the homeschooling revolution

'Homeschoolling' has been around for a long time:
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk
Jay Doubleyou: education happens beyond the classroom
Jay Doubleyou: the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states
Jay Doubleyou: schools as 'total institutions'

The BBC Education correspondent isn't impressed:
Coronavirus: The impossibility of home-schooling a nation - BBC News

And Deutsche Welle warns that "the digital playing field is anything but level. Access to education could leave a lot of people behind during the pandemic":
Learning revolution - but not for everyone? | DW News - latest news and breaking stories | DW | 22.04.2020

The longer-term effects are already being considered.

There'll be more interest in homeschooling itself:

Will coronavirus spark a homeschool revolution?

With children (and many parents) being forced to stay at home, homeschooling has suddenly become the norm. Whilst the situation is bleak, many parents will begin to see some of the benefits of homeschooling. Here’s what they’ll learn:

• There are thousands of resources for homeschooling parents on the internet
• Many of the resources are low cost or even free
• Learning can be done at any time during the day, taking breaks whenever is needed
• Spending quality time with your kids
• Siblings can learn together, when possible
• There’s less hassle getting ready for and traveling to school
• Kids are safe from bullying
• Kids can learn at their own pace
• You have complete control over what they learn

The Clever Tykes books, guidebook and activity packs have been a popular choice of resources amongst homeschoolers for several years. You can see and buy them on our homeschool resources page. Over the past few weeks, however, there’s been a noticeable increase in their demand. We believe that homeschooling can facilitate a broader base of learning and one that develops key personal skills such as resourcefulness, positivity and creativity – those we describe as ‘enterprising’.

Homeschooling in the long-term

Homeschooling in the long-term will not be an option for many parents. For some, however, it may now seem a more viable option than it once did, maybe even a preferable option. Some of the challenges those new to homeschooling will face include how to structure learning in the long-term, including developing a syllabus and working out how kids will sit examinations when the time comes. They’ll also need to ensure their kids get enough social interactions with other kids, which is something that the current situation restricts.

It’s a challenging situation for parents. This new homeschooling environment is not an ideal one. The home may be a stressful environment at the moment. It may not be set up well for remote working for parents and homeschool for the kids. Many of the freedoms we would have to take kids to places of learning have been restricted or even removed entirely.

The good news is that if you’re able to deliver great homeschooling in the current circumstances, you’ll be excellently placed moving beyond the crisis.

Will coronavirus spark a homeschool revolution? - Clever Tykes

The interesting thing will also be the longer-term effect on mainstream education:
Homeschooling during the coronavirus pandemic could change education forever, says the OECD | World Economic Forum

What Will Happen to the Education System When the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Over?

While virtual learning may surge, hybrid models with in-person elements may work best.

By Christian Barnard April 24, 2020

For the remainder of the school year, online learning is the new normal for most schools across the country. The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly all schools to close and has created a captive, nationwide audience of families interested in exploring alternative online platforms to keep their kids occupied and on track.

Online groups such as Learn Everywhere were quickly created and immediately attracted thousands of members who are sharing resources with each other, from online music classes for young children to free engineering lessons to empanada recipes.

While this could be a revolutionary moment in K-12 for virtual learning and homeschooling, it’s hard to know at this point. Here are three possibilities for what comes next.

Substantial numbers of students leave in-person schools and begin a virtual or home-based education full-time...

Online education and homeschooling remain only marginally influential...

Hybrid schooling becomes more widespread in every sector

...

What Will Happen to the Education System When the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Over? | Reason Foundation

The last word goes to the

Coronavirus lockdown: From the demise of GCSEs to technology and AI, how the crisis has changed education

At some point, schools will reopen — but many people think education in the UK may never be the same again

By Will Hazell Saturday, 18th April 2020

The impact of coronavirus on education has been unprecedented. Since last month, schools across Britain have been closed for most pupils and exams have been cancelled. In Scotland, it is the first time exams have not gone ahead since 1881.

At some point, schools will reopen – but many people think education in the UK may never be the same again.

Some people are already predicting the demise of high-stakes exams such as the GCSE. Others think coronavirus will lead to classrooms being revolutionised by technology. With exams not taking place, a new way of awarding grades using teacher assessment has been invented from scratch.

