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All right, let's get on with the show.
(gentle music)
A few weeks ago, I found myself in constant
power struggles with my seven year old.
I wanted him to be advancing more in math
and more up to grade level in various types of work
I had predetermined that he should know by now.
To be learning more, doing more.
Keeping up with grade level and dare I say it,
exceeding grade level.
I am not immune to those types of pressures.
The Parenting Junkie.
One day, as I was sitting there again, trying to refocus
my distracted kid, it dawned on me.
This did not interest him.
None of the agendas and hopes and dreams that I had for him
held any meaning at all for him.
He didn't want to do it because he didn't experience
any intrinsic motivation to study.
It was boring and it wasn't meaningful to him
because it didn't apply to his real life or his passions.
If you've ever found yourself in those shoes,
then you probably know how easy it is
to slip into power struggle after power struggle,
when you're so generously trying to teach a kid
something that they're not interested in learning.
- Shut up!
Shut up, shut up, shut up!
(crying)
The truth is with enough rewards and punishments,
you can force someone to memorize rote facts.
But you can't ever force a child to be interested.
You can force them to memorize, but you can't force them
to learn and you can teach them as much as you want,
but it doesn't mean that they'll be educated.
And we all know that if a child is genuinely passionate
and interested about something, they won't stop learning.
You can't stop them learning.
Maybe you're interested in alternative
educational approaches and in promoting and following
the intrinsic interests of your child.
But you might be unsure how you can both follow
their interests and offer them a solid education.
You might be wondering perhaps, as I was,
how you can ensure that your child knows
all of the common standardized things that kids need to know
like math and history and science and literature,
whilst also following their interests.
Hmm, was such a thing possible?
I set out to find out.
See the question goes, do you simply follow their interest?
Which is the radical unschooling approach,
where you just let the child be the leaders
and the sovereign and the authority of their education,
where they only learn what they want to learn
when they want to learn it.
And disclaimer, I have lots of friends who are
radical unschoolers and they're doing fantastically well.
Their kids are thriving and they're happy.
And they're getting a great education.
These kids read and write, they know math,
they know history, they know a lot.
But what's more important than the things they know,
is that they're open, they're curious
and they continually learn for the pleasure of it,
for the joy of it because the pursuit of knowledge
is meaningful to them.
No one ever told them that they have to learn something.
And that's the appeal in radical unschooling.
It's offering children that sovereignty, that freedom
that forced education can never give them.
It's liberating to think, I can just ignore
all the standardized curriculum.
All of the expectations that the government has put
on our children's education and instead,
maintain and preserve their natural curiosity
and allow them to follow that and create meaning
within their educational path for themselves.
The issue here is that in many countries and many states
it's actually not legally possible to unschool.
For many families, we need our children to be able
to perform on those standardized tests
or to pass the examinations at the end of the year.
And even if it is legal where you live,
as it is where I live, you might not
feel comfortable with that.
For many reasons, I feel that what's best for my family
is a slightly more middle of the road approach
where there is some adult-led education happening,
so that we know that our kids are hitting certain milestones
around about a certain age.
I feel I'm not quite there at radical unschooling.
Educationally or in parenting.
We have boundaries and we have expectations in our home
and I feel comfortable with that.
I feel that radical unschooling would be incongruent
with our family culture and would actually alienate
my children further from their social context.
So for me personally, I have this kind of very loose
commitment to keep my kids kinda, sorta, equivalently,
loosely on par with what they would be doing
at their grade level had they gone to school,
give or take a year.
I do not take this seriously, but I do find it useful
as a guideline, at least for now.
So if you're not doing radical unschooling,
i.e., letting your children run their education
on their own, and you're not doing full-on homeschooling
or public school or bringing home a curriculum
and making sure they get through the homework on time,
et cetera, what are you to do?
Often it feels like the very things our kids
are most interested in, like fashion or Minecraft
or Barbies or Pokemon, may be in direct opposition
with our idealized fantasy of what they should
be interested in and learning.
Math, science, history, literature, the arts.
We find ourselves categorizing their interests
as good or bad, higher or lower.
