Did you know that I never graduated from High School? I never even got my GED.
Yep!
Go ahead, let that sink in for a minute…
I bet you’re wondering “why?”. Well, I attended a private school called Kimber Academy during my Sophomore year of High School. The principles behind the curriculum were awesome, but if I’m being honest, I fell behind, academically, that year. The self paced learning didn’t work very well with my personality. But I don’t regret it, AT ALL! I found myself more that year than during any other year of jr high or high school. I learned so many lessons that helped to build my character, I learned about friendship, I learned about leadership, I learned about people and the world, AND, I learned to love learning again! I don’t know when, exactly, I lost that love of learning, but I’m guessing it was a subtle thing. I probably lost it drop by drop, as I was told what to learn, how to learn, and how to PROVE that I HAD learned something.
I was born with a love for learning, EVERYONE is! Babies definitely crave it. Toddlers are adamant about learning all about the world around them (even if it drives us absolutely bonkers because they have a messy way of doing it). I never went to a preschool, but I know I wanted to, so my mom gave me a little preschool workbook and I remember loving to sit down and work on it and “learn”. But when did we get this idea that learning has to fit into this little square box that we call “academics”? Why must we discount all the learning that we, as humans, are so naturally drawn to, that comes from so many sources other than textbooks, lectures, and worksheets? Things like, watching the clouds for hours and wondering why they are shaped the way they are and why they move the way they do, playing in the dirt, building forts and bike jumps, climbing trees, choosing our own books from the library and reading or even just looking at the pictures to learn all we can about a topic that fascinates us, watching the colors swirl in the soap bubbles while we are supposed to be washing the dishes. (Of course I don’t have any personal experience with that last one, I never doddled 😉 )
When did all of this become not enough? When did we decide that you have to learn letters at this age, fractions at that age? Why do we allow (or force) children to learn about ancient Egypt in first grade? And for a set amount of time, then they must move on to another topic. When my oldest daughter was in 1st grade, she was being homeschooled. But I wasn’t sure if she would always be homeschooled so I was using the book “What Your First Grader Needs To Know” as a loose guide for our studies, so that she wouldn’t fall “behind”. When we came to ancient Egypt, she was fascinated by it. So we found other resources and stayed on that topic for quite a while. Now, 4 years later, we still have a lift the flaps book that the younger kids love to pull out and look at/read that is all about pyramids and mummies. I’m so glad that we had the freedom to explore that interest more. Now, you might argue that she could have learned about Egypt in school and come home and told me about it and I could have then helped her find more resources and continue to learn about it at home while continuing with her other studies at school, and you could be right. Some parents and some children could probably pull that off. But for me, with three younger children also taking a lot of my time and energy and my daughter who would get easily overwhelmed and stressed out over finishing her homework (that the teacher told me should take them about 10 minutes per night, but always seemed to take us at least 30) that was not practical. When we force learning, we suck the joy out of it, we suck out the curiosity. When WE, the adults, decide when, where, and how, children will learn about a certain topic we rob them of precious connections. When a child (or anyone actually) becomes naturally curious about a topic, which naturally leads to another, then another their brain connects all the little bits of information that they/we collect to other bits of information and those bits of information are SO MUCH MORE LIKELY TO STAY THERE and make themselves useful later on.
So, yes, when I took a year off the beaten path and went to a pretty nontraditional private school, I “fell behind”. I didn’t collect all the bits of information that a 15-year-old in the United States is “supposed to” collect. But the bits of information that I did collect had something meaningful to connect to in my brain and SO many of them stuck!
Core classes were only held Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays until noon at Kimber Academy. So my parents helped me sign up for the extracurricular classes that were also offered on Mondays and Fridays. And each day, after I was done there, I would go to Weber High School for lunch, a Seminary (religion) class, and another extracurricular class. I LOVED my extracurricular classes at Kimber Academy! I was there because I wanted to be, not because I was expected to be for a grade, there were no grades there. I learned about physiology, I learned sign language, and spanish. I WANTED to learn! I would dare say that I learned more Spanish in a few months there than many of my friends learned in years of public school Spanish classes, because I CHOSE to learn Spanish. I wasn’t learning it for anyone but myself. When I got to college a few years later I chose to continue pursuing my education in the Spanish language and I loved it! I got to the point where I was almost fluent. My husband, who served a 2-year Spanish speaking mission for our church , and I would make up Spanish love songs together. He we make up a line, then I would come up with a rhyming line, it was a HOOT!
When I chose to go back to Public school I was faced with a choice. If I wanted to graduate from High School I would not be able to take many of the classes that I wanted to and I would have to take some that I really didn’t want to take. (And it wasn’t because they were too hard, it was actually because they didn’t interest me and wouldn’t challenge me in the ways that I wanted to challenge myself.) So, I decided to question the “should”. Everyone “should” graduate from High School, right? But why? Was that actually important to me? Would it help me meet my goals? I knew what I wanted to do after High School, I wanted to go the BYU-Idaho. So I sent an email and asked if I would be able to get in to that school without a high school diploma. I was told I would need an ACT score, a GED, or maybe both. GREAT! So I chose to not worry about a diploma. And that choice has caused me to have 2 uncomfortable experiences.
Graduation day was pretty awkward, I was still expected to be there, to sing in the choir with my friends. I was the only girl left in the choir seats when everyone lined up to walk across the stage (there were jr boys in the choir who also didn’t get up to “walk”) and I had to give a really quick explanation for why I wasn’t dressed in a cap and gown to a lot of curious friends. And while I was filling out the education portion of a job application, on a computer. I was currently attending college classes at Weber State University but I didn’t have a degree yet and there was no way for me to add a note about why I didn’t have a high school diploma. But I got the job anyway. I would have spent SO many more uncomfortable, and even worse, wasted moments trying to do all I could to fulfill the “should” of getting a High School diploma. How sad that would have been!
Let’s judge our education and that of our children by what we have BECOME because of what we have learned and not by what piece of paper we have to PROVE that we “learned” something.