The Secret Sharer...

The following is a quote that I came across yesterday as I was looking through a curriculum catalog.  It helped me to form a clearer view of my job as teacher to my children.

"Parents must not be afraid to help, and teachers must not be unwilling to encourage the parents to help.  "Whithholding help" is one of the "Four Deadly Errors"...and adults who are afraid of "helping too much" are usually the victims of a system that was designed to compare children with other children by segregating them by age and scoring them by standardized tests.  In such a system, if Billy's mom helps Billy more than Mikey's mom helps Mikey, then Billy has an unfair advantage over Mikey.  And since there's no way the system could get Mikey's mom to help Mikey as much as Billy's mom helps Billy, then the only way to objectively compare Billy and Mikey is to convince Billy's mom to stop helping Billy.  There, in a thumbnail version, is a picture of the exorcism of parents from institutional education over the past hundred years.  It's a tragedy in which we need not participate."   ~Andrew Pudewa (Arts of Language 2010, pg. 18)

This quote struck such a chord of truth in me.  Silly maybe, but really--even in homeschooling, after all these years, I still find myself stubbornly "withholding help" (of course AFTER having taught a concept)thinking, "If I help, then it's not really YOUR work." Of course I will help them through the rough patches or reteach a concept when necessary.  But after the initial teaching/explanation, when they ask for help, it is with great hesitation that I do so, making sure not to "give away" too much of the answer--as if it's a sacred secret.  But really, the point of education is to learn those secrets,  That means my job as a teacher is to expose those secrets, not to measure the students knowledge of the secrets.  So now it will be with great freedom that I will liberally "help" my students, exposing all those sacred secrets, imparting them to my children freely.  Have I mentioned lately that I LOVE homeschooling my children???