If You Started a School...

...what would be the Top 3 or Top 5 things you would be sure your teachers, methods, and goals focused on? Would things from Permaculture be a big factor in your school?

Problem solving techniques. If you know how to analyze and debug problems, and know what your options are for working on them, then ALL things can be done well.

Agreed - problem solving. Also, critical thinking, and researching information from the original source, reading, comprehension, writing (all aspects, including cursive, composition, etc) old fashioned math, money (budgeting, handling, investing, and tracking), logic, history, civics, 'shop' and 'home-ec' life skills. Some of those are things I truly believe are best taught at home, but unfortunately, too many folks no longer know those things to pass along to the next generations.

How do you learn by rote memory? Memorizing basic math facts can be really useful as a foundation for more advanced problem solving math, but what if you don't know how to do it?

So if I started a school, step one would be to help people figure out *how* to learn. How to learn different things, different ways. How to use ways of learning in combination with each other. I'd revisit it as children grew and learned more. I wasted way too many years before I figured out that for me the best way to learn many facts was through motor memory - printing out the answers multiple times in a row. I'm quite sure other people used different methods to get the same results.

I would use a mix of building a sound foundation of solid number skills and language skills with the problem solving skills Pearl Sutton mentions above.

There is a place for conformity: 1 + 3 = 4

But too often conformity is subtly forced on students. They all draw a house with a peaked roof and a chimney with smoke coming out of it! So making sure they understand when conformity is an asset and when it's a liability is good to start young.  

As of today my Top 5:
1) Pattern literacy. All high school students would spend at least two years on the work of Christopher Alexander, since Toby Hemenway died before he finished his book on the topic.
2) The Latin language and descendants.
3) Trades and handicrafts (of as many kinds as I could find people to teach)
4) Arithmetic
5) History with primary sources

Rachel Lindsay wrote:As of today my Top 5:
1) Pattern literacy. All high school students would spend at least two years on the work of Christopher Alexander, since Toby Hemenway died before he finished his book on the topic.

There are a lot more patterns than nature and housing. If you look at it right, everything patterns.
I think you have read some of my posts here on C Alexander'swork. To my eyes, he's very focused on what HE considers important. I use his work, but I rarely use it as written. I learned the patterns behind his patterns, then wrote my own for ME and my life.
There are meta patterns to the patterns :D

Pearl Sutton wrote:
There are a lot more patterns than nature and housing. If you look at it right, everything patterns.
I think you have read some of my posts here on C Alexander'swork. To my eyes, he's very focused on what HE considers important. I use his work, but I rarely use it as written. I learned the patterns behind his patterns, then wrote my own for ME and my life.
There are meta patterns to the patterns :D

Yes, to teach that everything patterns, that's exactly it! I too am always questing for the pattern behind the patterns. I only meant that I wanted to educate students that there are discernable patterns in general, I just don't know yet any other book that treats this idea as seriously as his do. It's how my brain works, and I have not seen this so honored before. (Also, full disclosure :) -- I'm in the middle of the audiobook of "The Timeless Way of Building" and am delighted by how the author presents patterns as something worthy of study. I know I have learned to see them better since discovering Permaculture and I want that for all of us!)

Edit: Right after I typed this and hit play on the audiobook it started saying how everyone should create a personal "A living language must be recreated in each person's mind." He believed we must invent rules for ourselves too!

...what would be the Top 3 or Top 5 things you would be sure your teachers, methods, and goals focused on?

1) Happiness.  This may seem like a strange academic goal, but I think it's so poorly promoted in our culture that people become adults not really knowing what makes them happy.  The culture at large pushes many things that give pleasure and ecstasy often, in my mind, at the expense of finding happiness.  As an experiment, see if you can create a "t-list" of things that made you happy vs. unhappy at younger ages vs. later adulthood.  Although some of these things will just be age-related, a surprising number of those from more land-based cultures might profess to be happy with their circumstances at a younger age than in more 'civilized' cultures.

2) Observation.  (...which assists #1 mightily.)   Careful, open-minded observation is the raw material for critical thinking.  Such exercise takes into account fully actions and their consequences, both short term and long term.  Accelerating at a breathtaking pace is the incorporation of information into our mental circuits via digital media that produces a different kind of 'knowledge' than that garnered from real-world observation and valuation.

