How do you learn?

            Some people say they learn best by listening to oral instructions, others say they like to read something for it to really stick. Other people say they learn by doing, and some need to hear it, read it, AND do it before it becomes ingrained knowledge. Most studies that analyze this sort of thing say you really learn how to do something by teaching it.

            As it turns out, they are all wrong.

            None of these methods actually provide the ideal learning experience.  Sadly, most of them are the only option given a child in a school setting with lots of other children vying for the single teacher’s attention. How often did your teacher have the time to do anything but lecture, assign reading, or assign an occasional writing assignment? I didn’t get the chance to teach a topic to other students until I was in college (an experience I enjoyed so much that I decided to get a master’s in education).

            No, we are not empty vessels that need filling—we are developing minds, bodies and spirits that need constant feeding, and we are hard-wired to seek out whatever knowing we need to become full fledged, self-actualized beings. It would be so nice and simple if having that knowledge handed to us on a silver platter all neatly packaged, illustrated and summarized got us to self-actualized adult… but we all know it can’t be that easy. And it shouldn’t be!

            The knowledge that means something to us and that sticks with us for a lifetime is the knowledge we acquire in our own way at our own time.

            Though we cannot learn for our children, we as parents serve an extremely important function in all this, albeit a constantly challenging one!  We provide circumstances that provide learning opportunities, who feed tantalizing bits without giving anything away, who avoid giving a straight answer to any question, and who seek new understanding ourselves and model the process for our children.

            I have to say, as someone who grew up in a public school setting where the teachers were supposed to know everything (and often claimed that they did), I’m having some difficulties following this path myself with my own children.   But I know the rightness of this way of teaching, and I experience justification for it regularly. I teach a writing circle with two eleven-year olds and a ten-year old, all girls, and we all write narratives together telling stories from our lives. As new writers, their stories tend to be full of “telling”, descriptions of what happened rather than having the action happen in the story. Over the last few weeks, I’ve hinted in various ways how their writing would be served by writing action, including dialogue and such. I was uniformly ignored… until today when I had them bring in their favorite books, read the opening pages, and discuss what made those pages draw in the reader. I said very little, but all of them on their own soon realized that the books described the action using rich detail and snappy dialogue, while their own writing simply told the reader what happened—the old “show, don’t tell” issue. One girl rewrote her opening immediately and read it for us. It was beautifully done, and we all told her so.

            And I KNOW you can’t tell anyone anything, but I keep trying it, not because I think it’s the best way, but because I haven’t quite figured out the sneaky way. But what power we give our children, when we leave them to discover the world for what it is—and then they can teach their newfound knowledge to US! How rich an experience for all of us!

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