Learning in a Different Language

 

Given the rising COVID rates in California, the fact that we were already working remotely (as were all of our colleagues), we decided to stay in Finland for the fall and work from here. After our decision in late summer, we scrambled to find a spot in an English language school for our daughter, but there were no spaces. She was put on the waiting list at one, but ended up attending a public school, taught entirely in Finnish. 

This was not, and is not easy, since, though she speaks fairly good Finnish, she has never read or written in Finnish, and there is a lot to adapt to. The first thing she noticed was that the mathematical symbols for multiplication, division, ratios and so on were completely different. She is compelled to learn Swedish, in addition to Finnish, which is an official language here, and compulsory in school. And, as she has been homeschooled for so many years (with a brief foray into traditional education in 2nd and 3rd grades) she had to get used to things like sitting in rows in classrooms, and compulsory PE. 

Finnish schools start much later than American schools, and when our daughter came home after the first week, she reported that they are working on things she already did two years ago--and especially in Math. so she is doing some classes remotely from here to the U.S. as well, so she doesn't fall behind. 

It's an adjustment, and we are going to try to see if we can get her out of the compulsory Swedish. It's hard to learn a language in another language!

Best schools in the world? Not really

Finns believe that their schools are the best in the world, but in this, as in many other things, they are guilty of what I think of as Finnish exceptionalism, a pervasive problem in Finnish culture. Americans who put their kids in Finnish schools will often tell you how disappointed they were in the schools. 

 My guess is that the best schools in the world are probably in the US, maybe the UK. What Finland doesn't advertise is that it doesn't have the best schools, it has  the best worst schools in the world, a description I originally heard from Helsinki mayor Jan Vapaavuori, and I think is true. Finns strive for equality, not excellence. On average, they have good schools. That is very different from having the best schools. And if you are average, or even, and perhaps especially, below average, Finnish schools are amazing, and make sure everyone rises to an average.

Summer Job at Kahvila Siili

We are spending our summer in Helsinki as usual, and for the last year after opening 6 years ago, are running our café, Kahvila Siili, which in English means "Hedgehog Café".  It is named for the many hedgehogs that run around the neighborhood where we live, Käplyä. We had been fearful that they had been suffering because of last year's drought, and we hadn't seen very many, but we found a tiny baby hedgehog in our backyard, the size of a potato. 

The best part of the café this summer, besides the hedgehogs coming back, is that our daughter is working at her first job there. In Finland, you can work as a "trainee" from the age of 13, and so the week after her 13th birthday, she started working at the café, alongside all the other servers and baristas she's known for a long time, some of them for 5 or 6 years. Learning to dress for work, to get to work on time, to wash her uniform, to have a boss, and co-workers, to earn money and to spend money wisely--all of these are great things she is learning this summer. In Finland, workers are paid only once a month, so it's also a lesson in delayed gratification.

Summer jobs are a rarer and rarer phenomenon, and she is lucky to have this job. I'm not sure she knows how lucky she is. You can't explain it to people: "you're so lucky!!". Uh-huh. Hopefully in the future she will realize it. 

Online resources for homeschoolers

Welcome to homeschooling everybody!

A bunch of people have been asking me for homeschool advice, since everyone's been forced to shelter in place. One of my usual responses, in prior circumstances to the "how do you homeschool?" is "Homeschooling is a misnomer! Homeschooling means your kid is not at home most of the time!" But that no longer applies. This isn't really how homeschooling works. Another frequent question is "are you her teacher?" to which I respond that I'm not--I'm really more of an Educational Director.

We belong to the Low Media Homeschool Group in Marin County, and many of our homeschool friends and fellow students come from that group. Technology is used as a tool, and for creation rather than consumption, and until recently wasn't used that much. Now, like all of you, we are forced to spend a lot of time on Zoom and other video platforms. It's not great. However, we do have some resources we've used in the past. So, a quick list of educational resources we've used online, and I will add to this as I come up with more.

Books are the default go-to around here. So let's start with that.

The Birchbark House books - by Louise Erdrich. We read these ages 8-9, as an antidote to the sometimes racist Little House on the Prairie books. Tells the story from the native perspective. There are four of them and they're all good, and get better as the series goes along.
Oishinbo - Comic books from Japan about Japanese Cooking, which we gave to our 10-11 year old, who then developed a big interest in cooking Japanese food.
DK Eyewitness Series. Instead of an old-fashioned encyclopedia, on everything from Leonardo to Soccer

Video
Before you let your kids watch anything on YouTube, install Distraction Free YouTube if you're running Chrome so they don't end up watching self-harm videos or being recruited by ISIS. I wish I were joking. Screen Time on Apple should be set up with reasonable limits you can discuss with your kid, if your kid is reasonable. Otherwise, use your own judgement. :D Here are some useful web sites for edutainment content.

Science
Deep Look by PBS - really brief, but really good science videos

Veritasium  - new developments in science, debunking science myths

Nature shows on BBC Earth - what they're famous for

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - animations, clearly explaining complex topics. 

Seeker - updated more often than some of the others, more like news programs

Art

Smarthistory - opening up museums online to teach art history

MoMA - for older kids, with artist profiles, exhibition explainers, of varying quality and utility

General
The Kids Should See This -a collection of "over 4,500 kid-friendly videos, curated for teachers and parents who want to share smarter, more meaningful media in the classroom and at home."

Crash Course Useful for explaining things from WWII to CRISPR
TED Ed - TED, but for kids, mostly animated, on many varied topics
Outschool - online classes on a wide array of subjects, taught remotely online. We have done D&D groups, classes on how to be more productive in studying, music lessons and history.

