The keynote speech at the homeschool conference was given by Rebecca Rupp. She has written many h/s books, some that were personally SO helpful to me when starting out, like "Homeschooling Year by Year". She has also raised and homeschooled 3 boys, who all went on to go to college and have jobs... :-)
Rebecca is a funny, smart woman, and I enjoyed her talk. Her session was a little more general - I guess she needs to be relevant to the whole audience, young kids or old, regardless of methodology etc. I think that everybody probably got something different out of it. So these are my own reflections for the most part.
For me, I felt she was saying that learning should be about REVELATION and DISCOVERY. And that those discoveries should belong to your KIDS as much as possible. One of the reasons school doesn't work is because all the variables are controlled. A perfection analogy here is a science experiment. You can tell your child "X + Y = Z Now do this experiment to prove the truth I've just given you". Or you can give your child "X" and give them "Y" and wait until they run to you, completely breathless, saying "MOM! X + Y = Z!!" She gives several examples from a book called "Falling for Science" where adult scientists from MIT all tell the story about how they got into science - and most of them had a scientific "discovery" as a youngster that they felt was completely their own, and it got them hooked on physics/chemistry/biology for life.
This was a common theme in her lecture: give your kids lots of free time, let them experiment in play and in all areas of learning. Try to do this *without* controlling the outcome of every exploration. When we control every variable in their learning we essentially control the "lesson" as well, cutting out room for OTHER valuable lessons that would have haphazardly presented themselves. Sometimes things are going to work out and they will learn what you hoped they would - other times it WON'T work out and that is a lesson also. Kids need to learn coping strategies and flexibility and creativity. Do not overprotect them from failure. Wasn't penicillin invented this way?
Beware of indiscriminate praise - this is bad, it makes them risk-averse. Praise for hard work, this encourages persistence.
She had a very interesting take on video games... and I thought of all you mums out there with sons in particular. She said that it is best to actually ignore the content of most of these games (unless they are very violent of course, we are not talking about Grand Theft Auto or Halo here). The content of video games is often fluff. What she actually considers *valuable* is the mode of thinking. Oftentimes you start off a game with no rules evident, and it's up to you to determine the parameters of the game. There is often a list of sequential tasks, etc. She is a firm believer that in appropriate games, entering that mode of thinking is a good thing. She references the book, "Everything Bad is Good for You" by Steven Johnson in support of her thinking. I did not really know what to think about this one, to be honest... Definitely an interesting take...
Resources:
The Element by Ken Robinson
TED lectures online by Ken Robinson
The Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart
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