How many of you are finding yourselves working from home unexpectedly right now
and on top of that, you are trying to make sure your kids don’t fall behind on
their education?
My name is Mark and I help coach teams on how write software efficiently using
Agile principles. Most of my videos on this channel are about that topic,
however my family also homeschools and since we travel a lot for work, this
often means doing school work under less than ideal conditions. We’ve done
Algebra at an altitude of 30,000 feet, woke the entire family up in a hotel room
at 5 am for a online science class that seemed like a great idea when we were in
our home timezone, listened to memory work while catching Uber to downtown New
York City, and admonished our kids not to spill their hamburger on their
Herodotus book as we drove half way across the country to a conference.
In fact the most constant thing about our schooling is that it is always
changing. While we definitely don’t have all the answers for ourselves much less
for others, we have found some ways to handle education in the midst of constant
change and while Agile was created for software projects, many of the principles
have general concepts that can apply to educating your kids when everyone is
suddenly trying to learn at home.
For example: “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile
processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.” That is what
Agile says about writing software. It looks at change as an opportunity. Maybe
there is potential to see this dramatic upheaval your kids educational schedule
as an opportunity:
“Welcome changing ways of educating, even late in the school year. We can
harness change for our children’s educational advantage"
With that in mind, here are X things we’ve discovered in homeschooling that you
may want to keep in mind.
You Don’t Need To Know Everything
Teaching your kids doesn’t mean you need to know everything there is to know
about every subject. If you had a good high school education you should have all
the skills you need to help your kids learn the vast majority of what they need
to know for a K-12 education. This doesn’t mean you will automatically remember
or know every fact there is about every subject, but you should have all the
skills you need to help them through a curriculum and find the answers when they
need it.
One of the great things about the internet and social media is that it is very
easy to get input from others if you need some expertise on on a topic or just
confirmation that you aren’t missing something. One of my nieces had a question
about how to diagram a sentence last week. In about 15 minutes they had the
answer and confirmation from several people who majored in English in college as
well as an example of how that particular sentence would work in Latin.
Speaking of Latin did you know you can get Winnie the Pooh in Latin? Yes. It is
all about Chrisophorus Robinus and Winnie ille Pu. I’m probably pronouncing that
wrong and autocorrect keeps changing my notes ille to illegitimate. So it says
the book is about Winnie the Illegitimate Pooh
My daughter had a particular tricky geometry problem a few weeks ago. In fairly
short order we had two ways to solve it and validation of those two ways from a
number of people. The problem was that the answers contradicted. This led us to
a closer inspection of the figure and we discovered that for it to exist, it
would require a circle to have 400 degrees.
Such a construct would obviously cause a number of moves by skateboarders,
skiers, and snowboarders to contradict the known laws of physics. So we
concluded the figure itself was in error.
Prioritize!
One of the most important things software teams can do is to prioritize their
work. When teams are trying to figure out which features are more important, I
often ask, if there was a sickness and everyone had to go home for weeks, which
stories would you wish they had built before getting sick? Looking back that
hypothetical example seemed eerily prophetic. The point is that there are always
going to be more things you want to do than you can actually do. This is true in
software. It is true in education. Your focus has to be on making sure the
important things get done and the way to do that is to make sure they get done
first.
When it comes to prioritizing what your child should work on, I find it useful
to loosely categorize school work into skills and knowledge. Learning how to
think mathematically or read difficult passages mostly fall into the skills
category. Knowing dates and facts mostly fall into the knowledge category. While
we want our children to have both, if we had to choose, we’d probably be better
off with some gaps in factual knowledge rather than in skills. If a child
doesn’t remember the date that the Declaration of Independence was published,
the migratory habits of whales, facts about dinosaurs, or the name of the
capital of Arizona, it is probably going to be easier to rectify than if they
don’t understand the concept of multiplication.
With that in mind, it is usually more efficient to start the day working on
skill based subjects. For us that is usually mathematics. If something changes
and we don’t finish everything we intended for the day, we will be much better
off having made progress in math, but being a day behind in our history reading.
This isn’t because we don’t value history, but doing two lessons in history to
double up is much easier than trying to do two difficult math lessons in a day.
What you prioritize for your kids may be different than what we prioritize for
ours. The important thing is to make sure that you do your work in a way that
when you look back, you won’t wish you had of done something else first so it
wasn’t the thing that fell through the cracks.
Collaborate
One of the practices from XP is pair programming which basically recognizes that
you can often get more done with higher quality by working together with someone
else on writing code. This is true for education as well. A well meaning but
infinitely distractible child sitting at a table with a sheet of math homework
is much less efficient than two children sitting across from each other working
the problems then explaining their answers and figuring out who did it
correctly.
Your child’s classmates are probably in the same position, and technology makes
it easy to bring up a video conference to do homework together. My son does his
math exercises on most mornings over video conference with his cousin who is in
the same place with the same curriculum. We bought an old DX70 like this off of
eBay and use it with WebEx. The document camera makes it easy to show each other
what they are doing and the video quality is very high, but any video
conferencing would work. We usually have an adult or older sibling on on side
checking their answers as they go and explaining things if they get confused,
but it is fun, faster, and quite a bit more efficient than having them work on
their own.
My daughter is doing an online geometry class this year and some of her
assignments were to prepare for a test by explaining various theorems to someone
else. She explained them to us, but she also did a video call with a cousin who
is taking a different geometry class and they talked through the theorems and
proofs together which helped reinforce the concepts for both of them. Explaining
something to a peer and struggling through questions and requests for
clarification is an excellent way to deepen your understanding of any subject.