In England, teachers have been asked to predict GCSE and A-level grades, which will be moderated by the exam boards. It is a remarkable volte-face. Under reforms introduced when Michael Gove was education secretary, the majority of teacher-assessed coursework was scrapped, with grades awarded almost purely on the basis of exam performance.

Many teachers have been critical of this system, arguing that it puts too much pressure on teenagers.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, believes the crisis could be a “transformational moment” for education, proving that putting children through 30-plus exam papers “was a whole paraphernalia of assessment that we really didn’t need”, he says.

Magnus Bashaarat, the head of independent Hampshire school Bedales, agrees. His school became so dissatisfied with GCSEs that it created its own alternative qualification, the Bedales Assessed Course. Mr Bashaarat thinks the Gove reforms were motivated by mistrust. “The reason why Conservative ministers moved away from coursework towards terminal assessment is because they haven’t really trusted teachers,” he says. Covid-19 has forced them to place their trust in the profession again – whether they like it or not.

... 

Perhaps the most profound legacy of coronavirus will be how we view schools. Teachers have come in over their Easter holiday to look after the children of key workers. Others have walked miles to deliver free meals. “In a crisis, schools have carried on doing what they’ve always done, which is being a major support hub,” Dr Bousted says. “The idea that we can go back to Government ministers saying schools are about academic excellence and nothing else, that’s really been shown for the lie it is.”

Coronavirus lockdown: From the demise of GCSEs to technology and AI, how the crisis has changed education | inews

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how to acquire a language in one year - and not 'to learn a language'!

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:

You've heard of the Krashen approach to learning a language?

'Acquisition' means picking it up, not learning consciously with lots of grammar. We learn through reading and listening, not studying rules! That is 'comprehensible input', not monitoring everything you produce!

Back in the 1970s, we had 'the natural approach':
Natural approach - Wikipedia
The Natural Approach
www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/the_natural_approach.pdf

The second method is TPRS: Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling:
TPR Storytelling - Wikipedia
TPRS: Making Your Lessons Impossible to Forget | General Educator Blog
TPRS Russian – Effortless Russian Podcast – Real Russian Club

But which language should you learn?

A 'level one' language for English native speakers needs 600 hours = 11 hours a week in one year:
How Long Does It Take to Be Fluent in Spanish?

But some are more difficult - because there are fewer 'cognates', or things which are similar between languages:
Language Difficulty Ranking - Effective Language Learning
Foreign Service Institute Language Difficulty Rankings | Atlas & Boots
A Map Showing How Much Time It Takes to Learn Foreign Languages: From Easiest to Hardest | Open Culture

And with really difficult languages, don't do any reading or writing because of the different characters/writing systems - that will come later!

HOW TO ACQUIRE A LANGUAGE:

First: find a language parent:
Tandem Language Exchange App | Find Conversation Exchange Partners
HelloTalk - Talk to the World
Find language exchange partners | italki

Second: find magazines and children's stories because there are lots of pictures!
= something to talk about with both sides asking lots of questions
+ the language parent retelling the story using the pictures (but not you!)

Some rules:
- don't use your native language to understand! keep to the target language!
- draw!
- or 'it's not important!'
- no grammar!
- don't correct the learner!

Third: Total Physical Response!
= lots of movement!

...

Here are some more posts from this blog:
Jay Doubleyou: theories of language learning and teaching: input
Jay Doubleyou: second language acquisition
Jay Doubleyou: krashen and second language learning
Jay Doubleyou: theories of language learning and teaching: input part two

Here's how to do it:


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Stop learning languages and start acquiring them! Jeff Brown is a full-time language instructor and polyglot who guarantees anyone can acquire any language in one year!
How to Acquire any language NOT learn it! - YouTube
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the limitations of language apps

There are some great places to go to help learn a language:
Jay Doubleyou: apps to learn english
Jay Doubleyou: duolingo: free language-learning app

But maybe they are not that great...
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500 Days of Duolingo: What You Can (and Can’t) Learn From a Language App

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Free language learning apps often promise the world — but don’t expect fluency from one. Here’s what to expect before you sign up.

If mobile language-learning apps are to be believed, it’s never been easier to pick up another language. Just spend 20 minutes a day with a few virtual flashcards and you’ll be fluent in no time! The reality is a lot more nuanced — and arguably more disappointing — than that.

