Finnish School - for now

 

We have, as so many other students, had to adapt to a new world of quarantines, distance learning, moving locations and moving schools. After so many of our courses in the States were closed and went to distance learning, we decided the kids should enroll in the Finnish public schools, so they could be in classes that were still meeting in person. The schools are also entirely in Finnish, which will help with their fluency. 

As so many children in the homeschooling community go between traditional schools and homeschool this is not unusual, and we expect them to continue their autodidactic pursuits even while attending traditional school!

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.

Memorization, Facts and Learning to Learn

"Never memorize what you can look up in books" is a quote often attributed to Einstein, though what he actually said was somewhat different. He was asked, but did not know the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. When this was pointed out, he said, "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, "...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." See also Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451:

"Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry. As a child I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite even now. I wanted to become a writer, and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

Tinkering as Learning

John Seely Brown, who was the director of the amazing Xerox Parc for many years, and whose book The Social Life of Information was hugely influential in the tech industry in which I work, has a new book coming out soon, The New Culture of Learning, which looks great. You can download the first three chapters from the site.

He talks a lot about one of my pet subjects, Community Mentoring, the apprenticeship model of education:

Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.

...as well as a dozen other favorite topics of mine: play as a means of learning, constraints as a stimulus for, rather than an inhibition of, creativity, and so on. I wish I could figure out how to get my hands on the whole book. There is a great page of resources on the site as well, for further exploration.

Here is an interview with John from the site, talking about tinkering as a mode of knowledge production, an idea reinforced by my recent visit to MakerBot.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u-MczVpkUA&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

(Thanks for the head's up, Scott!)

Teachers dislike creative children

Do teachers dislike creative children in spite of their assertions to the contrary? 96% of teachers say that daily classroom time should be dedicated to creative thinking. And yet they seem biased against the very children whose thinking is most creative. At school, creative children are punished rather than rewarded, and the system seems designed to extinguish creativity. In spite of all the lip service.

The characteristics that teachers value in the classroom are those associated with the lowest levels of creativity. Teachers want students to be responsible, reliable, dependable, clear-thinking, tolerant, understanding, peaceable, good-natured, moderate, steady, practical and logical. Creativity is not moderate or logical. It is associated with characteristics such as determined, independent and individualistic, people who make up the rules as she goes along, divergent rather than conformist ways of thinking. You can read some of the research in this article.



For good reason Ken Robinson's talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? is the most viewed talk on the TED web site as of this writing. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original," he says, and rightness and wrongness, as anyone who has ever received a graded paper can attest, is the very backbone of education.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality isn't really that surprising.  It's nearly impossible for a teacher, outnumbered by his charges, to help the rebels and mavericks flourish in an environment requiring more supervision than vision. The system is set up for teachers to prefer the obedient.

Confucius and Learning

"To learn and to put into practice at the right moment what one has learned–is that not joy?"
These are the opening lines of the Analects of Confucius.

Maker Faire - East Bay edition

 
We have been going to the Maker Faire, created by our friends at O'Reilly Media, since its very beginning! Caterina has even written for one of their magazines, Craft. 

 It is just as fun and fascinating as it looks! We have gotten special clay that we used for making models of cells, hula hoops for, um, homeschool sports, little bottles to wear as necklaces for which we made magical potions.  One kid was super interested in the aerodynamics of paper airplanes and entered a paper airplane competition; there were 3D printers everywhere making incredible stuff, robots, sewing, papercraft, you name it. The big one in San Mateo was a bit overwhelming to be honest, so we like the little ones. There was one in Greenbrae, in the parking lot of the strip mall there, where we met the guy who invented those fantastic maze balls, the Perplexus! He even had the original models that he had made out of wood and tubing and tape-- it was amazing.We have a lot of these.

There's something for everyone! Musical instruments, new games invented by kids, sports, cooking, doll-making. I really recommend going if you can get a ticket. It sells out every year.

Self Directed Learning

Many homeschoolers have read the articles by Peter Gray, who blogs at Psychology Today in Freedom to Learn. He wrote an article on the differences between Progressive Education and Self Directed Learning, which I thought was a useful distinction, and wanted to note here that Self Directed Learning is an environment in which the child:

1.  has unlimited time and freedom to play and explore
2.  has access to the most useful tools of the culture
3. is embedded in a caring community of people who range widely in age and exemplify a wide variety of skills, knowledge, and ideas
4. has access to a number of adults who are willing to answer questions (or try to answer them) and provide help when asked

He writes, further, Education, in this view, is not a collaboration of student and a teacher; it is entirely the responsibility of the student.  While progressive educators continue to see it as their responsibility to ensure that students acquire certain knowledge, skills, and values, and to evaluate students’ progress, facilitators of Self-Directed Education do not see that as their responsibility. 

Yousician

Since our dear friend and musician Rose went on tour with Cirque de Soleil, we've been without a music teacher! We pick up our instruments and play every now and then, but haven't found a good way to keep learning and progressing in music. When I was a kid, I found music practice to be tedious, so finding a way to make it engaging and fun has always been first and foremost.

Luckily, our friend Chris in Helsinki started a company a few years back called Yousician. They develop software that teaches people how to play ukulele, guitar and piano, and we've found it to be excellent and enjoyable. We us it primarily as an iPad app, and put the iPad on our music stand as we practice.

We started out learning piano, moved on to noodling on guitar and are now subscribers. You can see a screenshot above of what the screen looks like and how it works...you play along with a kind of tablature, seen above, at a tempo that you can speed up and slow down as you wish. It works well.

