Interest-led Learning Brings Back Joy

When I was fifteen, I got my first camera.  I began to learn by doing.  The camera was a basic point and shoot.  The most expensive part was keeping up with the film.  Over the years I took thousands of various film pictures.  I spent a lot of money.  I wasn't a professional.  I was just someone that liked to capture moments.  With the basic camera, I didn't need to understand f-stops or ISO.  I didn't need to do anything except turn on the flash in low-light.  Of course, the pictures were sometimes blurry.  Many times people had red-eyes.  Eventually, I began to scrapbook.  I purchased a "red-eye" pen, which I could use on my photos to help eliminate red eyes.

On my youngest daughter's first birthday, I received my first digital camera from my sister.  From this point forward, the need for film ended.  (I still have rolls of film somewhere that need developed. It might be a beautiful day if I can ever find them and get them developed.)  My drawers of loose photos and negatives and the shelves of photo albums stopped growing.  I could fit thousands of pictures on a good sized SD card.  Again, this was a basic digital camera. Eventually my other sister got into photography.  She began making money with her photography.  I would help her occasionally.  I ventured from digital cameras to smart phone cameras and even played with a DSLR I received as a birthday gift.  I am still learning... and playing.  I have found plenty of resources to help me learn and grow.

When I began homeschooling, I went online and to the library and found all the information I could find to help me to a good job of teaching my own children.  That led to over a decade of learning how children learn, how the brain works, different styles of learning, and ADHD issues.  I am still learning more every day.

When I needed to relearn math so I could pass the entrance testing to go back to college, I grabbed my daughters' math program they had used for high school Algebra.  I went through a year's worth of material in two months.  I passed my entrance test so I didn't have to take remedial classes.

This is how people naturally learn.  When we have an interest or a need, we find a way to learn all we need to know and more.  When I have an interest, I find a way.  Libraries have always been an ally for me.  The internet has become a major breath of fresh air because the world is at my fingertips.  It helps me to dig in deeper or find other resources.

I know how I learn best.  Much of what I learned in school, I don't remember.  I have learned more through homeschooling, following my own interests, and being a devoted reader than I ever did in school.  I think we are all similar in that we learn best when we are interested.  In fact, if it is something we want to learn, we will be passionate in the pursuit of knowledge.

I went back to college to study library science.  I could have learned much of what I have learned these last couple of years through many other methods.  However, I want to have the ability to gain employment after many years of being a "homeschool mom."  I have only one student left at home, and she is growing quickly.  So, I decided it was time to prepare for the next season of my life.  I had dreamed of going back to college for twenty-five years, so I enrolled in community college.  I have done well so far academically, which was a bit of surprise to me after being out of school for so long.  I honestly believe it is because I have kept learning, kept following my interests, kept reading.  I have been an active learner over the years.

Learning should be a bit like this, a quest, an adventure.  Yes, there are times when we have to learn things that aren't necessarily the most fun.  I am not a math-lover, but when I needed to learn math that I had never learned well and barely got through in high school a quarter century earlier, I did.  The same can be said about anything I have needed to learn.  I learned to grow a garden.  I learned to air-dry clothes.  I learned to can and preserve food.  I learned how to stretch a dollar as far as possible when money was tight.  We learn what we need to learn and what we want to learn.

Despite this knowledge, I have always been afraid to let my children follow their interests in education.  Oh, we would learn a bit here and there, but I usually had a plan, a scope and sequence from a curriculum company that I felt was important.  I have kept a bit of a public school mentality, despite using alternative methods.

I have graduated three students.  Granted, they all spent varying degrees of time in public school.  However, homeschooling should have been freedom for them. In many ways, it was.  In some ways, if I am honest, it was too similar to the system I pulled them from. All three received a quality education and a grounding in the Bible.  They are intelligent and have pursued various paths since they left school.  One just graduated last year and is still making her way.  But none of the three is passionately curious.  The one that seems to have the most curiosity about following her interests is the one that graduated first.  She went on to college, but has now spent several years out of school.  Maybe she has finally deschooled enough to become curious again.

Even in homeschooling, we can kill our children's curiosity.  They might receive a top education, but they won't necessary become life-long learners.  For two years I have watched my youngest daughter, now a sixth grader, lose her curiosity.  The word "school" caused groans.  School work was taking longer and longer, making the days drag.  The work she did finish was not done well.  She often skipped work or rushed or did such a poor job that it needed to be redone.