Apps like Duolingo, Memrise, and Babbel all promise to teach you how to read, write, or speak a new language, all from your phone. While they’re similar in concept, they differ a lot in the specifics:

• Duolingo offers a skill tree of lessons that use listening exercises, flashcards, and multiple choice questions to drill you on new words, phrases, and sentences. Most questions have a comment thread where users can discuss a particular question in detail. The service also has community features that let you connect with other people who are learning the same language you are.
• Memrise offers similar lessons to Duolingo, introducing new words and phrases with flashcards, listening exercises, and more. However, the app has a few unique features: on new words, you can write a note (called a “mem”) with anything that helps you remember the new word or phrase. These will appear later when you come across the word again. It also offers a feature called Learn With Locals, which pairs words with videos of native speakers saying the phrase out loud and demonstrating the phrase. For example, a speaker might shiver when describing cold weather. This helps connect words with their meaning. Memrise also offers more explanatory cards than Duolingo offers when introducing new or complex topics.
• Babbel is different from the other two. While it uses similar multiple choice or listening exercises as the others, it uses conversational examples to demonstrate how to use new words or phrases when speaking with another person. It also offers a speech recognition feature that lets you speak words back during an exercise instead of writing them out or answering a multiple choice question. This helps you learn how to pronounce words properly, or at least properly enough for your phone to recognize what you’re saying.

Despite their differences, they have the same goal: use daily exercises on your phone to teach you an entire language. It’s an enticing promise, especially if you’re not already immersed in a culture or education system that will give you the exposure you need to pick up a second language. The question is, are they effective?

After I accumulated a Duolingo streak in excess of 500 days — a feat that, thanks to the app’s notoriously insistent reminders, has now come to define my self-worth — I found myself in a better place to judge just how much an app alone can really teach you. The short answer is that you can definitely learn some things from an app, but if you want to become fluent in a language — or even conversational — they won’t be enough.

Language apps are great for writing systems and basic phrases

The phrase “learning a language” is deceptively reductive. A language isn’t a singular monolith, but rather a complex interconnected system of components that build a way to communicate. The lexicon consists of the individual words, which speakers have to memorize. The syntax and grammar tell speakers how to properly structure those words in a sentence. Then there’s the writing system, which is the visual representation of words or sounds that allow words to be constructed (for example, in English, the writing system is the alphabet).

For languages that have a different writing system, like Japanese, Russian, or Korean, language apps can be an excellent way to learn. Duolingo and Memrise both use a combination of flash card and simple matching exercises to train you to recognize symbols in a new writing system, while Babbel goes an extra step further with in-lesson explanations for how new symbols or sounds work.

After a few weeks or months of consistently going through lessons, it’s feasible to learn every sound and symbol in a new writing system. You won’t be able to understand every word you can read, but you’ll be a lot closer than if you started from scratch. However, that’s only part of learning a language. Understanding the alphabet used in English doesn’t inherently mean you can understand French or Spanish, for example.
...

500 Days of Duolingo: What You Can (and Can’t) Learn From a Language App - The New York Times
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how to learn any language in six months

From a TED Talk by Chris Lonsdale

Watched 21 million times:

There are five principles:

1) Focus on the language content that is relevant to you

2) Use your new language as a tool to communicate... from Day 1

3) When you first understand the message, then you will unconsciously acquire the language!
(= Krashen: comprehensible input)

4) It's physical! You need physiological training - what you can hear and what sounds you can make
('If your face is hurting, then you're doing it right!')

5) Psyho-physiological state matters!
(And you need to be tolerant of ambiguity)

There are 7 actions for rapid language acquisition:

1) Listen a lot: 'brain soaking'

2) Focus on getting the meaning first - before the words
= Use patterns you already know

3) Start mixing! Get creative!
eg: 10 verbs x 10 nouns x 10 adjectives = 1000 possible phrases!

4) Focus on the core
eg: 3000 English words = 95%
in Week 1: target questions, target language
in Weeks 2-3: pronouns, common verbs, adjectives
in Week 4: 'glue words' (and, but...)