3) From moderate experience in college-level class-rooms, the most astute discoveries and understandings seem to come from a marriage between happy-directed individuals engaged in thoughtful observation with as little bias as possible.  Too much bias leads to un-critical thinking, but too little bias can mean neglecting past work ('history') and re-inventing the wheel.  (Not to say that sometimes we just need to move past the wheel into hover-craft type locomotion, but those transitions come at their own pace.)

Would things from Permaculture be a big factor in your school?

4) I actually do feel that given enough time, humans could evolve to live generation after generation in space pods having found the right mix of mind and body nutrition, but I'm not really interested in that paradigm.  Rather, I see our long past that lived and interacted with nature, often in quite a positive way, as being in a large amount of our genetic heritage.  By practicing #s 1,2, and 3 above with *daily* immersion of the curriculum in natural settings, I feel a permaculture inclination in the student would come about quite naturally.  This is due to many of the natural 'drives' (gathering, observing, testing) as well as 'senses' (air and sun on skin, smell of 'nature' as it has tickled our noses for thousands of years of evolution, etc) that have sustained us for so long.

Another thing I'd teach: 3D visualization, the classic solid shapes and how the world is made of them. Helps you see under the world to see it's all built of pieces that can be modified separately.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:As of today my Top 5:
1) Pattern literacy. All high school students would spend at least two years on the work of Christopher Alexander, since Toby Hemenway died before he finished his book on the topic.
2) The Latin language and descendants.
3) Trades and handicrafts (of as many kinds as I could find people to teach)
4) Arithmetic
5) History with primary sources

So you'll only be teaching kids with average or above intelligence who are keen to learn what you want to teach. Latin- really?  History- is that ancient or modern, with or without a political bias or religious slant?   I mean no offense, I've just been aware lately of how unbalanced a lot of teaching is.
My late brother in law Bob was an Industrial Arts Master at a big high school- covering woodwork, metal work, architecture and design, technical drawing. He had brilliant students who are now designing modern building masterpieces and kids who- despite the best efforts of their teachers- were thick as planks and barely literate. He taught them to repair equipment. To rebuild engines. To do all manner of vehicle maintenance. To make things they could use around the home. Stuff that would help them get through life and raise their kids. Their parents used to shake Bob by the hand and thank him for being the only one who gave their kids any incentive to keep attending school. Your goals are lofty and defintely commendable Rachel but I fear your target audience is limited  :)

Jay Wright wrote:

So you'll only be teaching kids with average or above intelligence who are keen to learn what you want to teach. Latin- really?  History- is that ancient or modern, with or without a political bias or religious slant?   I mean no offense, I've just been aware lately of how unbalanced a lot of teaching is.
My late brother in law Bob was an Industrial Arts Master at a big high school- covering woodwork, metal work, architecture and design, technical drawing. He had brilliant students who are now designing modern building masterpieces and kids who- despite the best efforts of their teachers- were thick as planks and barely literate. He taught them to repair equipment. To rebuild engines. To do all manner of vehicle maintenance. To make things they could use around the home. Stuff that would help them get through life and raise their kids. Their parents used to shake Bob by the hand and thank him for being the only one who gave their kids any incentive to keep attending school. Your goals are lofty and defintely commendable Rachel but I fear your target audience is limited  :)

Teachers in my imaginary school would focus on giving each student as much as each student could individually process and make use of, not push them beyond their capacities. (I believe that even a little exposure to each of the things on my list would benefit students of all abilities and life trajectories, which is why they are on my list!) Teaching history, any history, via primary sources involves letting the documents of the time speak for themselves, and bringing interpretations out of the students themselves. I have been teaching Latin to all ages of students for more than ten years, and they do not all become fluent in Latin, and some have really struggled--but they have all gotten value from their time spent on it. In my school, I would set the best banquet table I could think of, and invite all students to come to the table, expecting them to dine differently.

I wish you well with it Rachel. I went to a one teacher primary school where the teacher used to stand on a chair to get a better swing when he caned one of my little friends across the hands for stuttering. And yes- that's the truth.

