What it takes to teach

Lately I've been reading John Holt's book Teach Your Own. So far I would set it, along with Gatto's Dumbing us Down aside as the two seminal books critical of public education. It it also about unschooling, which we are only partially implementing here at home, but it is a very enlightening read. I especially enjoyed an early section called "common objections to homeschooling" which you can find reprinted here.

One thing that also captured my attention the other day was Holt's description of what is required in order to teach something to anyone. One of the realizations we've come to over the past few years is that teaching is not nearly as difficult as we have been led to believe. In America, if you want to teach children in a school you are required to spend several years in a special school just learning "how" to teach. This strikes me as being very silly. From what I've learned through my own research and through talking with people who've gone through this specialized education (like my wife), it appears that teacher's schools teach primarily 3 things:

1. A lot of overly complicated theories of very simple ideas
2. How to manage large groups of children and keep them under control
3. How to negotiate the huge amount of administrative red tape required of teachers in a public school

In Holt's Teach Your Own he describes 7 principles of teaching that definitely ring true for me. These are (from page 41):

1. To help people learn something you must first understand what they already know;
2. Showing people how to do something is better than telling them, and letting them do it themselves is best of all;
3. You mustn't tell or show too much at once, since people digest new ideas slowly and must feel secure with new skills or knowledge before they are ready for more;
4. You must give people as much time as they want and need to absorb what you have shown or told them;
5. Instead of testing their understanding with questions you must let them show you how much or little they understand by the questions they ask you;
6. You must not get impatient or angry when people don't understand;
7. Scaring people only blocks learning

And, as Holt puts it, "These are clearly not things that one has to spend three years talking about"

It strikes me that the career of "teacher" has been built into a kind of priesthood where only the specially trained can hope to accomplish anything and everyone else should fear to tread there. In my opinion teachers learn how to be teachers through the experience of teaching and not by sitting in a classroom learning pedagogical theories.

If I were hiring teachers for a private school I would require that applicants impress me with a sufficient knowledge of the subject matter they have specialized in as well as an understanding of principles similar to those 7 mentioned above. I would be less impressed by people who described spending years how to teach, but who hadn't spent the same or more time mastering the subject they wanted to teach.

I don't at all mean this as a dig against teachers. But, I don't see that a special study of education in and of itself is especially necessary to do their job. Instead I'd rather see professional requirements be limited to a proven understanding of the topic to be taught (math, chemistry, etc.) through an undergraduate degree (if not actual work experience) and an apprenticeship program. Maybe a class or two in "teaching theory", but surely not a multi-year program learning only how to teach something to other people.

To be fair, I consider the same to be true of my own profession of Social Work. Especially the great majority of work that I did during my last internship at the hospital. I can't see how that work would really require a 2 year advanced degree.

The Great Rock Candy Experiment of '08

Last week we watched a new show on PBS called Nova Science Now. Simon watched the show pretty attentively and afterwards he asked if we could do science experiments here at home. We've had a few kids science experiment books sitting on the shelves at home waiting for the kids to express an interest, so we said "of course!"

A few weeks ago Simon was watching Zula Patrol (my favorite kid's show, along with Cyberchase) and they had a segment on "solutions" vs. "mixtures" so he told us he wanted to do an experiment that involved a "solution". So, we decided to make rock candy. I quickly found a recipe online and we got started last week.

We decided to make four of them in different colors so we boiled up some water and added more than 5 full pounds of sugar, carefully watching the sugar dissolve 1 cup at a time. We then separated it into glasses where we added colors. Then we used clothes pins to hang wooden skewers in the sugar/water solution. Then we set them aside to wait the alloted 7 days for the sugar crystals to form. Here's what it looked like the next day:

It's hard to tell from the picture, but it seemed that nothing was happening. So, we re-read the recipe and figured that we had "cured" the wooden sticks improperly. So, we removed the sticks, rolled them in sugar and let them dry overnight. The next day we re-boiled each glass and added 1 more cup of sugar before putting the sticks back in and putting them back on a shelf. This time we had dramatic results. The following day it looked like this:

And, the day after that it looked like this:

And then finally:

And this was only after three days. I think that adding that last extra cup of sugar drastically increased the growth of the crystals. In fact, one of the candies grew so big that it stuck to the side of the glass. When I tried to remove it I broke both the candy and the glass. Here's what they all looked like after removing them from their solutions and letting them dry:
And, finally, here are some shots of happy kids & parents eating their first science experiment:


In preparation for future rock candy experiments I cured a couple of dozen sticks and have put them in a ziplock bag in the freezer. This way we'll be all set to do it again many times over the next year or so.

So, our first experiment was not only a resounding success, but was very tasty too!

Here are the most important things we learned if you want to make rock candy:

1. Cure the sticks ahead of time. Let them soak in a hyper-saturated sugar-water solution for at least a few hours. Then take them out, roll them in sugar and let them dry for a day or so. This gives the sugar crystals a preliminary surface to attach to once the sticks are placed back in the final solution.

2. You need less water than you think you do. If, like us, you're using glasses that hold 1.5 cups of water each, you do not need to boil 1.5 cups of water per glass, but instead only 1 cup of water per glass. The volume of the water will increase considerably since you're adding 2 cups of sugar per cup of water. Next time we do this we'll follow the recipe more closely and only use 4 cups of water and 8 cups of sugar.

3. Getting a deep color takes a lot of food coloring. We used 5 drops of food coloring per glass and the solution turned a deep color, but the final product was more pastel and light colored. I'm not sure what the right amount is.

4. Next time we'll experiment with adding flavors. Ours turned out great, but they were really just sticks of sugar. Adding something fruity might be nice.

Oh, and regarding solutions and mixtures, Simon said something really funny the other day. He said: "A solution is when something dissolves in a liquid. If you put monkeys in water it is just a mixture because you can filter out the monkeys with a net."

Truer words were never spoken.