Transcriber: Bảo Bảo Reviewer: Mujtaba Abdelwhab
Hello, my fellow learners, and especially my fellow nerds,
I have done school in the garden, I have done school on overnight trains,
I've done school and campers, and I've done school in a tree house.
It's called home schooling.
But the entire point of it is that it can take place anywhere.
Now, I’m a third culture kid because my parents humanitarian work
kept them constantly on the move.
So public schooling wasn't really an option for my family.
We have a saying in the homeschool community that you
don’t know how mixed up your life is
until someone points out that you live at school,
you work abroad and you go home for vacation.
But that's a topic for another speech.
Home school is something that's still very unfamiliar in Europe.
So I have had to explain
the concept, the culture, the challenges
so many times.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen,
I present to you the home school answer shirt.
If I had had this when I was school aged, I would have worn it
all the time.
Yes, in my pajamas. Yes, I take tests and I dislike them as much as you do.
Yes, I leave the house. Otherwise, you wouldn't be reading this.
Yes, I had class today.
In fact, I'm in class right now.
Yes, I'm socialized.
Yes, I have friends.
So to change things up a little,
I thought I would give you a list of the pros and the cons of home school.
Well, at least from my point of view,
I trust that it will intrigue you and maybe provide a glimpse into
an alternate way of instructing young minds. So first frot.
No lugging heavy school bags every day.
The con, you never get out of anything because you forgot your book at home
and the teacher always knows whether you actually wrote that essay or not.
Next pro
and I feel like this one is simply not mentioned enough, but cleaner
bathrooms. Of course, the con is you cleaned it
pro, you get to personalize the curriculum in high school,
I got credit for typing all of the poetry from Lord of the Rings.
I hit 80 words per minute and I can still quote loads of it.
Khan is a mother with a European education
, teaching American
history and math. I remember her
exclaiming It's not how you spell Scholls motto.
And Americans make divisions so
complicated like this instead
And me going, no, that looks way too hard.
So, yeah, sorry, Europe. This is still the only way
I know how to do long division.
And please don’t get me started on the subject of writing dates but pro.
You get to declare that school is out for anything
from birthdays to snack time. Con, sick days are rare.
I got malaria and I still had to study. Pro.
You get to use whichever learning style suits you best,
whether you are visual or an auditory or tactile learner,
and you get to use Monopoly in Scrabble to practice math and English.
Khan, if you thought that sick days were rare
the weather is never an excuse.
Oh, is there a cyclone tearing toward the island where you live,
then you hang blankets over the windows and carry on.
Did the power go out then you light candles
and you keep writing your essay about your novel, incidentally,
because see candles on a desk are safe if this teacher is sitting there to.
So I got to read all my friend's textbooks con
which version of history to believe was Drak, a mere pirate
meriting one line in an American history book,
or was he, Sir Francis Drake, daring buccaneer, beloved
of Queen Elizabeth defenders, homeland from Conquest by the Spaniards
and the first captain to successfully
circumnavigate the globe?
Pro, you have your teachers full attention.
Can you have your teacher's full attention?
Pro and OK, full disclosure, my sister calls this a con,
but you get to visit castles, caves, museums, natural wonders,
architectural marvels, just because they're they're.
I loved visiting SERP a.m. and Blanken Berg,
Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Dublin, the Scientistic Museum in Brussels,
a fishing boat in Kenya, countless exhibitions,
pretty much every single castle in Ireland , all of which we just happened,
happened to cross and strolled into.
See, home schooling teaches you to love education
because it's not about filling in the hours or the pages or the checkboxes,
it's about filling your brain.
It's about taking one thing that fascinates you and making that
a gateway to learning about a hundred other things.
I do have to say, though, it's a little bit funny that up to exactly
a year ago when I told people that I was home schooled,
they would shake their heads and they’d be like,
no, that’s impossible.
I've never heard of such a thing.
Yeah, they don't do that anymore.
