Teaching Others is Learning Yourself

Teaching Others is Learning Yourself

by guest writer Peony

 

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Teach: – From vulgar Latin insignare, from Latin insignire, derived from signum (“sign”): to put a mark, to signal a thing.
-Train someone in knowledge.

 

To educate: – (14th century) From the Latin ēdŭcāre (“to educate, train, produce”).

In the 18th century, it was a scholarly neologism criticized by some authors: “The language is getting better every day: we are starting to educate children instead of raising them” (Voltaire).

Littré notes in the 19th century: [this word] is neither in Furetière, nor in Richelet, nor in the Dictionary of the Academy.

-Train through education, instill.

Looking at the definitions above, you might understand why I didn’t choose the word educate in the title because it corresponds to: form.

As someone I know would say to people who go to a training or to children who go to school: “You are going to get formatted !”
Well he’s not wrong. In one way or another school is based on programs.

So school is like a machine, it is programmed by the ideas of a group, a minority of people, and which by rules called (recently) “education” will in turn “program” the children.

While ; as Voltaire said above ; we should raise a child, using some teaching.

 

Raise: – (Proper sense) To put higher, to carry higher, to make higher.
– (Figurative sense) To bring towards what is greater than oneself, while speaking of its thoughts, its soul, its desires.

 

Format: – Structure data or a data medium according to a standard format.
– Conform to a standard.

Then the whole process makes sense.
Children should not be formatted but raised up.

Children are the heart of the world, what they are given they will return, repeat.

A few years ago I chose to give my children home teaching.

Of course I myself am discovering this teaching and moreover it is not easy to balance certain social obligations and freedom of thought.
So like I tell children we don’t really make mistakes, we experiment.

Children’s eyes are the mirror of us.

That’s why everything I do, say, or think, I have doubts. But a healthy doubt or rather a questioning: Does what I do / say / think resonate, in agreement, with my heart, with that of the child …?

If I don’t, my mistakes, or rather my experiences, will reverberate on the children who will in turn echo them.

Raising a child with the expectations of society is not easy because you have to respect a certain request while adapting to the needs, desires and necessities.

For me, teaching means to put beacons, signalize, ask questions, guide, approach the path sometimes without showing it …
But it’s also about exposing yourself, showing your strength and weakness and adapting, because every child is very different.

The other difference between education and teaching is that we are not there to engrave information in a child’s head and force to register and apply.

A real teacher is a guide.

Again you’ll notice that I don’t use the word (school) master either, which bothers me particularly.

 

Master: – Person who exercises his authority, his domination; owner.
-Title of persons bearing certain responsibilities.

So school has a unique program for all different children.

Most schoolmasters and teachers justify this by saying that they adapt the program to children, which is actually very vague and mostly wrong, as they often have neither the inclination nor the time and / or they are not able to see, do not have the possibility to adapt, because they have already been formatted. Although I understand that in classes of 23 students or more sometimes it is difficult to do “case by case”, it is the entire system that needs to be reviewed. Today multiple classrooms are the general solution for lowering the cost, because money is also and always an excuse.

Parents come to me for private lessons for their children, in general they are children classified by the school as “in difficulty” because they cannot follow the program, having accumulated delays in their learning or not having received the right basics and necessary tools.
So I try to find in the child the “engraving points” of the program, follow them and fill the “holes”, where there is a lack of information or “error”, then redo the link with the other partitions of their learning. All this by finding techniques to achieve it, while adapting as and when each child, so by retouching.

It’s like connecting the different compartments, aggregating. Sometimes you have to recreate, rebuild certain bases.

In general children here have common difficulties: The language, these children come from immigration (99% where I live, more than 40% officially in the country), then comes the fact that many have been neglected in too many classes (between 23 and over), then comes the lack of basics because they receive little learning and attention from their family (also knowing that more than 50% of the population lives below the threshold of poverty) and because of that there are repercussions on lots of levels. The last point being the most important and the most difficult to retouch.

When I say basics, I think of foundations as in building a house. Pillars are placed on the foundations which will support the entire weight of the construction. Well the foundations for children are largely built by parents when the child is small between 0 and 3 years old. Then you start to lay the foundations of education, but often the school does it. Well then try to put a pylon on a foundation that moves, it will never hold.
So there are no skilled workers, the parents – there is a lack of material, love – so no foundations, no support and no personal building. Plus you add the wrong pillars of school education and you can be sure that your house will grow awry or fall apart.

The choice to raise my last children was made after my first child had gone to school, the result was catastrophic. I tried to help her as best I could, to get her to practice reading, for example, without success. After strong personal questioning, responses from school that did not suit me, I continued my efforts and research. So to be clearer what I found that most closely resembled the situation is what doctors, specialists, schools classify as “Dys”.

 

Dys / dis: From ancient Greek dus- which expresses an idea of difficulty, bad condition, an anomaly of formation or a malfunction.

Terrible definition, isn’t it?

Dys children can think and see in all directions, in many dimensions.

Example of a dyslexic vision:

“Dyslexia must be considered as a peculiarity of the brain and not as a perverse effect of education, social and cultural environment or the consequence of emotional suffering (Dr. Michel Habib, 1997). “

(nb: Habib is derived from the verb habba in Arabic which means “to love”.)

The main difficulty with dyslexia is not the way of seeing but learning phonetics – the ability to attach sounds to letters and mix sounds into words – this is also called decoding or phonemic awareness. The eye must combine with the power and quality of the ear to make sense of written sounds.

The apparent difficulty manifests because the connection between what the child hears, what he sees and what he perceives is not in agreement.
Basically there is cognitive dis-son-ance (son = sound).

The understanding of dyslexia is in full development, various aids, methods, speech therapy, sound therapy, are tried with varying degrees of success.

It must be said that our modern language is converted into phonetics while the old languages were converted into ideograms.

Could it be that the conversion of languages to sounds associated with the change of 440 Hertz in music has altered the natural way our brains work and that some children can no longer decrypt ?
What if it was just another way of decoding, of thinking?

Society is made for one type of person who has to fit into the mold to be able to find their place, be accepted, and therefore be socialized. For this everyone must see and think in the same way, with a single vision and a single goal, for the “good” of all.

This is the view of the (in) human majority. A flat two-dimensional vision.

While we are made up of billions of possibilities in a huge multi-dimensional universe, society, school, asks children to become something they are not.

Beings without vision, without value, without imagination, flat beings.

With everything that is happening at the moment (year 2020) we also see the DISparition of faces becoming platitude.

As I was about to finish this article someone sent me a message about a law that French President Macron is trying to pass: “Law against separatism.” This law is presented to “protect against radical Islamism” in 2021 (see agenda 21 and control of the family).

If you read that law, it goes against freedom, including the freedom to educate children and for the control of the population, Islamism being only an excuse. I invite you to read “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” as well as “the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms”.

Here is already a petition against this radical law:
https://www.mesopinions.com/petition/enfants/instruction-obligatoire-ecole-2021/107379

To come back to what I learned in all that: it is that each one sees, hears, receives, understands, processes information, imagines, applies, in a different way, we cannot give a unique word to different people.

For that I had to observe myself, listen to myself, understand myself in order to be able to give back what I learned. My path is still long and I still have a lot to do … in small steps, I move forward and I am happy to share this experience, because I love children who show me everything. They show me my mistakes, my qualities, they laugh, they love, everything is natural about them, and I want them to keep nature in them, their nature, as I want to keep mine.

Associate article: https://www.heartstarbooks.com/the-repeating-circle/

Ken Robinson on school destroys creativity : https://refletdumonde.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/ken-robinson-lecole-tue-la-creativite/

 

 

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