102. (S6E15) Growing Minds
Episode description
Did you ever think of learning as training your brain chemistry?
The goal of skill-building in learning is automaticity, fluency, ease of use. It’s as useful to the child learning to ride a bike as it is the teen learning to think critically. Becoming automatic looks just like ease, skill, or fluency. Think of what it’s like driving: You can sing along to the radio and think about the upcoming election simultaneously, all while changing lanes on a highway at 75 miles per hour. Driving is so automatic that you have the bandwidth to focus on other things—but it wasn’t like that when you were first learning, where just the radio could be a distraction. How can we facilitate this growth of a mind, skill, fluency? How can we train our children’s brain chemistry for learning?
The three primary tools that we want to teach children and then build upon as teenagers are the “3 R’s” of reading, writing, arithmetic. These are the tools that help children get at everything they will ever want to know, but we often unload them in the most uninteresting way possible—through a workbook. For novice homeschoolers, teaching from the book seems like the easiest and most approachable way to educate. But what if you looked at the workbooks as a reinforcing tool, not the main teaching tool, and you found ways to convey the power of that subject outside of the book first? Let them have the same excitement for the subject they had when discovering the world.
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