“12 children, ages 9-12 asked for a math class. The adult they asked initially tried to discourage them (something I would never dream of doing) and then insisted that the children act responsibly (appear on time, etc) or the math classes would stop.

The class met twice a week for half an hour for 20 weeks, for a total of 20 hours of instruction. The class was structured, but any child was free to leave at any time. There was homework, quizzes, the whole nine yards. The children set the pace. They used a primer written in 1898.

Daniel Greenberg wrote the article “Learning Without Coercion: Sudbury Valley School”. It appeared in Mothering magazine, No. 58, Winter 1991.”

All 12 children passed at the end with flying colours.

I have heard of that school (or similar ones) before. There’s a similar school here in Victoria (Oak and Orca) which is one of the only schools I’d consider sending my girls to if we did choose to send them to school. I read an article called “Learning without Coercion” about something that takes place at a Sudbury Valley school, possibly the same one you’re talking about, though I can’t find a copy of the article. The students asked to learn math, and the teacher taught it to all of them in a very short time frame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp7W5TQ3HaA&feature=player_embedded#!

There’s a school in the states that has no curriculum. Clearly ‘alternative’, they are run completely by the students’ desire to learn. If kids want to play, they play, for days, months, it doesn’t matter. But, the moment they express any interest to learn more about something, the faculty is there to do everything they can to help that student learn more about their new interest.

It’s fascinating! I love the concept and the school does really well. Kids learn through living, as you talked about, and in this case, are then provided with all kinds of resources and guidance to learn as much as they want.

In an interview, a math instructor there said that on average it took students 6 months to learn traditional grade 1-12 math. He said that once the student is interested, they absorb the info quickly and easily, no school bells, forced classes or boring topics.

The graduates from the school, and all graduate, are so creative and inspired that they have a very high success rate of students moving on to prestigious universities. (for those who find that a landmark

The only difficulty students tend to have is when they introduce kids from public schools into this school because the kids don’t know how to make their own decisions, they are so used to being told what to do and when. That part just blew me away. It took those kids a few months to rediscover their own inner guidance and feel inspired to learn new things.

Neat heh? I’ll have to try to find out what the name of the place is, I’m sure you’d love it.

Have a super day!

I am excited to be getting to that point of starting to see interests forming. I have always seen Ant as a little follower of Sam, but recently I was surprised to see just how different they are becoming suddenly. Ant is really developing some strong preferences and likes.

One of our friends said this weekend that it wouldn’t always be this easy to homeschool. Eventually I would actually need to plan and teach things because they are not going to learn algebra on their own and they need to be prepared for post secondary just in case. I tried to explain the idea of if they are interested they will learn it and if they aren’t interested it won’t matter, but I think that it will have to be something that is seen happening vs something that I can tell people.

Have you read “And the Skylark Sings with Me” by David H. Albert (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865714010/ref=nosim/librarythin08-20). It is an awesome book about what the parents did to help the kids persue their interests.