My Kids Aren't Geniuses: The Importance of Time and Opportunity

Don't get me wrong - my kids are awesome. But they have been spotted doing the following:

- running in stores

- giggling about farts

- annoying their siblings

Basically, being kids. I have written about Why I Won't Teach My Son to Read and Why I'm Not Teaching Math and I fear, from those posts, you might infer that my kids are super-intellects. Yes, they have big vocabularies. Yes, they know a lot of stuff. But, they don't have anything brain-wise that any other kid doesn't have. Something they have, which kids in the public school system do not have, is Time.

Kids need Time (with a capital T!) to "mess about" with things to figure them out. John Holt in How Children Learn said the "messing about" stage needs to come first, not after a lesson in how something works. Let me give an example.

Yesterday I brought home from the library 2 electronic circuit kits. I simply sat them on the floor, said, "Hey, I brought these for you," while my kids were watching some Minecraft videos on YouTube and then walked away. Mister 4 was interested so he switched activities and started trying to figure one of the kits out. He sat for an hour working with the pieces and making them light up a bulb, turn on a motor, and spin a fan. He learned several things about how circuits worked from "messing about" with the pieces.

In contrast, Miss 3 wanted to play with the other kit. I sat with her and showed her how to light up a bulb...she played with it for about 5 minutes. Have I ruined her for the sciences forever?! No, certainly not, but once the puzzle is solved, what more is there to do? She moved on.

"Avoid showing kids an example of something they are supposed to make," was a warning I was given in my college education courses. The worry was that if you showed a child how they were supposed to draw a flower that the kids would all draw your flower instead of their own. Creativity is stifled when kids are told what they are supposed to do instead of letting them "mess about" with vase of flowers, paper and paints. (Unless, of course, they want to learn a skill that they haven't been able to master on their own, then BRING ON THE INSTRUCTION!)

Given enough Time and Opportunity, children can teach themselves nearly everything they need to know. Sugata Mitra spoke at the Lift Conference in 2007 about some experiments he conducted in India to see if children - who had never seen computers - could teach themselves to use it. He cut holes in the walls of urban slums and embedded computers there and waited. He didn't have to wait long to see results.

The children taught themselves! They taught each other!

He took the experiment to a remote village and left a computer and some CDs- all in English- there with the kids. When he came back he found the children not only knew how to use them but had taught themselves 200 words in English. His talk is in the video below. Here's a link to the transcript if you'd rather read it.

So, kids need Time to learn on their own. They also need Opportunity. After all, without the circuit kit Mister 4 couldn't have learned what he did about circuits and without the computers the kids in India couldn't have learned what they did from the computers!

My job then, is to provide the time and opportunities to learn and then get out of the process until I'm needed! For someone who trained to teach, this job description can be harder than it sounds but I'm getting better at it.

How do you provide opportunities for your kids?