Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Anyone Unschooling?

Yes, but how many of us actually need to know more than how to simply calculate the GAI? There are a seemingly endless supply of things I could learn about, but there aren't enough hours in my entire life to actually learn about all of them. (This fact makes me feel frustrated and sad sometimes, actually, but I know it is true. I daydream about having the superpower to "read" an entire library of books just by walking in and looking at the covers. :))

Even school is a pretty bare minimum experience. You barely scratch the surface on most things until you hit upper level classes in college. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

And despite being fairly intelligent and attending math classes for 13 years, I still required remedial math classes in college. I had terrible math anxiety growing up and I thought it was because I was stupid and just didn't get it.

I took math because I had to to take other college classes when I went back to college at 22. I found out I actually liked it because I was so good at it. I took fast paced classes (much faster than anything taught in school) and picked it up quickly.

I know a lot of other students in my community college class were struggling (as far as I could tell, none of them were homeschooled), but it just showed me how unnecessary 13 sloooow years of math is. And it also showed me that we'll really learn things when we need them to do something else. This is an important point.

I also don't know if back-to-front learning is all that bad. I've learned many things that way. In fact, I think a solid interest in something and dabbling in it is what usually leads to deeply immersing yourself in it. It doesn't work well the other way around.

I'm running a business this way, right now. I start doing things and I find myself diving deeply into subjects to become better at the things I need to do (like coding, marketing, etc.) I will never be a pro at coding, marketing, customer service, or maybe at any of the many different "jobs" I am doing right now, but that is because I'm doing the jobs of like 15 people at the moment. If I didn't know how to teach myself, I'd make a pretty crappy entrepreneur. The suppose the goal is eventually to hire other people who have focused on only one of those areas.

If I had a business degree right now, I'd be long on theory (I feel pretty long on it right now with all the books I've gobbled up), but extremely short of real life experience. I realize degrees are useful for other reasons, but I'm just not convinced starting with the basics all the time is the fastest route to learning. It is hard to have passion for something when you can't understand why on earth you are being forced to learn it.

I have to just wait and see what DD picks up on her own. Do I need to drill the alphabet and such, or will she pick up most of it easily on her own? I'll have to just see what she does by herself. I'll supplement with some structured learning if I really think she needs it. I have no idea how I would have learned math if I didn't have it every year. I'm pretty sure I'd be less stressed over it, though. Grading a perfectionist in math when she is trying to learn new concepts (and is making mistakes) is a bad idea.

Agreed. I just meant it as an example of a field that takes starting with a strong foundation to master. I also think back-to-front learning can work well, but far better with some subjects than others. For example, I think that becoming a capable chef might usually start with learning how to cook a number of dishes as a layperson, without fully knowing what is going on all the time. I don't think math is in the same category.

That sounds like a good plan to me.

My son, who taught himself to read at 2 1/2 through unschooling, was mostly unschooled after attending half-day kindergarten. I did my best to let him follow his interests and this worked well in everything except math. He will admit that he would not do much math unless forced to do it even though when he was tested by an educational psychologist the month he turned seven and was able to answer math questions at 4th grade level by doing mental math. The educational psychologist said he thought he could have gone further but he refused to use paper and pencil. He has dysgraphia but it was undiagnosed at that time. He had learned what he knew by playing educational games online and without me telling him to do it. The educational psychologist told me that he was surprised that my son wrote the correct spelling of knight. He said most kids miss that one at that age. My son had to write out the spelling words and stopped when his hand started hurting--again because he has motor dysgraphia so the test did not really show how high his real grade level was in spelling. For him it was a test of endurance and we already knew that this was a problem. This kid loved words and played spelling games online. He later won a spelling bee at the local well and competed at state level and won another homeschool spelling bee but wouldn't compete again because he just didn't care about winning any more trophies. I can't understand why they don't test kids like mine with mild disabilities that affect endurance and strength on a computer to see what they really know. The educational psychologist did say later that he should be tested again but he would need to be tested over more than one session because of the fatigue issues but we could not afford it. Four years later our insurance would pay for for testing but only the cheapest testing done through a university and it was done all in one day even though I told them what the educational psychologist had said and even though my son complained about being very tired (it was mentioned in the neuropsychologist's report) and he hadn't had much sleep because of anxiety and he was getting a migraine. I decided we were not doing any more tests until he decides he is ready to take CLEP tests at a community college especially now that he is wearing a scoliosis brace that further affects his endurance. CLEP tests are done on a computer.

I don't think my son would have learned half as much as he knows if he had been forced to learn according to one curriculum and according to an arbitrary schedule that did not take into consideration his disability.

Because I knew my son could naturally spell really well I didn't need to have him spend time on spelling. I didn't need to make him read because he read all the time. I didn't need to make him do history or science or anything but math because he loved learning everything else and he could learn so much on the internet.

I did have him take a homeschool co-op writing composition class last year (7th grade year) because I wanted to make sure he learned to write well. The teacher let him type his work and he did really well in this class even though I had not really taught him much about language arts except for reading through the What Your X-grader Should Know books after we found one at a garage sale and he liked it. We are back to mostly unschooling again this year. He didn't want to take any classes this year because the brace he wears now is what they call "more aggressive" which means more painful. At home he can work around the pain and learning actually takes his mind off of it.

Math has been difficult because of the dysgraphia but recently I found that he learns better if I let him learn it on his own and do the problems on IXL and show me how he does it which is sometimes different from the way I learned because handwriting was not a problem for me. He found that if he used the Mac he could use the calculator and it automatically entered information on a notepad and this somehow helped enough that he didn't have to do as much writing to get the answers so he wasn't as frustrated about doing math but I am not sure if this would be considered unschooling because I make him do a certain amount of math but I let him figure out how to do it on his own. He teaches himself and he is able to do it quickly and accurately (IXL takes away points if you make mistakes) and it just works for him for now.

Lori,

Do you know about this math symbol software? It sounds like it might help your son. You have documentation of his dysgraphia and hypotonia, so you should be able to get if for free.