Posted by Robyn Coburn
To http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unschoolingbasics/
<<<< My mom was a teacher and she always
told me to look a word up. I wasn’t
excited to do it, but I did....
snip
Why is this so bad? >>>>
There's your answer - you weren't excited to do it.
You did it because you had no other choice. A person you were trusting to help
you let you down, albeit in a fairly small way. Unschooling is partly about
preserving the excitement, not putting roadblocks into it - even small ones.
It is an interruption to your child's excitement and
growing journey towards reading to have to go and look up something. Telling
her to go look it up when you know the answer demonstrates to her that you have
a teaching agenda, and hints that you are willing to be her adversary in
learning rather than her wholehearted supporter.
Teachers in schools have 25-30 kids to attend to.
Maybe they say "look it up" because they have an agenda to instill
independence, both for itself and as part of simple time and classroom
management. We don't have to bring those schoolish
habits home.
Let's turn it around for a moment. Imagine if you
asked your husband some small how-to question that he knew, like how to reset
the satellite dish because it was frozen (a common event at our house). How
much would it contribute to your relationship if he told you to go look it up
in the manual?
Further would it make any real difference to your
ability to recall the procedure next time the freeze happened (turn it off at
the wall and wait 20 seconds before turning it back and wait for the reboot)?
If you have a fear that your child will never learn
how to look stuff up unless you force her to do so from an early age, let us
put your mind at rest. It won't be long until you find that you *don't have*
the answers to her questions, which is the perfect time to start saying
"Let's look that up on the internet....at the library....in the
encyclopedia." Jayn already says that (internet)
to me a lot, and I always tell both her and her father - several times a day -
how to spell various words.
Any process that puts even a small barrier between
the two of you is detrimental to building relationships (the core of
Unschooling practice). One bad result of not straightforwardly answering her
questions is that she might stop asking you stuff altogether. That may not seem
like much of a loss when it's the relatively trivial "how do you
spell....?" several times a day, or "what does ....mean?" But
what about when she is *not* asking you the sometimes alarming questions like
"what does STD mean?", or the deeply profound ones like "what
happens when you die?" or "what do you believe in?"
However possibly the worst result could be that she
stops answering your questions to her.