Mind the Gap

Plus, How we homeschooled today #4

My seven year old daughter recently expressed her concern to me that she only knows this much (squeezing together her finger and thumb) but that there is this much to learn (stretching her arms as wide as they could go.). I sympathised. I told her that she does already know so much, and also that I feel exactly the same.

When I first began homeschooling the thing that most kept me up at night was the fear that I would neglect to teach my children something critical. What if my daughter got to 18 and had never heard of the Great Wall of China, or trigonometry, or how to parse a sentence? What if I just somehow forgot a really important topic? I spent a lot of time looking at different curricula and copying lists from websites of things five year olds should know.

But I have gradually come to worry less and less about gaps in their learning, even though as unschoolers you might imagine we are more prone to gaps than those following a more detailed plan. Here’s what works for me:

1. Recognising the gaps in my own learning

I had an expensive education. I got very good grades. I went to a top university. And I am daily confronted with things I do not know. Not just specific tiny things but often really big things. Embarrassing things. I’ve noticed that my friends and family also have these gaps, but luckily everyone has different ones so we can usually help each other out!

Pakistan’s Hussaini Hanging Bridge. Another thing I don’t know about.

A lot of my own gaps are things that I know I must have known, once, but which have long since slipped from memory. I now couldn’t tell you what to do with sin cos and tan for love nor money. Parts of a sentence? I have only the vaguest recollection. And so much more. So many hours spent sitting in lessons staring at blackboards. So many hours of homework and revision and exam-taking.

I’m not necessarily saying I shouldn’t have learnt those things in the first place. But the fact is I haven’t used them since the day I walked out of the exam hall and they have, consequently, faded from view. The same will be true of my own children, whether they end up taking exams or not. We can’t use all of our knowledge all of the time, and what we don’t use, we lose. Even the things I do teach them could end up being gaps.

2. There is no such thing as a definitive list of knowledge which every person should acquire. Any curriculum is simply a list of what a person/some people think is important.

The National Curriculum looms large in our national consciousness. It certainly masquerades as a definitive list. But the National Curriculum didn’t even exist until 1989. There are things that made it onto the National Curriculum and things that did not. The most academic school or family in the country still has to choose what they’re not going to teach.

3. Plutarch’s wonderful idea that education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

This isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Plutarch isn’t saying we needn’t worry about teaching them anything. In fact I suspect the best way to light the fire might be to fill the bucket to the brim and then fill another one. But perhaps the most important thing to instil is a love of learning and the ability to continue to learn, forever. I often remind the children that learning never ends, that I myself am learning new things all the time. I want them to be excited by learning, not to think of it as something that has to be got through before the real fun can begin. And in some ways learning without a checklist encourages this, because a list is by definition exclusionary. Not everything makes it on to the list. When you learn without a checklist, everything is up for grabs.

So I have made my peace with gaps, in fact I almost embrace them. I have gaps. My children will have them. Stephen Fry and Stephen Hawking have/had them. But we can all have the power to bridge the gaps when we meet them. And, I think, being aware that there is t-h-i-s—————m-u-c-h to learn is all part of the fun.

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How we homeschooled today #4

• Read more of Bringing Back the Wolves

• Seven year old continued writing a story she’s working on

• Listened to some more of Greeking Out

• Went to athletics club

• Observed a baby bird that flew into our house!

• Watched Puffin Rock

• Started learning to code with Daddy

• Multiplication by Heart

• Translated another Greek god

• Ate ice cream for pudding and talked about coconuts and vanilla seeds and their different methods of dispersal. Then looked up the vanilla orchid in our Natural History Book. (I often do this when we eat ice cream, because I think orchid seeds are amazing. The children have yet to show any signs of hearing me as they lick their bowls clean.)

• Read more Wizard of Oz before bed, followed by more Oz and The Worst Witch Strikes Again before lights out.

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