A plethora of those days over the past two years left me needing to make a choice.  I could punish my child, taking a more disciplined approach, or I could change things.  I had done both a few times and things were not getting better.  I had become stricter, and she had fallen apart more.  I had changed the order of lessons, lessened the workload, dropped some things and added others.  It was a nightmare of planning and re-planning.  I normally enjoy planning school, but it was no longer fun.

In the meantime, I am trying to go to college.  I had begun to babysit for extra funds.  I was dealing with personal issues.  I was getting more and more burnt out as a homeschool mom.

I stumbled upon this post by Sarah Janisse Brown while reading about delight-directed learning.

"When a child explores their passion first they will be curious, next they will play, next they will explore, next they will research, Next they will question, next they will copy, next they will communicate, next they will seek mastery, and in mastering they will apply the learning and create. Allow your child the joy of EVERY phase of true learning. when we try to control the learning process we do it out of order, and seek results. Allow the child to spend as much time as they need in each area, and bounce back and forth between the stages. Play (not practice) is actually the most powerful form of learning, creativity is the expression of learning and looks a lot like play."

This so correlates with how I learn and with how most people learn.  When I am learning about photography, it looks like play.  When my husband is messing around with his bass, it looks like play, but he is a very talented musician from all his "playing."  The joy of discovery in learning about my interests doesn't feel like drudgery.  It's feels satisfying.  So, despite wanting my daughter to have this "well rounded" education, if she is dying inside, if she despises it, discipline won't bring back the joy.

And so, I put away most of the materials and started over.  I purchased a couple Funschooling journals.  My daughter picked her first "major," and we headed to the library to gather stacks of books about horses.  She also checked out books on weather, volcanoes, the Bermuda Triangle, and oceans.  Yes, she has a variety of interests.  She spends every other day studying her "major."  The other day are for her other interests.

I also found books on math that were more story-based.  I found a bunch of math games online.  I pulled out the Life of Fred.  I mixed it all with Khan Academy and Math Lessons for a Living Education, so she can approach math concepts from multiple ways and learn at her own pace.

I have other plans as well.  Yes, she still does reading and grammar.  Yes, she still has math every day.  She is still going through her McGuffey readers.  She still takes piano lessons every week.  But the rest of school has blossomed.  She is learning and growing.  Multiple times a day I hear, "Hey Mom, did you know...?"

I have been devouring books on following a delight-directed path.  Statistically, most children that follow this path do quite well in life.  They don't get burnt-out because their learning is about their interests.  In fact, from my reading, their biggest frustration is attending college and being discouraged by the other students' apathy toward their classes.  This is a frustration I understand because I waited 25 years to go back to college.  I don't understand those that aren't excited to learn.  Yes, not every class is "fun."  Not everything agrees with my worldview.  However, I still enjoy the process. I haven't been in a traditional school for many years, and so I have had time to learn what I want in my own ways.

I thought I would feel upset that the curriculum I purchased is not being used the way it was planned.  I'm not.  The resources will still be used.  The literature will still be read.  The difference now is that my daughter will absorb the information better when she reads and studies because she chose it.  It wasn't chosen for her.  All of that curriculum becomes part of a home library that we get to enjoy instead of a duty that must be completed. That makes a huge difference in a child's attitude toward learning.

If we miss a book here or there, if we don't study certain material in a certain year, if we never cover certain topics in depth, I am not worried.  I am no longer stressed that we have to do school a certain way at a certain time to meet standards that were created by strangers.  My daughter will be well-read.  We will continue read-alouds.  We will continue to study and grow and learn.

Mostly, I want my daughter to have that spark in her eyes about life and learning.  I want her to know herself, to learn who she is and to have confidence in herself while she is young, so she isn't "finding herself" at thirty or older.  I want to discover who God made her to be, instead of feeling like I have to make her into anything.  I want her to know her talents and gifts and have the time to figure out for herself what she loves and doesn't love.  I don't want her to doubt herself or feel she has to compete with anyone to be approved of or feel validated.

Life moves so quickly.  Time with my girl won't last forever.  This way of learning... it isn't the normal path.  However, the normal path has failed.  It has failed internationally where the United States struggles to compete and scores dismally.  It has failed in my home where I have educated children that get done with their homeschool and have lost their love of learning and discovery. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, than surely I have spent too many years insane.