Jay Wright wrote:I wish you well with it Rachel. I went to a one teacher primary school where the teacher used to stand on a chair to get a better swing when he caned one of my little friends across the hands for stuttering. And yes- that's the truth.

And what that teacher didn't realize, was how students such as you, judged the situation as a gross miscarriage of justice even at a young age. Bullying at its worst.  

We have had opportunities to learn more about how different people learn and exist since then - how to teach students who haven't been able to learn the way the class was taught, but I am well-aware of how often that hasn't happened, and that the real world is often sprinkled with only a few of those incredible teachers that teach what the student needs and will benefit from.

Some brains are wired in very different ways than the majority of brains. Teaching some humans needs more outside the box thinking than others, for sure.

I don’t think I know enough about teaching and learning to give a really helpful answer.

However, I would like teachers to have an understanding of aphantasia. I always thought I wasn’t creative because I’d get given a blank sheet and told to just draw whatever I could see with my ‘mind’s eye’ and couldn’t come up with something.

It turns out that I am creative but in problem solving rather than for art’s sake.


I also think there should be more time devoted to why we study what we do.

I probably would have done much better in English literature if I had known that we were doing it to give us the tools to describe and analyse the books that shaped civilisation. Rather than getting bored with 1 chapter per week, when I’ve already read the whole thing and decided that Romeo and Juliette and their families were idiots.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:...what would be the Top 3 or Top 5 things you would be sure your teachers, methods, and goals focused on?

Teaching what they asked to learn.

Jay Angler wrote:

Jay Wright wrote:I wish you well with it Rachel. I went to a one teacher primary school where the teacher used to stand on a chair to get a better swing when he caned one of my little friends across the hands for stuttering. And yes- that's the truth.

And what that teacher didn't realize, was how students such as you, judged the situation as a gross miscarriage of justice even at a young age. Bullying at its worst.  
.

And sixty years later I still feel for guilty for being too chicken s##t to stand up and do something to stop it.  When my mother was little she would sometimes forget and pick up her pen in her left hand- and be dragged out of her seat in front of the class and belted for it. That teacher was shot out of the sky over France in the forties- I like to think it was divine intervention  
We had some good teachers and some who thought it was a cushy job with no sweat and ten weeks of vacation. I appreciated the good ones. The first person one of my sisters invited to her wedding was her old maths teacher   Teaching in public schools these days must be a mine field for the teachers- the subject at hand plus political correctness plus psychology - the good ones deserve every payrise they can get.

No child would be left behind, but not every child would get a prize just for showing up either.

My wife is a teacher and it has reached the point where she cannot even teach. They don't even expect her too, telling her this years crop of kids just need to be reminded of the rules and that after Christmas it might be okay to start actually teaching.

She has twenty-two kids this year, but next year she is getting thirty-six, so a low teacher to child ratio would be nice to get under control. When I was teaching, I had a co-instructor but we had seventy-two kids between us. Those numbers are too high.

I loved the kids though, it is the crazy environment that schools are today that made me return to the private sector. I would ensure the teachers were rewarded for their hard work and make the hierarchy that should be kids under authority of teachers instead of the other way around. Kids want that too, but would never admit it.

My neice Kim taught English for a year in England, a year in Dubai, two years in Mexico, a year in Belarus and now back teaching in Western Australia. She said her profession now would be better classed as child rearing, because most of her time is trying to compensate for the problems and shortfalls caused by crap parents. She said it with a laugh but wasn't really joking. Not a good state of affairs.

Hi Jay,

At the risk of jumping off topic, the good old days weren’t always to good.  My mother used to tell me the story of the teacher who pulled out his pen knife and carved the letter B into the palm of a boy’s hand because he forgot his Bible.  The real problem, to me, is that each time she told the story, it was clear my mother approved.

To get back to topic:

1. Active listening
2. Discerning fact vs opinion
3. Research methods
4. Accepting responsibility

I have started a school. This year I started a Middle School. Here are 5 things:

1. The human mind feeds off ideas, not facts (Charlotte Mason).

2. We are our habits (Aristotle).

3. There are many different kinds of intelligence.

4. Rather than accomplish,  observe and interact ( Holmgren)

5. Religion, in the etymological sense (re-ligio); it ties everything together.