And we assume that their intrinsic interests
are categorized as non-worthy educational pursuits,
but ours are the higher
and more worthy educational pursuits.
This is what drives this massive gap
between parent and child and inviting
evermore arguments and power struggles.
Ask me how I know.
Have you ever found yourself bribing your child?
If you finish one more page on this worksheet,
then we can go do screen time.
First let me teach you long division
and if you get this right, we'll eat ice cream.
(ding)
But what if I told you, you could learn math or science,
history, literature, the arts, anything through
whatever it is your child is interested in?
Magic, right?
Let me show you how this works.
In her amazing book "The Brave Learner",
Julie Bogart calls it this.
"You can learn everything through anything."
In this book Julie teaches us to take a child's area
of interest, in my kids' case, this is Harry Potter,
and map out all the different ways
that this particular area of interest could lead to
just common standard subjects
like math, science or literature.
So do you wanna see how this works?
Let's take Harry Potter as our example.
Say we put Harry Potter in the middle as the subject
that our kid is genuinely passionate and interested in.
That means they have all their mojo
in the direction of Harry Potter.
You wanna talk Harry Potter or walk Harry Potter
or watch Harry Potter, draw Harry Potter,
they are there for that, they're down with that
because they've got Harry Potter on the brain.
Now you can of course apply this to any other subject area.
Say ballet or the jungle, it doesn't matter.
Robots, outer space, mermaids, whatever your kid is into,
you can do this with that.
So with Harry Potter in the middle of the page,
we can then draw out ideas of all the common core subjects
that kids usually study.
We'll put Harry Potter in the middle
and then we'll branch out with English,
including reading and writing.
We have history, math, entrepreneurship perhaps,
science, cooking, art, theater,
philosophy and even event planning.
Let me show you our examples of how we've tied in
all of these elements into our Harry Potter curriculum,
as you might call it.
For English obviously, we're reading Harry Potter
so my son is reading the book.
He can read and he's reading to himself
and they're pretty big chunky books,
so he's getting through them.
He's on the fifth and a half book.
And just a disclaimer here is that I don't think
they're entirely age appropriate, especially from books five
and up for a seven year old, so just a disclaimer.
But I'm following his interest and allowing him
to read them, so he is reading those books
and then we also have them on audiobook.
So he both gets to read them, but also to listen to them
and hear the proper annunciation
and the proper pronunciation, a lot of the words
that he may not have been reading properly.
It also is more relaxing to listen to an audiobook
and you learn in a different way when it goes in,
and that way so let's say when we're in the car,
he's listening to the audiobook, but then usually at home,
or before bed, he'll be reading the book.
This leads him to ask a ton of questions.
For example, what does several mean?
Or what is a Phoenix?
And of course, conversations are the juiciest part
of education, so every time he asks me a question like that,
I do my best to put down whatever it is I'm busy with
and to face him and to talk about it
and to find the answers with him, so that his learning isn't
stunted by an uninterested adult or an unavailable adult.
Now, I do have three other kids,
so I am sometimes unavailable, but I do my best.
With regards to writing, my son has written his own
little Harry Potter comic strip with alternative scenes.
He's been writing invitations to his Harry Potter party,
more on that soon, with a quill.
So he's practicing cursive and practicing writing
different letter styles so that he can create
his own Harry Potter paraphernalia.
(gentle music)
When we discuss the books, we discuss different moral issues
that come up for the characters.
The motifs, the alternative choices they might have made.
Why J. K. Rowling probably made the decisions that she made
with regards to the story's arc.
We discuss what a hero's journey is
and why Harry Potter is such a great example of one.
We discuss what the different characters are.
Are they good or bad or somewhere in the middle,
as most characters are?
We discuss references to pop culture
or other influences that may have influenced
J. K. Rowling in writing Harry Potter.
I look for behind the scenes documentaries or interviews
where we can learn more about how Harry Potter came to be.
I mean, J. K. Rowling's story is such an inspiring story
of rags to riches and it's wonderful to learn
about the context of this famous
and incredible bestselling book.
We can discuss history and the influences
of historical sights and events
on Harry Potter events and on the writer.
We can look at the design of Hogwarts for example
and see the medieval and gothic architectural influences
and learn more about that.