While kids are great to interact with, don’t forget about other adults. If your
child needs help with their school and you have to work, see if you can enlist a
grandparent to help. It can give you some time to focus on your work and give
your child some much needed time with their grandparent.
With a little creativity you can do a lot more than school work. Since the lock
down started, my kids have played Risk, Code Names, and Battleship with their
friends and cousins. My daughter has worked with her grandmother to figure out
how to sew masks for volunteers at a local charity, and we’ve had get togethers
with international friends that we haven’t seen for a long time.
One more thought on collaboration. If you are good at math, English, science, or
whatever. Consider offering to help your friends if they get stuck on a topic.
I’ve had a few of my Facebook friends post that they would be happy to help
others work through Math or English difficulties and I know their offers were
very appreciated by parents who were for example trying remember how to factor a
polynomial who had found no need to factor even a single polynomial since high
school.
Simplicity - Maximize Work Not Done
Agile says that simplicity is essential and that we should “maximize the amount
of work not done.” Now you may be thinking, “When it comes to school work, my
child is an expert at maximizing the amount of work not done. In fact they are
maximizing work not being done right now!” The point of this principle is not to
do no work, but do things in a way that is simple and doesn’t involve a bunch of
work that adds no value.
When your child is in a class with 25 other students, the best you can hope for
is to have things tailored to the average child. Your kid may get lots of
practice on concepts they already know or not enough on topics where they need
more attention. If we want to maximize the amount of work not done in educating
our kids, we need to find ways to focus less on repetitive drills of concepts
they already understand and more on things where they actually need help.
In the ideal world, everything would be tailored specifically to your
child—especially in mathematics. Fortunately, if your child is at home and you
have some flexibility on what they work on, you have a great option with Khan
Academy. Sign your child up for a free account at KhanAcademy.org and pick their
year in math and let them work through the drills while using the videos to
explain concepts they may not remember or understand. The system is extremely
adaptive and will keep drilling you on a concept until it is mastered and then
check again every few weeks to make sure nothing is forgotten.
KhanAcademy is the best way I know of to make sure your child doesn’t have any
holes in their understanding of math. The topics map to the common core
concepts, but they are taught by an engineer so it offers the valuable aspects
of common core without the lack of context that has made common core frustrating
for many students and parents. A few years ago I went through the Algebra
exercises until the system decided I had mastered (or maybe remastered) the
topic. I was very impressed with the way that system keeps track of what
foundational concepts are needed for the current concept. If you have trouble
with the current concept, it will take you back to make sure you have the
foundation in place before trying to move you through something you may not
understand. If your child completes their grade to 100% mastery they will likely
be one of the more prepared students for math when school starts back up again
in the fall.
Another really good option for learning math efficiently is the apps from
DragonBox.com. They aren’t free, but it takes a game based approach to learning
Algebra and Geometry. But instead of teaching Algebra and Geometry directly, it
tries to teach the thinking patterns that are necessary for those subjects. For
example, you have two sides of the screen and you need to get the box that has
your dragon in it on one side by itself, but the only moves you can make require
doing the same thing to both sides of the screen thereby keeping the “equation”
balanced.
My kids didn’t spend a huge amount of time using these apps when they were
younger, but when they started getting into Algebra concepts they would have
these “aha” moments and say stuff like, “Oh I see, this is just like DragonBox."
Education is more than worksheets
Agile says that “Working software is the primary measure of progress” for
software teams. In software people get in trouble when they start thinking that
progress is the number of lines of code they have written or the number of
partial features that have been implemented.
For most of ancient Greece and Rome the goal of education was to turn a child
into a good or virtuous adult. Sparta was a bit of an exception as their main
goal was to make sure that their boys and girls could kill other people and
survive while doing so. That is why they would do things like not give their
boys enough food and instruct them to steal whatever else they needed. If they
got caught they were beaten—not for stealing, but for being inept at stealing.
So what is the primary measure of progress for your child's education? It
probably isn’t the number of math problems completed or sentences diagramed. It
isn’t the number of hours they have spent sitting in a classroom, or the number
of essays they have written.
If your measure of progress in your child’s education is like Sparta and you are
trying to raise a finely tuned killing machine, I’ve got nothing for you on that
one.
But if the primary measure of progress for your child’s education is to produce
a good virtuous adult, then it is worth thinking holistically about what your
kid needs to learn in the present circumstances to become the adult they need to
be. A friend told me that their teenager was taking a deep interest his parent's
work and even getting to listen in on some conference calls and learning more
about the workforce, asking questions about the business, and seeing how adults
interact on a daily basis. There is a lot of valuable education happening in
that context that is very unique to the current lockdown situation and this wise
parent was capitalizing on a unique educational opportunity that goes well
beyond what their kid can learn in a classroom.
We’ve been having lots of conversations in our family about how government
works, what it means for the stock market to crash, how investments work in
downturns, the balance between freedom and laws to protect us during a crisis,
and how they can help without putting others at risk.
The skills and knowledge your child would be learning in a classroom are
important and while it is valuable to continue that type of education at home
during a lockdown, don’t overlook that the educational value of just talking to
them about their questions and thoughts in the current situation will probably
have a much bigger influence in the primary measure of educational
progress—becoming a good and virtuous adult.
If we can use the current situation to teach our kids things they wouldn’t have
had the opportunity to learn sitting in a classroom, then we will truly be
"welcoming change and harnessing it for our kids educational advantage."
Thanks for watching this video. If you are looking for ways to help train your
team on Agile, please checkout my playlist of Agile cartoons. Also I have a book
about Agile software and there is a link in the description that will let you
get a free copy in a variety of digital formats.