Education: Buckets vs. Fires

“Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.”
~~ W. B. Yeats

At my house, we love to have long conversations.  I say conversations.  Sometimes they turn into monologues, but that’s okay, because we’re learning.  I’m talking about when we get my mom going on a topic, whether it’s the economy or parenting or college or relationships.  She engages us by asking for our feedback, our opinions about what she’s saying, but my siblings and I are inclined to sit quiet and soak in what she’s saying.  It may be a few days (or years) before some of us fully digest what she has told us, but this is one of my favorite ways to learn (some of this stuff you can’t learn from a book because Mom hasn’t had time to write it yet!).

In one of our recent conversations, she made mention that the current educational model is one that compares children to a bucket that needs to be filled.  The idea is that if you fill the bucket with enough stuff (knowledge), the child will turn out a good citizen, equipped for life.  As you’ve probably guessed, we aren’t on that bandwagon.

We take the approach that information is not enough.  Computers have a lot of information, but without any directions, that data does no one much good.  You can know who fought at Gettysburg, know where Tanzania is, know the periodic table backwards and forwards, know why the Pythagorean Theorem works, but is that enough to say you’re a good citizen?  Does a child really know what to do with all that when they graduate?  Can they turn that into how to get a job, how to buy a house, how to choose a spouse, how to raise children, how to do your taxes, how to manage your money, how to cook, in short, how to be an adult.

I’m afraid that the bucket theory does not seem to be working.  Look at the drop out rate.  Look at the illiteracy rate.  Look at the number of people with credit card debt, and the amounts they owe.  Learning just because it’s mandatory does not seem to inspire children.  Even kids with parents who insist they get good grades, well, it’s possible to skate through and get good grades without learning anything.  My parents knew kids who did that, and that’s some time ago.  The situation has not been getting better, to judge from people I know and things I’ve heard.

So what’s our educational model?  We like to think of it as lighting a fire.  Mom has always tried to teach us to love learning.  We enjoy school time.  My youngest brothers couldn’t wait to start school, and they didn’t want to stop for their first summer vacation.  We’ve never dreaded starting school in the fall.  We’re usually ready for a short break by Christmas time, but that’s partly because we’ve just been doing double time working on school and our Christmas gifts, which are, with one or two exceptions in recent years, handmade.

Mom has worked hard to light our fires so that we will want to learn.  Learning is not only fun, it’s relevant, and it’s important.  We know why we are learning what we learn, and it’s not just because Mom says so.  She has a good reason for every subject that we learn.  This means that sometimes our curriculum has not been the same.  There are subjects that I covered with one textbook, but which 3G or Sister did a different way. 

If there is something we don’t have an answer to, my siblings and I have learned to go find out.  We are mongooses, to reference Rudyard Kipling’s Ricki-ticki-tavi, who always had to “go and find out.”  We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we do generally know where to locate the answers.   We are self-motivated learners.  We will learn for learning’s sake.

This has stood me in good stead as I do college online.  I have to be very self-motivated to get my school work done on time.  I know my best studying times, and I can manage my time accordingly.  3G has also been able to benefit from being a fire.  He studied several subjects on his own (particularly electrical circuits) which have helped him in his first year of course work.  He has been able to make the transition to college level work without loosing stride.

I like Yeats’ comparison of education to the lighting of a fire.  A bucket sits there inert until something acts on it.  A fire spreads, eating up everything in its path.  In the same way, we should be learning all the time, learning all we can about everything we can, ingesting every piece of information and storing it where we can use it later.  That’s what homeschooling is all about.  That’s my educational model. 

Once a child has a desire to learn, it becomes much easier to teach him.  You can scream and cry all day, but a particularly stubborn child will not write their essay on China.  A teenager who has no drive to know will be more easily discouraged when the going gets tough in Algebra, Geometry, or Trig.  A student motivated solely by grades may do the work, pass the tests, and two months later may not be able to tell you what they (supposedly) learned. 

When you teach a child to love learning, that child can become a lifelong learner.  These are the people who make good citizens.  Lifelong learners go and find out when they don’t have an answer about something, from deciding on a presidential candidate to buying soap.  Lifelong learners are people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Bowditch, Thomas Edison, and George Washington Carver.  These men helped shape our nation, helped make it safer, helped feed it, and helped inspire it to greater heights.

Our nation today is full of buckets, some full, some empty, many with leaks, almost all inert, just waiting (who knows for what). 

Imagine what America could be like if we were educating a nation of little fires, ready to learn.

Thanks, Mom, for lighting my fire.

