The “Knowing It Exists” Technique

Anna    Learning     education, foundations, Learning, memorization, process, resourceful, resourcefulness, theory, traits, unschooling

Those of us that have gone to school know the drill.

Literally.

Students have to go through an endless amount of repetition. Teachers bring up the same topic, again and again, in an attempt to cram their students with the right recipe of information. It’s just part of the way schools work.

When it comes to lifelong learning, focusing on repetition and drills is a bit like trying to build a pyramid from the top down.

A dictionary will tell you that memorizing something means you’re learning it by heart. Resourcefulness comes from using a number of resources and aids, instead of just relying on your memory.

Memorization and resourcefulness are the differences between someone who knows what he’s been shown in the past and someone who knows how to learn more in the future. Knowing how and where to find information is important.

Let me go back to the pyramid I spoke about. Like I said, memorization alone is like building a pyramid from the top down. You might’ve guessed how it should be built: from the bottom up, with a sound and solid foundation.

In learning, our solid foundations come from our resources. If all our learning comes from the same resource (school, for example), then our pyramid’s foundation will be small. Instead, our learning is best when it comes from a variety of resources.

I like to call my way of remembering information “knowing it exists“.

It’s a lot like remembering your favorite recipes. After finding a resource useful, you keep it at hand. When you want to know something, you use your new resource. The more you use a resource, the more you remember.

Would you prefer to have a resource prove itself to be useful, or spend days memorizing something you might never need to know again?

Questions Are More Important Than Answers

Anna    General, Learning     comparison, curious, curiousity, enjoying, examples, fun, Learning, learning from life, questions, relevant, school, unschooling

Today I played a game: I asked questions inspired by the things around me.

The result? A list longer than even I had expected. I stopped playing after a few dozen questions, but the game does prove a good point: we can learn everything we need to know just by paying attention to what is around us.

Why is learning from your environment better, though?

That’s easy to explain.

Let’s say two children are learning about chlorophyll at the same time. The difference is that one child is coming across it through school, and the other child is curious about her environment.

Now, the child in school (let’s call him Jimmy) is being told this information by his teacher and his textbook. The facts are presented to him in a very concise, step-by-step way. Jimmy hasn’t thought about plant color before.

The unschooler (let’s name her Jill) is out having fun in the park with her family. Jill looks at the trees before she asks why leaves are green. Her parents explain and they have a conversation about it.

Both children are told the same information, but I’ll tell you why Jill is at an advantage: read more

Learning on the Right Side of the Brain

Anna    Learning     brained, creative learning, creativity, holistic, how the right brain works, intuitive, jill bolte taylor, Learning, left brain, right brain, right hemisphere, right side of the brain, spatial, thinking, visual, visual spatial, what the right brain does

We live in a predominantly left-brained culture. Everyday things like language, numbers and the symbols we use to identify the world around us are understood by our left brain. Many jobs require us to be detail oriented. That’s left brain thinking, too.

The arts are commonly associated with right brain thinking. Certain traits, like left-handedness, are considered right brained. However, right brained thinking is more than just the arts. It’s about creativity.

A Side-By-Side Comparison

Our two brains are complete opposites, and we need both of them to understand the world the way we do. Let’s compare the two.

Left Brain:

- Logical: Draws conclusions according to rational information.
- Analytic: Figures things out step-by-step and part-by-part.
- Detail Oriented: Focuses on small bits of information.
- Symbolic: Turns information into symbols.
- Linear: Understands information in a linear one-thing-follows-another way. Is time oriented.

Right Brain:

- Intuitive: Bases itself on feelings, patterns, hunches, and visual information. Makes leaps in insight.
- Spatial: Understands relationships and how parts form a whole.
- Big Picture Oriented: Sees how things are structured into a whole. Recognizes patterns. Jumps to conclusions.
- Realistic: Sees things as they are, without symbols or short cuts. Lives in the present, without recognition of time.

What the Right Brain Does

We all use our right brain in some way or another, no matter what type of thinking we prefer (visual, kinesthetic, auditory, etc). The way we see the world relies just as much on the right brain as on the left. The right brain does a lot: read more

Empowered Learning: Unschoolers Are In Charge of Their Education

Anna    General, Learning     comparison, education, empowered, Learning, lists, responsibility, schools, schools vs unschooling, unschoolers, unschooling

Unschooling can look like the lazy way out.

Compared to unschooling, schools require dozens of teachers and faculty, all with their own specializations, to make sure the school runs properly. The same level of complexity is impossible to replicate at home. There’s simply too much to do for one family to be responsible of.

The truth is the complexity is unnecessary, and even harmful.

Schools Create Educational Dependency

Schools accept responsibility for their students in several ways:

- Organization. Schools tell students what to learn and when to learn it.
- Control. Through an endless list of rules and regulations, schools limit activity to what is necessary for the school to run efficiently.
- Assessment. Students are graded, evaluated, judged, rewarded and punished according to their performance. It’s up to the school to tell others whether or not the student is learning.

Most importantly, schools take responsibility for the student’s learning. Schools base themselves around that responsibility. How will they control what the student learns? How will they know when the student is learning? How can they prove the student’s progress?

The tricky thing is that whether or not schools have good intentions, they can’t tell you what a student knows or what a student has learned. Only the student can. The only thing schools can be certain of is what the student has known at a given point in time, and what the student has been exposed to while in school. Schools cannot guarantee a student’s knowledge. No one can.

However, that lack of guarantee itself isn’t the problem. read more