So how does math play into Harry Potter?
Well, you'd be surprised.
First of all, I can riddle my son all sorts of math riddles
just based on Harry Potter.
For example, if Professor Snape gives each student
two eyeballs for their magic potion
and there are 36 students in the class,
how many eyeballs does Professor Snape need?
Or for example, if Hagrid has eight bags of grass
and four unicorns, how many bags of grass
would each unicorn get?
Or, as my son asked me, if it takes two minutes
to read each page, and there are 30 pages in a chapter,
and there are 17 chapters in the book,
how long will it take me to read the book?
Let's figure that out, shall we?
We also take math into the direction of entrepreneurship
because that's something that really
interests me and my son.
So we started creating little Harry Potter figures
and we opened an Etsy shop together.
I'll link it below and we talked about
how we should price our products.
What we would need in order to sell them.
How we can make the customer service experience a good one.
Now, this was just a little experiment
and it's only really for his friends,
but he gets the experience of setting up a shop
from the process of validating a product,
asking his friends, would you like this,
would you like to buy it, how much would you pay for it?
Then taking the photos of them, making his stock of products
and getting the website up and running.
That's a great learning experience, right?
And a meaningful life skill to him.
We could talk about zoology and mythical creatures.
We can draw them and design our own.
Of course, there are endless opportunities
for artistic exploration around Harry Potter.
We can make our own glasses, we can face paint.
We can create our own wands which we did.
We went out and got our supplies and watched tutorials
on YouTube and made our own wands.
We can do a lot of theater of course,
we can act out scenes, we can dress up as the characters.
We can make our own dramatical interpretations of it
and we can watch theater, movies, videos and fan spinoffs
of Harry Potter to get a more complete picture
of the theatrical and dramatic experience of Harry Potter.
We can watch the making of and the behind the scenes
interviews with the actors and see how being part
of that project changed their lives.
We can notice and take note of the differences
between the reality and the fantasy.
And we can philosophize about whether we're really Muggles
and whether Harry Potter truly exists.
(inspirational music)
And then for us, we're gonna bring it all together
with a Harry Potter birthday party which we're setting up.
It's just gonna be with a few close friends.
We're trying to create fun, hands-on activity stations
that my son is setting up with me.
So we're talking about budgeting
and event planning and invitations and social etiquette
and all of the things like that,
that go into creating a party.
We can also get the Harry Potter recipe book
and make food that is themed on Harry Potter,
so we'll learn cooking and measuring
and budgeting and all of that stuff built in
and wrapped into creating a Harry Potter birthday party.
What could be more fun than that?
(inspirational music)
- [Woman] You guys take turns, whoever finishes
with a bit of glue, pass it round to the next person.
(upbeat music)
- And of course, science as well.
There are great curriculums and ideas online.
Just go to Pinterest and you'll find a ton
of different scientific experiments we can do
that have Harry Potter themes, like growing our own
medical plants for example.
(upbeat music)
So do you see how through just one subject,
we've touched on art, math, science,
history, drama, philosophy, literature,
reading, writing, all these different skills that otherwise
we would be addressing through rote memorization
and one by one in a separate way?
When each subject is separated like that in school
or in homeschool, they lose their meaning
and their drive and their passion for the child
because why should I learn multiplication
if it doesn't apply to my real life?
Once we can put it in the context of my passion,
I'm much more driven to face all of those exciting
challenges that my education poses before me as invitations.
Imagine I had tried to mute his interest in Harry Potter
because it wasn't the core curriculum.
Instead, we can through the prism of the child's interest
and open doors left, right and center
for meaningful learning opportunities.
That's true magic, right?
Whatever your child's interested in,
from spiders to LOL Dolls, I know you can expand it
and learn about everything from there.
Now I know that homeschooling in not for everyone
and that's why I want you to stayed tuned next week
when I get together with my bestie, Doctor Shefali
to talk about public school.
Meanwhile, I'd love to hear from you.
Is this inspiring?
Do you ever follow your child's interest in this way?
And what adventures and magical learning
has that led you to?
The best place to have that conversation
is at the parentingjunkie.com/blog.