my Reddit answer to questions re: structure/discipline and checking knowledge

Here's part of a Reddit post that I responded to at r/Homeschool:

Structure is important [when homeschooling]? Or is it not? Proving what [students] know is important to have on file?

Several people answered this question. Here's my response:

A healthy mix of structured and unstructured activities is probably a good idea. You can't expect kids, especially little kids, to follow a rigidly disciplined schedule day after day. At the same time, allowing kids to "rule the roost," so to speak, only leads to intellectual flabbiness and a lack of basic skills. Little kids are too young to know what's really good for them, academically speaking.

 

One possible compromise might be to find out what interests your child (that interest provides the intrinsic motivation to get things going), then use structured steps to show your child how to discover more and more about his or her chosen topic. She likes dinosaurs? Focus on one, like a triceratops. Ask her pointed, specific questions that she can research (show her how to research) and find the answer to. She'll gain knowledge and feel a sense of accomplishment (success experiences bolster motivation). Ask her to find pictures of triceratops bones, then match those up with artists' conceptions of what a living triceratops would have looked like. A single dino can become a never-ending rabbit hole of knowledge, and in time, your child can become a dino expert, especially once she branches out—now that she's acquired a number of skills—to look at other dinos, and then maybe turn her attention to living creatures in our era.

Anyway, my point is that structure and "antistructure" (to misuse a term from cultural anthropology) go hand in hand. True freedom is married to discipline because discipline lets us acquire skills that, in turn, allow us freer choices. Once you learn the discipline of how to write, you suddenly find you can express yourself in a myriad of ways. Freedom and discipline are, as they say in Zen Buddhism, not-two.

You also asked: "Proving what they know is important to have on file?"

I'll leave the clerical aspects of "have on file" up to you; everyone develops their own idiosyncratic method of record-keeping. As for the "proving what they know" part, though, I'd say that's one of the essential tasks of a teacher. Teaching isn't merely lecturing. Some people think teaching means dispensing knowledge like a vending machine, but in my opinion, you haven't really taught the student if you haven't checked the student's knowledge. This can take the form of quizzes and tests, or if you're against that sort of thing, maybe a softly Socratic Q&A method might work better. But never succumb to the temptation to use yes/no questions to check knowledge. "Did you get all that?" will only produce a "Yes" from the student, who simply wants you to get off her back. "Wh-" questions like, "What are two things you learned today?" are much better, and that's how you engage in a review of the day's learning. Always ask questions so that your student understands she can't get away with curt, one-word answers that cater to her laziness. In time, she'll get used to this style of knowledge-checking, which minimizes BS in the academic setting.

A lot of this answer mirrors what I wrote in Think Like a Teacher.