Hands On Self-Directed Learning

I was cruising(not much for swimming so I don't surf) Youtube for videos of Stampy Long Nose, my kid's current favorite character. Stampy makes kid-friendly videos of his adventures as a cat character in Minecraft.

Here is a Stampy video, below it is the subject of this thread.


Anyway I wanted to download some audio books so I went looking for audios to harvest from Youtube, sorry I don't see many libraries at the truck stops so I do a search at Youtube with the "audiobook full" and up pops a bunch of great stuff. Some are classics from days gone by and others are from a month ago.
I also like to download Ted Talks to listen to. I discovered I could use Mozilla's Firefox browser, it has an add-on that comes up on the Youtube page that lets you download various size files. I was looking for a way to take Stampy home to my son who is 8, we are out in the boonies in WV without internet. My wife used to like it but got away from it and she is sort of scared to let our 8 year old loose with all the freaks uploading homemade porn.

To the title of this thread, Hands-on, self directed learning. One of the Ted Talks has a man by the name of Gever Tulley. You can background information here.

Gever co-authored a book 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Child Do) First thing to do in the book? Put your tongue on a 9 volt battery. (Raise your hand, or at least grimace if you did this.)



Gever Tulley urges us to stop thinking of education as something that we *do* to people, and start thinking of people as voracious self-directed learners.



Gever Tulley is all for letting kids play with fire, use a pocket knife and play with power tools. He believes that in order for them to be creative as well as safe, they must experiment with these objects (with adult supervision of course) so he founded the Tinkering School, a week-long, sleepaway summer camp for children, where kids can release their creativity and learn by doing. Gever is also the founder and Education Architect of Brightworks, an innovative new K-12 school in San Francisco.



Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUbIu9m2Kks

Here is a link to all sorts of videos of Gever Tulley

I cringed on talking with my wife about our second grader who was a joy for his kindergarten and first grade teachers. The second grade teacher was always sending home orange and yellow faces for talking out of turn, running around and OMG "touching" other students. Family figured, "Jeremiah just needs more of a whipping." We have a really great kid, got him long after we thought we would be parents, spanking sucked. After my wife talked with his teacher about something suggested by a neighbor about "scaring him straight" with a visit from a local policeman, the teacher woke up and realized Jeremiah wasn't the terror she was making him out to be to us. As soon as she stopped, so didn't he. Hmmm?

           ////OPINION ALERT*////

I was raised to be a hands-on self-directed learner, along with my siblings, and we seem to be on trajectories that could seriously change the world, so I say “go for it!”

Hands-on self-directed learning is what we naturally do, anyway. Children want to bury their hands in dirt, run around in the rain, splash in puddles, etc. These are actually the way children observe the world around them. Like, the same thing as permaculture observation. When a kid is throwing rocks into a pond, he’s using a the pond as a perfectly flat surface, that marks the positions of every rock he threw. He’s learning to precisely control his throwing action. He’s also learning about the pond, and about the way water behaves in response to disturbance. He’s also learning about waves, and how they act. He could throw rocks into ponds his entire life and never reach the bottom of what there is to learn there.

The same is true for every childhood game. When a baby starts eating soil, he’s not only inoculating his gut with a rich bouquet of bacteria, he’s also tasting it, learning the taste of the soil. If he keeps doing this, and observes the plants growing and the form of the landscape around him, he will on par with the world’s leading expert on soil by age sixteen, if he travels a bit.

There is no end to the possibilities of this kind of learning, because it is essentially human. This is the way humans learn.

    *everything I said here is my opinion; everyone is free to have and express their own opinions, regardless of what I think.