I am useless with my hands, but my son and I have decided to build a go-kart. An old-fashioned go-kart. Not a modern engine-powered V8 thing made from carbon fibre, with rear wheel drive and ABS brakes. Not even nuclear boosters and dilithium chambers despite his insistence that it be an inter-galactic Justice Legion of Super-Avengers go-kart worthy of being driven by Steve Wayne, Bruce Rogers or even Yoda. No, neither of those. Just a good old-fashioned go-kart made of wood, nuts and bolts, metal rod axles and a rope for steering. We also got help from a brass foundry and metal foundry for the metals we needed to use.
I doubt ours will look like this!
One thing I am passionate about outside my son and autism, is education. At school, I was (at least in high school) incredibly rebellious, but it was the system and not knowledge I was opposed to. I may have been the only kid in the entire multiverse who bunked school and went and sat in the reference section of the local library and read. Besides the fact that I enjoyed knowledge, who on earth would think to look for a truant student there. More recently, I acquired a Masters degree in computer-mediated education and studied educational theory and pedaogogy as part of the course. I realise that so much learning happens without teaching – by osmosis (in the colloquial sense) – an invisible transference from others to others – even when discussing and building go-karts.
You don’t need to be in what my wife calls lecture mode, when you carefully and in depth expound on what is meant by area. Simply plonk him on the floor, haul out the tape measure and measure a rectangle which will be sufficient for him to sit on when the go-kart is made. The questions will follow and so will the answers and the learning happen. The knowledge will be less superficial than that from books. It combines so many educational notions. Problem based learning (PBL) – “How will we turn the kart?| If necessary prompt, “We have a rope. Do you think that could help?” Apprenticeship learning. Lev Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist of the 1920’s who worked with special needs children and he realised that people learn better in the presence of more capable peers. If a kid is learning from a child slightly more advanced than he or she is, then that child will pick up concepts more rapidly. It makes sense really. The osmosis is easier, the transference of ideas at approximately the same level of devlopment makes the transfer smoother. This does not mean of course that a Zone of Proximal Development cannot exist between parent and child, with the child learning from the more capable parent and perhaps in some areas the parent learning from the child.
But there are two caveats in this whole osmosis thing between parent and child.
1) It requires involvement. Xave at his iPad and me at my computer does not facilitate this transfer of knowledge and does not bring about the interaction essential to this invisible teaching and deep learning. If I want him to learn I have to be involved and not just present.
2) The teaching and learning that takes place is not just about academic knowledge, but about character and spirituality too. We create what our children become.
My son turned ten just the other day,
He said, “Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let’s play
Can you teach me to throw?”, I said “Not today
I got a lot to do,” he said, “That’s ok.”
Cat’s in the Cradle – Harry Chapin