January 13th, 2010 Homeschooling: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love (Sometimes)
The most naive thought I’ve ever had in my life (I think) is that in order to teach a child all you have to do is explain the subject in a suitably simple manner, or hand the child a workbook, and he or she would absorb the info like a little sponge and diligently work away.
Oh well.
We’ve been studying clocks now since Kindergarten, all right? You’d think we’d have gotten tell time sort-of-down by now. Nope. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of a.m. and p.m. to a child? Really, military time DOES make better sense. And why do clocks NOT have numbers for the minutes (other than them being so small.) ?
There’s another thing few people tell you. Just because you diligently teach a child something one day doesn’t mean that he or she will remember it tomorrow, or next month or next year. Even if you review it, they may still forget.
What’s worse is when they look at you with a blank stare, like you’re speaking Greek.
I think that’s why I have trouble with a lot of the great-looking, in-depth, intensive “lesson plans” I see posted on the internet for elementary school-children. Any teacher can probably tell that just because she teaches or lectures to children about a subject doesn’t mean that they really UNDERSTAND or LEARN the subject. It just doesn’t work that way. I know from my personal experience that sometimes you have to present a subject in many different ways and then review it over and over and over for even a single child to really comprehend it. Development, interest and even health have a lot to do with learning ability.
Except for swear-words. Someone should do a scientific study on that. We can work for months on math facts and pronouns and still draw a blank stare, but let a child hear a swear-word ONE TIME and it’s in his brain FOREVER.
It’s a mystery, I guess.
