Learning about the world for real

Pinkie Pie is continuing to work away at her online learning course to get her first high school credit.  I had big hopes for the course at the outset, even though it led off with a bunch of stuff leaning on Learning Styles, which is actually just a thing people made up.

Unfortunately it isn't getting much better.  We finished the section on Learning Styles and then spent a bunch of time on the theory of multiple intelligences.  It is presented as some kind of serious thing, but it lists 8 intelligences and then tells us that there are many more and we should feel free to add any we think of to the list.

'Just add on more stuff if you feel like it' does not have the ring of well researched material.

It seems like the course may be trying to teach us that people have many ways to learn and excel, and hoping to get us to accept all these various ways.  That goal works for me, and if they said that explicitly I would be behind it.  Unfortunately they dress it up in all these half baked theories that are supported by conjecture and guesswork, and I don't much like trying to teach that to kids as though it is settled fact.

I don't want to try to force feed Pinkie Pie theories that aren't solid.  I won't try to lie to her and tell her that it is actually super important that she determine what her best intelligences are.  Unfortunately the way the course is structured the marks are largely based around questions like

"What is your strongest intelligence, and how can that help you in your career?"

Pinkie Pie sees this question and just stares at it.  She struggles with perfectionism and she simply doesn't know what to say to this.  She hasn't settled on a career, and the tool to help her figure out what her strongest intelligence is was pretty much just 'pick your strongest intelligence from a list' form.  I know this is a waste of time, and so does she, without me having to tell her anything.

So she is learning sketchy science in order to make up stuff about herself so she can get marks.

It is tricky for me to navigate.  On one hand there is something I can teach her here - I can teach her how to give bullshit answers to bullshit questions.  After making up some stuff about her strongest intelligence, I got her to think about what her second place intelligence might be, and talk about how that might also influence her career.  I was sure that even though the question didn't even hint at this, that the teacher marking it would love it.

They loved it.  I am good at figuring out how to get marks.  I just have to work on the 'caring about marks' thing.

I don't quite know what to do.  Figuring out how to get marks is actually a hugely powerful skill in the world.  It can take you places!  Of course it is worthless and silly, but if you want more opportunities or just a bigger slice of the pie, knowing how to get marks is a good way to start.  I have tremendous reservations about spending a lot of time and effort teaching Pinkie Pie this skill though.  Do I want to spend time teaching her how to work the system?  That isn't the parent I want to be.

The more I see about high school through my kid the more I remember why I was so disenchanted with education by the time I finished it myself.  It seemed like a small amount of actual learning sprinkled into a giant vat of pointless busywork dressed up as something important.  I think my teachers were divided between those who truly tried to do the best they could, and those who just put in the time, doing what they were told they had to.  No matter how dedicated they were though, they were stuck teaching a standardized curriculum to a ton of kids in order to generate vast quantities of marks.  I think the learning itself is important, and marks are a way to serve businesses in order to facilitate employee training and sorting.  That isn't a thing I had respect for back when I was a teen, and my attitude certainly hasn't shifted now.

The internet is not for learning

Pinkie Pie has been doing a lot of homschooling these past months.  She is doing a lot better these days than in the past, though unfortunately she still isn't doing much in the way of getting any official accreditation.  It turns out that a teacher doing things in person is a vast improvement over online learning.

Right now Pinkie Pie is doing math and french with Wendy, and I am teaching her pretty much everything else.  She enjoys my random forays into a vareity of subjects, and she is progressing well in both the more structured learning Wendy is providing and the mishmash I am responsible for.

She is also taking an Learning Strategies course online for high school credit, and that isn't going nearly so well.  I struggle to figure out how to apportion blame for this.  On one hand, teaching a course through a website is hard.  Even if it were perfect, that is not an easy thing to do, and when you add in the requirement to produce documented work and marks it makes things much worse.

If only we had a learning system devoted to learning instead of a system devoted to producing marks!

Regardless of the challenge level though, this course has some issues with the way it is written.  It taught us about learning styles (Kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual) even though the theory about those learning styles is mostly made up.  It tried to use a quiz to tell Pinkie Pie what her learning style is, and the quiz was laughably bad.  Even if learning styles was a real thing the quiz would have totally failed to evaluate it.

The course also has issues with being unclear on what your answers are supposed to look like.  About half of the time Pinkie Pie asks me what the answer is supposed to look like, and much of the time I have absolutely no idea.  I understand the topic, but I cannot fathom what we are supposed to be writing in the answer box.  We end up looking at the sample answers, but then her responses end up looking just like the samples.

I just don't think that this is actually teaching her a lot.  Again, part of that is the format - you can't just let people be creative and do their own thing when you are trying to mark their responses en masse.  We are paying $40 for a course, and therefore I cannot expect much in the way of teacher oversight.  Filling in boxes and getting a mark at the end is the best they can offer at that price.  Still, they could be doing much better with what they have available.

The last section we did had her learning about scheduling.  They provided an app to help with this, and the app let you build a weekly schedule.  Unfortunately it would only take entries in single block hours, would not permit overlaps, and the interface was extremely clunky.  What Pinkie Pie learned from this was that scheduling apps are useless, hard to interface with, and much worse than just keeping it all in your head.

Not what they were aiming for, I am sure.

Learning from a website just isn't going to be good.  Websites can provide direction and facts for a dedicated learner, but they aren't even close to the standard set by a good teacher.  

I wonder if online math would be better.  Learning about something as wide ranging as learning strategies seems tough online, and perhaps math with its right/wrong answers and more linear teaching would work better.  I don't know, but the more I see the way online teaching goes the more I lean towards never subjecting Pinkie Pie to official schooling again.