Learning

Following in my mother’s footsteps, I’m an introvert. She would hardly have noticed a shelter in place order, except that instead of going out for dinner they would have had takeout. She would have greatly missed regular visits with Tamar, monthly visits with Aviva, and much less frequent visits with me, but it would only have been a relief to her to know that no one else might visit and require her attention. I found myself thinking that I should call her to see how she was doing, but it’s more than nine years too late.

There are so many habits of mind I learned from her that serve me well now. She taught me to pay attention to the night sky, to pay attention to plants and animals, to fill myself up with a view of distant hills. I never knew her to be bored, and I don’t remember being bored since I was a teenager when being bored was the thing to do. What I am a little surprised by is how little I feel called upon to do – although that was certainly my mother’s path and feels entirely familiar. Friends write about cleaning, organizing and cooking frenzies. I have finally managed to finish the excellent book I started reading two weeks ago, The Night Watchman.

The only purposeful activity I’m engaged in for more than a few minutes at a time is tutoring Kortney in math. She has been working on solving word problems, the bane of so many students. Kortney likes math well enough, and is good enough at it for a nine year old. But she does not like word problems, and she has all my sympathy. How could she care if a fireman had a hose 21 feet long and needed 17 more feet of hose to reach the burning building, or want to know how long his hose would need to be? Reading is still pretty abstract to her, more a decoding exercise than something with personal meaning and relevance, something that engages her imagination. So while she will add 21 and 17 competently if it’s presented as an addition problem in the customary vertical form, it’s hard for her to understand that that’s what these sentences want her to do. I’m struck by how much of her learning is a matter of performing tricks rather than a matter of understanding. Reading is still a decoding trick for her – not yet a joy, not yet something that meets a real need. Math is the same – she can reliably carry the one in addition or borrow for subtraction, but these are tricks she’s learned to perform, not something she does yet with real understanding or intrinsic motivation or pleasure. I can’t remember how I learned to love reading and math. I think I loved them because my mother loved them.

I can’t pretend that the word problems are interesting or important. The best I can do is let her see that it’s fun to work on them together, or at least not torture or humiliation. She doesn’t yet face problems in her life that she wants to use math to solve. The closest she gets are uses of money – does she have enough, will she get change – but with debit cards and computerized cash registers, these problems are still mostly masked for her. It often seems to me that we do elementary school mostly wrong, that we don’t respond to what kids need and want to know and do. We focus on teaching them things that we know they will want to understand later, but I wonder why. I wonder why we don’t just present them with lots of interesting stuff to play with and real responsibilities and let them develop the need to know how to read and do math. For generations, children learned by doing – by cooking with mom and doing carpentry with dad, by watching crops grow or fail, by caring for animals. They had real responsibilities, and real needs to develop their minds. So much of education feels like force feeding a goose. I know there are kids who can’t get enough of reading and math, but some kids won’t come to that until they are much older if they come to it at all. How much does teaching them to perform these tricks actually improve their lives?

Still, I look forward to my daily math lessons with Kortney. I love her playfulness, and if she’s not learning much, at least she’s not learning to dread math time. I always come away from our lessons with questions about learning, and Jay and I always have interesting conversations about what she’s learning well, what she’s struggling with, and how to be helpful. It’s one of the gifts of sheltering in place.