Languages
Spanish Academy - remote learning classes with native speakers from Guatemala
iTalki - A great place to find tutors, teachers and remote learning partners. I've studied both French and Finnish with tutors here.

Podcasts
Brains On the science podcast was a huge favorite with our kids ages 7-10
Story Pirates - for younger kids, this one takes stories written by kids and dramatizes them with hilarious results. Listen to one of my favorites, In the Car by 5-year-old Leah from Maryland.

Sir Ken Robinson's RSA Animation

 RSA Animate–in which an illustrator draws images to accompany a speech–has Sir Ken Robinson explaining our dominant educational paradigm and why it must change.

Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. The problem is, they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way they are alienating millions of kids, who don’t see any purpose in going to school.

Sir Ken is a British university professor and an advocate for the arts, known widely for his books on creativity and human flourishing. He’s a deeply human thinker and this is one of the finest videos in the series, well worth watching!

"Are home educated children as socialized as publicly educated children?"

Since COVID-19 hit, and schools across America closed, I've been asked a lot of questions about homeschooling. Some parents are finding it wonderful, others hate it, and there are a lot of new converts. People are realizing homeschooling parents have long known: that in many, or even most schools, only about 20% of the time is spent learning. The other 80% of the day mostly exists to permit parents to work. 

But homeschooling is best done with others, which is not how things are going in Northern California, which is in lockdown, with social distancing measures in effect. This is not homeschooling, which, in our experience, happens outside the home, and with other students 75% of the time. In a typical week of school, we see 30-40 other students and since COVID-19 lockdown we have seen almost none. In person, that is. We see lots of them on Zoom and other video chats.

I decided to excavate some of my old blog posts about homeschooling on this blog, which we had started circa 2013-2014, but later moved to another blog which is currently offline. So, to start, here is the answer I gave to one of the most frequently asked questions about homeschooling, which is

"Are home educated children as socialized as publicly educated children?"

Naturally this depends on what you mean by "socialized", and this is one of the most common questions and concerns regarding homeschooling. I am not sure how this could be researched, however. Number of friends? Hostile or amicable relationship with parents? Hostile or amicable relationships with peers? Frequency of contact with members of the community? Volunteerism rate? Suicide rate of homeschooled vs. traditionally schooled? Violence and bullying in traditional schools vs. homeschool groups?

However, here are some differences I've noticed, as a homeschooling mother:

Age Cohort & Peer vs. Family Orientation
Most schooled children spend most of their time with children their own age, usually within a year of their age, with a few adults teaching or supervising. Homeschooled children tend to spend more time with their families, siblings and children of different ages. Typical homeschool groups include kids of a variety of ages, from newborns through teenagers, and often you see four-year-olds working side-by-side with 10-year-olds. Related to the age cohort difference is the result of that stratification by age.  The tendency for schooled children is to be primarily peer-oriented vs. parent or family-oriented (see below). There was a study done which indicated that mixed-age groups of children were significantly less likely to exhibit bullying behavior. Children interacting with other children at least 3 years younger saw themselves as protectors and role models, rather than as competitors or rivals. The younger children saw older children as guides and leaders.

Personally I believe our society is broken, in that people mainly associate with people their own age. My relatives in the Philippines, if they threw a party, would include everyone -- babies, kids, teenagers, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s -- and grandmas in their 80s. This was not unusual, and I think, the mark of a healthy society. However I rarely see this kind of intergenerational mixing in the States, except with first generation immigrants.

One-on-one attention
Parents also know their children, and can adapt the pace of learning, the subjects taught to the individual child.  Traditionally schooled kids have to keep to the 2nd grade, 3rd grade, etc curriculum as taught, whereas homeschooled kids can go faster or slower as needed. As has been noted in the recent article regarding Khan Academy in Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/20...) and in the work of 826 Valencia (http://826valencia.org/about/) among many others -- kids thrive when given one-on-one attention, learn more, gain confidence. 

Community participation
We are able to spend time every week at a nursing home, in conversation with the elderly residents (we visit one resident in particular that we have a close relationship with, but have adopted the whole place). Children and the elderly are almost never seen in our daily lives and are missing from civil society. As such their needs are not taken into consideration in many decisions we make regarding public life.

Closeness to Family
After "better education" the reason most frequently cited for why parents homeschool their children is in order to have a closer family. Peers, media, and other influences commonly drive a wedge between children and parents and homeschooled children tend to have a closer relationship with parents and siblings.

I study communities, especially online communities, so I have thought a lot about the subject of communities and socialization. Here are some of my notes from John Taylor Gatto's book Dumbing us Down too, which makes some similar points.

Determining who in our society is 'well socialized' is subjective. But a friend of mine in the tech industry asked me "Why is it that homeschoolers are so much better socialized than other people?" He mentioned a woman at his company who was always sent out to talk to new employees, meet new customers, talk to "problem" clients. "She can talk to anybody," he said. It might just have been the woman's personality, but one of the reasons I decided to homeschool was I met a friend's 13-year-old daughter, who spoke to me without fear or contempt, as to another person, and not as an adult, as many preteen and teen kids do. She was talking about the radio show that she DJ'd on a local station and knew so much about music, which she clearly loved. She was empowered to pursue this interest by her parents, as a homeschooler.

There is a book called The Well-Adjusted Child, about homeschooling and socialization which I reviewed on GoodReads with some notes from the book. http://www.goodreads.com/review/... 

As there are books about this topic, and this answer is becoming one, I'll wrap it up here, as I could go on.