Plain Piano

Why is it that some people look at the piano with awe and others with dread?  I’ve met some people who think they could never learn to play, even people who play another instrument.  I’ve met other people (including one of my relations) who hate the piano.  Each likes to hear someone else play it well, but would never go play themselves.

I’ve had a conversation or two lately about how hard it is for parents to know when to encourage a child to pursue an instrument (or a lot of other things for that matter) and when to step back and let them alone.  I only know that my mother did a good job with me.  I may not be a concert pianist, I may not be much good at chording, and I may be shaky on expression, but I truly enjoy sitting down at the piano and pulling out some music to play.

I started with piano in third grade.  Mom had played the trumpet when she was in middle school, not piano, but she bought a couple of books and we worked through the lessons.  I would practice for a week on a piece, and then she would listen to me play.  If I hadn’t gotten the piece down in a week, I worked on it for two.  Mom even kept up with me for a few months, learning the lessons herself.  That didn’t last because she just didn’t have the time, with three kids on her hands, but it was an encouragement to me that she thought it was worth the time to try.

From the beginning I had trouble with keeping a steady beat, but we didn’t have a metronome, so I just did the best I could with my foot.  Mom had me practice three times a week, making sure to warm up with some exercises and a few old lessons before I started work on the week’s assigned piece.  Even with the simple stuff I was doing I got frustrated because I couldn’t play it like I thought it should sound.

So Mom had me take a year off.  In fourth grade I did a variety of different instruments and other types of music.  When it came time for fifth grade, I was ready to go back and give piano another try.

This time I remained patient and worked hard to improve.  I liked to play songs and sing along, but we didn’t have a lot of songs that were easy enough for me to play.  The music in my lesson book tended to be silly little songs, not the hymns and children’s songs that I knew.  So I worked toward a day when I could sit down with those songs and sing along.

I still had to practice at least three times a week, but Mom mentioned that if I wanted to get better, I’d need to practice more often, so I started playing more.  Even if I didn’t run through a lesson, I would sit down and try to plunk out a tune that I knew; sometimes with better success than others.  I’ll always be grateful that Mom didn’t make me do scales.  I think she has wondered sometimes whether she ought to have, and I’ll admit that I would be much better with chording and a few other things if I had drilled over my scales.  However, I am sure that if I had felt forced to do my scales every time I practiced, I would have come to dislike piano very quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, I know my scales, or at least most of them, I’m just rather slow at playing them.  The reason I’m sure that I would have balked at too much scales is that I balked at the metronome.  When I was eleven, we got a digital piano to replace our old keyboard.  The new piano not only could sound like several different instruments and record your playing, it had a built-in metronome. 

I hated the metronome.  My rhythm had not gotten much better over the years, and I was forever falling behind or going too fast.  Usually falling behind.  Mom had me practice with it for a few weeks, but I got so annoyed at that metronome that she quickly decided not to force the issue.

Thanks to Mom’s hands off approach, I stuck with the piano.  I wasn’t into a classical music much, but I taught myself the “Fur Elise” for fun, when it was actually a level or two beyond my skill.  I even memorized it at one time!  Now, I don’t memorize anything very well, except the words and tunes of songs that I sing, but I memorized the “Fur Elise.”

Eventually, I began playing at church.  Some of the other young girls often played something for Offertory, and the church pianist asked me to help out.  After a few years, I took over scheduling the Offertories and playing whenever I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to play for a particular week.  By then, I was also playing for morning services every so often.  I even played a few pieces with my sister.  Four-hand piano music (played by two people at one piano) can be tough to coordinate, but I had improved my skills enough to use the metronome sometimes in order to help me stay with her.  We only did that a few times due to limited music choices, but it was fun.

I don’t play fancy piano.  While I have had fellow church members compliment me by saying that it sounds like I have three hands playing, I do only have two, and they really aren’t playing difficult music.  I’ve seen a few concert pianists play, and I come nowhere close.  I don’t even keep up with my brother 3G, who taught himself to play the piano after he had already taken the clarinet to a great height.  He has more musicality than I’ll ever have, so even if he is not as quick at sight-reading the whole staff (clarinetists usually only have to read one line of notes, while piano music often has four or more notes to play at once), he has much more expression than I have.

At the same time, I like the way that I play.  I don’t have to play fancy piano.  I just like to be able to sit down and play the songs that I like to sing: hymns, choruses, and some contemporary stuff.  I can play quite well enough to do that.  I began taking singing lessons this spring, and my mother says that has actually improved my piano playing, as has teaching TJ and BP to sing.  I’ve got more expression than I had before, so maybe I have a chance to play as well as 3G someday.

Maybe.

Right now, I’m just happy to play plain piano.