It’s Not Like You Were Interested

First lambs

Back in late ’13 or thereabouts, I interviewed a number of adults who had been unschooled. There were two common refrains: 1) I wouldn’t have traded it for anything and 2) That said, I do sorta wish my folks had taught me a bit more math.

Much to the boys’ consternation, Penny and I have taken the latter refrain to heart, and what’s been particularly interesting to both of us is how little math we’ve retained ourselves and how much of what we have retained is specific to our work on this land. Fractions, for instance, well engrained by a multitude of on-going building projects, or the quick in-our-heads addition and subtraction, multiplication and division necessitated by commerce and the extrapolating of recipes to meet our unique needs (if the kimchi recipe calls for two tablespoons of salt per quart, and we’re making, oh, about 70 quarts, how many cups of salt do we need?). That sort of stuff.

Anyway. There’s a point in there somewhere… lemme just see if I can find it… ah… there we are. I think we owe it to ourselves (and more importantly, to our kids) to not become rigidly dogmatic in our educational path. Certainly I ask this of others, even as I am no doubt guilty of it myself, in part because of my personal experiences within the institutionalized educational system and in part because I cannot help but see how this system is engineered to feed an economy that exploits on so many levels. Environmental. Emotional. Spiritual. And so on.

But wait! There’s another point, and it’s lurking in Penny’s and my recognition of how little math we’ve retained. Granted, I wasn’t exactly teacher’s friggin’ pet – there weren’t many gold stars plastered on my worksheets, lemme tell ya – but still. Given all the hours I spent figuring algebraic equations, don’t you think I’d remember some of them? And it’s not just me – Penny’s in the same boat, and she was a gold star girl all the way. Heck, I bet she got double gold stars.

I’ve talked to enough schooled adults to know we’re not unique. Few remember much of what they learned in the classroom, and most agree that in hindsight, the majority of what they learned in the classroom really only mattered in the vacuum of academics. In other words, you learned what you were told you needed to learn so you could advance to the next level of learning what you needed to learn (meanwhile forgetting what you’d learned previously because what, really, was the incentive to remember it? I mean, it’s not like you were interested or anything) so you could advance to the next level of… oh, never mind. You get the point.

(Are there exceptions to this rule? Of course. There always are)

I see now that the aforementioned points are somewhat contradictory. Penny and I are essentially forcing our children to do some (albeit a fraction, though as evidenced by their caterwauls of complaint, it must be an exceptionally painful fraction) of the same sit down math lessons neither of us can recall, probably because we were forced to do them ourselves. Oy. Can we truly do no better than this?

Which I suppose leads me to my third and final point: We’re only human.