Of course, you do have to realize that home school is structured
on very different terms from public school.
The teacher is not there to control or to dictate the student's actions.
Rather, the student works independently.
They progress at their own pace and via whichever route suits them best.
Tell you what. Raise your hand if you've heard the saying a picture is worth
a thousand words. Have you heard that one see, well,
my learning style is best summed up as give me the thousand words
and keep your picture, whereas I have some peers who only learn
the multiplication table because the entire thing was put to song
or others who could tell you every detail you could possibly want to know,
and probably quite a few you don't about major battles
or massive historical events because they reenacted them in Lego.
And a teacher who observes
and cares can do their best work by enabling these different styles of
learning. I had the blessing of a mother who was a dedicated educator,
she devoted herself to ensuring that we had as well-rounded an education
as she could possibly give us.
Education does not need to be boring, just put putting a modicum
of effort, which nowadays, frankly,
just means scrolling some keywords on Google
or looking through some relevant accounts on your favorite social media platform.
Massive shout out to Pinterest here.
But the most important thing my mom did for me
was to pass on her ardor for giving other people knowledge.
Which brings me to my next point, my lifelong love of teaching.
One of my earliest
and fondest memories is as being five and six years old and helping to care
for one year old boy. I would feel so grown up and responsible whenever
I was seated with little Sammy on my lap and a picture book in front of us,
I would do all the pointing and exclaiming
that anyone who has taught young children is familiar with.
I would glow with pride when he sat with me and happily absorbed
the knowledge that comes from flash cards
to my memory. That was the beginning of a career in teaching that
I have been passionate about every day of my life since.
Terry Pratchett, my favorite author, who died six years ago today.
He said, you know, what is the greatest tragedy in the whole world?
It's all the people with talents who never find out what it is they're good at.
It's all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths.
It's all the people who could be really fantastic flute players.
Who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument.
And so they become bad ploughmen instead.
It's all the people who never even find out.
There's another writer who said books may well be the only true
magic and I couldn't agree with her more. But let me tell you,
watching the light of understanding Dawn on a little face as a new skill clicks
and they realize they can now navigate the world with
an extra helping of self-confidence and independence.
Oh, that's as close to magic as it gets,
you know, I wondered once how it was that influencers could possibly
spend their every waking moment documenting
what they ate and what they
wore and where they went and who they went with for a social media moment.
But then I realized that's exactly how I am about teaching.
I can't help but try to say something educational when I'm around a child,
because seeing everything as an opportunity to learn
or help someone else learn has just been ingrained in me.
Notice, though,
that I said educational, not necessarily academic, as vital as Scholastic's are,
sometimes what a
person needs to hear the most
is to quote a third author in fewer minutes.
You is kind, you is smart. You is important.
Learning is a thing of beauty, it's a joy forever, it's a right,
and empowering others through education is a privilege.
Learning is easier than we've ever had it before.
Although, on the other hand,
we are also currently facing difficulties
that we’ve never had.
The good news is that home schoolers have been trained to navigate those since
day one, and so I’d like to return to those pros and cons
and tell you what they have taught me.
First, the most obvious one is that school
doesn't need to happen in any specific location.
Education happens where and when you want it to.
You decide and it can happen.
Look at it as getting to learn at home instead of having to learn at home.
Bill, experiment and recreate that thing you saw in that YouTube video with your
hands, but also with caution because YouTube.
And take all of those sources that you have for researching.
And just dive in, find out the facts about what you're interested in,
the results will be fascinating and sometimes even useful.
They say that you don't really fully understand something unless you can
explain it to a six year old.
And the best way to learn is to teach.
So think of all the tutors, the mentors,
the teachers that you have had in your life.
Or the ones that you wish you would have had and tried to fill that role
for someone else. And finally,
to circle back to Terry Pratchett, as I inevitably do.
Helping all the people with talents find out what those are, is a craft,
a craze and a calling that I cherish engaging in,
and I urge you to try it as well.