are. Maybe the reason is that I missed school for a couple of days when my uncle took me downstate to pick up some livestock. He told me where we were headed and I had to figure out the best way to get there and back. He just drove and turned where I told him. It was over 500 miles round trip and I'm figuring now what his oil cost and the wear and tear on the truck—he calls it depreciation—so we'll know how much we made. When we got back I wrote up all the bills and sent letters to the farmers about what their pigs and cattle brought at the stockyard. My aunt said I only made 3 mistakes in 17 letters, all commas. I wish I could write school themes that way. The last one I had to write was on "What a daffodil thinks of Spring," and I just couldn't get going.

I don't do very well in arithmetic, either. Seems I just can't keep my mind on the problems. We had one the other day like this: If a 57 foot telephone pole falls across a highway so that 17 and 3/4 feet extend from one side and 14 and 16/17 feet extend from the other, how wide is the highway? That seemed to me like an awfully silly way to get the size of a highway. I didn't even try to answer it because it didn't say whether the pole had fallen straight across or not.

Even in shop class I don't get very good grades. All of us kids made a broom holder and a bookend this semester and mine were sloppy. I just couldn't get interested. Mom doesn't use a broom anymore with her new vacuum cleaner, and all of our books are in a bookcase with glass doors in the family room. Anyway, I wanted to make a tailgate for my uncle's trailer, but the shop teacher said that meant using metal and wood both, and I'd have to learn how to work with wood first. I didn't see why, but I kept quiet and made a tie tack even though my dad doesn't wear ties. I made the tailgate after school in my uncle's garage, and he said I saved him $20.

Government class is hard for me, too. I've been staying after school trying to learn the Articles of Confederation for almost a week, because the teacher said we couldn't be a good citizen unless we did. I really tried because I want to be a good citizen. I did hate to stay after school, though, because a bunch of us guys from Southend have been cleaning up the old lot across from Taylor's Machine Shop to make a playground out of it for the little kids from the Methodist home. I made the jungle gym out of the old pipe, and the guys put me in charge of things. We raised enough money collecting scrap this month to build a wire fence clear around the lot.

Dad says I can quit school when I'm 16. I'm sort of anxious to because there are a lot of things I want to learn.