Time for Homeschool Wednesday! On of the biggest goals for homeschooling that I can think of is to instill a desire for lifelong learning and to provide the tools to achieve that. As I am beginning to understand from reading up on learning it would be wrong to only emphasize cognitive tools in this regard. Instead there is also a big role to play for simply developing grit – the ability to overcome obstacles in the desire to achieve a goal. I am about halfway through the aptly named Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and highly recommend reading it (I definitely wish I had read this or a book like it when the kids were even younger).
I have had a great firsthand example of this over the weekend. As I am currently alone at home (Susan and the kids are all traveling), I was able to spend some time programming. In particular, I am helping out Oliver Friedman, Susan’s co-founder of Ziggeo, in rewriting the recording component which had originally been licensed from a third party. To do that we both had to learn some Actionscript, which turns out not to be difficult per se but fraught with lots of obstacles, such as documentation that’s outright wrong, massive inconsistencies and lots of things that should be easy but turn out to be hard (at some point I may blog about some particularly awful examples that we encountered).
I am happy to report that we are making great progress but it was eminently clear that the primary characteristic that let us learn how to solve some of the problems was not smarts but rather stick-to-itiveness. It was trying yet another thing after the first half dozen things had failed. I am looking forward to using the same approach to figuring out how to give our kids an appreciation for the power of determination.