5) Get a language parent
> works hard to understand what you're saying; doesn't correct mistakes; confirms understanding by using correct language; uses words the learner knows

6) Copy the face: get the muscles going

7) 'Direct connect' to imagery: same box (picture), different paths (language)



How to learn any language in six months | Chris Lonsdale | TEDxLingnanUniversity - YouTube

Here's the script:
http://www.the-third-ear.com/files/TEDx-ChrisLonsdale-LearnAnyLanguage6Months.pdf

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the language of food

Susie Dent is one of Britain's top 'lexicographers' and appears on TV.
She also writes regularly for the Independent and i newspapers:

Bellygods and gigoles tell our story in food

English is richly seasoned with words forged at the table

• Susie Dent
• Sunday 24 February 2013 01:00 

As a lexicographer on Countdown, I spend a lot of time researching the history of words, and two news stories – the horsemeat scandal and the obesity epidemic – show the extent to which food has shaped our language. The meat scandal has been called a shambles, and the word is entirely appropriate. The "shambles" were the bloodied stalls of medieval butchers –all that carnage led to our use of the word for something messed up.

For the Anglo-Saxons, food determined a person's position in society. The words "lord" and "lady" began as the hláfweard and hlæfdige, or loaf-keeper and loaf-kneader. A servant, conversely, was a dependent, so the hláf-æta – bread-eater: he also subsisted on the "umbles" or cheap offcuts – the origin of the expression "humble pie". A "pittance" was originally a small portion of food allowed to a monk or poor person. Some masters were more generous: to "foster" first meant to feed someone – an idea that's retained in our word "helping" for a serving of food. A "companion" was someone you broke bread (pane) with (com), and a "mate" a comrade at your "mess", or table.

Food as a determiner of status continued as English and society evolved. After 1066, the conquered Britons tended the sheep, pigs, and cows (names rooted in Anglo-Saxon), while the Norman elite ate the results – mutton, pork and beef all come from the French.

Bellygods and gigoles tell our story in food | The Independent

It's so comforting to return to the language of childhood, so let's make a whim-wham for the waterwheel

The vocabulary from home, that we grew up with, somehow feels important now

By Susie Dent

Monday, 6th April 2020, 6:30 pm

“Not just now. I’m making a whim-wham for waterwheels.”

If home-schooling parents ever needed an excuse to avoid calculating the area of a parallelogram or putting a long piece of prose into the present perfect, this would once have been it.

A Northamptonshire substitute for “I’m busy”, it was once the ideal, mysterious fob-off for any child wanting attention...

So why be just “hungry” when we can be pined or gant (Yorkshire), hearty (Worcestershire), jimp (Aberdeen), clemt (Lancashire), wallow (Cumbria), famelled or famished (South-East), or sinking (Sussex)?

And why simply be cold when we could be nithered, hunchy,  shrammed, mopy, or perishing instead?

Susie Dent: It's so comforting to return to the language of childhood, so let's make a whim-wham for the waterwheel | inews
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john tayor gatto: teacher, mentor, revolutionary

This blog has regularly featured the work and ideas of John Taylor Gatto:
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
Jay Doubleyou: education issues
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
Jay Doubleyou: the hidden curriculum
Jay Doubleyou: education: dumbing us down.
It is now a year and a half since he died:
John Taylor Gatto - Google Search
John Taylor Gatto - Wikipedia
A memorial to my mentor John Taylor Gatto - Lefteris Heretakis - Medium
John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling

Here is an obituary from Brittany Hunter, writing in the Foundation for Economic Freedom:

John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America's Most Courageous Teacher

Gatto leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built.

Monday, October 29, 2018

 

Brittany Hunter

Education John Taylor Gatto Unschooling

It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the passing of a revolutionary educator, John Taylor Gatto. Gatto spent nearly 30 years as a teacher in the infamously rough New York City public school system. He was awarded New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years while also being recognized as New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991.

Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents.

Over the course of his career, Gatto was recognized by other educators for the rapport he had built with his students. While other teachers were spending much of their day on behavioral management issues, Gatto’s students were actively engaged in his lectures and genuinely excited about learning. When faculty members would come to him seeking advice, his prescription was simple: treat your students the same way you treat anyone else.

Above all, Gatto understood that his students were not mere underlings, but individuals with unique skills and talents to share with the rest of the world. They didn’t want to be talked down to but longed to be treated with respect and dignity. He recognized that their worth was not determined by the neighborhoods where they lived, their parents’ annual salaries, or the scores they received on standardized tests. He concluded that “genius,” is “as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

After three decades in the classroom, Gatto realized that the public school system was squashing individualism more than it was educating students and preparing them for the real world. To make matters worse, his later research would reveal that this dumbing down was not just by accident, but by design.

Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system.

Feeling the education system was beyond repair, Gatto could no longer in good conscience be an active participant. Rather than sending his letter of resignation to his superiors in his school district, he sent a copy of “I Quit, I Think” to the Wall Street Journal, where it was published as an op-ed on July 25, 1991.

In his biting resignation, he wrote:

I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.

I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.

Gatto dedicated the rest of his life to repairing the damage done by the public education system. He wrote several books on his experience in the classroom including Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. His book The Underground History of American Education is perhaps the most accurate and damning history of the American education system that has ever been written.

He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.

Gatto encouraged parents to foster an environment where their children could follow their bliss rather than being stuck in a classroom, trained to be just another cog in the machine. He inspired teachers to reassess their reasons for becoming educators and to challenge the status quo.

He was also a firm believer in self-directed education, sometimes referred to as “unschooling.” He believed that learning was actually inhibited by the classroom setting and that every single moment of life presented the opportunity to learn and grow.

He wrote:

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Author and ardent unschooling advocate Kerry McDonald had this to say of Gatto's legacy in this regard:

John Taylor Gatto’s writings inspired a generation of parents and educators to question deep-seated beliefs about compulsory mass schooling and pursue alternatives. For homeschoolers, in particular, Gatto affirmed the vital role of family and empowered parents to take back control of their child’s education. His words will continue to have a lasting impact on education for years to come.

Zak Slayback, who authored The End of School and wrote the foreword to Gatto's newest edition of Dumbing Us Down, also had a few remarks on Gatto's legacy:

Gatto's writing, teaching, and approach to not just education but human flourishing in general inspired me to think critically about my own life and education. He's one of the most important thinkers in American history—that's becoming more obvious every day. He'll be missed dearly.

Slayback also said he carries a card in his wallet with this John Taylor Gatto quote:

You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life or you become an unwitting actor in somebody else's script.

On October 25th, after a long battle with health issues, Gatto departed this world at 82 years old. He is survived by his loving wife and two children. In addition to his family, he leaves behind a legacy that inspired thousands of people to challenge the premise on which our education system was built and to protect a child’s right to a real education built on actual experience rather than government-sanctioned texts.

So as we honor the life of this great man, I leave you with a few of Gatto's most inspirational quotes.

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”

“It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does. It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home, demanding that you do its “homework.” “How will they learn to read?” you ask, and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.”

“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Brittany Hunter

Brittany was a senior writer for the Foundation for Economic Education. Additionally, she is a co-host of Beltway Banthas, a podcast that combines Star Wars and politics. Brittany believes that the most effective way to promote individual liberty and free-market economics is by telling timely stories that highlight timeless principles.

John Taylor Gatto (1935-2018): Remembering America's Most Courageous Teacher - Foundation for Economic Education



See also:
Unschooling - Wikipedia
Anti-psychiatry - Wikipedia

free on-line resources for learning and teaching english

In these times, we need to be able to access good websites to practice our English.

There are loads of free on-line resources available:
Jay Doubleyou: apps to learn english
Jay Doubleyou: websites to practice your english
Jay Doubleyou: lots of resources from onestopenglish
Jay Doubleyou: free printable materials for teachers
Jay Doubleyou: businessballs - a site for your business english - but with much more
Jay Doubleyou: learn english on youtube
Jay Doubleyou: free english lessons with esolcourses.com
Jay Doubleyou: on-line resources for the esl and eng lit classroom

And there are many, many more:
Free English language resources | Cambridge English
Learners | ESOL Nexus
Interactive Websites for Learning - ESL/ELL Education - Research Guides at University of Wisconsin-Madison
ESL: English as a Second Language - Free English learning resources
ESL Lesson Plans, Printables, Games, Materials for Teaching English | ESL Lounge
ESLVideo.com | ESL Video | Free English Lessons
Free ESL Fun Games, Interactive Grammar & Vocabulary Games for Classrooms
Activities for ESL/EFL Students (English Study)
FREE Resources for Teaching & Learning English! on Twitter
Other Great ESL, EFL, ESOL Websites

Have fun!
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