The tagline for this site is “Homeschooling the humanities with humanity.” In my first blog post, I examined what I meant by “homeschooling the humanities” and why it was important to me, something that I will be exploring in depth through assignments, projects, readings, and discussions on this site.
For Part 2 of the introduction, I want to discuss the second part of that tagline: “with humanity.” The humanities is the broad content that I’m focusing on teaching, and “with humanity” is a nod toward the method in which I promote doing so.
In order to explain what teaching with humanity means to me, I want to tell you a little about myself.
My earliest experiences with teaching started when I was quite a young student myself. Word got out pretty early on that I was good at explaining things to people, and some parents reached out to me for tutoring. In high school, I tutored students who had behavioral problems and were at risk of failing a grade and newly-adopted refugees who were struggling to learn a new language. These early teaching experiences–long before I had any formal training in pedagogy–taught me something important that I have never forgotten: teaching starts with understanding where your student is.
Teaching is not about content. If it were, all of these attempts to automize the education process would be wildly successful. The MOOCs, the Pearson model of auto-grading written work, the online “academies” that never have interaction between actual human beings.
To be fair, these things do have purpose, and the explosion of accessibility to information is transforming our species. Content matters, and the ever-spreading methods to get more of it will continue to push our boundaries of knowledge and ideas. The explosion is still happening.
But it’s not teaching. Even when people thoughtfully put together those standalone courses and send them off into the world to guide new students through learning the content, they are not teaching. They are providing the conditions for teaching, but the people involved are either able to teach themselves, able to find some other means of interacting and getting support, or are not being taught at all. And if they are not taught, access to the information doesn’t mean very much. Just like flying on an airplane doesn’t make you a pilot and eating a great meal doesn’t make you a chef, exposure to brilliant content doesn’t make you understand it, doesn’t make you capable of using it to enrich the world around you, doesn’t make you learn.
I’ve known this intuitively for as long as I can remember, but the first time that I realized it and gave name to it was when I began teaching in a college prep program for low-income, at-risk students while I was in graduate school. These were motivated students. They had self-selected for a program that meant giving up their Saturday mornings and much of their summer vacations to attend extra classes with the hopes of getting into college. These were students who knew that their educational opportunities hadn’t quite prepared them for the lives they wanted. These were students who wanted to learn.
My job was to teach them to write in a way that would make them prepared for college. At first, I naively thought this meant simply delivering the correct content, filling their minds with the knowledge of prepositions, comma splices, and descriptive paragraphs the way that one ladles soup into a bowl. I made worksheets and handouts. I came up with clever acronyms and funny example sentences. Surely if they were given the content, they’d be able to translate it into “proper” writing.
It became clear almost immediately that they’d already been given the content. They could parrot back grammar “rules” with ease and a sense of complete familiarity. They knew that a sentence was “an independent clause containing a subject, verb, and a complete thought.” They knew that “paragraphs are a collection of sentences that focus on a particular topic.” They knew a lot.
Yet they could not–absolutely, unequivocally could not–pass a college entrance exam that would have allowed them access to credit-bearing courses. They could not write with clarity and purpose that would get their ideas across to someone else. They could recite rules. They could even take multiple choice tests about them and demonstrate their “mastery,” but they couldn’t put it into practice in any meaningful way.
We dismantled what they “knew” brick by brick, pulling back the pieces of knowledge they had collected until we had before us what we had already had but had not known: an absolute mess. We stripped contextless rules of their authority and frolicked through the chaos of writing. We embraced disarray. We wrote terrible sentences that spoke beautiful truths. We found reasons to want to share something. We started with a purpose and worked backwards to the rules that would be used to judge whether we had met it.
I heard the same thing over and over and over again throughout many years of teaching “at-risk” student populations both in that program and later as an Assistant Professor teaching developmental writing college classes. Students had never been taught to write like this before. What they were really saying to me was something that struck me as deeply moving and profoundly sad.
They had never been taught.
They had been given the content but not the context.
They had been taken to the woods but not shown the path.
Teaching isn’t about exposure to the ideas. Teaching is about demonstrating what to do with those ideas and, most importantly, giving the student the room to figure that out for themselves with the feedback to make it mean something.
Teaching is taking someone to the woods and then walking next to them until they find the path. Then it’s walking a little ways behind them in case they veer off track.
Teaching, in other words, is messy and unpredictable and individual and impossible to trap in a box.
This is something that I embraced in my role as a teacher, wrote into my teaching statement, and believed with all my heart.
But somehow it still threw me for a loop when my own daughter faced challenges in finding an environment in which she could learn.
I’ll tell the longer version of this story over time here, I’m sure, but the short version is that she had some areas of rapid acceleration and giftedness and other areas of delay and challenge. In some ways, this is true of everyone. We all have strengths and weaknesses. But hers were so pronounced, so at odds with one another that they made the reality of the need for individualized education and the messiness of teaching so very, very clear. This is how I came to find myself homeschooling, something I never in a million years would have guessed I would do.
When I say that this site is about homeschooling “with humanity,” what I mean is that it is about reaching learners where they are and making sure that we are taking them where they want to go. It means accepting that what works for some people doesn’t work for others and that what works one day might not work on another.
Teaching with humanity means embracing the process of teaching and learning as the messy, unpredictable, and tangled mess that it is.
What that means in practice is that in addition to discussing the content of the humanities on this site, I will also be writing about the process of teaching in a way that is mindful of individual needs and adaptable enough to meet them.
Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem, Drew Geraets