At Slush last year we received a Yousician ukulele, which we hadn't been using, but which we picked up and started with this spring. We've used Yousician to learn piano--ukulele was just as easy.

A Trip to Japan

Being able to travel off peak travel times is one of the best things about homeschooling. We managed to get ourselves some last minute tickets to Japan in April and were able to take a trip there. Cherry Blossoms were blooming and Sakura Day happened while we were there. We walked on the grounds of the Palace in Ueno Park to see the blossoms falling from the trees. I'd been a sakura skeptic--what could be so interesting about falling cherry blossoms?--but once there I finally understood the beauty, and the loss of that beauty, and the ephemerality of life. The sadness and the joy. We were inside the haiku.



Japanese culture is very different from ours. As a writing and research project, our daughter was assigned the project of taking photos of, and writing an essay about, all the differnt and novel kinds of food she encountered there. We took a few trips to the grocery store, ate at a variety of restaurants, including a ramen place, a shabu-shabu restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a bakery and a yakitori place. Tokyo is full of amazing restaurants.

Through a friend we met a local teenage girl who showed our daughter to all the special animal "cafes" that are all over Tokyo--the Cat Cafe, the Hedgehog Cafe, the Bird Cafe. There is a huge kawaii culture in Japan--the culture of cute! Even the dogs in Japan are cuter than dogs anywhere else as you can see from this beauty we met while walking through the cherry blossoms.



I want to go back next year! our daughter exclaimed. Me too!

Book Club: Five Children and It

The first book of our homeschool book club this September was Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. We've read so many excellent books this past year, and this one wasn't one of my favorites, or my daughter's. But for each book club we have a project, based on the book. Some of the kids make dioramas of certain scenes, others make games based on a books' themes, and once one of the girls wrote an entire rap, which she performed, called The Rap of Nimh. It was so good.

My daughter made a model in clay of the "it" in the book, the sand-fairy. It was an ugly little thing, but the sand fairy was not meant to be pretty. He was grumpy, reluctant and scowling. I wish I had taken a picture of it before it got broken!

Setting Goals

This week we are learning about setting goals, and how it is that people achieve the things they set out to do. We talked about how without setting goals you don't have a road map of where you are going and could end up just anywhere.

We talked through our goals for Sesat School this year, which are:

• Mastery of Fourth Grade Math
• Speak Basic Spanish
• Reading 200 books this year (then we discussed whether or not this was possible, or even desirable!)
• Play 6-8 songs on the piano with two hands
• Finish writing a story and Submit to Stone Soup

Then we set 15 year goals, 10 year goals and 1 year goals. These were fun! Dreaming about what could be, where we'd want to live, who we'd have in our lives. Do we want to have a lot of friends, or just 2-3 really good friends? Do we want to live in the country or the city? Where do we want to travel?

We've been continuing today with more learning about goal setting, and how you achieve things a little bit at a time, by working every day. We watched this video about this:



Then, to really drive the point home (and because my daughter has expressed an interest in learning how to play the violin) we watched these videos from a Norwegian woman who taught herself to play the violin, and videotaped her progress as she improved. She went from being a complete beginner to being able to play extremely well in two years. It is quite impressive!



We wanted to learn more about how she had done it, how much she had practiced, so we watched her follow up video. Turns out she practiced sometimes an hour a day, sometimes 15 minutes, and sometimes, not any practice at all. She took a total of 8 lessons during the two years, and taught herself to play by watching videos on YouTube. But she kept at it day after day.



 This has been a really great area of study for us! And it's only been two days. Looking forward to the rest of this week as we work more on goal creation, and getting closer to them every day.

I love a good planetarium!

While we were in Salt Lake City, we visited the Clark Planetarium, and the kids loved it. There was an exhibit where you could construct your own rockets and see how they fared after launch -- if they were able to get into orbit, or break free of Earth's gravity. Another exhibit was a scale that you could stand on and see what you weighed on various planets.

We had originally come to see a movie about extreme weather, which was so-so, but stayed to experience all the interactive exhibits.

We spent several hours there.

PhysEd, Homeschool Style

Oh how I dreaded Phys. Ed. when I was a kid. I hated everything about it: changing my clothes in the locker room, being the least athletic kid in the class, coming last in the foot races, and even though I had always been the best kickball player during recess, and could chase the boys faster than any other girl, I never excelled in anything in Phys. Ed. After school sports I liked: tennis, ski team, even archery and dance class. But ugh, Phys Ed.

So as a homeschooler, there are both fewer and more chances to engage in physical activity. You can run around outside all the time, even take your classes outside, or learn while walking (which we adapted from our grown-up "walking meetings"). Hikes are doable during the weekdays, even. Dancing class happens. And whenever you want you can go skiing.

We just took a week and went skiing in Utah. We skiied and skiied as much as we could. Our legs were sore. We learned to keep our skis parallel. We graduated from Green slopes to Blue (with the grownups and the more adventuresome kids breaking off to do the occasional black diamonds.) The best kind of physical activity: fun, exhilarating, exhausting.

Llamas in Port Angeles, Washington

We went up to Washington earlier this week to visit Rachel, who had been, until a couple years ago, our childrens' beloved nanny, and teacher. She was my daughter's first teacher, starting from birth. So warm and loving and kind and full of life and wisdom and sweetness. The very best kind of teacher to have.

We were lucky enough to stay in the Arcadia Farm and Inn in Port Angeles, where there were dozens of animals--7 dogs, 2 llamas, 2 horses, 16 sheep, chickens, about a dozen goats--baby goats, even!--cats. It was wonderful. The llamas even came to our window looking for snacks, and we were allowed to help out in the barn, feeding and caring for the animals.